liked it a lot! i did a 100% run which i don't think i'll repeat - the blue coins are a fun idea in theory (even if you're stuck on a shine you can still make some incremental progress exploring the area) but kind of frustrating and tedious to collect all of. there was only really one 'infamous' shine i had trouble with, the one you have to reach the island with yoshi for: because getting there at all is difficult, and then doing the shine is difficult, it meant that i had to replay one long annoying preliminary section every time i got a game over which was uh...several times. so i definitely had my frustrations with this game...overall i think i like super mario galaxy more, but i still found this one a satisfying experience, and especially i just really loved moving around the place in it? that's probably the thing i'm going to miss the most. also: banging sountrack

totally get why this may not be some people's Thing ace attorney-wise but i really loved it. real talk sometimes even in my fave games of this series there's at least one case that really drags/feels like filler (i think dual destinies really suffered from having TWO cases that i wasn't super invested in, even if i thought the concluding case was strong) whereas that wasn't a problem here! even the non-plot relevant case worked because it 1) didn't outstay its welcome, 2) had some fun characters in the witness box (and from what i've read a surprisingly accurate depiction of did?) 3) gave the focus to characters who otherwise wouldn't have had much in this game. between that and trucy's case i think this did a much better job than dual destinies at juggling an increasingly large cast of characters by simply acknowledging that it COULDN'T give them all equal attention all the time but could spotlight a few for one part. though i understand that maya may be less prominent than people imagined when it was first announced she was coming back (it's a bit hard to gauge this for me 7 years on).

also i think it's fun that you get followed around a bunch by a teenage girl who hates you and insults you at every opportunity!

This might be nostalgia speaking but I think on the whole I prefer smaller, tighter Zelda games. There’s a certain point where exploration loses a bit of that exciting new sheen. Also, while I appreciate that the Gerudo have had more emphasis placed on their heroic characters and the Hylians themselves are more racially diverse than they’ve been in the past, I’m still not entirely sure that puts to rest the thornier aspects of Ganondorf as a character, a brown, hooked nose, brutal foreigner come to take over Hyrule. The fact that Ganon was the villain in the last game as well just meant that I wasn’t super interested in seeing his human form in the immediate next game. Maybe it’s because my in to the series was the handheld titles but my attitude is that we really don’t need the Same Guy to be the villain in every game.

That’s a lot of complaining but at the end of the day I did like this. I liked the additions to the BoTW formula (fuse especially was my friend, making weapon durability less annoying because even if all you had were sticks you could do something with them). I liked being able to be an intrepid reporter (tho I suspect I’m being underpaid at 100 rupees per story given I almost died for a fair few of them - where are Hyrule’s unions when you need them?) I liked that the dungeons and bosses were more varied in aesthetic than the last game (tho I always thought the map manipulation technique there was neat and I was sad to see it go entirely). At the end of the day, I like Zelda, and I haven’t ever played a Zelda game I disliked. If there are others I liked more than this it just means there are a lot of good video games out there.

was looking for a short game as a sort of stopgap between two longer ones on my backlog and this definitely hit the spot. although 1) the back quarter of the test rooms is WAY longer than the first three quarters, to the point it took me by surprise, and 2) this is definitely not the game to play if you suffer from motion sickness. i don't think i'm especially prone (i've played through all of the metroid prime trilogy and the only time it hit me was when i got badly lost underwater once) but even i had to take a few long breaks - and probably should have taken more but i was determined to finish it tonight. my only other quibble is that i found parts of the final boss a bit fiddly. otherwise, i think it wholly deserves its classic status and i'm sure i'll enjoy the second game when i get round to it probably years from now.

on balance i think i like the plot and world of three houses more (this feels a lot like it's stepping back into 'standard fire emblem mode' if such a thing exists), plus some of the balancing in this is bizarre - which maybe i noticed more because i like to grind the supports out so this is partly on me BUT i still don't really get why the skirmishes and training battles were consistently so much higher level than the chapters and paralogues. equally, there is some decent cry for the devil stuff with sombron at the very end, and the break and engage mechanics definitely add interesting things to the battle system. i don't think it outstayed its welcome, though equally i can't see myself spending over 120 hours on my NEXT playthrough. so i guess basically my feeling is it's not always GREAT but there's some pretty good stuff in there.

i was gonna do the hard extra levels, completed the first two and then watched someone else do the rest and was like...nah, i'm good. they're all unlocked from the start so there wasn't that same satisfying feeling of progression and achievement for me, though i might go back and do them later. the rest of the game, aside from a few obtuse moments, hit a sweet spot for me of challenging my brain without being headbashingly difficult....a very nice change of pace from smb 3 which i played before this. also, even though it's a fairly linear game those gorgeous backdrops and the frequent sense of scale really created a great sense of discovery and exploration

i think i am...slightly too impatient for the sort of timed puzzle game this is, especially the dialogue bits which often repeat every time you turn back time, and as a result i looked up answers a bit more frequently than i would've liked. HOWEVER there is some pretty satisfying puzzle stuff, and i really enjoyed the story - well paced with likeable characters and a great ending. super glad this got an hd rerelease on switch because i've seen it listed on a fair few 'best ds game' lists but it's uh...expensive to buy on that platform these days and i'm too lazy to get into emulation

didn't super vibe with this one even though i DO think it's a well-constructed platformer...whereas i got a lot of satisfaction from dkc and its difficulty here i enjoyed myself most when i was zooming through stages and that didn't happen very often, tho i did start to get into the zone more when i aimed to play for half an hour a day - so i wouldn't have to sink time into it if i was stuck but could still hopefully make progress. i don't think this is a bad game, just maybe not for me personally!

wow i love sports games (the baseball minigame in the legend of zelda: a link between worlds)

anyway this is an all round pretty solid zelda experience! exploring especially is super satisfying. it is also nice to know that i HAVE got better at playing videogames since i was twelve...i'm debating having a second go at hero mode, which i tried years ago but gave up on because i was dying so much. it's not the one i'm most deeply attached to, and especially because of the last two zeldas i replayed it's kinda a bummer how little she gets to do here...but hey, we can't all be spirit tracks (2009) and i think as the game it aims to be it succeeds pretty well.