Same as the original but with worse controls and better graphics.

I was always wondering why I never beat this as a kid and now that I've played it as an adult I realize why. The game is just not designed all that well. Platforms are too tiny for how slippery this plumber is. The game constantly feels like it's rushing you and with how short each level is, which means you can beat the whole game in like an hour, even if you're taking your time. Enemies don't provide anything other than points that add nothing to the gameplay. Breaking blocks more often hinders than helps so it's better to just ignore everything and reach the end as fast as possible. If I played this in 1985 I wouldn't think its the future of gaming. I would think that somebody ported an arcade game to a home console and thought to change nothing. Because that's what it is, an arcade game. It feels designed to waste your time and suck tokens out of you through cheap deaths and crap mechanics. It's really just frustrating to play all around. I think people would look at this a lot differently if it wasn't one of the best-selling games of all time and didn't start one of the biggest franchises in gaming history.

I was always wondering why I never beat this as a kid and now that I've played it as an adult I realize why. The game is just not designed all that well. Platforms are too tiny for how slippery this plumber is. The game constantly feels like it's rushing you and with how short each level is, which means you can beat the whole game in like an hour, even if you're taking your time. Enemies don't provide anything other than points that add nothing to the gameplay. Breaking blocks more often hinders than helps so it's better to just ignore everything and reach the end as fast as possible. If I played this in 1985 I wouldn't think it's the future of gaming. I would think that somebody ported an arcade game to a home console and thought to change nothing. Because that's what it is, an arcade game. It feels designed to waste your time and suck tokens out of you through cheap deaths and crap mechanics. It's really just frustrating to play all around. I think people would look at this a lot differently if it wasn't one of the best-selling games of all time and didn't start one of the biggest franchises in gaming history.

Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales is really everything you expect it to be: more Marvel's Spider-Man. In some ways, it improves upon the original and makes it a more definitive experience. In others, it uses mechanics from the original in a way that just feels inferior to it.

Firstly, the story is pretty good and does a decent job of building upon Miles' character. However, it does feel like a side story, not because of the lack of focus on Peter, but because of the lack of focus on Miles. The original Marvel's Spider-Man already does a lot to establish Miles as a character, and I think it does a really good job at it. But it leaves this game to have to clean up the scraps, while simultaneously not pushing things too far that it ends up ruining his arc in the upcoming Marvel's Spider-Man too. So you're caught up in this story about Roxxon, an energy company with a pretty blatantly evil CEO, and the Underground led by the Tinkerer, who is more of an anti-hero trying to take down Roxxon. I realized about halfway through that the main story is not really about Miles at all. It's more about his relationship with each of these entities, which still works out very satisfyingly but does not really feel like a cohesive arc for the character.

Next up, is the gameplay. Solid as always. Swinging is satisfying. Miles has more tricks than Peter did thanks to his venom powers. Fighting feels much more deep thanks to the venom powers as well. Venom jumping, venom punches, and venom slams are all so satisfying to pull off properly and chain into larger combos. Stealth even got a big improvement in this game thanks to Miles' cloaking powers. A lot of what would have probably been slow sneaking sections with MJ were replaced with actually engaging puzzles that involve brain power and smart mechanics. My problem with the gameplay stems from an issue the original had as well. There's just too much crap. The whole world is stuffed full of items that I just don't feel like getting. It's all so easy to collect too. Scan an area, punch a wall, grab a thing, and swing on your way to the next thing. The activities like Spider-Man training, crime-fighting, and Roxxon/Underground bases are all very fun. But I hope that all of these worthless collectibles get removed from the sequel because it's just bloating up these games. Maybe that is why this game is so short, too.

Which brings me to my final point, the game's length. This game is really tiny. Normally I am not one to complain about game length. I don't care if a game is 6 hours long or 100 hours as long as it uses every hour respectfully. But everything about this game just feels too short. It feels like it had to be rushed so they could continue the development of Spider-Man 2. The story feels like it stops right as it's getting good, the fighting and swinging mechanics don't get enough time to really stick around long enough to make them feel as deep as they are and it feels like the amount of collectibles only exists to make up for that lack of length.

