What a surprisingly amazing game. I picked it up with the intent of it being a couch co-op game with my girlfriend, kind of thinking it would just be pretty mundane other than that, but no. I loved the Kirby games as a kid but each new entry really didn't bring much new to the table, so after playing Super Star Ultra I just didn't feel like any of them were worth my time as a grown ass man and didn't bother with the games.

This game brought the series to 3D and waiting until now definitely paid off because they nailed it on their first go. The level design is fantastic with tons of secrets everywhere - there are far less abilities than the other games but they're more integrated into the levels and each one has some significant interaction with a puzzle or your traversal. The combat works really well - the boss design is hilariously enough very clearly Souls-inspired but it works super well, especially for a few of the genuinely pretty difficult postgame bosses.

There are two complaints I have that feel obvious to fix
-There should have been some way to get the upgrade stones other than doing the Arena over and over. There's a glitch that allows you to get a stone every 30 seconds or so and I'm glad that exists because grinding out stones would be really monotonous otherwise if you're going for 100% completion.
-The couch co-op could have used splitscreen although I get why they didn't given how weak the Switch hardware is, this game is pushing it pretty hard as is. Your co-op partner gets the short end of the stick, they play as Bandana Dee but the camera doesn't follow them, enemies don't aggro them, and they're stuck to one ability that is exclusive to them (Spear). While the Spear is actually really cool, they end up getting left in the dust if Kirby has an ability that makes him too mobile for Bandana Dee to catch up like Tornado. I also get why Bandana Dee can't use abilities since that could break the level design but they could have given him some better mobility to keep up.

Logging this once again just because I have so much to say on this game and I'm in a better headspace to leave a less salty review. I started playing again after Elphelt dropped and have been learning her and I think it made me realize why this game is so flawed.

First off for a casual player this game is great, the visual designs and character designs are outstanding and really as a casual player you are not trying to learn the game. However I don't think reviewing fighting games for a casual player makes sense since they will simply just not spend much time on it, these games are played for their mechanical depth.

I also have to give this game credit for being one of the first major releases with rollback netcode and setting the standard for other games to follow there. It does however have a huge caveat with the ranked system and online lobbies being god awful, making it difficult to find games and even with the netcode you'll see people with 170-200 ping wander into lobbies for regions they don't belong in and ruin your experience. At least now you can block people like this because in the past they would just spam challenge you again and again no matter how many times you said no, until you got up and left to a different station. But the main issue is still that there is no actual matchmaking system, the matchmaking is based on what 32-person lobby you're in and you can just pick and choose people to play in that lobby which sucks. I get that the intent is to emulate an arcade, but SF6 has this system and a real matchmaking system which is the best of both worlds.

Mechanically this game is pure kuso and I think I've accepted it as such, it can be fun just for how silly it is but taking it seriously at all just leads to frustration as it seems the game was intentionally designed around mashing mid-risk, high-reward options. Damage is stupidly high, and yes past GG games had some high damage scenario but there was no GG game in the past where everyone was doing 60% meterless damage off of a c.S starter, or 60% damage off of a 1 bar f.S starter, which is extremely common in this game. One of the most frustrating changes they made to the past games is to the gatling system, where you used to be able to combo your light normals P and K into your damaging normals S and HS, this is no longer possible. This change confounded me for years because it doesn't feel good at all since the dial-a-combo system anime fighters have used (which Guilty Gear helped to even create in the first place) just feels so natural, and it feels unnatural not being able to do it even after playing this game a ton. I think I finally realized the reason for that and it's that Daisuke wanted defense to be as gimped as possible in this game. An important concept in all fighting games is abare where you use a fast normal to interrupt your opponent's pressure. In other anime fighters due to gatling/magic series/beat whatever combos you get to convert these back into damage to reverse momentum on your opponent - in Strive you're getting a knockdown at best and some characters can't even manage that, some characters just get a few jabs in and reset to neutral. Anti-airs also generally get low reward compared to pressure options (other than the very few characters that just break the rules and get tons of damage off of anti airs for some reason), and there are only 4 characters with invincible meterless reversals in the entire game (EDIT: theres a few more now but w/e), all which scale extremely heavily. So offensive interactions are getting like, I'd say 3-4 times the damage that defensive interactions are.

