gaslighting's everest. megafreaks convincing me this was the series peak had me telling everyone I knew how bad mega man sucked for two decades. I've already done more damage to the mega man brand than inafune ever could, and I was primed to do even more before I tried some of the other ones

sure, the robot master stages are mostly solid, but you'd need the most hexed, jinxed, and cursed grey matter on the planet to convince yourself normal people want to experience wily's castle in any capacity. the creases in your brain need to have been carved by unnaturally odious forces to sit there recommending this with a grin on your face while knowing sniper armours exist

boobeam comes up in conversation and MM2 guys go silent at the dinner table, start pushing their peas around the plate, and ask to be excused

if you love it so much then why don't you marry it

"Video games are supposed to be fun" - the motel clerk in Lake, whose name I never learned

I feel that boiling games down to purely "was it fun?" is a bit of a reductive stance... but when Lake itself said it, it distracted me. I wasn't having fun. And all told, while my favorite games are generally constantly active things like Mario or Doom, I do have quite a soft spot for small experimental titles that revel in their own weird quirks... but Lake wasn't clicking at all. And while the hotel clerk isn't even remotely presented as a likable character (at least as far as I spoke with him), his annoying griping struck at the heart of the biggest issue I was having with the game; even being down to see what it has to offer, I wasn't having any fun engaging with this game.

There's a moment near the end of Lake where you go up to a secluded cabin in the woods and deliver a package. An annoyed voice complains about you disturbing his writing process, and you have a back and forth with this pretentious author. After all, he's the one who ordered a package in the first place, what right does he have to complain about it being delivered? You drop that on him before leaving to do the rest of your route as he awkwardly gives a half-assed apology and goes back to writing his Alan Wake story. This is the kind of thing I was hoping would happen more often in Lake, mundane but mildly amusing encounters with random locals, but there's really only two or three moments like this throughout the game. We get plenty of setup for fun moments, too, but they're often just left hanging. In particular I'm thinking of what I assume is meant to be an Evil Dead joke, where you deliver a giftwrapped chainsaw to an abandoned rundown cabin. That was a moment where it felt like something could have happened, be it a spooky musical sting or maybe Meredith saying "groovy", anything at all. It was a complete softball to setup a punchline, and instead you simply knock on the door, Meredith has a voiceline expressing confusion that nobody is answering (??????), and you leave the item and go. Even something like Meredith asking why there's a delivery to an abandoned house would have been SOMETHING, but for my playthrough she remained silent as she does after leaving any package at the door. That's the majority of your deliveries, being done to relative silence - the best you can hope for is a few randomly selected canned responses from Meredith that you'll get tired of hearing. Otherwise, they're simply a means to force an interaction with an established character in the cast. In principle this isn't even really a bad thing, after all it's kind of what I knowingly signed up for, unfortunately I didn't find the locals to be even remotely compelling. The little moments just aren't really something that the game is interested in delivering despite feeling like the obvious thing to pack this game to the brim with, because what Lake thinks it's meant to be about is big meaningful moments to drastically change Meredith's life instead of smaller moments that make life feel more vibrant.

Where I find Lake particularly confusing is that the general concept is hard to swallow. Meredith has been away from home for 22 years, and she is 40 years old. She's apparently got enough of a good relationship with her parents that it's easy for her to spend her vacation house-sitting and substituting for her dad at his job so he can go on vacation instead, but she also hasn't been back here once for over half of her lifespan. It's almost a bit ridiculous how long a time she has been gone, and the way her parents and neighbors talk to her makes it feel like she's supposed to be younger, but instead she's middle-aged and with a well established job that she's eager to bring up and talk about with others. It's very clear that Meredith is proud of her job at Addit. The game then spends a good portion of its runtime trying to tear down her independence at her tech job, essentially saying "return to an idyllic small town away from a corporate tech job to regain your soul". And what's weird is that they could absolutely build up Meredith having some nostalgia for the town with some flavor text, but she only has around two or three nostalgic remarks and as a result it makes the idea of her even wanting to move back very difficult to sell. I remember her saying something about having her first kiss at the campground, but aside from that she didn't have much to muse about and it made her feel disinterested in being home. When she is offered to take her dad's job and her parent's house permanently, if you do not show interest her parents are taken aback and offended; frankly that interaction was kind of a harrowing moment. The game was pretty clear in its messaging that it felt that was not the right choice, but what it tries to say with that is that she should simply fall over and allow her parents to thrust her into a permanent change to her life because they're having a great time being drunks in Florida. Honestly, no wonder Meredith hasn't been home in 22 years if that's what she had to deal with for her first time back, and they act as if having a 20% stake in a company that's about to make millions of dollars off of her dedicated work is some silly impetuous whim. Listen - I'm not someone that's super motivated by seeking profit and personal gain, but it's absolutely jarring to have your mom scold you like a teenager for being on the ground floor of something like Apple because you're not jazzed about a bait and switch plot to move you back to a dead end place you've spent the majority of your life avoiding!

