holy shit
but this does not take place within the skyward sword timeline does it

didnt zelda and link create the kingdom of hyrule after ss?

strange
so i think it is some kind of a reboot isnt it

Unlike soulless trite that exists merely for cheap thrills like Silent Hill 2, Garten of Banban is a truly meaningful and impactful horror experience. It is a clear commentary on how capitalism ruined education as an institution, turning it from something that existed for genuine development of the mind to something with the top priority of preparing children to be merely another cog in a machine of capitalism. The core contrast between the "wholesome" drawn depictions of the creatures and their real, more radical counterparts is a very clear reference to Lenin's The State and Revolution and the particular quote "attempts are made to convert [revolutionaries] into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the 'consolation' of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it." While gamers will hail meaningless trash like Disco Elysium and Mother 3 as "masterpieces," the people who truly understand gaming's potential as a form of art will know that Garten of Banban is the true gold standard that games should strive towards.

Actually just kidding this game fucking sucks lmao

i cried when this was announced and i cried when i booted the game i cant believe how much kirby is emotionally ruining my life

return to dreamland has been one of my fav games for the longest time since i was like 7 yo or something when i used to play and replay it day and night and i honestly could not believe it when this remaster was announced it was something absolutely breathtaking that i only experienced when SMTV was announced and if you know me im a huge smt fag

i played this game something like 30 times between the normal mode and hard mode and i feel like i could play this blindfolded its just that muscle memory that makes me go so smoothly to the point that i think i finished the base game in like 4 hours this game is short but i dont think its THAT short so i think im sick in the head but anyway that means this game has no secrets for me and still i get back to it every year because i miss my pink ball so much

this also was the first game that made me acquaint with the pink ball of wonders and to this day i love him so dearly i swear i got a recurring joke with some friends about me being kirby because we were born the same day and we are both ENFP so like this is genuinely my entire personality

the review i made for return to dreamland wii didnt really contain all my feelings for this game so its the time to do it on this one

in general this game is quite a standard kirby for the series and you got some fun multiplayer to boot (didnt experience it even once because i got no friends but it looks fun at least) and you follow titular character + the whole crew waddle dee king dedede and meta knight ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡ my boyfriend i love him so fucking much in a quest to help poor little magolor from another dimension who got stranded on planet pop and his ship is all fucked up so you gotta help him and all going through different classic worlds that got some parts of the ship

now this is p bland but when i tell you that this game is full of life its so fun its so charming its so UGHHHHHHHH i love it

apart from the ship parts (boss reward) theres some ship gears around the levels that are needed to open up some parts of the ship for extra content like ability rooms or minigames and such so nothing that important i dont usually like collectibles and i dont care but i do religiously seek at least the most important ones or the ones that i remember because its part of the experience to be honest

a gimmick that was added in this game was the mega abilities which to this day still hype me up THEYRE SO FUCKING COOL like you got a big ass sword or a fire dragon or a huge hammer and you tell me not to scream and then theres that ost going tu tu tu TURUTUTUTU TATATATTAT yea no i love mega abilities i think about them everyday

at its core this is a platformer with some puzzle elements as in you gotta think about what ability to use or what to do to get some ship gears but thats basically it everything else is delicious action platformer content
so you go through the levels reconstruct the lor go through some other levels beat landia and then beat the TRUE FINAL BOSS WOOOOOOOOOOO not gonna spoil here anyway so the end

onto remaster stuff

im not a big fan of graphics as in i do not really care how many polygons there are for what i care they could all be 2d triangles i needed to point that out because the other day i was talking with a friend and i told him did you play uncharted and he said no i dont play games like those the graphics are too outdated (?) what ps3 graphics are outdated ok man live your truth so what i wanted to say with this was graphics got better DUh the landscapes are delicious the characters shine of a new light every monster and every environmental element has been polished and pushed to the limits of graphical fidelity and the background images are outstanding to look at but what really got me here are the little artistic touches now THATS the big stuff for me like the little star animations between levels or the new polished UI or even the characters restyling which is less evident in most of them apart from king dedede who looks GORGEOUS in the forgotten lands style hes … hes kinda hot can i say taht here can i umh is that allowed umh ok

also they got some sexy outlines i love outlines

OST remained quite the same i think i dont have the kind of ears to know what the fuck is different between some tracks i needed to listen to kingdom hearts 2.5 remix music and original kh2 ost like 10 times to know what was the difference but again the music in this game is phenomenal if youd let me say this so honestly theres nothing to remix or arrange its prolly just been hd scaled or something so love it