Finally what will prevent this game from ever having consistent quality is the patches just being completely insane. Tiers do not matter, what is fun does not matter, characters are randomly and wildly changed and I get a headache trying to even begin to piece together their logic for these "balance" patches. If your character happens to be one of the targets of the dev team expect to have to relearn them completely every single patch, and NEVER expect a character to be nerfed even when they're top tier for years, or even when they have several extremely polarizing winning matchups that just invalidate some characters. This game is balanced like its from 1993.

but yeah this is a fun game if you hate thinking and love mashing wildly and laughing your ass off. Maybe 3v3 will make it better, genuinely looking forward to it.

This was really disappointing as a game but it has some of the best implemented couch co op ive ever seen. The co op companion actually has a distinct role so co op greatly improves this game as you end up working in tandem. If you play Solo you just switch between controlling Luigi and the companion (Gooigi) one at a time so its not nearly as fun.

Outside of this one mechanic, the game itself is unfortunately a linear slog that goes on way too long. The first Luigi's Mansion was fantastic because it had an interconnected world and was a very short, replayable game. The fun of that game was in its exploration - it was Resident Evil for kids, the exploration gave it a spooky atmosphere and while the combat was mediocre it wasn't the focus.
This game has a level-based structure where progression is locked behind solving puzzles and fighting enemies. The puzzles range from overly cryptic to "hold X on a door" but are hardly ever clever or interesting, it feels like the main challenge is always finding what the game will actually let you interact with. The combat is not nearly interesting enough to justify the length of the game and it crumbles under the repetitive rooms filled with the same 3 or 4 types of enemies.

originally gave this a 2.5/5. After update 2.0, in its current state I'd say it's finally an actual released game however don't be fooled into thinking its perfect, it's still in a Bethesda tier state of QA and jank shit will happen like enemies clipping into cars.

This game really shines with the story, writing, and character building. When the game came out the AI was so broken that despite all of the build options being really cool and the areas being well designed for a wide array of playstyles, you really didn't get a chance to do much with the combat. But now the missing potential is there and this is a really good game and definitely holds up comparably well to CD Projekt's other games.

The Phantom Liberty DLC is also really good but I am a little annoyed they are charging for it considering it's really obvious the Dogtown area was cut from the original game due to the publisher pushing it out several years before it was ready, but hey. Whatever man.

I have way too much to say about this game to summarize it in one review so I won't try, and rather I'll just hit key points.

I think calling it overrated has become so common its a milquetoast opinion rather than a contrarian statement at this point. When you have decades of people telling you this is one of the greatest games of all time, theres an inherent pressure playing it to enjoy it, and that very pressure to derive pleasure from an experience rather than just letting yourself sink into it can cause you to experience the opposite, and end up having a bad time, especially for this now 25 year old game that runs at an inconsistent 20FPS with crude, barely comprehensible 3D models. I think if you're late to the party with this game its best to approach it with no expectations.

Overall this game is a polished package, but there are two main reasons this game is so revered. The first is that this is the closest game to being the "Citizen Kane of gaming". That's not saying its just good, Citizen Kane is talked about as it is because the way it used lighting and cinematography was innovative and was copied by nearly all other films made after it. OoT did the same thing for 3rd person 3D games: omnidirectional camera that sticks behind the player character, lock-on that allows you to stay swiveled around objects and enemies, dodge steps and rolls, omnidirectional movement with a joystick... other games before had a few of these ideas but none of them worked like how Oot did it and all packaged together. OoT has aged wonderfully specifically because it was one of the first 3D games to control as smoothly as it does. There are other games that could be considered to have a similar level of influence (DOOM especially comes to mind) but there are few genres as ubiquitous as third-person action games, and that's where OoT set the bar.

