As much as I'd like to complain that this is barely a Final Fantasy game, I'm wise enough to realise that it can't always be an ATB-spells-and-swords kind of affair every time - even so, this is well outside of it's wheelhouse and it shows in almost every facet.

First off, the game looks gorgeous - Square Enix have never had any problems getting good looking games out there, and it delivers in spades here. The animation and particle effects are spectacular, and watching some of the cut scenes you get to see a lot of this on display.

It's everything else where the cracks start to show - for a game that wants you to take it seriously as a political story around the subjugation of the Bearers, it's more than happy to veer off into ridiculous territory. The fights go full on shonen, which just flies in the face of the more grounded world and story and undoes a lot of the good it sows in the first few hours. The story is borderline nonsensical (though the voice acting is superb). the characterisation of anyone but Clive is...not good (this game in particular really seems to hate women, either killing them or giving them absolutely no urgency - Jill could have been such a good character!) and the ending just sort of happens after a strange lull? It's incredibly badly paced, and you get to see the pattern of the game very quickly (story beat, back to base for side quests, next story beat, back to base etc.). From such a good introduction to a grounded world and a more politically intriguing Final Fantasy, it lacks the courage to continue this and instead goes into full on pants-on-head stupidness.

Everything surrounding the main story are also subpar - side quests have taken their MMO-inspiration far too literally and are just boring delivery quests, or go-here-and-kill-this quests. When the game is trying to make growing an apple seem exciting, something has gone horribly wrong. The crafting system seems to have been stripped back, as there isn't one - you'll occasionally upgrade your sword, but all the crafting items picked up in the field or as rewards are largely meaningless as you can really only upgrade 3 items. The RPG side of this game is really lacking.

Which wouldn't be so bad if the world was fun to explore, as the time between story beats would be enjoyable. But it so actively discourages exploration of an incredibly drab and empty world that you shouldn't bother. When the field items are things like 5 gil or some common crafting materials, you will leave large swathes of the environment undiscovered - as it turns out that there's nothing even there to discover. On top of a main character that can't run on command, and a Chocobo which seems to actually be slower than running? A better movement system would help here.

If you played the demo, you'll know the combat system is a lot of fun and has the potential to stretch out into more fun areas - it has taken a lot of inspiration from things like Bayonetta, Dark Souls or Jedi: Fallen Order. Unfortunately, the combat system has no evolution like that aforementioned games, and once you've found a few Eikon moves you like you'll be doing the same thing every fight. Even the Stagger system is easy to unpick, and for most of my playthrough I would actively avoid fights as it wasn't fun to do the same thing over and over. It's not as if the game was overly difficult that this affected anything, anyway. The upgrade system falls by the wayside once you've found the 2-3 moves that get you through the game.

In terms of Eikon battles - ehhhhh. I seem to be against the grain here, but they are overly long and boring and didn't push any buttons for me. The Titan fight in particular just goes on and on for far too long, and the spectacle of them really just got old for me. You are looking at a full 30 minutes for one of these fights, and that was with me skipping the many cutscenes due to boredom. Bahamut is even worse, clocking in at a full hour - and worst of all, it flashes up that you've defeated Bahamut and the fight is over, then proceeds to continue into another Bahamut fight! That is not how things work! I found the Eikon fights overly flashy button mashers where the required amount of thinking or skill was minimal.

You can do a lot better for an action focused RPG (and the RPG side is paper thin here) for the ridiculous price of £70. The combat doesn't hold through the 30-40 hour runtime, the story goes all over the place and suffers for it, movement and controls are dire, there's barely anything to do outside of the main story quest - I could go on, but you'd be better placed picking up something else - The Witcher 3 does everything here 10x better and came out in 2015, which is ridiculous. The game sure is pretty, but that's about it.

An incredibly patchy games with high highs and low lows - the meat of the game is fantastic, with traversal mostly fun and the new mechanics being great additions. As is always the case with Gamefreak, they've removed a lot of that worked from previous games for their own reasons, which removes a lot of individuality of how you play and how you look. The technical aspect is diabolical, with slowdowns and awful textures throughout my run - the fact BotW runs and looks better and is 5 years old is incredible. There's a noticeable lag with any input in all menus and when using the bike mode, and the online is abysmal - it shouldn't take 30 seconds for me to get told I can't join a tera raid.

I say this for every Pokemon review, but this is a good jumping off point for the next game. I'm starting to think this will never be the case, and all we'll get are half baked games like this for the next few years.