And speaking of changing up your life, there's romance in this game. I opted to seek out neither romance route simply because I found both of them to be almost too painfully telegraphed as romantic interests. That's not really fair to Lake, but it just didn't feel natural for me so I opted to simply not engage that way - I called them both as love interests off of their very first sentences and I was right. Props to Lake for some bisexual representation here by having an option for Meredith to go either way, but I wasn't feeling either of them and opted to just be a professional upstanding postal worker and go about my business politely. Even with that behavior though, you'll get Angie calling you "babe" as if you've been flirting with her too, and you'll get Maureen telling you that Robert has a double meaning with "trying to keep pretty things in PO". It's nice that there are dialogue options to try to blow people off, but it really doesn't matter and it often doesn't feel like what you say has any impact at all upon the characters and their interactions. It feels like the game thinks you're pursuing romance with your every interaction until the point where those plotlines end, and that sure does get a bit uncomfortable feeling at times when either Robert or Angie are clearly angling at you despite showing no reciprocation.

And speaking of Lake ignoring your inaction, your actions never have any consequences. The crazy cat lady wants you to help her with her sick cat? Doesn't matter if you don't! I mean, I'm glad the cat didn't die, but I said no (I'm the postman, I have work to do, you clearly have a car right there in your driveway lady) and it made no difference. I said no to hanging out with the hippies who I spoke to twice, both times incredibly brief encounters, and yet I was still forced to go say goodbye to them and listen to the guy's bad singing while they passed around a blunt - if ever there was an encounter I wanted to not do, it was this one. Hell, I'm actually just surprised that there weren't more events that I was forced to do like that. One such event I thought would be a shoo-in for a forced encounter, if you don't help Robert save the town from new apartments (who are they going to put into those apartments??? we're in the middle of nowhere and have a tiny population, who are we renting to?), he will still succeed at rallying the town to stave off the construction. If you do or don't help Angie with her movie rental store, it will always fail and she will always leave... and honestly I'm surprised that you even had the option to say no to helping her, she wanted you to do deliveries and that's what the game is all about. Most egregiously, your boss at Addit will repeatedly pester you to do work off the clock to help ensure their multi-million dollar deal goes through - I blew him off every single time he asked and not only did the deal still go through, I was still offered a huge stake in the company too. You can simply sleepwalk through Lake, never once engaging with anything, and your inaction doesn't matter. I was cordial but distant to Meredith's former best friend Kay (I'm shocked at how abrupt her storyline is, I was expecting a more natural moment for them to reconnect and it didn't really happen), and after days of being treated the way you would treat an inoffensive customer at a retail job she just decides that you're still her best friend and she'll go asking you favors and being super chatty all the time. She asked me to babysit her kids so she could go see Journey, and I didn't - she still ended up seeing Journey anyhow. Your actions don't matter, aside from whoever you choose to kiss or where you decide to go in the end. You can even be kinda rude to most people and you'll still get a radio sendoff where the town says they'll miss you if you leave town at the end.

Probably the strangest plotline in the game for me is the bit with Frank and his gambling addiction. The man is using his federal job to run an illegal gambling ring to better himself. The postmaster general gives you a threatening phone call to do postal policies correctly, and then shows up in town to ask about Frank. I actually completely spilled the beans about Frank, saying that yeah, he's misusing his position and doing some kinda corrupt shit. Listen, I don't WANT to acquiesce to the police like that, but honestly yeah Frank was kind of a shitty person for using his job to do that kind of stuff so I figured screw it, let him have some consequences for abuse of his position. Frank is then suspended for a single day, and the postmaster general immediately gives up with the provided reasoning that he didn't wanna talk to the crazy cat lady again and that Frank has some lawyer friends who scared him off. What do you MEAN this backwoods doofus has lawyers who got the federal government off of his back when he was in the wrong? The game even tries to portray Frank as the hero who is in the right here! Come on man, misuse of federal funds and shit like that, why do you want me to root for Brett Favre?

