Honestly? Not a huge fan of Zero Mission. It's definitely cool for what it is, but it really does hold your hand too much and the bosses are WAY too easy. And, yes, it's cool that the devs included so many intentional speedrunning shortcuts and skips for repeat playthroughs (where the heavy guidance is irrelevant because you already know where to go anyway), but that doesn't necessarily make a one-off casual playthrough more interesting. It kinda kills the atmosphere of the previous games, too, by leaning more into a heroic action-adventure vibe. Again, not bad by any means, but far from my favorite Metroid.

On the one hand, this is maybe the worst RPG I've ever played, a game ostensibly made for kids that's also incredibly cruel to the player at every turn. Every resource from MP and items to XP and money is too scarce and too tightly controlled so that you can't lessen the difficulty curve by grinding - and even if you do manage to gain an extra level or two, the enemies will just scale up. The repetitive battles quickly become gruelingly long and can easily spiral out of control if you make any mistakes. Missed inputs on the insufferable Elite Beat Agents QTEs are punished way too severely. And attacks randomly miss all the fucking time, particularly early on, because for some incomprehensible reason the "attack" and "defense" stats in what was pitched as the Sonic equivalent of the beginner-friendly Mario RPGs are actually secretly tabletop-style hit and dodge stats. It's completely miserable to play. The hand drawn backgrounds are kinda nice, at least, but they also mean that the world has to be incredibly small with few areas to explore, making the adventure feel uneventful. And, of course, the literally unfinished soundtrack is just the icing on the cake.

On the other hand, my fursona is now immortalized in the IDW comics with the army of duplicate "unique" Chao I save scummed for on stream so that I didn't have to do the QTEs for the special moves anymore. So who's to say if it's good or bad

It's hard for me to complain too much about my issues (glacial combat speed, massive RNG influence, questionable class balance) because I still mostly had a good time with this game. Early on it's a multilayered resource management game; proper attack placement and spell management is necessary both to avoid falling victim to attrition, and to make sure you don't spend so much money on healing that you can't afford the next set of gear. Once your party becomes strong (and rich) enough to break this dynamic, it shifts into a globe-trotting dungeoneering adventure more focused on labyrinthine dungeons, trying to blow through encounters as quickly as possible and not falling prey to that one encounter that can stunlock your entire party if it feels like it. It’s satisfying to realise that you aren’t actually in as much danger as you used to be, that your fighter can hit multiple times for some reason and blast any enemy into low orbit when they feel like it, and that there’s nothing stopping you stuffing 99 potions in your back pocket to make your white mage really sad for the rest of the game. The stripped-back presentation and story lets these mechanics bring your own personal triumphs and failures to the forefront as the driving narrative. Even something as simple as watching one of your party members hit level-ups a bit slower than everyone else can call back to that one time where they got instakilled or stunned for eight turns in a row three dungeons ago.

While I didn’t find the game incredibly engaging once the earlier parts were over since the combat itself never gets any more interesting (or faster), it's still hard not to respect it. Almost everything weird, dissatisfying or ‘loose’ makes a whole lot of sense if you consider there’s a good chance it’d be one of the first RPGs you played if you had it back in the day, and was likely designed around that idea. The fact that I was measurably underleveled despite fighting everything I saw is uniquely interesting if considering that failure could have been intended in its design - losing characters and running back to revive them means gaining more experience on everyone else in the process. And while it’s not a particularly hard game - speaking as someone who *was* measurably underleveled - a lot of the friction it threatens is probably far more present for someone playing an RPG for the first time. While I can’t say if the whole ‘built for new players’ assumption is actually true or not, operating under it makes the game come off as extremely confident in how it can make itself approachable without compromising the experience it's trying to provide. It’s a beginner-friendly game built to be able to onboard people into a simple RPG system, but it’s still a heavily player-driven adventure with a lot of room for failure and discovery.

My opinion changed a lot the more I played this game.

When I first started it, I was completely hooked. The beginning sky island area is well designed and gets you familiar with the new cool abilities that I used much more then the ones in BOTW. The graphics and size of the world are also super impressive for being a Switch title.

