Kowloon's Gate was sadly a little too dense for me. Not in the other senses of that word, but of layered and ornate. Overwhelmingly so for me -

For this is a game that boasts a cornucopia of influences - weird philosophy and psychology guys like Deleuze and Guattari, Carl Jung and the like; Not to mention steampunk, cyberpunk and according to this article (http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/kowloons-gate/) gothic architectural concepts. They wanted to create a whole new concept of "Asia Gothic" - very few games that I can think of have the ambition of creating a whole new aesthetic paradigm.

The game elaborates on the idea from Chinese spirituality - "Feng Shui". Of course, we might have the bastardized idea of Feng Shui which makes it simply a matter of modern interior design. Feng Shui is kind of about design - but not simply of furniture, and not simply about peaceful modern living. It's about arrangements on the Earth in general, and applied to Kowloon Walled City - finding meaning in dark and claustrophobic spaces full of suffering.

A game that tries to tackle the 'mystique' of this historical community, and does it in fantastical terms, seems to me pretty rare. The Kowloon Walled City of this game is a place where dark, sunless places are where everything is possible - not just in the optimistic sense, but in the sense of going beyond what is 'natural'.

It's a double-edged sword - Kowloon Walled City presented through this games wonders that a neon-lit, uncomfortably compact and self-contained city can nonetheless be deeply connected to some kind of possibility for our lives. What can a cramped room teach us, what is the poetry there? Even if it's that we float towards the sunlight, like shrimp. Yet it's far from romantic about these ideas - and this is the other side of it. It presents the problematic of Kowloon in a way I've never seen before. Nuanced, and only because it presents things in a fantastical lens.
Reading up on Feng Shui, and how it was intertwined with the architecture of the family unit (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng_shui, under "expression of identity) and being used to analyze dualisms; I can also see the political side of it.

I'm grateful, because there is a translation team working on this game, and I've heard they are pretty much done with the translation part.
It's gonna be awesome.

My opinion changed a lot the more I played this game.

When I first started it, I was completely hooked. The beginning sky island area is well designed and gets you familiar with the new cool abilities that I used much more then the ones in BOTW. The graphics and size of the world are also super impressive for being a Switch title.

Once I finished the tutorial area which took around 5 hours, everything started going downhill. The game is basically an exact copy of BOTW. The enemies are identical with the only new ones being these small robots that have replaced guardians and some dragon mini boss which I didn't bother fighting. Armor sets are also the same, there are a few new additions but to get many of them is a real chore. The main negative is that the map and story are pretty much identical to BOTW. The whole sky island I found to be a really cool concept but there's almost none of that in the rest of the game. That tutorial sky island is the largest with none of the rest being as remotely interesting anywhere. They're all very tiny with nothing on them and no reason to visit them except shrines. Another addition was an entire underground world which sounds cool and again is quite technically impressive for the Switch but after 20 minutes I decided to never go there again unless I needed to progress the story. It's all empty copy pasted land with nothing special and no reason to explore it. This leaves the main land left and as I've repeatedly said, it is an exact copy of BOTW I keep finding the need to say it over and over since I'm still amazed at how little they decided to change for this hyped $90 game. I played the shit out of BOTW in 2019 and even after 6 years so many things felt familiar, practically nothing surprised me in my playthrough. The story is very generic and worse then BOTW imo. Once again you find 4 sages then gain their powers to defeat Ganon; only this time the sages are younger kid versions who were made into anime personalities for some reason. The dungeons I found to be a downgrade and as they were much easier than BOTW, that goes for the shrines as well; they were still quite enjoyable and my favorite part of the game. I really thought I'd spend a lot of time on this game especially with the increased price tag but that was not the case. In BOTW I spend around 150hrs with 100% completion, in this game I did all shrines, a few uninteresting side quests, and the story picking up whatever korok seeds I find on my way which brought me to around 65 hours with no urge to do anything else but put it back on the shelf. Why play anymore when I pretty much experienced all of it already in BOTW? I'm very tired of this new Zelda formula and would love to see it go back to its core.