Overall, I still enjoyed my time with this game, and if you're simply looking for more of Marvel's Spider-Man gameplay this will be well worth your purchase. But this game is more like a Star Wars Clone Wars than a real entry in the franchise. Just something bite-size to chow down on if you're already a fan of the original. I do hope they bring a lot of the gameplay improvements, such as venom powers and stealth, back in the next game. Hopefully, they will not do Miles as dirty as they did him here in his own entry.

It's design principles are very much so similar to its predecessor. And that is still very much so a good thing. A good half of this game is you just feeling like "oh its BotW again. Fun 😊." But then you get to the that third temple and the cracks really started to show and youre like "oh its BotW again. But kind of not as good." It's still got shrines but it's best puzzles don't take enough creative use of Ultrahand. Then you releasing that sometimes ascend can just straight up break the game in terms of travrersal. Then you notice the really crappy AI on your champions and they basically never do what you want you want. It starts to get more tedious doing shrines. Systems are still very physics based but it just never quite feels like any of that matters because of how easy it is to abuse the systems. Which is a little impressive in its own light but eventually I just realized I don't wanna actually go through and fully 100% this and I feel like there could be more to the main gameplay loop that made me want to 100% complete it but I just couldn't.

Fuse and Undo are super cool and really good systems though. Fuse and the new level of item scarcity really made collecting stuff so important. And I think it combined with what felt like a very big level of item scarcity that felt fair made interacting with the cooking and fusing to become so much fun. You really have to ration your resources in this game. Until late ga

Persona 3 Portable is the biggest "mixed bag" game I have played in a long time. There are obviously a lot of good elements here, I would not have played for nearly 90 hours if there was nothing redeeming this game. However, there are also a lot of things holding this game back and I hope that within this review, I can break down what works and what doesn't.

I would like to start with the good, the best of the good being the characters and theming. There is some absolutely excellent writing being shown off here by the Persona team, and the introduction of social links to the series makes for compelling gameplay. Between Persona 5 and Persona 3, this game absolutely has P5 beat for social links. Akinari, Maiko, Mutatsu, President Tanaka, Saori, and Bunkichi are the greatest standouts of the side characters, each grappling with the theme of loss in their respective stories. In terms of the main cast, Akihiko, Shinjiro, Koromaru, and Mitsuru stand out as excellent examples of how to write believable high schoolers without making them feel like stereotypes or archetypes. There are very few characters I would really call bad in this game, although Ken is seriously wasted potential considering his place in the main story compared to his social link. I have to say that I could not completely get into Aigis' character the way others have, not to say that I disliked her character but I simply did not feel she resonated with me the way she did others. Meanwhile, the themes in this game are as strong as ever. The persona summoning is done through means of suicide, the music constantly mentions the coming destruction, and the arcana ends in the Death 13 card. I can see why some people consider this their favorite game of all time, because going purely off of themes, this is one of the best games ever.