gameplay is basically the same what is different here is the new additional content aiding the gameplay

wii motion controls were seamlessly adapted for the switch control set in mind and work flawlessly even though i kinda miss shaking my fucking wii remote to the hell and back but im fine with pressing B i guess

new abilities were added theres festival who acts like a screen bomb clear which is fine and theres mecha and sand now i thought i was gonna love mecha ability which somehow i do but what really took me by surprise is the fact that i fuck with sand ability too much what the hell that ability is so fun did you look at the moveset that shits amazing people you need to try it firsthand wows

super abilities are mostly the same but they got some faster gameplay and that animation flair uuuuuuuuh delicious fucking great i love the little magic ball animation he looks so fierce kribri i love yoiiiiiiiuuuuuuuu kirbuuuuuuuuu

clearly since theres new abilities but also in general the levels got revamped to some degree to accommodate the new stuff but to the core this is the exact same game you can trust me this is basically return to dreamland wii with fancy graphics

now theres also a new world called merry magoland which is basically a hall for the countless minigames (that i didnt even try if you know me you know i fucking hate minigames im sorry thats true maybe its the trauma from final fantasy fort condor minigame) and where you can use the new ticket collectibles in the level to unlock some useful objects to carry in the levels and get some masks for kirby to wear like its fucking majoras mask this is so funnt they also make sounds im dead anyway this is basically a waddle dee town from the forgotten land clone but its a cute addition anyway for the base game also it looks like magolor my bf so its fine

theres also some missions i guess . never did them goodbye also the bosses get in here after you beat their asses

theres a magolor helper mode if you suck . i dont suck haha so i didnt need it HAHA I FINISHED THE GAME WITH 50+ LIVES LEFT SUCK MY DICK im failing at life but at leasst i can play kirby

i think thats all the new stuff ………………….. I THINK ? idk

ok so anyway MID SPOILER actually if you havent played return to dreamland yet what are you doing honestly

whatever after the final battle against magolor which is one of my fav final bosses of all time literally its perfect its great i love it i want every game to be like this ok anyway you unlock the usual stuff hard mode (didnt do it) arena (didnt do it) and then

a surprise i was not fucking expecting a brand new holy shit magolor mode for people like me who absolutely love magolor . i screamed i screamed i was not ready for this and wow . wow when i finished the main game it was already a 5☆ this sealed the deal

you play as magolor after being defeated by kirby and besties and being stripped of every power in true metroid esque fashion and gets stranded in a place between dimension where he needs to go through some levels to piece together AN . ? apple ok weird twist but anyway

I LOVED THIS MODE . I LOVED IT THIS IS GREAT its like nightmare returns the mode where you play as meta knight but with my other fav character so like . this was particularly made for me as you all can tell

main gimmick is magolor got some basic skills that you can power up by going through levels and acquiring some spirit tears or something so then you can use them to idk get the main attacks range longer or attack stronger to shit like making him faster or modify some abilities or increase the health bar its just . its great you can slowly and steadily see him go from a wounded little bitch to a strong magus and UGHHHHHH i love it i love his movesets i love the levels he goes through i love acquiring the tears in normal levels or extra levels and make him stronger this mode absolutely blew my mind its just wow

wow

so whatever the levels are actually “new” even though they do use the same assets of the base game and the bosses are just reskins of the main game ones but still with new movesets and anyway whats really different here is magolor animation arsenal of spells and absolutely cute battle cries hes ……. hes fucking great people

finished all of this you get to battle against possibly one of my new fav bosses in this series which funnily enough is a tree and no its not whispy woods so thats already 1 less

anyway umh great battle and i love seeing magolor smile in the end hes a sweet boo oof i want to hug him ok

OH ALSO theres remixed osts i forgot about them theyre the base game ones but with some extra flare and i ended up bopping to every of them so good good stuff

so umh

i guess this is it this really is a piece of my heart i just love this game to the moon and back and its still a big part of my life today as it was 10 years ago funnily enough

its kinda weird playing a game that you know everything about and still get excited like it is the first time booting it up idk its a weird feeling do you get that feeling too idk its just yeah

if you look at my ratings i dont usually put 5 stars to basically anything apart from smt mainline stuff and possibly jak 3 or sly 3 or ratchet deadlocked if i played them again because those are also big parts of my childhood and adolescence and to this day they still have a big weight on me like they never left and i guess its due to give this tribute to one of the dearest games i have a 10/10

