Good god I was expecting just another Wii U port, but even the base game felt like I'd never played this before. The movement feels so much better and more fluid than it ever did on the Wii U and I really could not put this down to play anything else for a long time.

That's before even talking about Bowser's Fury. Although it was short, I had an absolute blast with it, I could not say enough good about it. Just play the game, even if you bought it on the Wii U (unless you played that version to death). Somehow, it's worth the $60.

This is before the April update, but already this game is going to be one of the highlights of my year. I'm not a fan of how much it trivializes a lot of key aspects of older games by removing any need to prepare before a hunt (like, you can access your item box at any time from a camp. Why.), as well as not even needing to track monsters or learn their habits because everything just shows up on the map now; it just feels like a glorified boss rush. Fortunately though, each fight is really fun, the wirebugs add a lot to make the movement feel really good, and it's just an absolute blast to play with friends, especially the Rampage quests (aka tower defense). If you haven't played MonHun before, this is a perfect place to start (although it's really hard to go back to the older games grumble grumble). I really can't wait for the future updates and eventual G-rank stuff.

Edit - post April update: Holy fuck I love this game

I played this coming off of the RE2 and RE1 remakes, so I was a little disappointed that (aside from one section) there wasn't much in the way of "survival horror" here. There's an abundance of money and resources so I was never once worried about running out of anything, especially with enemies dropping those resources at a rate so high I could almost compare this game to Doom. However, the game makes up for this by being a blast to play. I was picking this game up every spare moment I had to see what comes next in both story and game, and while I can't say I was never disappointed (in the story, anyway - there were a lot of boneheaded decisions made and quite a bit of cheesy dialogue) the game still satisfied me enough that I can look past it. Capcom did not pull any punches with the presentation, because the game is beautiful, even with my brick of a graphics card producing the visuals. There were a ton of really cool set pieces and locations, and the UI was efficient yet minimal, allowing for easy immersion. Although I personally prefer OTS Resident Evil, first person wasn't bad at all and I think it was pulled off amazingly well.

EDIT: Forgot to mention there's no backtracking allowed in this game. That made me sad.

It's basically a Yakuza game so it already gets a decent score for me. I think this was the best take on the brawler combat yet, it was a lot of fun to just be always bouncing around, kicking off walls, leapfrogging over enemies, etc. Plethora of minigames too, but not as many as you'd expect.

Not going to spoil the plot, but I liked it until I didn't. I felt like it fell kinda flat towards the end, and the two main antagonists (I don't mean Hamura) turned out to be really uninteresting, and it felt like an obligation to fight them rather than just let the plot continue normally which would have cornered them anyway. I enjoyed the main cast, but they were somewhat shallow too. Yagami feels very much like a stereotypical tough guy most of the time but Kaito was cool, Mafuyu was great too when they weren't throwing her into bad damsel-in-distress situations (they could have easily made her as kickass as Saeko in Like a Dragon), but she had pretty good chemistry with Yagami and I liked watching them interact. The other "party members" are alright but nothing too special.

There was also not enough detective stuff. I wanted to present evidence more than like two times through the whole game (what's the point of even having case files if you're not going to use them??), and actually have a part in solving the mystery with more deduction stuff like in Ace Attorney. Instead, most detective stuff is either chase missions (QTE fest) that got old pretty quick and weren't dependent on any kind of skill, stalking missions (those were fun, at least), and occasionally going into first person view and scanning the environment (or doing the same thing but with a drone). Again, it never really felt like I was solving a mystery aside from just watching it play out and I hope they do that better in the sequel.

Overall, I'm excited for Lost Judgment, but I'm more excited for the next true Yakuza game.

God there were so many good ideas here but it fell flat on its face. The overall gameplay was actually better than I was expecting and sideways Wii remote was weird but simple enough to get used to, and it was surprisingly fun. The combat took a lot of the good parts of Prime and the main series and put them together in a pretty solid way (except you can't move in first person, why?).

However, exploration - the most important part of any search action/metroidvania game - sucks so much. The game is constantly restricting you (I don't mean the restricted suit powers), they really tried to crack down on any kind of sequence breaking by throwing invisible walls everywhere (even when bomb jumping you hit an invisible wall if you go above a low height), locking doors behind you constantly, and just overall taking any thought or enjoyment out of running through the space station. Atmosphere is okay, but nothing special. I can't remember any of the music in this game, even though I finished it minutes ago.

Dear lord what was that story. I heard it was bad but I was not expecting it to be that bad. I don't even know if it had any themes (what does "other m" mean anyway??) to it, it was just "Samus goes here does stuff with Fed army and her old CO". There was nothing necessary in the story that made this game worthwhile, even if it explains some things in Fusion, those were not necessary explanations to justify how bad this is. I'm totally fine with Samus having emotions and expressing herself more but not the way it happened in this game. It's almost laughable just how bad the story was.

Overall, I really wish this game had good writing. Even if the story doesn't matter at all, it would have at least made this game more enjoyable, at least if they were going to restrict the player this bad.

Giving it a 2 star because at least the gameplay was pretty fun.

I feel like I'd heard that this game wasn't as good as the other two Prime games and I'm happy to say that wasn't true at all. Some parts (especially the beginning and the end) felt more like Halo than Metroid which I wasn't overly crazy about, but the rest of the game was very Metroid and I loved it. There were a few times where I got completely stuck and there was almost no indication whatsoever about what I was supposed to do next which was not fun at all, but like every other Metroid game, once I found my way forward I was having a blast.

Metroid Prime always delivers presentation-wise, and although the color palette for this game was almost entirely brown, there was a lot of cool stuff to see and a lot of detail was put into the environments. Each planet was super cool and had a lot of great ideas new to Metroid, especially SkyTown. Taking place in the sky of the planet Elysia, you traversed the area almost entirely by zipline and morph ball cannons which was exhilarating and just a ton of fun overall, and I hope future Metroid games look to this game for inspiration because wow SkyTown was just really really good. The music was okay but there wasn't too much I felt like would stick with me, unlike the music in Phendrana Drifts or Torvus Bog but it was serviceable.

This game was made for the Wii and as such it introduced new motion controls besides aiming. The grapple beam was now activated with the nunchuck (nunchuck motion controls are cringe) but you could use it to tear off enemy shields which I thought was a really cool use of it, and once you realized you just had to move it in a straight line it was easier to get the hang of it. Some motions (like removing energy cells or opening locks) used the Wii remote and for some reason you had to wait for the message to tell you what motion to use to pop up before the game would let you perform the action, which made it feel clunkier than it should.

Overall I hope this trilogy comes to Switch because it's an amazing time and it really just needs some quality of life updates and it would be perfect.