Once I finished the tutorial area which took around 5 hours, everything started going downhill. The game is basically an exact copy of BOTW. The enemies are identical with the only new ones being these small robots that have replaced guardians and some dragon mini boss which I didn't bother fighting. Armor sets are also the same, there are a few new additions but to get many of them is a real chore. The main negative is that the map and story are pretty much identical to BOTW. The whole sky island I found to be a really cool concept but there's almost none of that in the rest of the game. That tutorial sky island is the largest with none of the rest being as remotely interesting anywhere. They're all very tiny with nothing on them and no reason to visit them except shrines. Another addition was an entire underground world which sounds cool and again is quite technically impressive for the Switch but after 20 minutes I decided to never go there again unless I needed to progress the story. It's all empty copy pasted land with nothing special and no reason to explore it. This leaves the main land left and as I've repeatedly said, it is an exact copy of BOTW I keep finding the need to say it over and over since I'm still amazed at how little they decided to change for this hyped $90 game. I played the shit out of BOTW in 2019 and even after 6 years so many things felt familiar, practically nothing surprised me in my playthrough. The story is very generic and worse then BOTW imo. Once again you find 4 sages then gain their powers to defeat Ganon; only this time the sages are younger kid versions who were made into anime personalities for some reason. The dungeons I found to be a downgrade and as they were much easier than BOTW, that goes for the shrines as well; they were still quite enjoyable and my favorite part of the game. I really thought I'd spend a lot of time on this game especially with the increased price tag but that was not the case. In BOTW I spend around 150hrs with 100% completion, in this game I did all shrines, a few uninteresting side quests, and the story picking up whatever korok seeds I find on my way which brought me to around 65 hours with no urge to do anything else but put it back on the shelf. Why play anymore when I pretty much experienced all of it already in BOTW? I'm very tired of this new Zelda formula and would love to see it go back to its core.

The one thing I did quite enjoy with the story was the ending. The Ganon boss fight was solid, one of the best in Zelda and a huge improvement from the BOTW final boss. The ending cinematic was also amazing. Seeing that caught me off guard, it made me wish they focused on story more as it showed they are capable. I was impressed that there could be such epic cinematics in a Zelda game and wish there was more of it throughout the story rather then using the most bare bones RPG story that goes all the way back to Final Fantasy on the NES. This game has no reason for existing. A sequel like this was not needed, this felt much more of a quality of life update with new sandbox stuff and that's about it. This was not a GOTY 2023 contender to me.

There's a lot to be said about Paradox's development and support strategy that I'm just not getting into. I will say that this is a stellar example of a Space Opera themed 4x, and, critically, it delivers the player expression that Paradox is uniquely able to bring to strategy games. The options for generating your own empire are robust, and the development options in game provide a lot of replay value for a variety of playstyles. Some options do feel strictly superior, which isn't ideal balance-wise (hive minds feel like straight up stronger because they can ignore parts of the economy and focus on expansion), but these are hardly the worst examples of that in the genre.

Very very well written, as you probably know if you've heard anything about this game. It's difficult to keep a mystery story moving in video game format, where the player controls the pacing and lines of inquiry, but the game is crafted such that you can stumble through one of a dozen logical, interesting, flavorful paths between any given plot points, allowing for a variety of roleplaying options without losing the thread of a good whodunnit. The plot is twisty and turny, philosophical and political, and the game is always evocative of a wider world. I kept expecting that we'd leave Martinaise, transition back to the precinct and see other parts of Revachol, and I was left wanting more from the characters and setting. The game's strong political themes and well-crafted sense of impending doom also made me expect a more sweeping narrative than just the resolution of the case, but that vague sense of anticlimax actually dovetailed well with the story's themes. It felt like a natural sequel hook for a game that really deserves one, but given that that's not likely to happen, the story of this story-focused RPG does feel a little incomplete. As always, feeling like you want more shows that the creators did something right.

Majora's Mask 3D takes what was a masterpiece and makes it... mostly the same except it looks broadly more appealing from a graphical standpoint (while sacrificing that moodiness N64 games naturally held), and they've replaced some of the "jankier" aspects of the original with new, more complex forms of frustrating mechanical aspects. Most of the ways they chose to "fix" the game feel misguided at best, but there are a few welcome changes tucked away in here.

I'd say if you want a marginally more consumable version of the Majora's Mask, this is kind of what you're looking for? But you're probably just better off playing the original since it's not only the easier version to set up and play but also feels more even in visuals and design, more authentic. Whereas Majora's Mask 3D feels lost in time, one foot in the N64 era and the other foot in the 3DS era, full of half-formed ideas on how to improve upon a game that perhaps didn't even really need improving upon.

