As someone who loved Sea of Stars enough to Platinum it, I'm sad that The Messenger didn't win me over in the same way. Instead I was mostly really annoyed that this game's plot connections to Sea of Stars were the exact opposite of a cinematic payoff. Sure, all the shared locations and music were really cute, but all of the villains that stepped through a portal and walked out of the plot of Sea of Stars all just come back as pretty generic demon monsters and that's a little irritating.

It genuinely adds nothing to know that the Demon King was once four reoccurring minibosses and a Dweller glued together by the Fleshmancer for the shits 'n' giggles. The villain who would later become Barma'thazël has his memory wiped so nothing about this character carries over between games beyond his facial hair. Could've just let me defeat all those guys in the RPG I was playing earlier instead of playing Keep Away.

Narrative connection gripes aside, it is what most people say - The Messenger's first half is probably the best Ninja Gaiden clone you'll ever hope to play with a gorgeous sprite art and soundtrack, an absolute delight of a 2D platformer that plays well and gives the player enough of a toolbox to do sick endless jumps through their environment...and then it decides to be a mediocre Metroidvania and just piss away your time with obnoxious backtracking as you comb the map for shiny things while Quarble is eating your time shards and making rude calls to your mother.

The Metroidvania part really is the iron shackle chained to The Messenger's ankle that drags the whole game down. The level designs in this game are not a one-size-fits-all for both pure 2D Ninja Gaiden bliss and explore-y, backtrack-y Metroidvania-ing. Scarce checkpoint placement that's forgivable for a tough action game becomes an absolute slog if I have to explore the same long stretch of map over and over again for a fetch-quest. Howling Grotto and Searing Crags in particular were revisited a good 4-5 times during my Platinum run and I was starting to get really bored of gliding through the same air vents over and over and over.

It's a shame too, because after you choke down the second half's backtracking like a leftover turkey sandwich and get all the magical MacGuffins, you're rewarded with an amazing final level that times the environmental hazards to the music, reminding you of the game that The Messenger could've been from start to finish.

Despite all of that, I'd say it's a decent game. It has extremely high highs but then trips and sprains its ankle for a couple hours because it needed that cool little hook to set it apart from its retro contemporaries. I stuck around long enough to Platinum it too; I just miss the cool game that it was until it decided to become tedious.

Short but sweet. This might be the first game about death I've played that can be accurately described as "cozycore" without it sounding like a backhanded compliment.

You play as Morris Lupton, the recently deceased curator of the museum on the island of Shelmerston. After frittering about his new free time in the museum he once worked at (his old haunts, if you will), he reunites with his dog Sparky in the afterlife and Sparky reveals that A) she is now a talking dog and B) Shelmerston's dormant volcano is going to explode due to the waning powers of the island's protector, Aggi the Custodian. With the help of Sparky, Morris searches across the island for some more ghosts, uncovering their history, stories and secrets, in an attempt to find a new patron of the island before it's too late.

As a whole, I liked this little five hour experience. The two best ways I can describe the gameplay are "point-and-click Where's Waldo" and "art piece diorama". You're a ghost that can phase through objects and see the innards of things as you go about, collecting the memories of other ghosts. It's all just picking things up in the environment, rotating them around, and discovering their secrets, but it's also a beautiful and gentle contemplation of memory and loss, of the connections we form in life before we pass on, and about the odd ways you'll be remembered. But you can also gaze inside a thermos and see what color tea a sea captain was drinking.

The game starts out all jovial by having beloved pillars of the community like a yoga-loving lighthouse keeper or someone's husband, but then you also get to visit a campsite where a nature lover is remembered for being a prickly asshole. Ironically, the prickly asshole was the character that stuck with me the most. The other ghosts have family members and friends fondly remembering their loved ones (the second ghost in particular is a 37-year old woman remembered by her father, who tragically outlives her) but then you get to the campsite where a dead man's camper has been left abandoned to the elements and all the campers are mildly relieved that the weird owl-obsessed loner guy with all the strict rules is gone. It's this story - this tale of a guy remembered for being an asshole in life, even if he had a good reason for it - that keeps the game from feeling too saccharine. Sometimes, death happens to the guy that was just kinda annoying.

The game also gently eases you into its whole "this may LOOK like Earth but also there's weird fish people and bird people living alongside humanity, and also there might be fruit people?" setting over time, which I enjoyed. Sure, you're dead, the island might explode, and the dude in the camper is mainly remembered by people who hate him for confiscating their kite, but also you can find a four-legged pear man smoking a corn pipe in each level.

The ending is kinda underwhelming though. You spend the entire game looking for a Custodian to keep the island's volcano from erupting and wiping out the entire island but then, after talking to the Bronze Age woman who's the current Custodian (which, sidenote - I appreciate that this game didn't treat her beliefs as "primitive" and "wrong" or had her talk like a caveman), the game just kinda rolls credits without saying anything concrete. It is rather easy to connect some dots and come to a conclusion (that your main character and their dog are the new Custodians), but also it's weird that the sense of urgency that's been brewing for the entire runtime of the game just sorta fizzles into a lazy walk on the beach. I feel like "Does a volcano explode?" is one of those questions that shouldn't be left vague.

Ah well. It's cute, it's a fun little art piece, and I honestly think this particular game flew under the radar for a lot of people. I just wish the talking dog had a more convincing dog bark than "human-making-a-vaguely-dog-noise" and the weird goat man that looks like Discord from My Little Pony didn't give me such a strict time limit on his riddles.