A fantastic and sprawling story, a wonderful battle system and fight mechanics, and some great characters only slightly let down by the rigid job system put in place. It really scratched that itch left by Final Fantasy Tactics, allowing me to put hours into battle strategies and upgrades whilst telling a compelling story which can be very different between playthroughs.

For any sequel (please), it would be nice to have some freedom of job switching, as very quickly you settle on a set of core characters who have the best jobs (Anna, Medina) and quickly forget about those who barely offer anything (Groma, Lionel). A fantastic game worth the time of any strategy fan.

You're either doing one of two things - mashing R3 looking for what to climb or interact with next, or taking part in a strangely designed battle system.

The environments are so dense and beautifully rendered that working out what you can interact with or even what you should do is difficult to work out - there were many times I would walk around, unable to see anything, and then just wait for Aloy to highlight what I should be doing next. It's not very intuitive because everything is so busy. And even then, the act of moving is painful - no game has made climbing fun in this way. You rapidly tap X to move across yellow handholds and completely switch off, or press L3 and run through arena after arena.

Which brings me to fighting - for a game which seems to mostly revolve around battling at a distance, every enemy wants to get in your face. So you have to use a mediocre melee attack to fight, or continuously roll away to put space between you and the enemy. Later upgrades make this easier, but the whole loop makes no sense. Enemies are so fast that you are running and taking pot shots, or going full Dark Souls and rolling in place, waiting for attack animations to end before melee-ing.

Yes, it looks beautiful and the new enemies are well designed. But it's classic all filler no killer - the base gameplay just wasn't fun for me and led me to quickly abandon this. It's an incredibly bland game in the end - everything it does has been done much better in other games.

Mind twistingly good and a step above the original in every single way. Takes a much deeper and darker storyline and just infuses it with such good and varied gameplay and art - you can tell the background artists on this game had an amazing time. The worlds are varied both in style and playability, with a fantastic script stringing each one along - by the end it all connects back to the original for such a tight set of games I'd be almost disappointed if they made a Psychonauts 3.

With such a deep storyline, the whole experience took around 25 hours but drew to a wonderful conclusion without dragging at all. Psychonauts 2 is an absolutely fantastic experience, that has brought the collect-a-thon platformer back to the forefront - this is a must play for anyone who enjoys games.

So expectations were already low based on the dual facts of this not including any Platinum content and not even being developed by Game Freak. But - to be fair - this is an almost 1-to-1 remake. The problem is that the games they've decided to remake are just dull.

The Pokemon diversity is still terrible, the decision to go full 3D movement but not update the map is boneheaded (the amount of times I got caught on an edge due to this - urgh!), the levels are all 5-10 levels too low for this game to start being challenging. People can say it's a faithful remake all they want, but Platinum solved a lot of the originals issues, and for them to be ignored just feels strange. Coming from Legends: Arceus to this feels like stepping 15 years in the past. Games like this need to stay there.

Within about 5 minutes of controlling Samus you can tell this is going to be a great game, and a worthy addition to the Metroid franchise - the new movement additions feel fresh whilst also being familiar, the level design is (mostly) wonderful, and running at 60fps it just feels really good.

This is probably the most I've died playing a Metroid game - the bosses in this can be brutal at times until you learn their movesets. The E.M.M.I machines - goddamn, countless deaths to them from being greedy or just trying to whiz past, it's fun to actually require stealth in a Metroid game. I don't dare to think how bad Dread mode is.

There's some issues with the aforementioned level design - it feels like exploring the wider ZDR planet is pointless until you get the last couple of powerups, as there's needless blockades which can only be circumvented by these which halt a lot of exploration. This is also related to the other issue, which is the hand-holding - it feels far too aggressive at times. I like that I never got lost (and the Aeon moves help alleviate this), but it always seemed to be guiding me too much? It's a strange complaint but in these sort of games I want to get lost and stumble on things. The soundtrack is also non-existent outside of a couple of remixed tracks - not sure what happened here as Prime/Fusion had fantastic OSTs.

All in all, a fantastic return to form and a good alternative to the (imo superior) Prime series.

When it comes to great video game ideas, Double Fine are absolutely one of the best. Their catalogue of games have some incredibly unique premises which are unlike anything else, even to this day. Psychonauts is the absolute pinnacle of these - there's such a wellspring of inventiveness in this game that you can't help but be swept up in it. And because of this it's easy to forgive some of the problems you come across because you want to see what awaits in the next world.