What I'm left with in Lake is a game that feels like it wasted my time. I didn't like the cast, and frankly that's all the game was really about - without that, it's nothing. The gameplay loop is to walk slowly (hold down a button to walk 1% faster), drive a clunky unresponsive van, and fight the map with its icons that rarely feel like they're in the right place for most houses. You'll chat to some locals, and if you aren't interested in them you have nothing to latch onto. The sound effects often broke, I'd constantly see massive 8 car pileups happen entirely on their own in random spots on the road, there's about 3 songs on the radio, and when I finished the game the credits song didn't even play. Maybe that's because I did what the writers clearly felt was the bad ending? It's hard to tell whether that was intentional or not when so many other things broke so frequently, but it did lead off the credits with the name of the song so I doubt that was the point. This game wants so badly to have the vibes of Life is Strange, but all I could feel the whole playthrough was how much I wish the town could be the setting of a successor to Deadly Premonition instead of what it is. It's a shame, because I wanted to find something in this game, but I felt unfulfilled the whole adventure. I guess the answer was to simply just not go back home.

After years of 2D Mario being great but bland, it's so goddamn nice to have it get back on par with 3D Mario. The only bad things in this game are the uninspired Bowser Jr fights and the Spring and Invisibility badges, everything else is absolutely phenomenal and bursting with creativity. Fungi Mines is just about the best world a 2D Mario game has ever had, and we've also got some great new creatures like Hoppo, Taily, Outmaway, and Maw Maw around... the Switch is where Mario finally got weird again and that's exactly what we've needed.

Louie: History's Greatest Monster?

It's not a unique story to say that I've been excitedly waiting for Pikmin 4 for years and years, ever since that weird Miyamoto story where he once again said "it's basically finished and ready to release" just the same way he did with Pikmin 3. That's the story of half of Pikmin's releases, Miyamoto says it's on the way and then you don't see it for ten years. I'm thrilled the series is still going and still getting high quality entries, and I did love Pikmin 4, but it's also easily my least favorite of the series so far. Before even getting into anything mechanical, I'm so bummed by the fact that it's a weird reboot. There's a lot of weirdness in the decisions of Pikmin 4 that make it feel like it isn't designed for longtime fans, and that story decision more than anything is the biggest sign to me. We've had a pretty progressive narrative build-up across the past three entries and left Pikmin 3 on an interesting cliffhanger with exciting world-building implications - which we even make hints towards here! - but ultimately none of the prior stuff is remotely compatible with this game's plot. Scrap it and move on, we're seeking a new audience. Maybe we'll see it someday, but if Pikmin 5 is anything like the previous two entries we'll hear about it within the next year and not see it for at least a full decade. That it's interested in expanding the audience is not a dealbreaker, nor is it even bad, but it's disappointing when that focus is also the source of quite a few decisions that I feel hurt the game.

There's a lot about Pikmin 4 that tries to focus on making the game easier, and ultimately I do feel it's overall the easiest in the series. Oatchi in particular is so insanely useful that he can often entirely trivialize huge parts of the game on his own. That said, it's worth mentioning that the cave you unlock for beating Olimar's story has some of the toughest challenges in the series, particularly the Purple Key level which has an extremely tight time constraint that manages to be even more threatening than the two rolling walls of death you encounter. There are a few other standouts, like the Sovereign Bulblax in Cavern for a King and the multiple required encounters with the surprisingly returning Smokey Progg, but outside of those few outliers the rest of the game is easy to breeze through. It doesn't help when areas get entirely emptied of things to do as you progress, leaving them as empty wastelands with no remaining dangers to navigate. That's not necessarily a bad thing, the whole ethos of Dandori is more centered on the game being about how quickly and efficiently you can succeed and I think that shines well with how they've designed the levels here, but that's also not necessarily a new thing. It has always been Pikmin's ethos (we just have a catchy word for it now) and after a few days enemies would respawn to both incentivize getting things done efficiently in an area and to keep the world feeling alive. In a lot of regards their Leafling-like focus on Dandori is a success, and with some difficult challenges it shows they can still throw you for a loop when they want to. The problem I have is more that they tend to reuse the same ideas multiple times, where something like an Emperor Bulblax in the past was an imposing and unique final boss it's now... pretty common, showing up repeatedly and making the Sovereign Bulblax feel like "oh, you again" even with it being a harder version more akin to Pikmin 1's original Emperor. There really aren't very many unique or memorable one-off boss moments or surprises, and that's a shame because all the previous games in the series really shined with their unique one-offs that made you really think and try to utilize your skillset on the fly. Again, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it helps make certain aspects feel undercooked and repetitive rather than engaging and exciting, just going through the motions.

