I bought this game based purely on the art style and I absolutely don't regret my decision! I was really invested in this game, I finished it in a week!

Eastward is an action adventure RPG. You play a father, John, and his adoptive daughter Sam. John is the one you will be playing the most, since it's him that has the ability to attack, with guns, bombs or in melee combat with a frying pan. Sam on the other hand uses magic to freeze enemies. Gameplay alternates between exploration-combat and puzzle solving, using the abilities of the 2 characters.

Like I said, I picked up this game because of it's art style and omg it's beautiful!!
The game is in pixel art, but a very detailed kind of pixel art. Characters are very expressive and over animated, backgrounds are filled with details everywhere and the colors are very soft to the eyes.
I really dig this kind of pixel art, but what makes this game even more beautiful is it's effects! The game may look and play like a 2D game, but it is actually running in 3D. This allowed the devs to create impressive light / shadow VFXs. Every sprite in the game reacts to light sources and can receive shadows according to the general shape it should have. For exemple, when trees cast a shadow on top of a train, the shadow isn't the same on the side and on the top of the train, because the surface isn't inclined the same way. This creates a great sense of depth while keeping the 2D pixel art look intact and I am really impressed by this technique!

This game is a RPG, so its story and setting are very important. And wow, once again, I was amazed by the beauty and creativity put in the environments you traverse. The story is set in a post-apocaliptycal world, where humanity is doomed by a mysterious miasm that kills everyone it touches. But post-apocaliptycal doesn't mean dark and muddy, quite the contrary in fact! The world of Eastward is very natural, with a lot of vibrant colors and filled wih strange structures and creatures. Characters all have A LOT of charm and the general mood of the game is pretty upbeat. This contrast between the looks and the real nature of the world makes the tragic events all the more impactful and brutal.
Pacing is also really good, with a great mix of action, exploration, puzzle solving and story progression. There is only one chapter that felt a bit too long, because you are stuck in a time loop, seeing the same cutscenes over and over and with pratically nothing but walking and talking to NPCs between the cutscenes.

I won't say I understood all of the plot, because I didn't (there is quite a lot of things happening at the end), but I really enjoyed my adventure alongside John and Sam. The duo really feels complementary, both in story and in gameplay! The perpetual flee in a train going toward east is a great concept, and it is well executed.
There are some strange decision here and there, like wanting to have a playable character that never talks or express anything begin to show regrets and trauma, but nothing breaking the immersion.

For at least half of the game, I was thinking that audio was the weakest part of the game. But after finishing it, I'm not as sure about that. Audio in the game definetly feels a bit weak, even more so in epic or dramatic scenes, but I think the problem mostly comes from SFXs and not from the music.
There are a lot of tracks in the game, but I had a feeling of constantly hearing the same ones in every cutscenes. BUT, it may be because I played the whole game in 5 or 6 long sessions :'). The intro and final chapter also contains some really good chiptune bangers!
And by the way I think I'm being picky: bear in mind that while I said that audio is the weakest part of the game, the rest is absolutely amazing, so it's not really that bad.

There is one final thing I would like to applaud: accessibility!
This game is pretty easy if you use all the tools at your disposal, but remain challenging for all players depending on how they choose to play. If you decide to invest a little bit of time in cooking, you can create food that heals + buff your attack or defense for 1-2 minutes. You can also buy refill items that you can use to completely refill your ammo at any time.
When exploring, if you don't like fighting you can also choose to evade monsters and don't deal with them. And during bosses, you can either try to optimize and hit the boss while it attacks you, or you can focus on evasion and you will always get a large window where the boss just lets you damage it.
I think that the game can adapt itself to a large variety of play style and skills and this is a good thing! It allows people not very experienced with action games to enjoy the story without feeling frustrated, and other players will not feel the need to abuse this because the fights are fun and engaging.
There is one boss that doesn't follow this rule. It requires to do perfectely timed parries. But the timing windows are very generous and the fight comes very late in the game, so I think even less experienced players can beat it, maybe with a couple tries.