For a game overflowing with ideas and humour, at it's base it's a platformer. And for a platformer to get platforming so badly wrong is frustrating, as the biggest flaw is that is it's controls are pants. You never feel safe jumping or moving because the depth perception is so difficult to track - in a 3D space it's so hard to work out where you are because of this; you need tight controls and an easy way to perceive where you are. The wonky camera adds to this issue, and makes the last two levels (Asylum and Meat Circus) exercises in tedium. They're not badly designed levels, but their focus on platforming in tight spaces with little room for error highlights the worst parts about this game and leaves a bad taste as an ending. The earlier levels paper over these cracks as the focus of a level is mostly in other areas.

It's everything else where this game excels - the levels themselves are so different from each other that each one could be expanded and spun off into it's own game. Whether it's a Catan game vs Napoleon or being Godzilla to a city of lungfish, every single world has a very unique essence. I'm a sucker for a good hub world, and the camp itself is a great example of one - it's bursting with secrets and hidden dialogue from characters, and all of this is elevated by a wonderful script and stellar voice acting throughout. This world feels very alive for such an odd premise and it manages to sweep aside a lot of problems from the mechanics side of things.

I never had the chance to play this back in 2005, and it's only relatively recently (with the sequel being released) where people have revisited this and come to appreciate just how good and inventive this is. Because even now, 15 years later, it still has elements I haven't seen in any subsequent games. It's just such a shame that the fundamentals drag down everything else here, and it's something I hope the sequel has fixed.

When I originally played this back in 2011 (and I was young and full of hopes and dreams), I put down a lot of Skyward Sword's shortcomings and failings down to the fact that Nintendo were really leaning into the whole Motion Control thing. I didn't enjoy it (and this doesn't seem to be an unpopular option); it felt clunky, at times it barely worked, and it seemed like a lot of gameplay ideas had come from the interaction element first (Those boss keys - just why?). Twilight Princess, despite not being a great game overall, was vastly greater than this whilst being 5 years older. So hopeful me played through SS, and just...forgot about it. It came and went and the only things that stuck was that I severely hated the control system.

So now it's over 10 years later, and I can finally play it with traditional controls (and even in handheld mode!) - but as it turns out, the control scheme they decided to implement isn't much of an improvement. Swimming is still horrible to do. Flying is bad bad bad. Sword actions are spammy and gamebreaking in places. And then you delve deeper into the game and realise it wasn't only the motion controls that were dragging this down - there was plenty more on top of the game. This is (in terms of a Zelda game) just not good.

Let's go from the beginning, with a big one: The first 5 hours or so of this are straight up garbage. The tutorial sections are slow, even by Zelda's mind numbing standards, and you are constantly stopped to be told exactly what to do or where to go next. From getting woken up through to the end of the second temple, everything is just below par. The atmosphere and design of Faron's Wood just screams bland. The music is...there? But barely, there's nothing memorable here. The first temple might just be the worst introduction level I've played - it's just so dull and unwelcoming and tops it off with a horrible bossfight. You remember the Deku Tree in OoT being this strange and wonderul dungeon topped with a great Gohma fight? Yeah, you get none of that here - the whole thing is just by-the-book and boring.

But, once you breakthrough this and come out to the Lanayru Mines, things start to look up and the game begins to come together. There's some novel puzzles, sidequests start to open up and - despite the inane padding that's embedded throughout the game - there's fun to be had in a world coming to life. Reality hits, and then the game decides to send you back through the last three environments (oh, but now it's with a very slight twist) for the next three items. And also sprinkle some more useless tasks in here. Then - incredibly - you have to do it a third time. The amount of busy work and padding they've added in to increase the playtime is ridiculous and a horrible user experience. The fact it's so blatant about it is astounding; the game's not trying to hide the fact that you're required to prove your hero-ness(?) twice because the character said so? The justification for doing all this is paper thin at best and is trying to increases the size of an already small world.

And speaking of a bad user experience, one of the big changes for the HD release was that Fi could be ignored and cutscenes could be skipped. I must've not checked whatever box I needed to because she was constantly telling me the most obvious things about the room I just entered, or repeating what someone else told me immediately after talking to them. You're telling me I need to use this item for a puzzle as soon as I pulled it out of the chest? Wow! She's such a braindead personality for what should be an interesting character, but throw that potential away because she's going to point out something very obvious. And the amount of skippable cutscenes is extremely low. And I almost forgot one of the other big improvements - the easily moveable camera - being undone by the fact you have hold L to use it at all. Which means for the entire 25 hours you'll be playing this (that's a lot of padding) you'll be holding L to look around. And you also can't do anything else while holding L. What a strange decision.