Where the clear focus on largely making things easier hurts, I feel, is in some of the mechanical decisions that they made that have the opposite effect. The lock-on is awful and makes targeting things extremely difficult, with no ability to use free aiming. Just killed an enemy in a mob of enemies? Sorry dude, you don't want to target that other enemy, you want the raw materials it dropped - oh, you lost a bunch of Pikmin because you couldn't throw them where you actually wanted? Oops. Similarly, they make it so that you need to whistle twice for Pikmin to abandon a task, which isn't a terrible idea... but if it was a mistake they entirely lose all momentum, and if it was intentional they have a very noticeable delay before finally listening if you're lucky enough for them to actually decide to. I've never had so much trouble getting my Pikmin to listen to me, whether they keep trying to carry something away when I don't want them to or whether they simply won't get thrown or charge, there were tons of times where there is intentionally developed input delay that hurts the experience. In some ways having Pikmin stop being thrown with your inputs when you hit the required amount for an action can be nice, but in many situations I actually WANT to throw more for a more efficient carry or because I want to target something else but the auto-targeting refuses to move. Sometimes I'll throw my guys at an item and they won't even try to pick it up, sometimes they'll just abandon a task for no reason, other times they'll try repeatedly to do a task as I try to stop them and they just decide nah, that wall needs to break and I'm gonna do it, that bomb you threw be damned! God help you if 50 guys decide to attack an enemy without your command, you have to just hope that they'll actually listen and escape from a dangerous situation before disaster as you desperately mash the whistle. Between this and some clunky menuing with the pack, it feels like they've managed to make things feel less intuitive when by all means it should be the opposite. On that note: there is no New Game Plus, so why is it that you can get things like Infinite Rush, Extra Hand, and Olimar's c-stick trumpet feature from 1 and 2 but not until you've 100% completed the game and there is nothing to use them for? Infinite Rush and Extra Hand require saving Louie and doing his optional post-100% completion side quests, respectively... cool that you can get rewards, but you have absolutely nothing to do with them as every area is picked clean and devoid of enemies. What's the point, just easier high scores in Dandori challenges?

My biggest gripe is the regression of the co-op. Pikmin 3 Deluxe's co-op was incredibly good. It is one of the most fun co-op experiences I've ever had, it's wonderful and extremely well implemented. There's absolutely nothing about Pikmin 4 that should prevent it from having a similar implementation - Oatchi can function almost identically to a captain, and on top of that we're playing as a generic create a character so why not allow for a second? Instead, we have Mario Galaxy's co-star mode, which isn't particularly engaging and also kinda breaks the game. It turns co-op from a fun way to engage with the game into something that actively encourages you not to - why go fight that potentially difficult encounter fairly when you can lob rocks at it forever and stun it with electricity? It's not terrible as an extra mode to include someone who isn't familiar with games, but if you have two people who want to play the game together after loving 3 Deluxe together it's a letdown that hurts the game's design to engage with... I do imagine it will lead to some very entertaining speedrun cheats however.

Despite this myriad list of gripes, Pikmin 4 is still an extremely well made game that I'm glad exists. I will replay it multiple times, like I have with all the other Pikmin games. It excels at creating interesting maps to explore, it does an excellent job of making you think about how to plan out your approach to the world, and as with the other Pikmin games the writing is a joy to read. There's more flavor text than ever here, and we have 50+ character voices floating around to make the universe of Pikmin feel livelier than ever before. There's a ton of content here, and most of it is great! I want to point out Night Exploration in particular, which is an amazing addition that I hope to see revisited and iterated on further. There's a ton to build on here, Pikmin could have a very bright and fruitful future! Just next time, have a little bit more trust in your audience and please don't make us wait another decade like we did for both 3 and 4.