The concept of this game - Metroidvania where you play as a magical genie that attacks with her hair and can transform into animals - is really solid. Too bad the actual game is a fairly slow, plodding pile of nothing with weak combat and weak level design that spins its wheels in the mud for 90% of the runtime until all of the cool plot twists happen in the last room in the map and then the game just ends.

I've been told that Pirate's Curse is The Good Shantae Game so I'm definitely giving that one a chance. I've also been told that this game had a very troubled dev cycle, to which I replied "Yeah, I can tell".

It's funny/sad that they decided to make this game an early 2017 3DS game and not wait two more measly months and instead make the version with the stop-motion theater shorts, Poochy auto-running levels, and the create-a-Yoshi customization a Switch launch title instead. Now Yoshi's Woolly World both feels underappreciated and exists in this weird limbo where I can't consider either version "definitive" because one version lacks content and the other one doesn't have the cute HD yarn graphics.

It's a shame too, because if I ignore my childhood nostalgia for Yoshi's Story, this might be my second favorite Yoshi title behind the eternally beloved Yoshi's Island. After all these years and various releases of varying quality, they finally rediscovered the secret sauce for making another good Yoshi's Island title - complete with a great soundtrack, as if in apology for the auditory crimes committed by New Island - only for Nintendo to say "yeah I'm sure the 3DS and the Switch can coexist without any sales repercussions" and doomed this game to obscurity two separate times.

They even changed the way items are collected in this game! You don't have to gather everything in one run to count for 100% completion! Now I don't feel like I HAVE to spend forever combing through every corner in every level and find every little stamp to make sure my playthrough "counts"!

This game deserved better. Yarn Yoshi deserved better. My custom-made Rayman Yoshi (whom I've named Ray-Yoshi) and my custom-made Banjo-Kazooie Yoshi (dubbed Banyo-Kazoshi) deserved better.

And Poochy, especially, deserved better, even if don't want to ask the uncomfortable question of where the Poochy Pups came from if there only seems to be one Poochy. (although I guess Yarn Stork brought them. maybe.)

Owlboy is a visually stunning, beautifully crafted pixel art showcase with a wonderful soundtrack and a cute cast of fun characters that lure you into a false sense of security until you try to actually play the damn thing and learn that your little mute owl friend has glass bones and paper skin and his main weapon is a peashooter that takes multiple hits to kill even the lowliest cave bat.

Owlboy is beautiful, you can tell that a lot of time went into crafting this beautiful world and all of its wacky inhabitants, and I like the idea of an avian character having to carry people around to do their fighting for them, but it wasn't exactly...well, fun.

This is a very tedious game. As you play it, you start think "Oh I'm sure the game's gonna get better..." as the stealth missions and various maze-like dungeons beat you down in an ever-increasing volley that wears on your patience. Soon, you'll ask yourself "Am I having fun?" when you know the answer is "No", and that's usually before you realize that this game wants you to treasure hunt for over 2000 finite coins across a playing field that has zero warp or map options available.

But at least the art is really nice. It's a shame about the whole "gameplay" part.

UPDATE - Okay this is the first game I've played on my PS5 that actually hardlocked my system. I had to manually shut down my PS5, have my USB drive repaired, and use a back up save because the Owlboy save file got corrupted in the process. Because I...walked through a doorway wrong? I guess?
Fuck you too, Owlboy.

Greatest hits compilations can be a hard sell since a fan of the series might say "big deal, I've played all these games before" but the beauty of Gold lies in the hardware it was released on. Getting a WarioWare on the 3DS, a system that can emulate both the gyro controls of Twisted and the touch screen of Touched, was a stroke of genius - even if it occurred late in the system's lifespan - and the way it accumulates into an absolutely frantic finale where you're switching between 3 different play styles on the fly was a real "This is why I love video games as a art medium" moment. If you're going to use console gimmicks for your video game, might as well go this hard with them, and if you can, please play this beautiful game on an actual 3DS system. This is where Gold shines. like gold

In a way, WarioWare Gold is an amazing send-off, both for the handheld WarioWare games and the 3DS itself. An absolutely exquisite curtain drop for the system before it succumbs to its fatal injuries via poorly selling remakes, and I'm saying this about a game where Wario gains godlike powers by wearing a communal toilet on his head and tries to murder a small child in front of a stadium full of people while doing so (in makes sense in context, I promise, and also it's unclear if the communal toilet itself has godlike powers or if Wario gave himself godlike powers via the placebo effect).

Oh, and to sweeten the deal, once you collect all the souvenirs, the game slaps you on the back and says "well done, now you get this mildly addicting collectible card game where you play rock-paper-scissors against those random freaks from the minigames". This game rules.

Really not a fan of the fact that 3 of the 4 latest Crash Bandicoot games are (or, in this case, were) battle pass grindfests that want you to turn the marsupial into a side-job as you work the long hours for your free-to-play cosmetics, all while a frog in boiling water scenario is playing out where the releases have been steadily becoming online-only after the success of CTRNF, a game with a "seven dollars gets you 700 Bandicoot Bux!" cosmetics store that at least was still a full game that could be played offline.

But hey, at least they brought back Mr. Crumb from the obscure Tiger electronics game and did a crossover with The Noid at one point, which means that Crash Bandicoot has canonically interacted with a Domino's pizza.

Similar to how the Animal Crossing villagers used to insult your weight and steal your stuff in the first installment, Cooking Mama used to be a weird bully who would call you a bitch because you didn't peel three potatoes perfectly under an oppressive time limit.

While this does give the original Cooking Mama more of a personality than the sequels, I also don't like being stressed out while making pixel art spaghetti. I definitely prefer the defanged Cooking Mama of the 3DS era to the original "if I see one lettuce leaf break then it's a bronze medal" Cooking Mama.