I can't overstate how humbling it is when strangers find your character charming enough to pop them into cute outfits. The game is clearly aware of this, too: it makes such a production out of getting Lookit Mail that opening one is a guaranteed serotonin boost. In a similar vein, it's extremely satisfying to work some color-coordination magic with another player's Muse. Going off their preferences and accessorizing properly will shower you in huge bonuses and stars galore, which is an undeniable rush. There's a clever sort of open-ended puzzle aspect to this game — and knowing that your unique solution will make someone on the other end of the screen smile really sweetens the solve.

Sadly, it's hard to get that same satisfaction from dressing up the NPCs spattered in the overworld, and the menuing itself is finicky. This is a notable problem, given how much time you spend in menus. It's frustrating that there's no way to save previously-worn outfits, or sort any of your clothing beyond extremely general categories of tops, bottoms, onepieces, etc. This becomes especially burdensome as your inventory becomes inundated with (literally) thousands of items — which happens much faster than you might think.

As much as the style pops, the setting itself is pretty barren, and lacks any significant way to interact with it. It's just a space for you to walk around, gather clothes, and dress people up, but there's not much to do even as you unlock more Cocoons. Progression is a bit haphazard without a dedicated campaign, and the fatigue doesn't take too long to set in.

At the end of the day, the social aspect is what really lifts Fashion Dreamer up and sets it apart from its predecessors. That being said, without some significant content additions and major QOL changes, that probably isn't enough to carry it long-term.

The purpose behind Soviet propaganda was not to deceive, but demoralize. The lie had to be so blatant, so bombastic, that it made the power of the institution behind it look utterly unchallengeable. The lies I told my Pikmin were in a similar vein. “The bulborbs are of no consequence,” I said. “You can still pick up the bomb rocks,” I said. “I will save you if you fall into the water” I said. As the falsehoods spewed from my mouth, I could see that the masses were not filled with faithful determination, happily gobbling up the slop of inspiring platitudes. No, instead there was only resignation. Eyes welling up as they knew, no matter where they wandered, they would be venturing down further into the caves. They prayed not necessarily for life, but for enough brutal, unnecessary, nonpermissible death that it would force me to reset the game and improve my performance as their leader. They were comforted only by dreams of one day becoming purple, becoming part of the anointed. The indispensable few. But these were merely dreams, dreams that rested under layers of nightmares.

Pikmin 2 is known for its very vocal fans. After a long wait between sequels, hardcore fans initially seemed split on Pikmin 3’s shift from a focus on survival to a focus on efficiency. Now, the Pikmin fanbase is known for its irreverent derangements, so most people could still agree that all the games were good despite the shitflinging. Still, it seemed like 3 generally came up short as far as the general opinions went. Then, upon Pikmin 3’s re-release on Switch, it seemed like things began to change dramatically. 3 became a much more positively seen course correction after 2 failed to follow up the format from 1. Pikmin 1 remained as an impressive-but-flawed first outing, and public opinion of 2 began to fall behind.

I like Pikmin 2. It does a few things I wish the other games would have kept more relevant. I would rather replay this over a lot of games, perhaps even games I’ve rated higher. Pikmin 2 is just easy to pick up and play like that. However, I have to say I’m pretty pleased with how things turned out for the franchise, with it choosing to skirt around 2’s fundamental ideas to instead focus more on expanding on 1’s more carefully tailored time management challenge. 2’s spelunking spirit still lives on, but its unique feeling of building dread as you dive further down seems mostly lost to time.

Overlap still exists between the games. Pikmin 2 certainly ups the ante as far as treasure collecting goes. There are tons of things to collect which, like many aspects of this game, are a double-edged sword. With more collectables to find, there are more instances of the game stopping every single time a new item is brought back to your base. Treasures piling up one after another when you are just sitting and waiting to move on to the next floor already slows the pace of the game down unnecessarily. The game already demands you pace yourself with a bit of “hurry up and wait” as Pikmin complete tasks, no need to add on to it. A results screen listing your treasures at the end of the day would do fine, and indeed it did in later entries. Pardon the comparison to future games, but I don’t believe this was impossible for Pikmin 2, it might have even been easier.