All in all, I loved this game! It's cute, it's beautiful, it's fun, it's exciting! A perfect introduction to RPGs, without the boring Excel stats and complicated turn-based gameplay or combo systems!

Pikmin is the Nintendo licence that everybody knows (mostly because of Smash I think) but very few people have actually played it. And I'm like everybody, if a friend had not lent me his cartridge, I don't think I would ever have played Pikmin 3.
But I am thankfull he did, because Pikmin is fun and intersting!

Pikmin 3 is a RTS, and it's the first game of the genre I have ever played I think. I may have played some games that could be categorised as RTS on the DS but I'm not very sure...
When I think of RTS, I always associate the genre with complicated gameplay, precise ressource management and very steep learning curves. But I'm happy to say that I was wrong!

At first I felt a bit lost, because I am not used to this type of game, but the controls are very intuitive and it quickly became very natural to move and command the Pikmins. There is basically 2 actions you can do, call Pikmins to you or throw Pikmins on something. Every other command in the game does something that is similar but a little more efficient depending on the situation. This means that the game is very easy to take in hand!
Same goes with the "go there" command. Since there are 3 playable characters, you can have one go to one spot while you do something else with another one. This lets you be a lot more efficient and I struggled a lot less when I started using it!

The game tries to give you a sense of urgency by using a hunger system. Every day that passes consumes one food ressource, and to get more food you need to bring back fruits to your ship. It felt like a real danger at the very begining of the game, because you only have enough ressources to survive for 3 days, but it quickly became a non-threat as I learned to be more efficient, and I quickly gathered more than 30 days of food (I finished the game in 17 ingame days).

The story mode is very chill and fun, puzzles are well balanced. Fights in general are a bit more messy, but the more Pikmin you have and the less trouble you'll have to kill enemies. Bosses on the other hand are good puzzle fights, each one of them requiring you to use the correct pikmins to deal damage to them.

I love how the brutality and cruauty of the player actions is completely ignored in the game. Sending these cute Pikmins to their death is so much fun and it feels right! It's like controlling an ant colony, individuals don't exists, only the group is important. If you have to sacifice a few to reach your objectives, then go ahead! It's no problem, you can always create new ones anyway haha!

While I enjoyed the story, what really hooked me to the game were the 2 side stories with Olimar. In opposition with the story mode, you start with no Pikmins and you will have to play with the ressources you find. You get an objective and a time limit to reach the highest score possible. I found it very engaging and beat every level on the platinum rank, because the levels are really well constructed. It's like figuring out the optimal way to solve a puzzle and it feels really good! Plus the platinum rank is generally pretty generous and allows for mistakes to happen!

So once again I had a blast playing a new video game from a genre I'm not familiar with. If you are like me and only know Pikmin from Smash, you should check out the game, it's a lot of fun! And fruits. Juicy fruits. Very juicy fruits...

Well this game is definitely is "MGS1 but more modern". This description can be applied to almost every aspect of the game, gameplay, story, characters, graphics, etc.

Gameplay is very similar to MGS1's, with a few extra additions:
･ First perspective view is now a lot more important, as it allows you to aim precisely to shoot specific part of the bodies of your enemies. To push you to use the feature, the game introduces a gun with sleeping bullets, more effective if you hit the head of your target. And since there are a lot more enemies than in the first game, you will quickly realize that you have to be really attentive and aim precisely if you don't wan't to get caught! Managing to put a guard to sleep and crossing a room unseen feels definitely more satisfying than in MGS1!
･ There is now platforming in the game?? I don't really understand why they added this feature. You can now hang over the edges of specific platforms, with a gauge telling you how much time you have left until your character looses grip. This part works and I don't have any issue with it. But the second thing you can do is what I don't really enjoy. Compared to MGS1, your character is a lot more agile. You can climb small steps and do cool evasions by doing a cartwheel. This is cool, BUT, the game uses those moves to make you do platforming and it feels very clunky. At one point in the game, you have to cross a diagonal gap by climbing on top of boxes and then performing a cartwheel above the void to jump to the other side. I understand what they tried to make, but the problem is that it is impossible to be very precise with the direction you go to when doing the evasion move, plus the character automatically jumps down when he reaches the end of a platform. So I spend 15 min on an obstacle when it should have taken me 30 sec to pass. But fortunately it is the only time it happened and I think I talked a bit too much about this small issue :')