Kinda went into Pentiment expecting to have to "eat my vegetables"; its aesthetic being artistically sound, but not really the kind of thing I'm generally into, and its premise sounding intellectually invigorating in a games industry that's arguably in arrested development when it comes to making mainstream experiences for adults, but maybe not enough to keep me personally going for a playtime of over 20 hours. And well, I was pretty fuckin' wrong! And not even in the Disco Elysium way where after I got over the hurdle of the first hour or two that it finally clicked (not to say that Disco Elysium's intro isn't basically perfect in its own way), Pentiment managed to sink its teeth into me right away. The game's art is also a lot more affective and unique than I would've expected just from the couple trailers I'd seen, and despite the entire game taking place across only a handful of screens (contextualized as pages in a book), there were many times that I found myself stopped in my tracks, contemplating the beauty of a specific moment.

It's also just as real as fuck without succumbing to either condemnation or romanticization. Pentiment's perspective on history and the people who shaped it is complex without cowardly labeling every participant as a morally grey agent -- there are unabashedly terrible and evil people in this world, people who are deceptive in their self-servitude, and even inarguably cruel entities like the Catholic Church house individuals who really do want to make the world a better place in their own way and even people who are in the church due to societal forces beyond their control. Pentiment is a game that tries its best to be honest about the world. It's also a game that's absolutely more intelligent and worldly than I'll ever be, and I really don't think I can do it the full justice it deserves in my own analysis of its setting and themes, so I'll just leave it there.

And yeah, Pentiment is also just a great example of how to make a dialogue-focused adventure game fun. Like, part of that is probably because I chose hedonism as one of my skills and made Andreas into a terrible little boyslut, but you know how it is. The dialogue never bored me, every character feels truly alive -- and that's without voice acting! I actually appreciated that there wasn't any honestly, it's a double-edged sword in a lot of games like this, and it only would've detracted from the bespoke aesthetic decision to give every character's spoken dialogue in "their own handwriting", in quotes because I'm not entirely sure what the implication was for the characters that are by their own admission illiterate (but I did love that Claus the town printer's dialogue is the only one that uses an actual typeface, accompanied by the satisfying thuds of a printing press).

By the end of the game, Tassing really does begin to feel like your home as well, not only because many pivotal events in Tassing's recent history are influenced by the player, but because you've grown close to the town's citizens and watched them grow and change as well. Pentiment isn't a power trip in that sense -- you cannot save everybody or give everybody a happy ending, not that you'd want to with some of the assholes you run into honestly -- but it does manage to encapsulate the warm and fuzzy feeling that despite the world being dogshit, we can still do our best for those around us, be a part of a greater whole with honest fervor. The player and Andreas will inevitably fuck up a lot, but it's something we have to live with, something to learn from. Things like that feel self-evident in the real world and are rarely explored properly in games, but the fact that Pentiment lacks a manual save function really sells that feeling. But even if we can't meta-game Tassing into the perfect little Bavarian town suffering under feudalism and religious oppression, the Tassing we end up with is undeniably ours. I think that's probably why I might never replay Pentiment, which is rare for me, since I tend to replay games I love quite often.

Also the "third act" is pretty good! Saw some people criticizing the shift in gameplay focus, but it was a nice change of pace and was probably my favorite part altogether. Don't normally recommend games on here, but honestly, check it out for yourself. I can't really think of many demographics that'd be outright disappointed by Pentiment. It's good. :)

I don't know how long it's been since a game made me feel the way I did when I was a kid. Like it was all I wanted to do, when I was outside I was thinking "oh i could be playing injustice gods among us right now." And picturing what zod combos I could think up in my head while zoning out in class. Wait actually yeah i do know how long it's been. Literally 10 years. See the injustice sentence? That game came out 10 years ago. When I was outside, hanging out with friends, exercising, doing whatever. I always think oh man i could be playing hollow knight. I lied down at night thinking oh man maybe tomorrow I could check out this area over here now that I have this ability. And I would imagine what stuff I could find there. Also perfectly captures that dark souls 1 feel while being a lot more forgiving. It's so easy to just do whatever and go in one direction and explore. There's always something there. And the movement and everything is so easy and snappy that it's not a chore at all. At first when my friend said there's DLC that triples the length of the game i'm like oh man that sounds so stretched out and long and boring. But now i'm like ... only triples??!? give me more!!! hahahaha. ohh what a day what a motherfuckin day. I can't believe I found the injustice gods among us of a new generation. I'm telling everyone about this. I'm goin back and im doin the DLC and finding every little one of those tiny collectibles. Cause this game is sick.