A truly Zappy game. Engage nails the Fire Emblem experience by putting me in scenarios that appear to be totally unwinnable until I stuff Yunaka in a bush to make her a god. Peak Fire Emblem is when my best plotted strategies completely fall apart due to bad luck and I'm forced to use obscure loopholes and idiotic bullshit to get myself out of a bind, and Engage gave me that in spades. While the writing is definitely more Saturday morning cartoon than Three Houses' enthralling shades of gray politics, it sold me early on that it knew exactly what it was doing by having the traditional Doomed Fire Emblem Parent ask Sigurd (the protagonist infamously killed in a fire before he can ever be a parent) for parenting advice. That said, my one gripe is that by being a self-referential celebration of the series, the world of Elyos is definitely far less fleshed out and nuanced feeling than most Fire Emblem worlds... but hey, it still manages to be more coherent than Fatesland, so I'll take it.

Good story almost completely ruined by the worst fucking backtracking I’ve ever seen in a video game.There’s absolutely nothing fun about repeatedly being set back and having to play the same story over and over again, going back through the same areas and doing the same things, and fighting the same bosses to actually progress. It’s especially not fun when that’s what most of the game consists of. Like I’ve even seen several diehard fans recommend that players just rush through the repeated routes as fast as they can, not doing any of the optional content and skipping most of the cutscenes and dialogue. That is a sign of a poorly designed game if you ask me.


Speaking of poor design choices, the game is littered with so many of them that somehow manage to needlessly pad out the game even more, several of which made me seriously consider dropping the game entirely. Route C requires you to gather all the weapons in the game (for literally no reason, might I add) in addition to it being almost the exact same story you just saw twice. This includes grinding for money (weapons are not cheap at all) and doing several mundane side quests, some of which require you to farm rare drops from enemies, or reload the same area over and over again until the weather changes. You better hope you get lucky, because there’s a chance that you’ll be killing the same enemies and/or reloading the same area over and over again for hours on end.


Also using a guide on route C is basically required if you want to get through it at a reasonable pace. The game gives you no indication at all on which side quests reward you with weapons, not to mention the side quests themselves have no markers/trackers on your map so you know where to go. Also, there’s a weapon that you need to buy from the Aerie, an area that becomes unaccessible at a later point, so you’re just out of luck if you slip up and happen to forget. And to top that all off, it’s best for you to make a separate save file in addition to the one you already have before the final dungeon to get ending D, and by extension ending E. Because if you don’t, and you save over the one file you’ve been using for most of the game… you have to play through everything, all over again, for the FOURTH TIME. The game does not tell you that, and they didn’t think to add in a chapter select like in Automata.


All of this just so you can continue with the story. I wish I was making this up, I swear.


The little bits of new cutscenes that you do get in between just do not make the rest of the repetition worth it in the slightest imo. Most of route C adds nothing, the beginning of route E adds nothing… I got so used to skipping through the same cutscenes that the game had already shown me a million times that when the time came for actual new cutscenes, I almost skipped those too on accident. And even with the added context of the story bosses, the boss fights themselves get more and more boring with every time you have to fight them again, since you’ll be massively overleveled in comparison and they’ll go down in just a couple of hits.


The game gets two stars because I still like the characters, and that soundtrack is godlike but I absolutely despise the way the story is presented, especially a shame for such a story driven game. It completely broke the immersion for me.

Do you want to play a game where you explore well designed areas densely packed with interesting creatures that interact with their surroundings and require thought as to how you approach and capture them, balanced with a thrilling investigation into the mysteries of the society you suddenly find yourself in? That sounds great, right? Well, I just described Bugsnax, the game that Pokemon Legends Arceus wishes it was, and I recommend that you play it. Arceus isn't a bad game, but I definitely have to count myself baffled by the volume of praise and hype it has received over the past 9 months because I don't think it's particularly good either.