I thought the double hexagonal level design was really clever! This structure manages to create a playing ground that feels quite small and restricted, while also allowing and favouring exploration. You can always go in any part of the map relatively quickly since its constucted in a loop. Plus, this makes it impossible to get lost, because you will always end up at somewhere you know.

While level design definitely feels better than in MGS1, bosses on the other hand are a bit weaker. But, there still are some really good fights, like the one against Fat Man! His design is so goofy, and his fight is really good. having to both disarm bombs and shoot the one placing them makes for a great fight with good rythm! Quite the opposite of the RAYs boss fight that feels long and repetitive, as you have to take down I don't know how many RAYs that all have the 2 same moves that can be evaded simply by moving in circle...

Story was fun to follow, even if I'm not sure to have 100% understood everything. There are so many twists and people being double agents, but actually they are triple agent, but they are in fact quadruple agent... xD
Raiden character felt like a good protagonist to play after Snake. They are perfect opposite in terms of experience and personnality, so it was interesting to watch his evolution.
Cutscenes are top level, they always felt like a great reward for progressing in the game! And I must say that for a 20 years old game, it looks really good!
On the other hand, the codec chats have a tendency to drag on a little to much. Fortunately (I think?) you can at least play with the cameras framing the characters speaking, so you have something to do while waiting.
And also, the ending cutscene felt strange after all the action and fighting, a very bizarre way to end a game like this.

Music is very intense and it works really well with the gameplay! When you get spotted, you know that you have to fight or die, and the drum and bass stresses that point very well!

All in all, a excellent sequel to an already fantastic game! It is less perfect in every way than it's predecessor, but what it does good is definetly better than what MGS1 achieved.

I played Zelda: Wand of Gamelon and actually liked it, so I figured I could give this one a shot.

This game is more or less the same thing, but with a different map and new levels.
The game let you choose freely where you want to go and figure out by yourself how in what order you have to do things in order to progress. But I felt this one was not as good as Wand of Gamelon with guiding you and giving you hints. I felt I was doing a lot more random things before finding something that worked, and the NPCs gave very vague hints.

Also, the enemy spawn rate feels higher than in WoG, and it gets a bit tiring. Plus there are a lot more traps that will almost kill you in one shot. But since you don't loose any progress when dying, exception made of your position in a level, it's still not a big problem.

I don't have a lot more things to say as pretty much everything I said on WoG also applies here. I got through the game in about 2h, and I enjoyed my time on it!
And since in my review of WoG I linked a remix of a level music, here is one from the bazaar level, made by the same guy!

I recently watch a video review of Link - Forces of Evil, and I was surprised to hear that the game wasn't that bad at all! I had always heard that the CDI Zelda games were awful so I knew I had to play them to find out myself if this reputation they have was deserved or not.
And I have to say, this game is not bad at all!

Technically, I played a fan made PC port with a lower enemy spawn rate, faster shield and with controller support (you had to play with a remote on the original, and the jump was mapped on the up key), meaning it was not the true CDI experience.

But I mean, if you forget those QoL changes, the rest of the game is really solid! Zelda controls really well, and is very reactive, almost every enemy die in one hit (even bosses when you have the right object), and the gameplay is very fast paced. Progression goes quick too, you obtain new items very often and unlike in a lot of Zelda games, these items will stay useful throughout the whole game. There is a real feeling of becoming stronger and stronger, even though the game only last 2 or 3 hours.
I really like how the game lets you freely choose the level you want to go in, and figure out in which order you have to do things. Cutscenes give great hints to guide you and I almost never felt lost!
Also, the game isn't very punitive. When you die, you respawn at the start of the current screen. When you die three time in a level, you go back to the map. But everything you did in the level is still active, so you don't really loose a lot of progress and you can go back pretty quickly to where you were!
Graphically, it really isn't that uggly! Yes, the cutscenes look weird and have super funny (in a weird way) dialogs, but the gameplay environments and characters look good and are very varied! There is only one time I got stuck because I didn't see a door in the background because it had the same color as the wall.
And finally, the music. Yes it has nothing to do with regular Zelda games, but wow it's great. Every screen of every level has its own music, and the more you progress in a level, the more intense the music gets. My favourite must be the graveyard one, I found a great remix of it on Youtube and I'm very happy!