At this point I could go on and on about it's many shortcomings - compared to other Zelda titles it has some really low lows throughout the game. There's some downright bizarre choices woven into the design and story and music - everywhere, in fact. And it's bad for 2011, never mind 2022!

Don't get me wrong, though, there's still some good here. It's still Zelda and scattered amongst the lows there's some real standout moments. This is probably my favourite design for Link & Zelda, and the supporting cast - whilst thin on the ground - are fun. Some temples and environments are really well done (the time stone mechanic is amazing and I really want more of that in the future), and the ending is fun. Motion controls do have some interesting implementations with the Beetle and aiming items, so it's not all bad. And lore wise it's also very interesting, and fits right into the existing timeline. Lastly, playing this at 60fps makes a ton of difference too - despite the games painting aesthetic really showing it's age at this point.

So back in 2011, it was easy to dismiss the overall shortcomings here as just a symptom of some crappy controls. But now we've got it in HD, and honestly I'm not sure why you'd play this over any other Zelda. TP is a formulaic Zelda that's better, WW does a grand world (with nothing in it) better, and OoT is a better traditional Zelda available on Switch. The only bullet point this has is the weird motion-turned-stick controls which end up breaking most fights as you can hit the stick faster than the game intended. The game's fairly in the middle in terms of fun, but as a Zelda adventure it's easily, easily towards the bottom of the pile. The HD re-release improves many things, but the original is so flawed it doesn't make much of a difference. You can do better.

It's very difficult to review this without looking at Undertale or Deltarune or LISA or any of the other countless games inspired by this - from a modern day point of view there's not a lot here I haven't seen before. In 1995 this must have been completely bizarre, and I start to get exactly why this is a cult-classic rather than a straight up classic.

Let's go right into the story - this story. It exponentially gets weirder and darker as it goes one, while the team follows a very simple task - go to 8 special locations. Whilst they calmly go about this task, we have zombie infested towns, KKK-esque cults, diamond dogs, a lost underworld filled with dinosaurs, A DUNGEON WHICH IS A MAN AND ALSO JOINS AS A PARTY MEMBER - it's so dense with strangely wonderful characters but they all make sense in the world's context. Everyone just goes about their business and it just works! The translation job does most of the heavy lifting with choice lines throughout, and the music is equally as odd as the game. Such a great scenario and a well written story.

The gameplay has aged, however - what may have been fine in 1995 isn't great now. The inventory system is dire (and I still hate it now when implemented in a Toby Fox game), the movement of this game just sucks - I hate the decision to just stop when you hit an angled wall rather than just...move up against it? It's also painfully slow to do anything in the overworld - travelling is slow, going in/out buildings is slow, battle transitions are slow, menuing is a chore. Combine this with the amount of enemy spawns (it really gets ridiculous at the end of the game) and dungeons start to take a while.

Which brings me to the battle system. I love this battle system. It injects the EarthBound weirdness in some great ways - I like that status' are just...things like crying or having a cold. Then there's the ticker system, which is just fantastic, and I can't think of another game that has it. Saving a doomed ally by healing as their HP ticker goes down - that is such a good feeling. Outside of Ness' massive level jump from Magicant, I never felt overpowered, and there's a great selection of PSI moves. I loved Jeff's weapon system, though it introduces it far too late in the game for my taste.

But the whole game is just a precursor to what is my favourite part of it; the final battle with Giygas. I wasn't sure if what I'd heard was hyperbole, but goddamn did it live up to expectations. The final hour of EarthBound is oppressively dark, with the music and the background and the Prayer system - it felt on another level to the rest of the game. And then the epilogue, where you have free rein of the world with no monsters, is the complete opposite in feeling. Suddenly there's no cares other than soaking up the atmosphere.

There's not much more to be said outside of everything else - it comes across as a near 30 year old game in some areas, but in others it feels like it's more recent. Yes it's painfully slow and could trim the fat in a few areas, but what RPG from near 30 years ago isn't like this? I finally checked this off my bucketlist and was not disappointed - I came in expecting a cult-classic and left with a classic added to the list.