The best version of this game is the one with the NTSC dub where you have Veronica Taylor and Rachael Lillis just using their Ash Ketchum and Misty voices like this is an episode of Pokemon while Dan Green is both the Professor and Spike. Trust me, hearing Ash Ketchum's voice while you're finding the monkeys and, let's be real, catching 'em all really enhances the experience and there's no better reward for beating the game than seeing Spike appear in an ending cutscene and he just sounds like Yami Yugi. 5/5 best 4Kids dub ever.

This is a pretty solid monster collecting RPG overall but man oh man did Square-Enix do an incredible job at surgically removing all of the charm present in the original Game Boy game in order to make it more like DQM: Joker, wi-fi battle metagame and all.

My best example is the library. In the original, you walk into a building and check each bookshelf for little Pokedex entries of each monster. Each page has the monster's sprite, some breeding information, and one sentence of flavor text. The flavor text is small, but it's stuff like "The reflection of the mirror can trap souls in the underworld" and it was junk food for little kid me's imagination. In this game, you walk up to the library once, the librarian says "oh I gave you a portable library that you can access in your menu" and, when you check the library app on the bottom of your touch screen, each monster's entry is all statistics and data, clinically vomited out to you in lists, with every piece of text devoted to the battle mechanic instead of something silly like "world-building". You don't even get the monster's 3D model! It makes each monster feel less alive than they did in the 8-bit game, and it's all to support that lovely multiplayer battle system that the game occasionally elbows me and tells me about.

And honestly, the whole game is like this. Since the remake takes place in big, sprawling super empty 3D spaces that take longer to walk through than the sprite-based rooms in the GB title, they made damn sure that you could teleport to important landmarks at any time from the touch screen so you didn't have to worry about walking anywhere anymore. This speeds up the gameplay, sure, but then The Great Tree ceases to be a location and becomes more of a series of Important Rooms that you can blip in and out of. No no, mustn't waste the player's time trying to make this place feel like a livable area, better make sure they can build up their wi-fi team asap.

I do think there's a fun little game here, but this is less "remake" and more "sequel to the Joker games, now wearing the skin of an older game" and there was truly nothing more depressing than playing that first hour of gameplay and just saying to myself "oh no no no what did they do" in a way I've never felt for other, more contested remakes like Ratchet and Clank 2016 or Let's Go Pikachu.

It's efficient, but the efficiency came at the cost of its soul. And honestly? Playing this is just making me want to play the original Dragon Warrior Monsters again.

Quick side-note: I have zero complaints about the actual text translation for this game, you guys are awesome.

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QUICK EDIT NOW THAT I'VE BEATEN THE GAME
It's like this in the original, but since the final boss of this game takes place during a tournament, that means it's 100% luck-based and you WILL watch your monsters make stupid decisions with their little walnut-sized brains. My Jamirus is a real brain-genius and cast Kaswooshle on a monster that absorbs wind damage.

Surprise surprise. The NES game that is notorious for being difficult and unfair is indeed difficult and unfair. The Internet and the Youtube reviewers are right about this one and any contrarian "oh I'm sure it's not THAT bad!" attitudes instantly evaporate the moment you play that childhood-destroying dam level and realize "oh hell, I have to thread through this tunnel of electric death seaweed like a goddamn sewing needle with these controls".

Then, if you happen to make it past the well-remembered dam level, it begins to dawn on you that the whole bombs in the dam sequence of the game was one of the earlier levels and that the rest of the game gets harder. Everyone remembers the seaweed but that seaweed didn't instantly kill you the way the fire pits and the spike walls do.

I played this on the Cowabunga Collection, which really is the best option since they both give you the option to turn sprite flicker and game slowdown off and they give you a rewind feature and save states just to give you a fighting chance. And let's be real - the rewind feature isn't cheating if the game itself is cheating right back. I suppose if you held me hostage and told me to beat this game on a legitimate piece of NES hardware I could eventually bring myself to do it, but for now, my time on this planet is fleeting and I just have better things to do with my life than to memorize the inner workings of TMNT NES.

Also anyone who says that utters this game in the same breath as Contra and Castlevania is getting a boomerang to the face followed by a crouched bo attack that hits you from across the room and through a stack of crates.

"Confused" is the best word I can use to describe Unravel Two. The gameplay and controls feel better and are more fluid than the first game but it resulted in a loss in identity. The first Unravel is a lot jankier but also knew what it wanted to be and what story it wanted to tell. This game decided "I'm going to be a better video game!" but now it feels shallow and going through the motions of the previous Unravel.

At its core, Unravel Two wants to be a cozy co-op experience with some stunning background visuals and a beautiful soundtrack - and for the most part it does this well - but then the game makes a lot of strange choices like making the levels 30 minutes long with unskippable cutscenes, making it a chore to replay anything in this otherwise short game. And, trust me, Unravel Two wants you to replay the levels, because each level has speedrun and no death challenges with rewards and trophies/achievements attached to them.

I enjoy a good hard puzzle platformer but this game feels ill-suited for that role, especially if the level I'm speedrunning has an unskippable narrative of a child fleeing from an abusive family playing in the background. Watch as this terrified child is struggling to hold the door closed as you and your fellow video game partner employ frame-skipping strats to get out of the bedroom in the least amount of time so you get that gold medal. Uh oh, looks like you got silver on the level where two kids accidentally start a forest fire and struggle to free a bunch of horses from a burning barn! It's just the tiniest bit tone-deaf?

The choice to add a handful of short challenge levels was a good one, and I can't help but wonder if it would've been a better idea to go with a level structure closer to the challenge levels' format rather than "Hey Yarny and Other Yarny, you think this level is over, but surprise! There's a chase sequence!". I got way more invested in saving the little Yarnys than whatever was going on with the story of the two orphans in the main levels.