With so much treasure to collect, you might think there is an increased emphasis on how you route the process of amassing all of this. Not so. You have free reign to take your time in most of Pikmin 2. The surface level areas are difficult to assess in their quality, as they are mostly an excuse to bring you to the cave, where you have unlimited time to work your magic. Strange, given that Pikmin 2 gives you a second captain to control, allowing you to split the group up. Yet once you’re down in the caves, this becomes a moot point. Very few instances in the game benefit from the split up mechanic. It is mostly an act of convenience on the surface, where you can leave a captain at the base to wrangle returning Pikmin.

With the caves being procedurally generated, their challenge generally cannot come from careful routing and puzzle solving. Instead, they are designed to catch you off guard and make you think on your feet, particularly over the incremental randomization. Get ready to fight, because you’re going to be doing a lot of it. With that, you are gifted a new, vitally important combat tool in the Purple Pikmin. Only available for resupply in caves, these are your main fighting force for much of the game. I would argue their actual introduction comes a bit too early, as Red Pikmin are benched from their usual combat role as a result. A later introduction for Purple would have been a very empowering moment for the player. Instead, their presence is quickly rendered a matter of fact. An early fight with a boss that would prove destructive, the Empress Bulblax, was far less impactful thanks to the purples’ ability to stun.

The purples’ are so vital that I felt cheated when I first found out that caves don’t really suggest you bring them with you in your party, as they are not immune to any hazards like fire, electricity, water, or poison. Imagine my shock upon entering a cave that suggested I bring everything but purples, and I found myself struggling to justify barreling through without them. This does raise some interest in the idea of “no purples” run of the game, as most of the challenges are technically beatable without them. However, Pikmin’s combat is not interesting enough on its own for this already longer game to extend its life further through my self-imposed challenge.

A wipeout of your Pikmin population is a common threat you’ll face in these games, and Pikmin 2 is easily the most eager game in the series to do that to you. A beady long legs jumping down from on high to genocide my yellows with the eagerness of a Harvard student realizing those kids with the little hats were still acceptable targets after all these years. Here you are presented with a choice. You can reset the game, perhaps at the cost of your personal time, or persevere and rebuild the group as you go about your normal tasks. Except not really. That’s how it is in Pikmin 1, where you have a macro time limit to complete the game within, a micro time limit of each day, and plenty of ways to repopulate as you are collecting items necessary for completion. In Pikmin 2, the game saves at every new cave sublevel, which will only take a few minutes to complete, and caves do not commonly give you opportunities to repopulate. Taking a day to rebuild on the surface feels like a total waste when you just want to get to the next cave, where the time limit does not exist. Purples in particular are a very precious commodity, and demand a reset should you lose even a few. So your only choice is to reset.

Why then, can I not reset to my last save from the menu? Pikmin 1 let me do that, and the other sequels let me do that. I actually have to close the game and reboot it in order to undo my mistakes. In the game where mistakes that lead to mass death are the most common. Who thought this was a good idea? It does not make the game more challenging, only more cumbersome. It does not create a greater fear of punishment, as the process of resetting carries with it no risk when I’m plopped right back to the same sublevel I was on. Compare Pikmin 1, where resetting could mean a major setback, misallocation of tasks as you repeat the day, or a repeat of your mistakes right at the end of a cycle. I can only assume that the removal of an in-menu reset was to discourage the act of resetting, in a game that was clearly more designed towards trial-and-error style gauntlets. There must have been more than a few changes in direction during development, as this and the aforementioned captain switching mechanic indicate that Pikmin had its priorities a little misaligned.

Reloading is also a completely viable strategy when tackling caves. I recall one particular cave where just crossing a bridge over water lead to mass genocide. The Pikmin pathing is hugely improved in this game over the first, a massive quality of life jump and very impressive given it was on the same hardware. However, sometimes Pikmin have the self-preservation instinct of a pasty British man cruising into Morocco waving a rainbow flag. Caves often end up with baffling setups thanks to their procedural generation, with alcoves and blocked off areas that present you with nothing of note, or enemies awkwardly grouped up so as to make things more vexing than necessary.

The good and bad of this structure culminates in the Dream Den, a harrowing gauntlet of death that is two parts a tense descent down a surprisingly tough series of obstacles and one part a complete slog where you are pretty much over the entire game. If you just want to get it over with, you could even waltz by nearly every enemy and just jump down each subsequent level. Pikmin left idle will follow you down, so there’s no reason to bother engaging with enemies if you’re going for speed.