However, I do not critique games purely on theme alone, so allow me to indulge my mixed feelings before heading directly into the territory of what I consider bad. First off, the story, which starts off very passively, gradually grows into a much larger narrative toward the middle, before entirely halting just before the climax. This makes the game's story feel really slow at one of the most important parts. The entire month of December lacks any social links, which means your daily life goes from hanging out with friends while the threat of the end of the world looms over everyone, to a boring month of doing absolutely nothing while the characters learn to accept the things that they already accepted months beforehand. I partially understand why this was done from a theming perspective, December is supposed to be an incredibly depressing month for the game's story. But from a storytelling perspective, giving the player nothing to do as the story reaches its peak really kills momentum and just had me going "Can this be over already?" by the time January rolled around. Secondly, menus and UI. The main system menu is decent but a little bland. The battle UI wheel is a little confusing, with left going right on the circle and right going left, as well as inconsistent UI memory in battle. The real struggle with UI comes in the Velvet Room. Because of the limitations of the PSP, I understand why menus had to be dulled in some places, but cutting manual selection for skill inheritance and being unable to sort by name in the Compendium really made me want to tear my hair out. The mechanic that the game gets its namesake from should not be unfun to interact with but so many times I found myself skipping out on a visit to the Velvet Room that would have been otherwise beneficial to my playthrough, simply because I did not feel like it. The lack of skill inheritance picking especially made me feel really unattached from my personas and I found myself not interacting with the card systems, simply because I knew I would be throwing my personas out during my next Velvet Room visit anyways. Finally, for my mixed feelings, I want to discuss the combat. At certain times, the combat feels really fun to go through. Balancing SP usage, using critical hits and co-ops to save SP where I could, and landing a powerful move exactly when you need it all made me feel very connected to my party members and really pushed me through the worst of Tartarus (don't worry, we'll get to it soon). On the other hand, there were times when combat felt like I would press three buttons and then mash A to get through the all-out attack cutscene as fast as I could. The lack of enemy diversity is more so a problem with Tartarus than it is the combat, but ultimately it is the combat that suffers because of this choice. On each block of Tartarus, there are, at most, 10 unique combat encounters. Combine this with the fact that each floor of Tartarus has you go through anywhere between 5 or 10 combat encounters and you tend to run out of unique problems to solve by about a third of the way through the block.

Now I really get to tear into this game's worst features. First off, the obvious, is Tartarus. It really is a marvel of modern game design that in the year 2009, P-Studio can look at 263 randomly generated hallways with no visually unique style separating one floor from another aside from a hue shift and the occasionally added decoration and go "yeah, change nothing." I really do not know how you would go about making this better but P-Studio sure did not do it. I would always reach my Tartarus day, put my headphones in, turn on some music or a podcast, and just accept that the next 5 hours of my playthrough would be mindless RPG grinding and walking down long hallways. Finally, my greatest critique of this game, exclusive to this version of the game, is the presentation. The presentation of this game cost it a full star in my mind. Almost everything else, even the mind-numbingness parts of Tartarus could be excused if the entire game were not presented in this disgusting visual novel style. I understand that the PSP was a very limited piece of hardware and I'm not asking for fully animated cutscenes for everything, but man they could at least let more than 2 PNGs on screen at a time. It's really hard for a scene to emotionally capture you when the scene consists of 2 still characters talking at each other over a crunchy jpg and sound effects convey each action the characters take. This is not a big deal for when two characters are talking in class, but a major death scene in this game is ruined because you can hardly even tell when the character has been killed because all that signifies their death is a gunshot sound effect, the character grunting, then the sound effect of the character falling to the ground while their sprite stays completely still. This is then followed up by every single character onlooking to gasp or interject with a scream, simply to remind you that the character is there. It shouldn't even be too much to ask to have the 3D models in the background of these cutscenes, even doing simple actions, since one of the final cutscenes has this happen for dramatic effect. This presentation takes away a lot of tension and emotion from scenes that would otherwise be the most emotional game of all time.

Ultimately, do I think Persona 3 Portable is a good game? Yes. Do I think it's a great game? Almost. There are a lot of pieces holding this back which really sucks since this seems to be the only way you can play a good amount of the content. But it also seems to be lacking content from other versions of this game. It ultimately feels like the game you play after you play Persona 3 or Persona 3: FES. This really sucks because for many people, myself included, this is the only way they can play Persona 3 at all. It seriously makes the news that the Persona 3 Remake will be excluding both FES and Portable content, only furthering the gap of content in this game. I would say, play Persona 3: FES first if you have the opportunity, but if you cannot, this is not the worst substitute.

Persona 3 Portable is the biggest "mixed bag" game I have played in a long time. There are obviously a lot of good elements here, I would not have played for nearly 90 hours if there was nothing redeeming this game. However, there are also a lot of things holding this game back and I hope that within this review, I can break down what works and what doesn't.