The one thing I did quite enjoy with the story was the ending. The Ganon boss fight was solid, one of the best in Zelda and a huge improvement from the BOTW final boss. The ending cinematic was also amazing. Seeing that caught me off guard, it made me wish they focused on story more as it showed they are capable. I was impressed that there could be such epic cinematics in a Zelda game and wish there was more of it throughout the story rather then using the most bare bones RPG story that goes all the way back to Final Fantasy on the NES. This game has no reason for existing. A sequel like this was not needed, this felt much more of a quality of life update with new sandbox stuff and that's about it. This was not a GOTY 2023 contender to me.

On a cold Saturday night ten years ago, I bought the midnight e-shop release of Paper Mario: Sticker Star. This event would later come to be known as The First Betrayal.

I say without hesitation or exaggeration that everyone with a credit on this — including those who did no wrong of their own, such as the art and sound teams — should have been barred from ever working in the field of video games again. While this may sound harsh, this act would be one of kindness, not cruelty; these people do not deserve to feel the shame of knowing that their names are attached to an industry that allows something this unforgivably bad to ever be put on the market. The name "Alan Smithee" appears zero times in the credits, which marks one of several missed opportunities present in Sticker Star.

This game has the worst battle mechanics of any RPG to have ever been released. I will not provide modifiers to this statement to lessen the blow. Any RPG. There is no experience or leveling up, your party members are gone, your attacks are now limited-use consumables, and getting more of them requires finding them in the overworld or buying them from shops. Enemies do not drop enough coins to pay back the cost of the stickers it takes to defeat them, making the only viable strategy to avoid every single random encounter and run from every battle that you're able to. Some bosses, such as Big Cheep Cheep, are immune to all attacks. The only thing that can defeat them is if you find a Thing (proper noun) hidden somewhere in the world, pick it up, backtrack to a shop to convert it into a sticker, and then use the Thing Sticker (proper noun) to insta-kill the previously-invincible boss. To say that this is bad design is an understatement. This should not have been allowed to be released.

Sticker Star may have some of the thinnest writing ever released by a major publisher, and this includes early NES RPGs that only had a maximum of 512kb of data to work with. How in the hell did this game have twelve writers? Without irony, there is more of a plot present in the instruction manual of the original Super Mario Bros. than there is in the entirety of Sticker Star. Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario — sixteen and twelve years Sticker Star's senior, respectively — do not suffer this problem. It cannot be claimed that this was a technical limitation. Shigeru Miyamoto is on the record stating that "It's fine without a story, so do we really need one?", and barring Intelligent Systems from making new characters or developing in any way on old ones; his insistence that the Paper Mario franchise be brought to heel — stripped of its gameplay mechanics, writing, and character design — should stand as a monument to the man's inability to lead. Sticker Star is the statue of Ozymandias, swallowed and weathered by the sands. Look upon this work and despair.

I find it hard to type out everything that is wrong with Sticker Star, because everything is wrong with Sticker Star. There is nothing that it does right. It is a complete, abject failure of a game. In a just world, it would have been dragged out from the Nintendo Kyoto Research Center by its heels and shot. Miyamoto should have been quietly shuffled away to a small, distant corner of the company where he could placidly collect his salary and not damage any further reputations by involving himself. This is a game for nobody. I have tried with everything I have to come up with reasons why someone might like this, and I have nothing. It is not often that this happens. I'm usually able to come up with some sort of redeeming factor, but there is nothing here. Sticker Star is a black hole from which no fun can escape. It's sad. It's just sad. May no meddling manager ever do to another game what Shigeru Miyamoto did to this.

"lol Sticker Star sux" is not a joke. It's not the lowest hanging fruit. Well, it IS, but the lowest hanging fruit is what sustained our ancestors in fair Lascaux. We are compelled to reach for this fruit to ensure survival and propagation of our wretched species who will, in turn, use the same hand which sought fruit to craft this absolute fucking abomination.