As overly generous as I thought Pikmin 4’s lock-on was, Pikmin 2’s final boss is a great testament to lock-on as a permanent fixture of the games. It’s well known that you may as well only bring Yellow Pikmin to this fight, for all the good the others will do you. Not only does their higher throwing height help them consistently reach each destructible body part of the boss easier, but electricity is the only hazard in the game which acts as an instant kill. Fire, water, and poison all have a grace period in which Pikmin can be called back and saved, meaning all other Pikmin are completely useless in this fight. This is still a pretty fun final battle, you have to keep on your toes and for those not in the know you will likely lose most of your non-yellows thanks to electric attacks. I personally decided to keep things interesting by performing it the intended way, with a diverse group of Pikmin, but Yellows quickly became the only thing worth preserving.

The bosses are a massive highlight of the game. Trudging through a cave and meeting a unique, powerful creature at the bottom was always a delight. Dealing with unyielding levels of chaos, dodging bomb rocks from flying enemies for twenty minutes, only to be met not by relief but a firestorm of bullets from Man-at-Legs was a ton of fun. Each enemy acts as a different chess piece, and they can be mixed and matched to create a ton of unique combat scenarios with what would otherwise be a very simple system. It’s no wonder that Pikmin 2 enjoyed a lively rom hack scene, which goes a step further and frequently allows the bosses to team up against you.

Bosses were also some of the few times I would just accept my losses and move on. These being at the ends of caves, I would have no further use for many of the pikmin I brought, as my reserves outside had already been built up. While bosses would still cause resets, I appreciated them much more in these scenarios. They hit an excellent sweet spot where I was willing to improve but accepting of my mistakes after a certain point.

These encounters also offer two of the only set pieces where the captain split up mechanic really gets to show its usefulness. A fight against one giant enemy asks you to repeatedly switch between leaders to distract your foe and then attack it from behind. It’s absolutely shocking that no other Pikmin game offers anything like this. It seems like an easy slam dunk. Particularly for Pikmin 4, where your other playable character is just a super Pikmin. There’s also the infamous Water Wraith dungeon, in which you are saddled with only Blue Pikmin upon entry. Here you must quickly complete your tasks within a time limit before the wraith shows up. You may as well reset if you aren’t ready to leave, because the wraith is fast and unforgiving. So you begin again, desperately working to perfect your run through each level, passing the baton between captains, feeling the weight of the encroaching wraith grow heavier. Pikmin 4 would go on to recreate this cave, and while it was similarly fun, the wraith itself just does not compare with the Pikmin 2 rendition’s deadliness.

Pikmin 1, 3, and 4 were perhaps the most sure I’ve ever been of my odds to replay any given game. So I must apologize to 2 fans when I say this is the only one I might hesitate to give another go to. Was it good? Yes. Does it play better than many other games, perhaps even games I’d rate higher? Yes. Is it pretty unique compared to the other games? Yes. Did I find it as fun as the other entries? No, but it's still pretty good. This is one where I’d be much more likely to check out the romhack scene, and indeed I might have done that sooner. Unfortunately, when my computer forgot that its start menu existed, the team of Indian men I conscripted to help me were of no use, and everything was wiped. So instead of setting up an emulator again, I bought this game legitimately on Switch. It’s nice that an entire series is available for legitimate purchase on a single device, and my choice to pay for it here is a testament to piracy as a service problem. If only Nintendo would allow me to just buy their classic library instead of going through their online subscription service, but oh well you little bitch ass bitch boy don’t mind me while I play Path of Radiance the only way a sane person would bother to.

After years of sterile, commercial, uninspired entries, it's nice to finally see a 2D Mario full of life and creativity. Not that the NSMB games were necessarily bad or anything. They were, generally speaking, well made platformers that were perfectly serviceable. However, serviceable doesn't and shouldn't cut it for Mario. Playing a Mario game shouldn't feel like you're playing a corporate product developed by people being kept on a leash so they don't "go too far" or something. Luckily, Nintendo seems to have freed them from those shackles, and clearly it paid off incredibly.

This game feels like a true follow-up to Mario World in that it's actually expanding upon 2D Mario with things like badges, new enemies, and tons of new level gimmicks. There's also a bunch of secrets to find too that are pretty easy to miss, so there's plenty of replayability. The badges alone add a lot of replayability too just to experiment with and see how much you can cheese levels with them.