So, if you have a couple hours to spend, and you like fast action platformer, give this remaster a try! You could be surprised how despite its reputation, it's actually a fun game!

I enjoyed this game a lot!
I never played any modern Castlevania game, I only know the NES games. So this was sort of the first modern Castlevania game I played haha!

In the game, you play as Miriam, a Shardbinder who has the ability to absorb the power of demons. You goal is reach the top of a mysterious castle from which hords of demons are being summoned and stop the one responsible for this. In order to do so, you will have to explore and unlock powers allowing you to progress to places you coudn't go before. All in all, it's a Castlevania game!

The first thing that stroke me when I started playing is the music. It is very catchy and energetic, pushing you to move forward, while also being extremely fitting for the area it plays in! And this not for only the start of the game, the whole adventure is filled with bangers haha!

Bloodstained is a very simple game to take in hand: you can run, jump and attack. The character is pretty agile too, so it feels great to control!
If these options feel a bit limited, do not worry because there are a ton of different weapons, each with their paterns and secret abilities. You can spend the game trying out new weapons and it is awesome!
Your character can also use abilities. You get these abilities randomely during the game by killing enemies. Every enemy can give you one ability. Most of the time it's an ability this monster uses, but you can also sometimes obtain the power to summon the same enemy to fight by your side. There are as many abilities as there are monsters in the game, meaning there are A LOT of abilities haha! It follows the same principle as the weapons, you will be testing new abilities very often.

But this is also where lies a weakness of this title: menus. Everytime you get something new, you will have to go in the menu to equip it. Weapons are not equiped in the same menu as the abilities, abilities have multiple sub-menus depending on their type... there are menus and sub-menus everywhere and it gets a bit tiring to change your loadout.
The game knows about this issue, because it offers a shortcut feature, allowing you to create presets and change your loadout without opening the menu. But, because you are always getting something new to test out, it solves nothing. It only transfers the problem from the Equipement and Ability menus to the Shortcuts menu.

The story was interesting, I had fun uncovering the mysteries behind the birth of the Shardbinders. I was also very happy each time the game said to me "You though it was over did't you? Well it actually isn't!" :')
I must mention there are some really nice staging throughout the game, both in the gameplay and in the cutscenes! There are some neat ideas using the 3D camera in a 2D gameplay!

Difficulty is nicely balanced I felt! I always found save rooms right at the moment I was starting to get very low on health, and had no more healing item left haha!
Some bosses can maybe feel a bit brutal at first, but except for 1 or 2, I beat them all under 2 or 3 tries. And if you really struggle on a particular boss, the game lets you craft food that can heal you and give you permanent passive boosts on your stats. The more you cook, the easier the game gets!

However, the difficulties of exploration and advice on where to go or what to do next are not really well handled... I had to open a guide multiple times because I was stucked, and most of the time it was because of something very dumb... (e.g. I had to speak to a NPC twice in a row for him to spontaneously find an item in my inventory and converting it into a key, even though he had never talked about before)

I played the game on the Switch and I got to say, they used pretty cleverly the HD Vibrations feature of the controller. Everything you do in the game (jumping, moving in a menu...) gives you a very light vibration feedback and it feels great! I love how you can feel the character's heartbeat in your hands when she is low on health, it is such a nice touch!