Finally, there's character customization! I... don't really understand why this game has character customization, but if you play this game on a PS5, the light on the controller changes color to match your selected Yarny and that's really cute.

This game really took everything nice I had to say about Fall of the Foot Clan - namely the part where I was like "wow, they gave you enough reaction time for enemy spawns despite your character moving so slow!" - and decided to just throw all of that in the garbage.

As your selected turtle gently strolls through levels and attacks with a hit box best described as "pathetic", the sound of your teenaged reptile taking damage will start to become rhythmic as you slog through a tidal wave of relentless enemy spawns and asshole traps. I can't even compliment the more detailed sprites here either because some of the characters (like Bebop, good lord) inexplicably look worse in this game.

The only silver lining in all of this? This game is pretty short and, hey, it has voice clips and they're actually pretty good! Congratulations, TMNT II: Back from the Sewers, you made audible voice clips play through my Game Boy speakers.

This game legit feels like someone made a ROM hack of the PS1 Spyro games, only it's a licensed Muppet title and you play as Robin, the frog Muppet whose most notable role was Tiny Tim in The Muppet Christmas Carol. The levels look like Spyro, the enemies look like Spyro, collecting all the Monster Energy feels like the gems in Spyro, and you even get a glide that feels like Spyro with the platforming based around gliding from higher spots in the level since you lack a double jump. It's utterly shameless in how much of it is cribbed from the Insomniac Spyro games.

However! While it is, indeed, a shameless Spyro clone with a Muppet-themed coat of paint, it playing and looking almost exactly like the PS1 Spyro games actually made me love this game. It helps that the soundtrack kicks ass and they actually got the Muppet performers to voice their characters.

I know it's not a hot take by any means to say "the New Super Mario Bros franchise is a bland, flavorless oatmeal of reused assets" but man I am struggling to finish this one. I have to play this 2D Mario in the middle of the day because it's a powerful cure for insomnia.

Sure, it functions well enough, the level design is tighter since there's no 4-player, and I don't think this is the worst NSMB game (Reznor and Raccoon Mario over Boom Boom and the squirrel suit make this better than U) but also I can't help but think about how there was a Game Boy game where some of the level themes were "Halloween", "Giant House", and "Giant Robot Mario" while this game can't be assed to think of something beyond "well World 2 HAS to be the desert level right, that's how it was 6 years ago".

Come on, man. At least do something with the whole "collect all the money" theme. Have Bowser's Castle be themed around giant piles of treasure. Give the Koopalings some slightly altered designs where they're just covered in jewelry. Make Mario explore a sunken pirate ship with cartoony pirate skeleton enemies instead of just having the beach/ocean world be the beach/ocean world from NSMBWii. This didn't have to be boring!

UPDATE - I beat the final boss after writing this review. It starts with a fakeout battle where Bowser recreates the mechanics from the Super Mario Bros Bowser fights and then he grows really big. Wow. Never seen that before.

This is one of those scenarios where the sequel is mechanically better than the first game in a lot of ways but that first game had that special something about it, you know? Will of the Wisps has far better movement tech and locales but the tradeoff is that a lot of the new additions like the sidequests and the currency system feel a little undercooked and the story feels weaker.

Ah yes, the story. Not gonna lie, the story is a bit of a mess that feels like it's trying really hard to hit those Oscar Award highs that the first game did but instead events just kinda happen without much impact beyond "this is Sad and Meaningful I Guess". The main villain in particular just felt like a less interesting version of Kuro from the first game, and the cutscene where they explain her backstory - instead of leaving a super strong impression like the scene with Kuro's nest in Blind Forest - almost came off as comical from the way they overdid it with the judgemental owl heads looming over her. At one point the game throws in an ancient prophecy complete with murals hidden in some desert ruins which...kinda makes a crucial moment at the end of the game less impactful because it feels less like a choice made by the character and more like something the character has to do to move the story along, and really, the game's writing is like that the entire game.

Also, gotta say. It really sucks that Blind Forest's big story theme was about Family and then this sequel immediately separates Ori from their family for the entire game save for the opening and ending cinematics. At least have Naru and Gumo hanging out in Wellspring Glades giving out words of encouragement instead of sticking them on a raft for the entire game, come on.

Of course, I really only have a beef with the story. The rest of the game, where you gradually give a glowing bunnydog enough jump abilities until they can launch themselves through mazes of spikes without breaking a sweat because you saw a glowing purple rock at the end, is a hell of a lot of fun. Ori's jumps are floaty, but the adjustment period from "damn I fell into some spikes" to "I just wall-jumped through a corridor of lasers" felt shorter than in Blind Forest. They try a lot of new movement mechanics in this one and they all feel great.

Just try not to think too hard about the story or question whether or not you're actually having fun constructing that one town, you'll only hurt yourself.

(Also this game has minor performance issues including annoying loading times when opening your map on the Switch but that's to be expected)

Honestly one of the most underrated PS3 exclusives out there with how little people talk about this game, and man that's a huge shame considering what this game offers.

Mechanically, there are some things that could've been better (and, if you're trying to go for a Platinum, some of the trophies are really bullshit and involve either a guide or lots of trial and error) but it oozes so much charm and style that it honestly makes up for it. While very much a "style over substance" game in terms of how intricate the platforming is (or isn't in this case), this game's general aesthetic sucked me in enough that I kind of don't care that the gameplay is merely "okay" while the game's atmosphere, soundtrack, and character acting does most of the heavy lifting.

I don't know what made the PS3 such a target for charming craft-y games with British narrators but honestly I couldn't get enough of it. Sometimes a game can just be a very cool art project with the gameplay mainly being used to string the extravagant set-pieces together.