i enjoyed everything about the remake and they even managed to make me fucking excited for new stuff with the magolor epilogue so congrats nintendo you stole my heart yet again with this pink ball

the forgotten land was a great game that is gonna be a 4.5 stars soon because thats just how much i loved it but still this is the game that i think about when kirby comes to my mind

umh

that was long

this is probably gonna be the definitive edition to play this game for the next replays to come even though i will go back to the wii version from time to time and idle in my childhood yet again playing as the gluttonous pink sphere being from space

i just wish sakurai knew how much this series meant for me

As much as I wish I could say otherwise, this is the superior Conquest. This game is probably the absolute best and most fair Fire Emblem has ever been in terms of raw gameplay systems, as long as you are open to changing your playstyle when met with maps that demand it (See: C10, C21, C24.)

I’ve heard some argue that it’s too easy to break or cheese, but the game keeps you on your toes enough that you are literally never gonna be bored. It’s far preferable to FE12’s highest difficulties, cause you can still use p much every unit in the game to good effect. Stats aren’t the difficulty, the difficulty comes from smart map design and interesting enemy formations with interesting skill setups.

If you haven’t, please use the Capture command next time you play, some of the units you get fucking rule


not defending the furrycon 2015 map tho its just bad

The netcode sucks, the single player options are utterly barebones, my one attempt at trying to learn this game competitively only resulted in utter frustration at how bad the buffering system feels, and the obnoxious hype culture surrounding this game's speculation scene has resulted in some of the most agonizing discussions I've seen surrounding a video game but goddamn, the time I played this for hours with two friends while talking over Discord was one of the most magical experiences I've ever had playing a video game

Before Engage was revealed, my biggest hope for a new Fire Emblem game was for it to not just be a carbon copy of Three Houses and be a return to form. Be careful what you wish for.

Fire Emblem Engage is shaping up to be one of the most polarizing games in a series where every game is polarizing on some level. I fall into the camp that does not care for it and I’m putting my extended thoughts on it here just to have them somewhere. This is not meant to demean anyone who enjoys it but rather to explain why I feel the way I do.

I actually do see why a lot of people in the FE spaces I frequent really enjoy this one. Breaking is one of the best mechanics to get added to Fire Emblem in a while, as it gives a nice flow to player phases and makes you have to put more thought into playing around enemy phases. Rounds of combat look absolutely stunning with quite possibly the best 3D animations in the series (Kagetsu’s crit animation gives me life) and other neat touches like the cool subtle effect for hitting someone with bonus damage. Ring abilities can just be incredibly fun to utilize, whether it’s busted stuff like Celica’s warp and Sigurd’s massive movement boost or more situational but still fun to use stuff like Lyn’s copies and Ike’s risk vs reward attack. And there’s plenty of maps that stand as some of the best designed in the series, with chapter 11 being the obvious standout, 17 being a tough but fair gauntlet of six strong boss fights, and 19 having a ridiculous surprise that feels like something from a rom hack but in the best way possible.

Based purely on gameplay, I have more positive things than negative things to say about Engage. But that’s not to say that those negative things don’t exist. There are some parts of the game where the map design falters. The earlygame maps essentially being scripted tutorials is a drag, the Solm arc has a desert rout map, a fog of war map with a dumb gimmick of having to break crates with the Ike ring, and a map with the Corrin ring that feels Rev inspired (derogatory), and there’s plenty of otherwise good chapters that suffer from excessive reinforcements that end up slowing down an already fairly slow game.

I also dislike how units feel in this one. The earlygame units are actively unfun to use and are ridiculously outclassed by any mid to late game unit with the same class. Furthermore, I’m not a fan of the effect rings have on unit feel. Plenty of aspects behind units such as skills and weapon proficiency are locked behind bonds with certain rings so it makes units feel less like actually unique entities and more so just vessels for rings.

Lastly, this may just be my personal preference but I’ve never liked the rewind mechanics that have been in every game since FE15’s turnwheel and they’re arguably at their worst now that you can save mid-battle and effectively give yourself infinite rewind uses. I get why these mechanics are there but they feel redundant with the existence of casual mode and really just take me out of the experience as they remove a lot of the interesting dynamics that permadeath creates. And this is before the assholish design choices that they tend to inspire.