Level design is overall pretty great and each world has very unique theming as well. You don't just have a grass world, ice world, water world, etc. Every world has a variety of different aesthetics to keep them from getting stale. The trippy Wonder Seed parts of certain levels are a highlight as well. It's fun to see a Mario game really lean more into the weird and wacky aspects of the series that inspired so many people to make the same insufferable drug jokes over the years.

The online functionality is actually pretty cool as well. I at first didn't think it would be all that notable, but having these ghost players play along with you and help you out with finding secrets (or revive you from death if you really want to go full baby mode) adds a lot to the experience. The levels where you have to search for hidden coins especially make use of this feature in a neat way.

Only negatives I can really think of is that I do wish the different characters weren't just skins and had their unique attributes they're known for. Playing as Peach often would confuse me because I'm so use to her having a hover ability. I guess also the bosses are a little uninspired, but honestly I don't think 2D Mario games ever truly had particularly great boss fights.

Mario Wonder is genuinely wonderful. I wouldn't put the game above Mario 3 or World, but I would say it's definitely in the same tier of quality.

Wonder is an interesting game because it’s good in ways that are new for the series while falling short in areas Mario is known to excel in.

I’d like to begin with what was the most surprising home run: the online, somewhat asynchronous, multiplayer. I had written it off as completely meaningless, but it consistently kept me engaged through to the end of the game. I’d really hate to evoke a certain title, but seeing other players along on their adventure and weaving in and out of their lives while occasionally offering support and messages was reminiscent of some game.

And it works really well for Mario! Someone’s standee marking the path to a secret exit, or a revive point placed before a tricky jump were two organic uses of a multiplayer system that might at first seem like a poor fit for a platformer. Being able to emote at other players and conquer courses alongside of them are less mechanically engaging but are extremely resonant if you’re a human being. I was conquering the game’s final hidden course alongside another player, and after seeing him respawn next to me a few times, we traded off waiting for one another as we conquered each section of the level. Overcoming that with a stranger whom I’d never see again was a novel moment of emotion I never got from another 2D Mario game. It wasn’t very deep, but it was unique in the series.

The older style of multiplayer is gone, and a loss of a feature is unilaterally a bad thing, but for solo players this system works incredibly well. If you haven’t used it I’d recommend replaying the game entirely with this feature.

Another, unfortunately, uncommon W for this game relative to its brethren is style. Wonder oozes style, and one can tell great efforts were taken so that every course presents something new. This comes out visually, but the mechanics of each level’s wonder fruit section are also incredibly inspired. Only one or twice was an idea revisited, which was great to see. Other Mario games simply lacked such mechanically diverse levels, especially in 2D.

However, this approach to level design isn’t without pitfalls. As each level needed its own unique selling point, there are fewer of them to go around. Instead of the usual eight fun worlds there are now only six.

But perhaps that’s for the better. Outside of the wonder fruit sections the platforming on offer is neither difficult nor particularly engaging barring the final level of the game. This is particularly strange for the series that made 2D platforming its bread and butter. Boss fights are also a simplistic bore.

No, Wonder is at its best when the basics of platforming are either stripped away completely or augmented with a mini-game-esque flair. In addition to the wonder fruit sections there are scores of mini-levels that ask players to go on scavenger hunts or do something else trivial as a break from the usual gameplay. All of these diversions are welcome, and while they don’t solve the difficulty problem, they are fun.

The implementation of new features is another typical strength of Mario, but the badge system in Wonder left a lot to be desired. I was hoping for them to be utilized in ways that necessitated picking the correct badge for a given level. Whether that be to finish the level or get all of the collectibles, I was expecting to need to use a variety of badges.

It’s worth noting that the game’s somewhat open structure would make necessitating a particular badge somewhat difficult in terms of level design, but multiple badges fill similar roles; expecting the player to have at least one to get an optional collectible would have been perfectly reasonable.

As it stands badges just don’t add much to the game. I kept the same badge equipped for the entirety of the game and was never at a loss on the road to 100%. Perhaps for the diehards the expert badges can fill in for the missing challenge, but self-regulation does not gel with difficulty as a rule.

A little more rapid fire now: Music? Not up to snuff. Voice acting? Oddly hit the mark; the characters all had personality in spades. Overall world design? Very well executed mix of SMW-style linearity with more modern, open spaces in which to hide secrets.