The second is the story and soundtrack really leaves a lasting impression. The soundtrack is Koji Kondo's best work and one of the most memorable in any video game - most future Zelda games feature several arrangements of songs originally from OoT. The focus on having the player actually play the music on the Ocarina also helped it stick. The story also indirectly has a message about the passage of time and adulthood beneath the story of defeating evil - Link transitions from a child to an adult halfway through the story, and the game's tone changes drastically. You go from whimsical adventures to a dark, oppressive world - but with that dark and oppressive world comes a responsibility you hold to take care of and protect those around you.

It's a beautiful game and I think everyone should play it at least once. If you haven't played it, try to go in letting go of preconceived notions and give it a shot. It's ok if it ends up not being your cup of tea.

this trashy-looking porn game seriously impressed me enough that I felt the need to leave a review.

As pornography it actually kind of sucks, maybe it's just me but the cutesy artwork and bizarrely drawn anatomy just wasn't appealing to me

However as someone who plays a ton of indie Metroidvanias this is genuinely one of the better ones I've played. The combat is basically a 1:1 copy of Momodora, Reverie Under the Moonlight - and there is also a color (or in this game's case gender) swap mechanic that creates interesting platforms and puzzles, similar to Ikaruga. The boss designs are also great, and the map design is pretty interesting with lots of verticality. If you enjoyed Momodora you'd like this too.

This is one of those rare 18+ games that would have probably benefitted from expanding its target audience by not being porn.

I still love this game a lot, this served as an entry point to the Dark Souls series for a lot of friends of mine being faster paced and more accessible than 1. For boss fight lovers I think this game overall still has overall the best bosses of any FromSoft game, with the final boss of DLC2 I think being my favorite boss fight in a video game ever.

This game lacked a lot of originality though and you kind of got the feeling playing this that Miyazaki wanted to bury the Dark Souls lore and start something new by this point. I think my biggest complaint of this game is it honestly has the least interesting combat in the entire series for me - magic is the weakest its ever been and dodge rolls have more i-frames than ever and consume hardly any stamina, meaning that the best strategy for every fight is to dodge and hit, but you arent adequately punished for carelessly panic-spamming dodge rolls and can kind of make it through the game like that. The combat almost feels like a "worst of both worlds" mesh between Dark Souls 1 and Bloodborne - it takes the lack of build variety that Bloodborne had but without the trick weapons, the rally system, the riposte system and everything else that made Bloodborne combat a lot more interesting than this game. Thankfully Elden Ring would eventually come out and have a combat system that this game really should have.

Level design is stronger than Dark Souls 2 but still noticably weaker than both Bloodborne and Dark Souls 1, checkpoints are really egregiously placed and a lot of areas lack tension because of it.

Despite its flaws I still give this game high praise mostly due to its setpiece moments being arguably the best in the franchise.

When Dark Souls came out in 2011 it really blew me away, but I always felt like the game's reputation as some sort of super difficult rage game was a disservice. The reason it had this reputation was specifically because it was marketed as such, and while that marketing was very smart and is a major reason for Fromsoft's growth into a company making niche, low-budget games to now making AAA titles, the difficulty had very little to do with why I liked that game. The atmosphere and level design were the two biggest reasons, with the level of build and playstyle variety being a smaller but also important one. Dark Souls had an interconnected world where you learned the map as you went, with very distinct areas and environmental cues to help you if you got lost, the same environmental cues also being used for storytelling to create a rich atmosphere unlike anything I have ever seen before. I was also amazed by the amount of weapons, spells, and movesets at the player's disposal, which again was not something I had seen in games much at the time. The difficulty of Dark Souls was definitely present but was overstated, as with enough patience to find an extremely good build for the situation, the game was easily trivialized.