So overall, from a gameplay perspective, Engage is a flawed but fun experience. Base Fire Emblem gameplay activates my neurons on a level that I can’t explain so not fucking it up too much is enough to make me happy. I might even go as far to say that a good chunk of my gameplay issues won’t be as much of a problem when a fair bit of time passes and the meta gets easier to understand. But my main source of issues with Engage is not so much its gameplay as it is its story.

I’m seeing a lot of takes from Engage enjoyers along the lines of “people only hate the story because it’s not as serious.” However, I wouldn’t mind a less serious Fire Emblem story if done well. I genuinely love the cheesy 4kids/saturday morning style English opening and I would look forward to Fire Emblem’s G Gundam equivalent: a weird outlier in the series’ history with the primary appeal of being really stupid in a fun way. Sadly though, Engage fails to capture scenes of true peak fiction like having Holland use a windmill mech or having the protagonist get detained in post apocalyptic Italy and interrogated by having his head shoved into a pizza.
The story just overall feels dry and uninteresting. Alear has the personality of cardboard and the four “lords” that join him don’t get much screen time after their respective arcs so none of them have any chemistry amongst themselves or with Alear in the main story. I’m sure that they have interesting dynamics with each other in the supports but if I shouldn’t have to go out of my way to find character dynamics that should have been there in the first place.

Beyond that, the plot is your standard Fire Emblem fare and almost everything that happens in it is something that has happened several times in the series, whether it’s a possessed ruler who’s the pawn of the main villain, a wyvern riding character who starts out on the villain’s side but defects to your army, or the main villain being a generic purple dragon whose main “Fell Dragon” title is the same as another game in the series’ generic purple dragon. For fuck’s sake, the game’s central theme of “going against what you’re fated to be” and the plot twist associated with said theme were both already done before and better in Awakening. It’s hard for me to enjoy this as a less serious game in the series when it just ends up being the same shit as before but with the most superficial layer of “irony”.

The sad thing is that there’s a handful of times where the less serious tone pays off. Yunaka is a fun twist on the bubbly personalities you see in the series by having a character whose bubbly personality is actually just a way of hiding her criminal past and her introduction chapter where she tries to hide the fact that she stole the ring is a fun dynamic. Alcryst is an entertaining parody of angsty characters like Takumi and his introduction scene cracks me up. Fogado is incredibly charismatic and you can tell that his VA had the time of his life recording for him. But these redeeming qualities are the exception, not the norm.

There’s also several moments where the game tries and fails to do serious emotional beats and its villains are the worst example of this. The game arbitrarily makes villains sympathetic with little build up, presumably because of the perceived notion that sympathetic villains are inherently better. It tries and fails to make you feel bad for the side villain who beats up children multiple times and the other side villain who looks like a DeviantArt user’s edgy Fairy Tail OC and whose primary personality trait is being a sadomasochist. Even worse is that the game waits until the very final chapter to give the main antagonist a backstory and then proceeds to treat their death as a sad moment in a way that feels completely unwarranted.

Finally, I’m not a fan of the way the emblem rings were implemented into the narrative. They don’t feel like the actual characters they were in their home series (although calling Byleth a character is a stretch tbh) but rather feel more like generic collectibles that have the faces of past protagonists attached to them as a marketing gimmick. In the main story, they’ll get a little bit of screen time in their join chapter and then get reduced to doing nothing but giving off exposition for the rest of the game. In the game’s side content, their supports are only two to four lines of dialogue so there’s not much they can add beyond generic advice or “remember this thing from the past game” dialogue.

Now because Engage has spawned gameplay vs story discourse, I’ll just say this: I can enjoy games with bad stories and there’s plenty of FE games that fall into that camp. I’m even in the camp that enjoys Fates: Conquest for its gameplay even if I do understand why some might not be able to. But the way I see it, the more time a story takes up, the more of an impact that said story has on my opinion of a game. Cutscenes are lengthy, even more so than Conquest’s, and the game is becoming notorious for how dragged on death scenes in particular feel. These cutscenes take up a lot of the game’s time so I would prefer for the time spent on them to have good writing. And no, being able to skip cutscenes doesn’t make the issues go away. That excuse doesn’t hold up for games I like (like the aforementioned Fates: Conquest) and it doesn’t hold up here either.

Minor tangent but the victim complex a small but vocal portion of the FE fanbase has for any criticism of this game is pathetic. I totally get it if you enjoy games primarily for gameplay and there’s plenty of cases where I do just that but you have to understand why some people aren’t able to do so. If you get genuinely mad at someone for not liking/being interested in a game primarily because of its story, you are part of the reason why video games aren’t treated as seriously as other forms of art.