Wonder does a lot right, but the relative fumble of the basic platforming mechanics has me rethinking my affinity for this genre of game. It might be unfair to hold that against Wonder, but overall I still had a great time, so I won’t think too much about it.

By the way if you’re that Japanese Luigi who spent 20 minutes on the last level of the game with me, hmu.

I think I like the idea of Yume Nikki more than the actual act of playing it.

This really is just a walking simulator in which all you do is wander around strange environments and soak in the atmospheric background music. Sometimes it's creepy, sometimes it's calming, sometimes it's extremely unsettling. However, any emotion the game was trying to evoke from me eventually turned into boredom after slowly walking around the same area trying to find a door or an effect.

I get what it's going for, but after playing 2.5 hours and 9 out of 24 effects I'm throwing in the towel for now.

Good lord. It's astounding to me that a game with the reputation that Pokemon Sword has managed to disappoint me. I could've sworn that I went in with eyes wide open; I'd play the game and have a good time despite the well-publicized flaws. After all, it's a pattern I have repeated to success a few times.

Pokemon Legends: Arceus was a game that everyone knew looked like dog shit from its announcement trailer. I bought it, and had an excellent time for several hundred hours on my road to 100%.

Pokemon Scarlet was (another) game that everyone knew looked like dog shit from its announcement trailer, and it was also one that was well understood to be complete and total jank. I also enjoyed that game for upwards of 100 hours.

So, as I sat bored one day, I figured "Why not but Pokemon Sword! I'm down for another hundred hour, janky adventure with subpar graphics." Of course, only the latter half of that statement ended up panning out.

First I'll describe the devil I knew. It's hard to be aware of Pokemon Sword without knowing its reputation for subpar graphics. Surely an odd thing to make a mainstay of the series, but god damn it let's let GameFreak cook. While this is most definitely a identify to have with this Pokemon title, it's almost redundant to take serious umbrage with it. The games are so consistently undercooked insofar as visuals that by this point you either accept it or you've moved on. It's a worthy talking point, but not a big contributor to my opinion of Pokemon Sword.

The flaws that only showed themselves over the course of my time with the game, however, were much more damning.

Part of the reason I enjoyed Legends Arceus and Scarlet so much was the sense of freedom and, to a lesser extent, adventure that permeated them. (You're probably enjoying a laugh at my expense right about now if you've played Pokemon Sword. Good beats.) Pokemon is a series that lends itself well to nonlinearity. The agency to seek out your favorite guys and build a team you connect with does a lot to enhance the experience; any amount of time you're forced to bond with the second-stringers is wasted.

Openness also gels with the games on a narrative level. Just about every one of these games is about a kid shoving out into the world to carve their own way. Having one's hand held and dragged through a linear series of events would be too dissonant with that idea. While it's easy to look at the latest games in the series and say that Pokemon has only just now reached that level of nonlinearity, the games have always had this down. Even in Pokemon Red one had a few junction points where the player could choose which boss encounter to pursue. You always had some amount of agency.

Pokemon Sword does its best to dispense with that idea entirely. There is always one (1) correct way to progress. Not only are there no other options, there are never any side routes for optional objectives or challenges. No, you simply are rushed through the main story until the game finally stops at some point post-credits with the message to "Go explore!" when there is no longer an incentive to do so.

Not that there would be much to explore, anyway. In addition to being a linear corridor, the world of Pokemon Sword is lacking in anything compelling to do or see. It's not even interconnected, as a few parts of it are cut off with only the loading screen of a train station linking them. The claustrophobia of the world design only exacerbates the death of the sense of adventure started by the game's linear progression.

And without an adventure to embark on, what is the reason to even play a Pokemon game? It's surely not the combat, which never even approaches a stress test demanding the player actually engage with it on a strategic level. It's also not the collectathon nature of a world with so many unique monsters; the absolutely glacial pace of any encounter discourages someone from catching 400 unique creatures.

I'm at a loss trying to answer that question. Why play this game? Why did I play this game? While I feel deflated now, it's nothing compared to how I felt when I finished the "post game content". Seeing my final play time fall shy of 30 hours was paradoxical in a way that inflicted psychic damage.


My time with Pokemon Sword was so insubstantial and mind numbing, and how dare it be this short??

Unfortunate that SEGA is asking $60 for a WiiWare-quality title, but here we are.