But the Switch port has also a downside: it runs pretty poorly. The game never has a stable fps, there are constant drops everywhere. Plus, if you play on portable mode, the resolution can drop very low. Fortunately, those problems are the most present in the hub area, where you don't have to be has precise and reactive as in the rest of the game, and I got used to the unstable FPS after some time spent on the game. Just remember to save as often as you can because the game crashed once for me.

I felt this game was made with a lot of love and care, even if it is a bit rough at times. For me, the quality of the gameplay and presentation overcomes its performance issues.
Also, when you finish the game you unlock a ton of bonuses! You can replay the game with 2 new characters (without story tho), in new difficulty settings, try the time attack mode or even the classic mode (a game mode that plays like the NES Castlevania).

With all of that, I think it's time to wrap up this review. To sum up, it's a great game! It has some issues but in my sense its qualities largely compensate for that and I had a really good time on it!

Well this is quite literally Celeste in Mario 64 haha!
It was refreshing to play this very small game after spending 75h on a heavy RPG :')

Celeste mechanics transfer very well in 3D, more than I would have imagined! Still, the game has been developped in about a weak, so don't expect Celeste level of polish. The game is far less precise than Mario 64, but given that death has literally no concequences and that it takes about 15 sec to go back to where you were, it not frustrating at all.

N64 graphics replicated to perfection! The music and sounds use the N64 soundfont and it works great also, even tho the bonus level music really wants me to go crazy hahaha!

A fun 1h game!

Etrian Odyssey IV is a game I've been wanting to play for quite some time now. In fact, the first time I played its demo was in 2013! I really struggled to play back then, since the whole game is in English and I had only just started learning the language :')

But since then, I have discovered Etrian Odyssey Untold, which became one of my favourite games of all time, and played a bit of Untold 2 (I don't own a copy and I never finished it). I was really wanting to play some more EO lately and since it is the least expensive of the 3DS EO titles (seriously, I am so sad when I look at the prices for EO5 or EOU2 in Europe), I decided to pick it up and see what it had to offer!

For those who may be unfamiliar with the series, EO games are dungeon crawlers with turn based RPG combat. You control a guild of 5 adventurers that you created and your goal is to explore and map a labyrinth, trying to uncover its secrets. The games are narrated almost like "choose-your-own-adventure" books. There are no fancy cutscenes or anything, everything is told via text and you will often get to choose between one or another action (mostly with secrets you find in the labyrinth) resulting either in a good find or in something bad. If you don't like reading, this may be a bit much, but I find it really well writen! Plus, the characters speak in an old english, and as a french it amuse me to find all those french words everywhere hahaha!
Also, these games are knowned for not being very beginner friendly, as you will have to be very careful with every action you take in order to survive the deadly Yggdrasil Labyrinth. A game over means loosing all of your progress, except for map data, and it can happen very quickly if you are not careful enough.

There are 3 main things that I love in Etrian Odyssey:

The map system
I'm very surprised that this feature wasn't copied by any other game, because I find it amazingly clever and immersive! In EO, when exploring a dungeon, you don't get the map from the get go. If you want to know where you are and where you want to go, you will have to draw the map by yourself. So, as you progress through the labyrinth on the 3DS's top screen, you fill in the walls, doors, treasures and secrets you find along the way on the bottom screen. This tool makes exploring really enjoyable, because even if you don't find anything, you will have completed a part of the map that wasn't uncovered before and it is really satisfying to see the map of a floor come to completion. Plus, if you are careful enough with the notes you take on your map, you will be rewarded when side quests will ask you to find specific things in a labyrinth!

The F.O.E.s
EO games feature random encounter battles. But these are not the only encounter you can get in the labyrinth. There are also monsters that you see in the labyrinth, called F.O.E.s (Foedus Obrepit Errabundus, or Field On Enemy in Japan). Every type of F.O.E. have a unique kind of behavior, like running in a circle, standing still until you get in their field of vision and then chasing you, or alerting every other F.O.E.s in the area to hunt you down, etc. These enemies are very strong and you want to avoid fighting them as much as you can. A lot of the puzzles you will have to solve revolve around finding a way to use their behavior to evade them or force them to open a new way. This feature also goes along very well with the map feature, as you will see F.O.E.s on the map in the areas you already explored.