I would like to start with the good, the best of the good being the characters and theming. There is some absolutely excellent writing being shown off here by the Persona team, and the introduction of social links to the series makes for compelling gameplay. Between Persona 5 and Persona 3, this game absolutely has P5 beat for social links. Akinari, Maiko, Mutatsu, President Tanaka, Saori, and Bunkichi are the greatest standouts of the side characters, each grappling with the theme of loss in their respective stories. In terms of the main cast, Akihiko, Shinjiro, Koromaru, and Mitsuru stand out as excellent examples of how to write believable high schoolers without making them feel like stereotypes or archetypes. There are very few characters I would really call bad in this game, although Ken is seriously wasted potential considering his place in the main story compared to his social link. I have to say that I could not completely get into Aigis' character the way others have, not to say that I disliked her character but I simply did not feel she resonated with me the way she did others. Meanwhile, the themes in this game are as strong as ever. The persona summoning is done through means of suicide, the music constantly mentions the coming destruction, and the arcana ends in the Death 13 card. I can see why some people consider this their favorite game of all time, because going purely off of themes, this is one of the best games ever.

However, I do not critique games purely on theme alone, so allow me to indulge my mixed feelings before heading directly into the territory of what I consider bad. First off, the story, which starts off very passively, gradually grows into a much larger narrative toward the middle, before entirely halting just before the climax. This makes the game's story feel really slow at one of the most important parts. The entire month of December lacks any social links, which means your daily life goes from hanging out with friends while the threat of the end of the world looms over everyone, to a boring month of doing absolutely nothing while the characters learn to accept the things that they already accepted months beforehand. I partially understand why this was done from a theming perspective, December is supposed to be an incredibly depressing month for the game's story. But from a storytelling perspective, giving the player nothing to do as the story reaches its peak really kills momentum and just had me going "Can this be over already?" by the time January rolled around. Secondly, menus and UI. The main system menu is decent but a little bland. The battle UI wheel is a little confusing, with left going right on the circle and right going left, as well as inconsistent UI memory in battle. The real struggle with UI comes in the Velvet Room. Because of the limitations of the PSP, I understand why menus had to be dulled in some places, but cutting manual selection for skill inheritance and being unable to sort by name in the Compendium really made me want to tear my hair out. The mechanic that the game gets its namesake from should not be unfun to interact with but so many times I found myself skipping out on a visit to the Velvet Room that would have been otherwise beneficial to my playthrough, simply because I did not feel like it. The lack of skill inheritance picking especially made me feel really unattached from my personas and I found myself not interacting with the card systems, simply because I knew I would be throwing my personas out during my next Velvet Room visit anyways. Finally, for my mixed feelings, I want to discuss the combat. At certain times, the combat feels really fun to go through. Balancing SP usage, using critical hits and co-ops to save SP where I could, and landing a powerful move exactly when you need it all made me feel very connected to my party members and really pushed me through the worst of Tartarus (don't worry, we'll get to it soon). On the other hand, there were times when combat felt like I would press three buttons and then mash A to get through the all-out attack cutscene as fast as I could. The lack of enemy diversity is more so a problem with Tartarus than it is the combat, but ultimately it is the combat that suffers because of this choice. On each block of Tartarus, there are, at most, 10 unique combat encounters. Combine this with the fact that each floor of Tartarus has you go through anywhere between 5 or 10 combat encounters and you tend to run out of unique problems to solve by about a third of the way through the block.