The gameplay of this one is a real mixed bag. The stages are typically serviceable, if fairly uninspired on their face. More often than not, they feel the need to throw a gimmick at you in their second act, just to make sure you're not falling asleep at the wheel. The jungle zone is hidden by a fog of war that narrows your view, the factory stage has a self-destruct timer in the background that needs to be reset by hitting certain switches — hindrances that discourage you from seamlessly coasting along the best path, while disincentivizing taking your time exploring wide areas. Overall, this is a tough balancing act to pull off, and Superstars rarely handles it with grace.

Thankfully, giant rings aren't too tricky to track down this time around, in part because the game wants you to play around with the powers you get for clearing special stages. Those stages themselves are among the franchise's jankiest (particularly the fifth one), but they're generally inoffensive. These new powers are situationally useful at best and actively intrusive at worst, especially on the Switch, where they're liable to tank the FPS. More likely than not, you'll find an ability you like and forget that you have it until you're in an annoying spot — or, maybe you'll grab the water ability, only to find that it has little use outside of Lagoon City. Mileage varies.

There are also four unique stages that force you to play as each cast member. While these seem tailored towards their character's platforming on paper, they often don't do enough to lean into what makes their movement options unique — Knuckles's stage puts too much emphasis on scaling walls, and not enough emphasis on his glide. You get the sense that with the emerald abilities, any of the characters would be able to clear these stages (and to an extent, this is proven post-credits). The addition of a playable Amy is welcome, and her double jump is immensely practical, both in navigating frustrating bits of verticality and, occasionally, in skipping segments where other characters would be unable to hit a boss.

On the topic of bosses, they're extended waiting games. Far too often, they hang in the background or just out of reach, looking for you to take advantage of a short window where you hit a blue projectile back, only to make you wait for them to take the shot again. These are exercises in tedium, and the emerald abilities don't do enough to quicken the pace.

Music is another dud, which is a real shame, because there are some competent compositions here; they're often just obscured by that weird Sonic 4/"classic Sonic" soundfont they insist on using for these 2D entries. Tee Lopes and Jun Senoue have both made some decent songs for this game, which would sound much better if they weren't held back by god-awful instrumentation. The real crime, however, is the sound direction. Enemy lasers are ear-splitting, Sonic jumps out of water with an obnoxious crash, and turning down the volume of the sound effects does little to remedy the mixing. Not sure what they thought they were cooking up here.

Once you clear the eleven zones in the main campaign, you unlock a new one with a fifth character — think the Sonic & Knuckles approach, where the acts and bosses change ever so slightly to accommodate a different playstyle. Unlike Sonic & Knuckles, the true final boss is locked behind this second campaign. Be prepared to play through twice if you want to see everything.

But to end on a positive note, at least you get to play Fantasy Zone twice. That's worth half a star alone.

2020 was a bizarre and potentially depressing year due to numerous happenings, so I can only assume that the gaming community decided to gaslight themselves into thinking that Origami King was a good game just so there was a little more positivity in their lives. Unfortunately, not only is the game not good, I’d say it’s almost as bad as the infamous Sticker Star. It’s not even like I went into the game expecting to hate it. Hell, I went into the game with a pretty positive mindset thinking I’d enjoy myself, but after spinning around that fucking circle for the 10,000th time I wanted to genocide every last Toad in the game as much as the main villain did.

Just like the previous games in the Sticker Star trilogy, this game completely lacks everything that you would expect from an RPG. There is no experience, no leveling up, no real stat growth or anything. All you get from battles are coins. The only real stat you have is your HP, which increases from getting health upgrades at random points in the game. Other than survivability, this also determines whether or not hitting an enemy outside of battle will just instantly kill them instead of initiating a battle much like in games like Earthbound. I guess this is a good thing, but when battles are already pretty pointless, not to mention incredibly boring, you may as well avoid enemies entirely.

All battles involve this ring mechanic that makes them a slog. Every turn you have to line up enemies to group them either in a row or a 2x2 square shape so that your jump or hammer attacks hit all of them. You also get a damage bonus from successfully aligning all the enemies. Having to do this every single turn, on a time limit as well, gets annoying fast. It overcomplicates fights with an obnoxious puzzle, while also simplifying them by basing your damage output almost entirely on whether or not you solved the puzzle. I say almost entirely because you do find equipment throughout the game, which are basically temporary upgrades to your boots and hammer that degrade with each use and eventually break. You may think this makes getting coins in battle more meaningful, since you can buy equipment in shops, but the overworld has a bunch of question mark blocks with equipment in them anyway. I started out buying things in shops, but eventually didn’t even bother because of how many items and equipment the game hands out to you. Most of my money was spent on the game’s useless collectibles.

