The customisation options this game promotes result in fundamentally different gameplay to that of other Fire Emblem games. I was very fond of the characterisation of most characters and despised the maps, so I resorted to only playing 99 turn battles with rusted weapons so as to maximise support. After a measly 240 hours, having not even reached timeskip, I realised I had just been wasting my time. Golden Deer.

IDM FOREVER

My Inkay 4-0d my friend's team in a randbat using our boxed mons as the available pool and became part of my main team from there on #CALAMARDI

I played this game for hours on end, I wouldn't grow tired of it as a whole, completely absorbed in my town. I will never forget the day I stayed up late and came across a scarab beetle for the first time. I mistakenly said I was a girl at the start of the game.

QUE ESPAÑA ES UNA GRAN NACIÓN, Y LOS ESPAÑOLES, MUY ESPAÑOLES, Y MUCHO ESPAÑOLES. Muchas gracias.

This is the quintessential classic Pokémon game for my money. You get the Gen 2 narrative arc with all the added perks of being a Gen 4 game, and then some. I personally enjoy the unconventionally broken level curve, even if it can prove to be inconvenient at times. As someone who tends to keep their team members evenly levelled, this was a welcome change of approach for me. Meganium.

This was the second game my brother owned, the first being a copy of Pokémon Diamond he lost at school. For his sixth birthday, he got a DS all of his own and a game of his choice. He went with this game instead of New Super Mario Bros, for which he was really hyped at the time, on a whim. We've spent countless train rides playing Bomberman and its minigames together on DS Download Play, so I count this as one of his best decisions.

Kill la Kill got me acting unwise enough to drop 90€ on this

I find it really funny that the friend with and against whom I've played Pokémon Showdown the most is the one I could read without fail in Among Us

This was my first Fire Emblem, so I had no idea how most of its systems worked and ended up having a harder time than most people will have you believe is possible with this game. Map bosses suck and I got to know next to nothing about the characters since I didn't know how to get support conversations (I only got 3 throughout the whole run). Even so, this is my favourite Fire Emblem of the three I've played when it comes to gameplay. I chose Eirika's route and benched Seth as soon as I could.

The sense of freedom and breadth of systems this game sets out to provide are all too soon rendered drained, bordering on counterproductive, by the fact that several of its flimsy components don't help but to disincentivise interaction with the rest of them. The whole experience rapidly devolved into a rudderless ordeal. Capturing the towers was cool, if nothing else (all the climbing and gliding surely wasn't). On another note, I wish it had been designed to take advantage of the Wii U GamePad.

I was almost as invested in my brother's playthrough of this game as I was in my concurrent (at least until he started outpacing me) playthrough of SoulSilver. On an unrelated note, there's an unfinished Machos Veniese save file of HeartGold out there.

This is my most played Pokémon game and I didn't even reach the Elite Four. It was my first Pokémon game, I could go on and on about how much I relish Sinnoh as a region (HMs should be paramount), the Pokédex tops off those of previous gens, the OST is magical, I exchanged many a Pokémon and even won my first competitive battle (despite my ace being 20 levels lower than my best friend's Empoleon). A wonderful send-off to the classic Pokémon cycle, and the start of my personal Pokémon journey.

If the original Metroid was a coarse prototype of Super Metroid, Zero Mission is a functional reiteration of the formula, the next best thing when it comes to sequence-breakable 2D Metroid (nor do I think it reaches the heights of Fusion, but that's beside the point) and a nifty game at that. The ever so memorable Zero Suit section spices things up and lends the game an additional sense of identity, the framework it was working with already being fairly sound.

I'm not a fan of the trend of new Pokémon being conceived first as concepts and then as creatures, more blatantly obvious in Gen 8 than ever before, but even if this shift in design philosophy was already present in Gen 7, the Pokémon all felt like a cohesive part of Alola, so I sought to catch them all. The story had its good moments and the level curve was steeper than usual. I naïvely expected more in terms of advancements to the formula. Wrist flick like Z-move (for real tho, fuck Z-moves).