Now I really get to tear into this game's worst features. First off, the obvious, is Tartarus. It really is a marvel of modern game design that in the year 2009, P-Studio can look at 263 randomly generated hallways with no visually unique style separating one floor from another aside from a hue shift and the occasionally added decoration and go "yeah, change nothing." I really do not know how you would go about making this better but P-Studio sure did not do it. I would always reach my Tartarus day, put my headphones in, turn on some music or a podcast, and just accept that the next 5 hours of my playthrough would be mindless RPG grinding and walking down long hallways. Finally, my greatest critique of this game, exclusive to this version of the game, is the presentation. The presentation of this game cost it a full star in my mind. Almost everything else, even the mind-numbingness parts of Tartarus could be excused if the entire game were not presented in this disgusting visual novel style. I understand that the PSP was a very limited piece of hardware and I'm not asking for fully animated cutscenes for everything, but man they could at least let more than 2 PNGs on screen at a time. It's really hard for a scene to emotionally capture you when the scene consists of 2 still characters talking at each other over a crunchy jpg and sound effects convey each action the characters take. This is not a big deal for when two characters are talking in class, but a major death scene in this game is ruined because you can hardly even tell when the character has been killed because all that signifies their death is a gunshot sound effect, the character grunting, then the sound effect of the character falling to the ground while their sprite stays completely still. This is then followed up by every single character onlooking to gasp or interject with a scream, simply to remind you that the character is there. It shouldn't even be too much to ask to have the 3D models in the background of these cutscenes, even doing simple actions, since one of the final cutscenes has this happen for dramatic effect. This presentation takes away a lot of tension and emotion from scenes that would otherwise be the most emotional game of all time.

Ultimately, do I think Persona 3 Portable is a good game? Yes. Do I think it's a great game? Almost. There are a lot of pieces holding this back which really sucks since this seems to be the only way you can play a good amount of the content. But it also seems to be lacking content from other versions of this game. It ultimately feels like the game you play after you play Persona 3 or Persona 3: FES. This really sucks because for many people, myself included, this is the only way they can play Persona 3 at all. It seriously makes the news that the Persona 3 Remake will be excluding both FES and Portable content, only furthering the gap of content in this game. I would say, play Persona 3: FES first if you have the opportunity, but if you cannot, this is not the worst substitute.

WHY WOULD YOU REMOVE THE CAMERAS FROM A FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY'S GAME SCOTT??? THERE ARE NO VISUALS IN THE MAIN GAMEPLAY AND IT LEADS TO THIS BEING THE LEAST SCARY AND LEAST TENSE GAME IN THE FRANCHISE! The pizzeria tycoon section is alright with a few bullshit minigames (I'm looking at you basketball hoops) and the salvage sections are actually super cool and tense but a little too easy. I feel like those parts could absolutely pass as they are if it weren't for the unbearable office gameplay though.

Hi-Fi Rush is a flashy game with a lot to do and that is absolutely why it has captured the heart of the internet. Unfortunately, it does have some elements holding it back from being a truly perfect game. I'm here to poke a few holes in everybody's new Game of the Year contendor.

First off, the main gameplay loop consists mainly of platforming sections and fighting gauntlets. Levels use this loop to varying degrees of success. At its best, the platforming is used to create some really fun puzzles that combine your movement abilities with your partner abilities. At their worst, the game will just have you jump across blocks for 20 minutes. Overall, the platforming is pretty consistent, it only falters a few times closer to the middle and end of the game. The fighting, however, can really grow old in some areas. Sometimes, instead of designing levels, the game will put 10 enemies in front of you and just say "kill". Enemies do get many variations at the beginning, but towards the end you will start seeing the same enemies over and over. This would not be so bad if the combat were consistent. While in the beginning, the combat does require genuine strategy and skill to beat enemies effectively. However, after you obtain your second partner, that partner system begins to break the game's combat entirely as it becomes much easier to summon partners as often as possible and have them damage and distract enemies for you. This main gameplay loop can lead to some of the best levels in the game, and at other points will have you playing mindless gauntlets for an hour. The production areas and museum are two stand-out examples of the solid side of this gameplay.

Outside of the main gameplay loop, there is an upgrade system that allows you to customize attacks, specials, gear and "chips", which act as bonus abilities to boost your powers. The attacks and specials are fun to customize to see which abilities work for you, and the ability to sell them makes it so you can choose to allocate those credits elsewhere in the lategame. The chips are unfortunately not very important, and I found myself mostly just using the ones that decreased partner recharge time. The gear is what will give you the most edge in battle but really does not offer much in the way of customization. Additionally, you can speak with your partners at your hideout, (when the game lets you access the hideout) and check smaller challenges the game has set for you. Although the hideout was fun at first, I found myself mostly avoiding the content once the game really started to pick up.