Experiencing Paper Mario: Sticker Star made me a worse person. Let me explain:

This is not a game. It is a flashing screen in which you may or may not have any influence on what happens. Decisions you make have no outcome on battle. Everything is preordained. I am thoroughly convinced you can select stickers at random in each battle and still come out on top. I'm convinced of this because I utilized this exact strategy in a second attempt during my 2020 playthrough. Because yes, I wanted to graft physical and mental pain in place of the looming existential caused by a pandemic.

I was only walled when it came to boss fights. You can skate by Large Goomba without using its kismet Thing sticker. However, in any other boss battle, you MUST use the invisibly assigned Thing card. There is no way to get around this. You will lose. And if you happen to not have the fated Thing card, which the game may or may not hint at, you must exit the battle, go buy the thing from the shop (or god fucking forbid, you never encountered the Thing, so now you must go track it down in the wild), and attempt the battle again. And you must use this EXACTLY ONE (1) Thing during the battle at the exact poorly-telegraphed moment to win with ease.

There is no strategy. There is no fun. Simply put, this was a $40 soundtrack released in 2012 with a completely unhinged (and un-playtested) visual experience included as a bonus. This visual experience slots into a Nintendo system, but again, it is by no means a game.

I will never forgive this alleged game for ruining an amazing series for no other reason than "Miyamoto likes Toad." If this is your favorite Paper Mario game, it is either the only one you have ever played, and thus playing it put you off the series entirely, or you are LYING. Or seeing the sexy Birdo/goat scene emulsified your brain using the 3D slider as a vector.

If it is your favorite game, or even if you think it's "good," then please by all means articulate a response. But your response cannot simply be "idk because I just liked it." Why did you like it?? What is there to like?? I don't understand!! I'm chained to this flesh prison until a zoomer can explain to me why this is an objectively good game!!

Help!!!!

This game is so weird because most bad games are bad due to jank or lack of polish or whatever, y'know just normal stuff like that. But everything here feels very intentional. The shitty unintuitive sticker system and combat designed around it. The "puzzles" which either involve hitting something random with a hammer, finding some random "thing" sticker that the game likely doesn't tell you about, or some other random obscure solution (intentionally sink in quicksand lmao). The obscene amount of backtracking and level redoing. The bosses being tedious health sponges or dying immediately because you brought the right thing sticker. The boring and uninspired settings reminiscent of 2d mario games alongside the lack of any unique NPCs. The AWFUL "partner" character. The annoyingly heavy reliance on the paper gimmick despite every other Paper Mario game using it as a nice aesthetic. These are all TERRIBLE design choices but not one of them doesn't feel intentional. I'm almost convinced that Nintendo hates Paper Mario fans so much that they hand crafted this game to be the worst shit ever.

People always (fairly) rag on this game for random encounters quite literally being a detriment and there being no point to them, but I'd argue that's the best part about the game. Combat here is so unenjoyable and if you were forced to actually fight random encounters it'd be SO much worse. Because it's pointless, I can just run away from everything and save myself the headache. Yeah the run button barely works and is just RNG dependent but like anything is better than having to sit through all of the random encounters.

Also bowser doesn't even have a line of dialogue here like wtf man he's the best Mario character have some respect.

Also also people who think this is disliked because it's different from the other Paper Mario games are weird. This game is genuinely terrible even if you haven't touched a single Paper Mario game. If you say this is overhated I'm stealing something out of your house.

when i'm not blatantly baiting i'm happy to let people have their opinions, but man, when are we going to stop equating "addictive" with "interesting game design"? someone of you roguelike fans should try pachinko machines, the addictive randomized endless gameplay will surely blow your minds and rocket to the top of your topsters

i should clarify: i have nothing against gambling games. i gambled away all of my money in yakuza. and this is barely a gambling game! my problem here is moreso with the current state of the indie roguelike being that every game is mashed with the same repetitive trendiest tricks to make le epic addictive gameplay and heralded as the newest masterpiece on the block. it ain't exciting. oh well. it's only a video game, at the end of the day