I guess to explain my apprehensiveness towards Engage overall in spite of liking the gameplay for the most part is that there’s a feeling of soullessness to it, at least to me. It doesn’t exist to do anything new or interesting and primarily exists to reference pre-existing games. There’s been a fairly common take that Engage has a worse story than Fates. Suffice it to say that I don’t agree with this take. Fates’ story is a level of poorly constructed that is the lowest of low bars to clear and that’s before the mountains of gross shit in it.

However, I can see where this take is coming from, even if I find it disagreeable, to say the least. Fates’ concept of a choice between your birth family or your adopted family was a novel idea, at least at the time. Conquest in particular had an interesting idea of focusing on the flaws of implementing change within the system. Both of these ideas were squandered though, in such a way that resulted in some of the worst writing I’ve ever seen. But while Fates had the issue of trying and failing unbelievably hard, Engage had the issue of not trying at all.

And one last thing that I couldn’t fit in here: Fuck Nintendo/Intelligent Systems for putting in pedophilic romance options and fuck Backloggd for deleting my friend’s review because he told pedophiles to do something to themselves that would make the world a better place.
FREE BATTLEHUNTZ

I might edit this and go more in-depth and detailed when I finish the game, but this is after about 25 hours of gameplay time and over halfway through the main story so I feel pretty confident in my opinions on the game right now.

The more I play Engage, the more I enjoy it and I honestly just don't understand the hate at all, this is not even close to being the worst FE title let alone the worst game ever in general. Even the story is nowhere near as bad or offensive as people make it out to be, it's just very dated and simplistic.

If you can get past the extremely flamboyant, V-tuber, modern anime character designs (Personally I like a lot of them as they're very vibrant and colorful, but I get why they're not everyone's cup of tea), this is the most "classic" feeling Fire Emblem game post-Awakening with the most polished and arguably the best gameplay the series has ever had.

I'm very happy to see the iconic weapons triangle return and I love the new additions with the break and smash mechanics and of course the whole gimmick of Engaging with Emblems which you'd think would be overly OP, but since the entire game was designed around it and even enemies can Engage as well it is pretty well balanced and the game will really give you a challenge even on normal, but the one thing I honestly do miss is weapon durability.

I think a lot of the disappointment just comes from people who were expecting this game to be like 3H and don't get me wrong, I love 3H, it's great in its own way, but it is a Persona game in disguise with a Langrisser combat system. Nearly nothing about that game feels like Fire Emblem. It was a cool experiment, but I wouldn't want every future Fire Emblem to be like that and I'm very happy Engage actually feels like a real Fire Emblem game.

Engage feels like a true love letter to the series past (Which makes sense considering it is an anniversary title), I especially see so much influence and inspiration from the GBA titles everything from the animations to the over-world map making a return to the stripped down and more simplistic support events (Note: Most of the characters don't have a lot of depth, but I still find them likable and charming enough, however Alear is the best protagonist Fire Emblem has had in years) and even the very old-school 90s-like narrative with a classic tale of good vs evil, a band of heroes traveling around various kingdoms to collect magical artifacts to stop an evil dragon complete with a very campy 4Kids sounding Saturday morning cartoon dub and that really makes me feel nostalgic.

Also want to mention how much I love the side mission Paralogues which let you re-live iconic battles and maps from the classic games even with remixes of that game's music as well.

I also want to say that I am not a fan of the Somniel. Glad they cut down the Monastery-like content (Despite actually enjoying it in 3H for the most part), but I would've been happier if they removed it all together because while raising the Guardian Spirit, adopting animals, working out and eating meals with your friends are all cute side activities they feel like inconsequential fluff that could easily be skipped entirely if you wanted to and I think it was developed like that on purpose due to the criticisms of many people saying the Monastery parts of Three Houses went on for too long. The main thing that your base offers which is mandatory is the shops and smithy where you can buy new equipment and upgrade it.

One last thing to note, the animations and cut-scenes are very smooth and look better than ever thanks to the improved graphical fidelity and I haven't had a problem with the performance overall yet which is a miracle considering most newer games run horribly on the Switch.

Overall if you got into the series with 3H or 3H is your favorite in the series you'll probably be disappointed because Engage is nothing like it and in a way kind of dated, but if you've been a long-time fan and prefer old-school FE compared to the more modern titles I think you'll be pleasantly surprised and satisfied with Engage.