As for presentation, this is where Hi-Fi Rush really shines. Enviornments are very rich and feel lived despite the game mostly being a set of linear platforming levels. Characters are super well-designed, with each one feeling distinct in their own way. (Unfortunately, somebody on the team must have been a gigantic Jojo's Bizarre Adventure fan, as Zanzo is quite literally the stereotype of a Jojo's fan. I, too, am a jojo fan, but oh my god the constant referncing got really tired, really quickly.) The music is really good, but if I had any complaints, it would be that apart from a few of the boss tracks, none of the tracks felt all that distinct from each other. Some tracks are even a little too ambient for what the game was going for, and therefore, it can be really hard to do anything on rhythm in those sections of the game. However, the artstyle is absolutely the best part of the game. This world and these characters look and feel straight out of a comic book and cutscenes are the highest high points of the game. Unfortunately, that whole "comic book" style the team was going for really bleeds into the writing. While I don't hate the writing this game has, it definitely wears on you with how trope-y it is, and the ways it uses meta humor to try and shield itself from any criticism. If you are not a fan of MCU writing, DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME. Yes, it fits with the tone. Yes, it fits with certain characters. (Kale should've been the only one constantly making jokes because his lines and line delivery are genuinely so funny.) But after you hear the fifteenth "Chai is dumb" and "CNMN says exactly what is happening" joke, it really starts to get old and you just want to move on with the game. The game also has some genuine performance issues that I have not seen called out too much but I hit a couple of big performance drops in certain areas and cutscenes would sometimes desync from the audio.

All in all, while I really appreciate Hi-Fi Rush for such a creative idea with a really rich world and characters, games are defined by their gameplay. Unfortunately for this game, I think there are one too many elements that players will find genuinely frustrating, to the point where I would not be surprised if most of the people praising this game so highly, have not actually finished it, yet. Whether it be the pacing issues, the occasionally repetitive and trope-filled writing, the lackluster side of the platforming level design, or the easy-to-break combat, I think there are just too many elements to give this game the rating I want to give it. Which is really unfortunate because the game is incredibly charming and was clearly made with a lot of love, and even had a lot of elements that I did like. I think that with a sequel, the combat can be better refined, and some tweaks made to the writing can really bring this game the praise I know it deserves.

DISCLAIMER: I do not spoil any of the campaign/main story mode in my review here. I only talk about my personal critiques of the story in a vague way so as to not spoil anything for anyone who has not beaten it. No boss spoilers or story spoilers were involved in the writing of this review.

My experience with the Splatoon franchise is probably a little unorthodox. I really enjoyed the first Splatoon when it first came out on the Wii U but when it came time for the Switch to get a Splatoon entry I wasn't all that interested. Even when the first reveal trailer for Splatoon 3 came out I wasn't really sold on it even though I knew I would probably end up playing it anyways. Then I played the Splatfest demo in late August and I knew I had to play this game. It has quickly become my most played game this year, even behind Elden Ring, and my love for this game, and acknowledgment of its flaws, are why I sit here writing this review today.

The very first thing I noticed about this game when playing is just how good it all feels. Movement feels fluid, menus are organized and stylized in such a unique way. The game controls well, and it just feels great to shoot, swim and play. Each weapon feels distinct and it really feels special when you find your selection of weapons that works well for you. Dualies are your quick, mid-range fighter guns. Sloshers make for excellent support weapons, while still giving you plenty of power within close quarters. Blasters are nice mid-range alternatives if you need something with a little more support to it. Snipers are effective long-range without ever feeling busted. The unique weapons like the roller, splatana, and splatbrella are all fun in their own way and allow players to really fit their own niche in how they choose to approach the shooter genre. In terms of how it looks, I think the game does really well for being a Switch game that prioritizes fps and fast internet connection. The world is unique, beautiful and allows writers and composers a chance at creating new, unique creative opportunities. Textures and UI look like they really got that "first-party Nintendo game" polish to them. The ink in particular kept impressing me with how good it looked and how realistic it looked. However, the music really added a whole other level to this immersion. The music all fits with the post-apocalyptic theme that the game has, and reuses familiar Splatoon motifs in a way that even a casual fan will recognize. The whole game has a very punk-rock, rebellious feel to it that really makes the Splatoon franchise feel like it's "grown-up" in a way.