I'm leaving my playthrough of Arceus feeling like I played an early access or rough beta, rather than a polished up and completed retail product. Look, I've played some ugly games and loved them - Fire Emblem Three Houses at times feels like it's missing important sequences (Blue Lions Dedue return for example, no cutscene or build, he's just... suddenly back with no explanation) and its texture work is extremely rough looking, but not only does it make up for that with the quality of the rest of the package I also don't think those failings are anywhere near as major or glaring as equivalent issues in Arceus. Almost every texture in Arceus is extremely ugly - if the world were well designed and interesting it could make up for it, but in practice it's a roughshod paint job on a ramshackle void bereft of anything to see or do in it. It constantly reuses cutscenes (ah yeah lemme watch the Potato Mochi meal cutscene 10 times with identical animations and barely different dialogue each time) or, rather than even pretending to have a cutscene we can just fade to black for 10 seconds while a sound effect plays to avoid even having to try to show something happening. There is nothing appealing in its presentation aside from the Pokemon themselves, and I do think that the new ones are all hits (with the exception of Sneasler, who I loathe). Even the music is iffy, I hate the Jubilife music and the music that plays when you talk to the Professor and they play so frequently that they grate on your ears if they don't land with you. The music for the various regions is actually pretty great... but unfortunately it either decides to simply not play or instead it'll just constantly be interrupted by the lackluster wild encounter theme, so it might as well not even be there.

The battle system doesn't make any sense. Every trainer battle seems to start with the enemy attacking you before you can even see a menu, often with an unexpected super-effective move not in their usual learnset, instantly sucker punching your pokemon as you send it out and often killing it. It's frustrating to not have a chance to react and to immediately lose your lead... but then I have 5 other pokemon and I retaliate by instantly nuking their ONE pokemon and win the battle. The combat forecast for moves often doesn't tell me correct information - the amount of times it showed me moving first or multiple times, or the enemy moving only once, and then suddenly something entirely different happened (in the final trainer battle against that bandit girl, her Gengar moved 5 times? I looked up the datamined stats and it barely had a higher speed stat than my pokemon, launching 5 moves at me absolutely did not track there) is just absurd. It's an unfair system, and yet the battles were so imbalanced and easy that it didn't even matter because I never lost a single trainer battle and nearly every pokemon on either side was dead in one or two hits. All it amounted to was somehow Gamefreak managed to make Pokemon Battles not fun for me, which is bizarre because I enjoyed them even in Pokemon Sword, my least favorite Pokemon game with my least favorite battling gimmick in Dynamax. You can walk around in them for some reason - I don't know what purpose this serves but it's a feature.

The story, and in particular the writing, is bad. I suppose this is to be expected because writing in Pokemon games is far more miss than hit, with really only Gens 5 and 7 being anything worthwhile. But even so, the writing just felt even more insipid and uninspired than it usually does... it's truly disappointing that Pokemon seems to lean into the defense it gets for its writing, "it's for kids" (as if writing for kids cannot be good, or as if kids somehow deserve bad writing). I feel especially shortchanged by the fact that the bulk of the game is helping the various Noble pokemon... and that's it, that's the last you see of them. Wouldn't it make sense for them to show up at the end and do a whole power of friendship thing to support you before you fight Origin Form Dialga/Palkia? That would make sense and show your impact on the world and that what you've been doing has mattered, and it's so obvious... and it does not happen, because the Nobles do not even remotely matter after their respective story quest ends. The only characters I really remember having any investment in are the woman who took care of Growlithe/Arcanine and the Battle Subway guy whose mere presence in this game is completely inexplicable - the rest are either forgettable or downright annoying (Melli, the Braviary girl, and the bandit trio come to mind, they were the goddamn worst). Otherwise, the game feels like it ran out of ideas when you quelled all the Nobles (Avalugg wasn't even rampaging yet, doesn't get hit by lightning, and then just IS rampaging when you fight it) and rushes to figure out how to include a banishment subplot, the lake trio, and Dialga/Palkia in to wrap it all up. It just didn't feel finished, and I know that it isn't in part because it has a post-game quest with Volo/Giratina and Arceus, but the main game story isn't satisfying. Ah yeah, we need the origin ore, thank god it's two feet away from the spot where we decided to invent the fact that it exists, glad we had that annoying detour.