The music ❤
The music in Etrian Odyssey is something I consider very important, since almost all of the narrative of the areas you explore rest on it. Every track you hear in the games perfectly reflect the area you are currently in and there are some amazing tracks! From the happy and uplifted day town theme, the tranquil first labyrinth theme, the energetic battle theme and the menacing F.O.E. theme, you understand almost instantly how you must feel.
The soundtrack is composed by Yuzo Koshiro, who you might have heard of if you like video game music! The music in EO is so good that Atlus released more than 30 albums of rearrangements of the themes of every game in the series. Unfortunately, they are sold only in Japan but you can listen to them on TheFabulousTroup youtube channel! There are many different genres represented, like jazz, classical, orchestral, chiptune, pop, rock, metal, even eurobeat (yes there is an eurobeat arrangement of EO1 first labyrinth and it is amazing), so it is impossible not to find something you like!

Finally, about the EO4 specific aspects:
I liked the airship parts, as it brought some new ways of exploring (small dungeons everywhere, labyrinth with two entrance...) but the ship is too slow! And because the only way to buff your party is to find food on the sky map, you are kind of obligated to cross the sky before entering a dungeon, and it gets a bit tiring. But the 3 levels open map exploration and the F.O.E.s to evade or manipulate is fun!
The dungeon mechanics are great! I really enjoyed that main dungeon are only 3 floors instead of the usual 5, and that there are very small annex dungeons with a specific mechanic for each of them.
The story is good but loses a bit of pace towards the middle. Fortunately, it gets better when you finish the third area and discover the final one, with a new epic battle theme that will boost your motivation! The ending fell a bit flat however.
I can see why some players prefer the main line titles, because you can really create vastly different set of characters, but I prefer the way the Untold games handle the story. And since I don't feel like replaying the same game over and over, I don't mind having set characters.

All in all, I really liked this game. I liked it so much in fact that I decided to go through the post-game bonus dungeon. It was fun (except for that one room in the 2nd floor)! I didn't beat the boss since it wouldn't bring more story and I enjoy exploring way more than strategising. The puzzle to weaken the boss was fun to resolve however!

If you never played an Etrian Odyssey game and are curious to try one out, I would encourage you play one of the Untold games rather than this one (if you can find one at a reasonable price lol). These games are a lot more beginner friendly, you get a second chance before a game over, and there is a story mode with a set party and some animated cutscenes, meaning that you won't have to handle team composition and your characters will be involved in the story!

If you reach this part of my review, well this is the end haha! I can't make short reviews so thank you for reading the whole thing :')

With how big of a juggernaut and Lightning in a Bottle the original Katamari Damacy was back in 2004, you'd expect a sequel to the game to maybe take a handful of years and multiple brainstorming sessions in order to maybe equal if not maybe slightly below the original. Well, what if instead the sequel was made and released in only a year and a half and was actually JUST as good, if not EVEN BETTER than the original. This game is We Love Katamari. Somehow this team was able to craft what essentially is a perfect sequel in every way. New gameplay gimmicks for levels, returning challenges from the first game, an expansion of the Cousins and multi-player, and a very sweet and self referential story that takes full advantage of how fast Katamari has become a juggernaut. Couple that with the always perfect soundtrack and you've got yourself a flawless sequel that's amazingly a second batch of bottled lightning that's just as impressive as the first. The newly released Remaster also adds a new collection of retro Namco stickers that's fun to scavenger hunt for through levels if your using the Camera present, and it even seems like they're even testing the waters for a potential new Katamari after all these years with the addition of 5 brand new challenges featuring the young King of all Cosmos as he endures intense training from his stern father before him. These levels are made using existing levels and are actually pretty short, but it definitely feels like a potential "what if we make a brand new Katamari?", and while later Katamari entries would struggle without the guidance of original series creator Keita Takahashi, I think a new generation of devs at Bamco deserve the chance to bring our favorite royal family back for a new outing.