Honestly, I ended up enjoying far more of Splatoon's single-player than I had in previous Splatoon entries, and part of that was the overhaul in the single-player hub world and the addition of TableTurf battles. The singleplayer in this game is fantastic. It provides a better context for the world while giving more creative freedom for the team to expand the world, and really immerse you in the idea that this world has a full culture and scientific history that justifies its existence. As for the actual gameplay within the single-player, it is more akin to a gauntlet of challenges that need to be completed. On one hand, this is great as it allows for a greater focus on the weapons and introduces players to new ways the weapons, sub-weapons, and specials can be used. On the other hand, with a greater focus on broadening the Splatoon narrative, and an overworld similar to that of Super Mario 3D World, I would have liked to have seen greater theming to the world. While most of the levels are designed incredibly well, they do not leave much of an impact on the player outside of a simple "Huh, that was a cool concept. On with my day." Nothing about these levels or this world really stand out to me and it left me wishing for just a little bit more. I was planning on collecting everything in the campaign and 100%ing the story mode, but the main game was unfortunately just not compelling enough for me to want to do so. After the very first playable section in the game, nothing really screams "post-apocalypse" to me when it comes to the story mode. While I did enjoy Alterna and the setting itself is rather creative, it did not feel like the story mode connected to the main game thematically, regardless of how many mentions of the idols it throws your way.

Tableturf battle was a smaller section of the game that I felt deserved its own paragraph for simply how creative, unique, and thematically appropriate it felt. This small side mode was genuinely one of my favorite parts of the game. Including a small, turn-based, strategy card game that mimics the main turf war mode while including its own unique rules and strategy made for an excellent way to kill time and even get some cool gear to use in the rest of the game. My only complaint is how they limited it to a single-player mode. It baffles me that they would think through such a novel concept only to make it so you can only play against CPUs. I am sure that there will one day be an update added where you can play online but if you were going to include this, it really should have been ready with online play at launch.

Finally, we come to the main game and what I personally played the most: turf war, anarchy battles, and salmon run. I suppose I should preface that I have played in two Splatfests and achieved a B+ rank after approximately 3 weeks of play. I personally love everything about this online experience and it is genuinely the most fun I have had playing an online game in a long time. First up, the Splatfests, which I have always thought was an ingenious way to keep your player base engaged, certainly more than something like a double XP weekend. People love arguing about useless stuff on the internet and turning that into an actual mode for your game where people can defend their option by representing their team in turf wars is absolutely ingenious and I could not praise the Splatoon team more for their decision to continue this tradition and expand upon it by introducing a third option into the Splatfest. What I dislike about the current Splatfest system is how points are currently divided, and the now-infamous Tri-Color Turf Wars. Splatfest points are divided into three categories in this game: the number of battles you win for your team before the Splatfest begins, the number of people that joined your team and the amount of "clout" attained during the Splatfest, of which winning Tri-Color Turf War battles will net you significantly more clout. This system sounds good on paper but when applied to the actual game it just turns out an absolute mess as it means effectively all a team has to do is win the popularity contest. The team with the most votes and the most amount of players to play open battles gets the victory automatically. Creating a new Splatfest system had to be hard on the developers but the two Splatfests have gone the exact same with Big Man taking an early lead, only to be absolutely crushed by the popularity of Shiver (and everybody on Team Big Man avoiding Tri-Color battles), with Frye getting absolutely nothing. Honestly, though, the voting system would not be this bad if it were not for the horrid maps the Splatoon team is picking for these Tri-Color matches. As someone who has now played them from both Attacker and Defender perspectives, they just always seem to be biased in favor of the attackers. Defenders spawn in the middle of the map with that middle typically being incredibly small and are forced to simultaneously take space and defend the Ultra Signal, which pretty much gives Attackers the win if they get it early enough. This means that maps that have hard-to-reach spawn areas are near-impossible to win as defense. This problem, unfortunately, lead to me not being able to play many Tri-Color turf battles at all and lead to my Splatfest experiences feeling like I was just queueing up for some normal Turf War. However, I will throw in some final praise for the Turf Wars as they give quite a bit of extra equipment bonuses, further incentivizing players to play on those weekends.