What's unfortunate is that part of me likes the live capturing mechanics, and I don't really know why I do. Capturing literal dozens of the same pokemon is undeniably repetitive busywork and I really gotta question the fact that they focused on it as the main gameplay loop, but it did somehow get its hooks in me for the first few areas. It feels nice to throw the pokeball and catch the pokemon, even if there's realistically no reason I'd ever need or want 25 Bidoof. The problem is, the system for capturing is not deep at all. There's all this talk about stealth and throwing berries... you don't need to do any of that. Half of the pokemon you can just walk up to and crack a pokeball into the back of their skull to instantly catch, the other half all you need to do is either snipe them with a feather/wing ball or simply throw a spoiled nut or dirt ball in their face to temporarily de-aggro them and then hit them in the back of the skull with a pokeball. It was genuinely more effective for me than slowly creeping through the bushes or trying to figure out which berry would interest the pokemon, so I stopped bothering to experiment with that - after all, they only have three types of behavior. They're all either docile, aggressive, or docile until you do something that makes them aggressive like running or being seen capturing a nearby pokemon. They all wander around in circles, doing whichever of those three behaviors, and don't stray from their little zone. They don't do any particular animations or anything special, they don't interact with each other or the environment, they're just replaceable figures standing around in empty boring zones that have nothing to do or see in them. There's no puzzle to get them and getting them stopped feeling like an accomplishment when I realized I can just speedrun through an area and casually toss pokeballs and catch the vast majority of them. If the world could have at least had things worth exploring and discovering, that would've been great! But the world really is just nonsensically designed and has nothing other than hidden Spiritomb orbs and Unown. And the Noble fights are just clunky - they're easy affairs that tend to drag on, and I guess you can actually battle the pokemon but I didn't feel like seeing what bullshit they were going to pull vis-a-vis the unpredictable nonsense of the battle system so I just kept tossing balms, which completely works as a way to win and probably took just as long as the battle would have.

My biggest problem with this game is that I could see it being the groundwork for something good in the future... but I don't really have any faith in Gamefreak to deliver on that. With a more capable studio I could see this evolving into something interesting, but as it stands Gamefreak is just kinda marginal. I wouldn't call it a bad game, but I don't think it's a good game - it's about as middle of the road as can be. I don't think it really excels at anything but I've played much MUCH worse, and I feel that this was still more compelling than Gen 8 despite the many flaws I think it has. Props to anyone who loved this - I sure didn't see it, and I don't understand it, but if this is what you wanted then I'm glad you got to have it. I just wanna have a Pokemon game that catches me again, and as the entries keep coming out and missing with me I feel I'm getting less and less likely to get that... At least I got Basculegion and Overqwil.

World 10-1 was a genuinely good level, it was actually fun. There's like 4 or 5 other levels that are pretty good, and I love the Fire Hydra(nt) boss. That aside, this game is a baffling fever dream of horrible design decisions and awful levels awash in an obnoxious and annoying soundtrack with some of the stupidest cutscenes I've ever seen. Every button doing the same thing, often overwriting the ability to jump, is absolutely the most insane design decision I've ever seen in a video game (especially in a platformer!). I love how the various NPC storylines range from "this farmer's home and livelihood are destroyed in a tornado" and "this girl is nearly murdered by a dolphin that goes crazy" to "man loses a single game of chess" and "boy doesn't understand gravity". Genuinely hilarious that the game seems to be trying to tell a story of overcoming your fears and reaching out to make friends, but the main villain just gets killed off instead of them doing some power of friendship deal to redeem him. Maybe Act 3 changes that? Who knows, I sure don't care to find out! It's not the worst game ever made, but it genuinely is an awful experience with very few redeeming qualities and I was really only able to derive any entertainment out of it from the co-op breaking the game to a hilarious and unintended degree. Don't put yourself through this.

When I started playing Abzu, I was eeling a little blue, and figured "I cod sea what it's pike swimming with the fishes. Not doing anyfin else right now." And so I dove fin to the waters.

Being honest, it took a whale for me to get finto, but the only fishue was that I was dragging my tail. The gill robot chums were neat, and all the locations and fish were reel pretty. Soaking in the Seanery, going through the moceans, it was nice. (However there was one seane that nearly anchored me it was so unnecessary.)

Overall, it's sardinely a deep experience, but you only get trout of it what you put fin. Well worth a couple of squid.