Story and characters are good enough. Most of the lines are voice acted which I appreciate.

It's lacking a lot of quality of life features. There are frequent random encounters, a lot of backtracking, fixed save points, unconvenient crafting mechanics which waste your time with a short "animation"(it's too simple to call it an animation, it's more like a fade out effect), sudden difficulty spikes, skill system which is difficult to understand without a guide.
There is also no difficulty settings. I was forced to go out of my way at some point and follow a guide for easy levelling so I could progress, I was getting one shot by mobs otherwise.

This re-release could have been used to smooth out the issues, but it's just a port of the psp version. It's outdated and it shows.

Despite all that though, there is a good game here if you can overlook how many small problems it has. The skills allow you to break the game once you put enough into them which feels satisfying.

The gameplay is simple, you have an attack, a dodge and a special button. Each character has a short list of combos they can do and offensive and defensive special moves.

The story mode goes by very quickly, in around 30 minutes. You play through Ippo's story in an arcade-like way. Moves are locked until certain matches.

Tournament mode is much more difficult, and is where you'll spend most of your time. Trying to beat this with some of the weaker fighters (Hayami especially) is a nightmarish task. In the last 2 matches, the CPU is much more aggressive, takes a lot more hits to take down and does significantly more damage. To the point that it starts to feel unfair in my opinion.

Still, overall it's an enjoyable game, worth at least a try. The spritework is very good.

Pretty good. I liked the cutscene direction, the animations, the music.
Unfortunately, it has some of the worst dungeon design I've seen. They are just long.

The action combat is almost great, but the balance makes it just good enough. You end up spamming so many potions because of the ridiculous damage you take. The game knows this and gives away money and puts shops in the dungeons to make sure you're always stocked. I really liked how seamless the transition is from combat to exploration. The enemies just appear and disappear, no battle transition.
Once you get a bit into the game, you can easily break any encounter using aoe spells or buff abilities.

The voice casting is surprisingly great. I loved hearing Steve Blum as Zegram. There are other big names here too like Yuri Lowenthal. Pretty good dub for a game of this time.

I don't regret playing through this game, but it could have been so much better.

It's picross. Not sure why it's Mario's, there are hardly any mario related pictures in it.
It's lacking any QoL. When you complete a number in a row or column, it doesn't get marked.
While it's possible to finish the puzzles without guessing, it does get very difficult. Some of them take up to 1 hour for me(especially starting with the time trials). Maybe I'm just bad. I stopped after 7 time trials.
There are 256 puzzles in total. They get more difficult as you progress. First puzzles will only take a couple of minutes or less, then it ramps up.
Not sure I can recommend this one, when there are so many more picross games. Nothing wrong with this one, and I was curious how it was, but it's probably a better idea to start from the newer titles and go backwards so you don't get burned out by playing the old ones.

It's a really nice and short game.
It has a couple of joke characters in there which was nice to see.
Not a difficult game at all. The AI is pretty easy, just hit the ball left then right and most of the time, the Ai won't hit back. Not a balanced game, characters which have more power are easier to win with(just adds to each character's uniquness a bit)
I finished the tournament with all the characters in around 2h 50 minutes. Not much to do beyond that, except maybe play the game ocasionally each month, as there is a different tournament for each zodiac sign depending on the day of the real-life calendar that you play it on. There is a nice trophy display in the records screen.

The music gets repetitive really quickly. It just repeats the same notes over and over, there are 3 songs in the game, one for each match in the tournament, but they are really short.

Overall, good game to play a couple of rounds while on the bus or during a break.

I really didn't like this game.
Music gets repetitive quickly.
The controls are some of the worst I've ever encountered. It feels like you're all the levels are ice levels. Momentum makes no sense. It's either too much or not enough.
There are rock-paper-scissors bosses, so unless you follow a guide, you'll lose just because of luck(luckily they always pick the same thing).
The level design at least is decent. But because of the horrible controls, I really can't enjoy it.
Only managed to play until the first castle, which I think is half of the game.
You're not missing anything by not playing this one.

I had an absolute blast with this one. The amount of content on offer here is absolutely incredible. I can't even begin to imagine how much effort this must have taken to make.
Not everything is good (I really dislike Chadley), but the good outweighs the bad by a long shot.
Music is amazing. Gameplay is great. Graphics are top-notch. The open world is ...ehhh, I could have done with less of that. Some mini-games would be good enough to be their own stand-alone games (chocobo racing and queen's blood card game). You can easily find yourself trying to get the highest score, but you'll probably enjoy the game more if you don't do that.

Every character gets their own spotlight in the main story and all side-quests involve at least one of your party members in some way.

The cinematics are really beautiful and always a treat. Such a beautiful game.

Highly recommend it. I really hope the next game doesn't have Chadley or that at least there's less of him. I hate Chadley.

This is a very fun and challenging game. You get only 3 continues and can't earn any more than that. There is a beginner more where you take less damage, i recommend that to get used to the stages and enemies first before tackling normal mode. You don't get ranked or the credits at the end on beginner.

It plays mostly like a top-down shooter, but you're fighting fire. You have to types of spraying, top and down. There is small fire on the ground that can only be hit with the down spray and larger fire that can be hit safely from afar with the top spray. You can hold the R button to maintain the direction you're spraying in.
You also have a water bomb that functions as you'd expect. Like a bomb in any other shmup. Pretty important for bosses, especially the last 2. You can find bombs hidden in the levels. If you pick up a bomb while you have 3 bombs, you get a more powerful spray for your hose that lasts until you get hit.

Ocasionally, there are other types of hazards you must avoid by ducking such as explosions, fireballs, fire drafts etc. Ducking is also used to go under certain obstacles.

The game is on a time-limit for each stage. You're rated based on how much fire you cleared during the level, how much time is left on the clock and how many continues you used. If the time limit reaches 0, your health goes down to 1. Once you die, you get another few minutes(I think 3) when you continue.

Really great game, I enjoyed it a lot.

It's like an anthology of jrpgs. You play through many worlds, each with their own charm and style. Some worlds focus on the story, others on the gameplay. The fighting mechanics are pretty simple, but that's not a bad thing.

The pixel art in this is really good.

I enjoyed my roughly 25 hours with this one. Worth a playthrough.

Amazing atmosphere and pixel art. Worth playing for that alone.
Music is fitting. Voice acting is captivating.
The game is for the most part not that hard, just towards the end and when playing the DLC areas it starts getting more difficult.

There is a bloodstained crossover which is just a platforming challenge. I didn't enjoy these that much, as the more difficult ones involve a lot of waiting for moving platforms, and jumping from ladder to ladder without getting hit by a fire ball, else you get thrown into death spikes. They're not long, but they were the worst part of the game for me.

There are many quests with some vague hints for the steps you have to do. Some you might figure out yourself, for others you definitely need to read a guide. What I wish I knew earlier, is that if you donate 20k to the church, you unlock fast travel between all checkpoints. This really helps the backtracking.
Wish there were more icons on the map put automatically. You're supposed to add them yourself. If you see a flying baby, mark it on your map so you don't forget about it. I had 3 missing by the end of the game and no idea where they were.

Playtime was almost 20h for me. A bit more than I expected, I thought I would be done in 10-15h. Some of it was spent in the Bloodstained DLC, or backtracking for quests, or retrying to some of the more difficult bosses.

Definitely recommend for any metroidvania fan, it's a really good game of the genre.