As Fromsoft went on as a company they started to focus more on action and combat and less on RPG elements, with Sekiro, Bloodborne, and Dark Souls III all pushing the player into a much more narrow amount of playstyles than Dark Souls 1 and 2. While this isn't inherently a bad thing and these are all still great games, I always thought this wasn't something we would get back.

Elden Ring feels like a culmination of everything that went right in the Souls series. The "RPG" part of the game is back and more expansive than ever, it's hard to go in depth but there are hundreds of spells and weapons, dozens of unique movesets, hundreds of special attacks from each weapon - just an infinite amount of ways to approach combat. If you are turned off by this game's reputation of difficulty I still think you should give it a chance because if you approach the game with an open mind you CAN find a playstyle or build that will make the game much easier for you. You should never feel ashamed to play how you want to either, anyone acting elitist who says you didn't "beat the game" is merely imposing a challenge run on themselves and should be ignored.

The game has an open world structure for the first time with fantastic open world design, from every spot on the map there is a waypoint in the horizon that naturally will play at your curiosity and desire to explore and draw you towards it. The map feels so organic, any huge castle you can see from the distance is actually a structure you can go and spend hours exploring, every building has some sort of reward in it, every cave is a dungeon, every single point of interest on the map has some sort of function to reward the player's curiosity.

Contained within this massive world is the game's legacy dungeons which combined would easily make a game they could have put together and shipped as Dark Souls 4. The level design does not suffer despite the open world design, as these legacy dungeons are just as tight and well designed as the levels in Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3. Leyndell Capital is the crown jewel of this game and possibly the entire series, being an area that seems impossibly large yet interconnected with itself.

The art direction is also some of the best I've seen in a video game, and the atmosphere and environmental storytelling is here in full force again despite the massive size of the open world. Areas are littered with little details like corpses, unique and creative enemies are found everywhere, and important figures in the lore are found scattered around the land, creating a feeling of immersion rarely found in other games. Meanwhile the world and art is so beautiful that in any given location you can look at the horizon and feel like you're looking at a painting, with the landscapes feeling almost impsosibly sculpted considering they also are all areas the player can actually explore. I've looked at some of the horizons of the game side by side with the art from the manga Berserk and the similarities are uncanny - I mean this as a huge compliment. Again this is something that they fully realized, as the original Dark Souls also had a very painting-esque aesthetic with the way it used depth of field effects, and this game is able to achieve something like that but with much more impressive tech.

As always this game also has some amazing keystone bosses. I won't spoil them here but the better bosses in this game share the same excellence as the rest of the series.

This game is not without faults however, most of the faults being sacrifices needed to make an open-world structure work. Because of the amount of content in this game the quality of the side-dungeons you can find is inconsistent, as its clear these took less development time than the legacy dungeons. Most of these are still pretty fun despite this, but a few of them stand out as frustrating and simply not good. Unlike the past game this game frequently repeats boss fights to fill out the open world, and a lot of the "boss fights" are merely regular enemies with boss health bars. The final open-world area of the game especially suffers from this issue frequently repeating enemies that feel out of place, kind of indicating that the devs were pressed for time at this point of the game. Coinciding with being an RPG this game also has level scaling more present than other games, meaning if you miss content early on its easy to level yourself to the point where the content is trivialized and you can come back taking almost no damage from enemies and killing bosses in 2-3 hits. Luckily, also because of the open world structure, if you find a part of the game you don't like you can in most cases decide to simply not do it, although unfortunately a small amount of these frustrating parts are either required to progress (Godskin Duo) or required to reach more interesting optional content (Ordina Liturgical Town). There are going to be people who prefer the more linear, polished structure of games like Bloodborne and Sekiro, and that is perfectly OK if that's you.

For me, however, this is currently my favorite game of all time. This game is what I daydreamed that a game could be as a kid back in the Gamecube and PS2 era, thinking to myself it was nothing more than an impossible fantasy since the technology to make something like this felt so far away. This game feels like playing an interactive piece of art and its hard to imagine something that could top it for me.