Corny, goofy, great themes, and fun. One of the most explorative and creative experiences for your heart and blind eye. The inverted castle is unfinished but still fun. The realization Dracula had of his love for humans at the end of the game when Alucard drags it out of him is genuinely heartwarming and sweet, and also features a bad ending that's satisfying enough to also feel content with ending it there. Although the inverted castle and true ending are worth going on for. Play it anyway you can. A case of a game really just being that good.

This is my first time playing a Star Fox game, and I must say, it's a great introduction. The action is fast-paced and satisfying, the characters are charming, and the presentation are great. I finally understand why this series is so fondly remembered.

The only downside for me is that the sections set during the all-range mode aren't very enjoyable and can be a bit tedious to me. Besides that, I can still highly recommend this game if you're looking for a fun and replayable game with lots of personality.

Of course I was going to love Psychonauts 2, the 20-years later miracle sequel to one of my all-time favorite games. Every level was fun to play at worst and stunning at best, and if there were no Milkman-level levels then at least there were no meat circuses in the entire bunch. Deeper characters? We got deeper characters, baby. We’re talking Jack Black as a gay hippie learning how to use his five senses again after spending years without a body, his alcoholic depressed husband finally learning to process his grief, dogen boole’s father battling a nasty case of co-dependency, and Raz learning about the importance of consent in a riff on the meat circus from the last game, this one being a casino-hospital. We have a great surprise twist villain late in the game with probably the most fun level out of all of them, and czarist Russian kitsch to boot. We have Lilli no longer just a stock tsundere character but a fun supporting character with motivations of her own. I mean the first game treated its mentally ill characters sympathetically, but it was still a Saturday morning cartoon tone, they never made me want to weep. Psychonauts 2, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll fard and shid your pant.

Why did I only give it 4.5 stars instead of a perfect five? I’m so glad you asked. The one thing that cost the game an entire half star is the interns. The goddam interns. I hate the interns so much.

One of the small joys of the first game among many is interacting with the other children in the camp. It’s a microcosm of any typical middle-school age group of kids: some of them are kind of awkward and weird, some of them are pretty cool, some are annoying but you can’t help but like them anyway, some are irrationally mean and you just stay away from them, and a few of them are just straight-up bullies. It’s entirely optional to interact with the kids after a mission, and often rewarding if you do.

In Psychonauts 2, this diverse group of kids is replaced by about six or so insufferable little cunts. They start out mean to Raz for no reason, and they stay mean for the whole game. And not just mean, but mean in a way that is completely narratively flat. There’s no context in the intern program itself that motivates this behavior, competition or what have you, since no one’s like in danger of getting kicked out one by one, reality-tv show style or anything like that. Theres nothing that differentiates either of them also; one of them is mean but likes yo-yos, one is mean but can also control ice, one of them is mean but also likes indie rock music. One of them fools you by being somewhat nice at first before actually being meaner than all the others. And oh yeah, let’s not forget my favorite one, who is mean to you but ALSO mean to animals! Har de har har.

There is barely a whiff of an opportunity for them to change their attitude when Raz saves them from a tough spot, with Raz having absolutely no motivation to do so outside of “I’m a decent human being and I suppose even these dickheads don’t deserve an eternal I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream fate.” Would you be surprised if I told you they don’t? And after this moment, every single collectible side quest is given to you by these asshole kids. Worse still, the collectibles are all extensions of them being shitty to you. The scavenger quest given to you by Ford Cruller in the first game is like a fun camp activity, whereas here its obviously a waste of time given to you by the head bitchy character who is holding your clothes hostage. Another one involves turning off machines which surprise surprise, the mean intern forgot to tell you are dangerous.

Check out this scene, for example. First of all, it’s important to understand that I already do not like this character at all, and then this game insists that it’s hee-larious to see her treat animals like an emotionally abusive mother for like a minute and a half. It’s an ugly and honestly hard to watch scene, and for what? There’s no narratively-significant reason for this, it just automatically plays when you enter the diner. Look, I’m not that thin-skinned, it could have been funny if like there was a reason for Raz to be here, if like he had to put up with it to get the pancakes from her, or if she was unexpectedly nice before and he was like “sure, pancakes, Sam should be a pushover, how hard could it be,” just like, something, man.

When the bully in the first game, a far less interesting one by the way, first starts doing his bully shit, Raz immediately sticks up for himself. It’s baffling that such a huge chunk of this game, with so many wonderfully-realized supporting characters elsewhere, forces you to watch Raz just become a human punching bag for so long, and it’s exhausting every time you have to sit through it. And then your family shows up, and they’re mean to you too! Jesus!

All this, and then for the tiniest token gesture of support during the final boss where they all get no-scoped anyway, they become junior agents along with Raz! Why? Raz did all the work! I bet you, just like the people you went to high school with who were mean to you and then wonder why you don’t give them the time of day as adults, they’re all going to act like they have a shared experience or some shit that’s going to make them think they’ll be friends forever. Bitch, you stole my clothes on my first day of school, get out of my goddam life!

A stupendous game otherwise, of course, and I guess to be fair, despite all the ink I spilled on it, it’s a small enough issue to just ignore if you really want to.

I didn't dislike this as much as I did when I was younger, but the parts that are bad seemed even worse.
Really what saves this game for me is the Battle Frontier and the music, both of which are excellent.
Visually this is a pretty notable step down from gen 3 visually, which is pretty sad considering the gen 3 games do not look good for GBA games. So many Pokemon sprites just look off, the 3D and scaling look awful on such a low-resolution screen, making the sprites jitter around when they move, and this generation has the weakest set of new Pokemon designs of any generation in my opinion. There are a handful of good designs, but it is very highly outweighed by some of the all-time worst Pokemon designs like Acreus, Heatran and the lake trio.
I can excuse the visuals much more than I can excuse the atrocious, repetitive dialogue from the NPCs in this game. Gen 3 already was pushing how much I could tolerate the dialogue with the Team Magma/Aqua stuff, but this is way too much. I like games with a lot of dialogue, some of them like Summon Night Swordcraft Story 2 are among my favorite games, but the difference there is that the dialogue is actually good. This generation represents the point at which Pokemon lore was irreparably damaged, and my feelings toward it are very similar to my feelings about what Dark Souls 3 did to Dark Souls 1. Fleshing out a world to the point where absolutely every mysterious facet has been explored and explained robs players of the ability to engage with the world with theories or their imaginations. It's restrictive, it's boring, and Pokemon quite frankly didn't have that much going on to begin with. Trying to compensate for ironing out the mystery by adding like 14 new legendary Pokemon just feels like a slap in the face. When nearly 15% of the new Pokemon are legendaries, it makes the concept of legendary Pokemon a lot less special.
This was where I stopped playing Pokemon for over a decade because of how much I disliked it, but I am on a mission to play every mainline Pokemon game, and if this game is beloved by newer generation Pokemon fans, I am dreading what is coming next.