Analyzing the remaining online features for the game is significantly less scrutinizing, simply due to how fun all of the main modes are. The online modes are what the game truly revolves around and they all feel great. Turf War is fun and chaotic but a great way to boost gear or just hang out and play a fun casual shooter. The competitive ranked modes are great and each mode type allows for the unique use of weapons that may not normally get played in regular turf wars. Splat Zones was my personal favorite because the "King of the Hill" style gameplay works so well with the Splatoon formula. Finally, Salmon Run is a fun alternative to the main online modes which focuses on more of a PvE element that I love. I do wish that Salmon Run was a little more connected to the main game because I definitely would have liked to level up and use my unique gear for the game mode but players will still find a lot of value in the mode as is. I found the way the gear system interacted with the main modes incredibly fun when it was connected. I loved leveling up gear, swapping out gear chunks, and designing a build that worked just right for me. This is definitely the type of game you can grind for hours and still discover something new about how a certain piece of gear interacts with the rest of the game.

To end off this review, I would like to acknowledge the large "Communication error has occurred"-shaped elephant in the room. The online connection can be truly awful sometimes and it just goes to show how underdeveloped Nintendo's online infrastructure can be. I would sit in lobbies, disconnect from those lobbies if too many players from the previous game left, and then get thrown out, and put into new lobbies only for players to disconnect a minute into the game. I would genuinely wait 10 minutes just to solo queue an unranked mode and it would seriously kill my desire to grind. It's not the worst Nintendo online game, but it could absolutely be improved upon.

That about wraps up my extensive thoughts on Splatoon 3. All in all, it's a really solid game and an incredibly full $60 package that I think just about anyone will enjoy. This game is absolutely amazing and if you are a Splatoon fan, you will love the game. If you want an unconventional shooter game with tons of content, weapons, character, and charm, this is your game. If you just want something fun to play and you have a few friends that already own it, absolutely play this. I wish I could give this game a perfect score but each almost perfect element has just a tiny asterisk on it that the game as a whole just barely feels like it misses the mark as a "perfect game." I still think the game is incredibly solid, a good buy, and all-around one of the best multiplayer third-person shooter experiences out there.

Resident "Not A Rhythm Game Type of Guy" here. As someone who has basically always observed this as the "Kirby games of rhythm games" I think it lives up to that standard very well. The game is incredibly easy to get into, has a cute artstyle and is just fun to play. My only complaint is the lack of any content. A very limited selection of songs that mostly consist of noncopyrighted music and Bandai Namco owned music. I get that licensing music is hard but the best you can do is like 40 songs? Twenty of which you already own. And if you lack actual music, you could add modes to make up for it. There's no real substance to the game other than the standard rhythm game fanfare. I will say, points for the two Undertale tracks.

Windjammer 2 is a game with an absolutely fantastic concept with a fun artstyle and characters bogged down by an absurdly high barrier to entry. Despite being one of the better day one releases on Game Pass this year, it's sad to see this flop all because of its lackluster tutorial and bare bones content. If there had been an easy to get into tutorial, a practice mode, some challenge modes and a sizable online experience I think this game could've done amazing but as it is, it's just going to be a game most people pass on because it felt like the fighting game community would love it by default. Sad to see this spiritual successor to a NeoGeo classic go unloved but that's just what happens when you don't put that passion needed to make a game truly great.