You can also spend coins in battle to have the Toads in the audience help solve the ring puzzles for you. Coins also can be spent to add time to the timer while you’re trying to solve these ring puzzles. This ended up being the most useful thing coins are for, but again, coins are found pretty easily in the overworld and mandatory fights. If coins are all you get as a reward for battling, and the things you buy coins with are really only for battles, then what incentive do I have to engage in battles outside of the forced ones? You can effectively avoid as many battles as possible and get through the game just as easily as someone who fights every enemy they come across. This is a turn-based RPG with no progression system.

What’s also bad is that there’s no variety to action commands. It’s all just “press A at the right time.” The first two Paper Mario games had a ton of different action commands that made your attacks along with your partners’ attacks feel unique and prevented combat from getting boring. Jumping on four enemies in a row for the hundredth time, in the same exact way, with the same exact inputs, will inevitably get boring. If the developers aren’t going to bother making combat meaningful, the least they could do is make it fun.

Oh also, speaking of partners, this game kind of has them, but not really. You get party members throughout the game that do help in battle, but they’re mostly useless. You have no control over them, their attacks sometimes will randomly fail, and they don’t even appear in battle for the more difficult parts of the game like boss fights where they could potentially be useful. The closest the game ever got to feeling like a real Paper Mario game was the desert area, where a Toad archaeologist follows you throughout most of the chapter. He even has a useful ability outside of battle. Why wasn’t the entire game like this chapter?

Boss fights are also mostly a pain because they’re mostly super gimmicky. They have a different spin (heh) on the circle puzzle thing, where bosses are in the center and you have to make a path to the boss and end on one of three types of attack panels. However, once you figure out exactly what the game wants you to do as an attack, they become complete non-threats. Other than the basic attack panels, there are 1000 fold arms attacks and vellumental attacks, the former of which usually involves mashing the A button and the latter having your sidekick, Olivia, transform into a giant beast and deal a ton of damage herself. It reminds me of Sticker Star’s bosses in which the fights are tedious slogs unless you bring the “Thing” sticker that happens to be the boss’s weakness, typically taking out half of their health. It might actually be worse here because for most of the bosses, there’s really only one way to beat them and it’s always gimmicky. Hell, the final boss even ends up being like this. First phase is just more annoying versions of a few bosses you’ve already fought, second phase is a dumb action minigame, and the final phase is one last obnoxious circle puzzle ending in a very generous QTE sequence. Bosses are supposed to be a test of the player’s skill and knowledge of the game’s mechanics, and here they’re more a test of the player’s patience as they try to trial-and-error their way to the solution the game wants.

Okay, enough bitching about the battle system. What about the other aspects of the game? Well, they’re not much better. Much of the game’s content is finding generic Toads folded into origami. The more you find, the more you benefit from spending money on them in battle. I’ll admit that this part of the game, despite once again being finding generic Toads, isn’t that bad because I do for whatever reason find it fun trying to figure out where they’re hiding. It does get pretty monotonous quickly though, and it didn’t take me long to stop caring. There’s also an aspect of exploration where you cover up holes by throwing confetti on them, filling them up and allowing you in some instances to progress. This honestly just felt like busywork to me more than anything since there’s nothing to it. There’s also the 1000 fold arms gimmick where you stand over a magic circle and have to move around Mario’s now giant arms and find a thing to grab onto. Again, this just feels like more busywork that is essentially pixel hunting. I guess there are a few puzzles here and there that are somewhat interesting in the more dungeon-like areas, but for the most part I don’t recall the game’s exploration to be anything all that noteworthy.

I did like the game’s more action oriented battles more. In fact, these are not only the best parts of the game, but also the parts I wish they focused more on. I don’t get why Intelligent Systems doesn’t just make Paper Mario an action RPG series instead of doing turn-based stuff if they can’t figure out how to make the turn-based stuff fun. Super Paper Mario was more action focused, and while it was easy as hell, it was still fun and kept the spirit of Paper Mario in tact.

One of the biggest aspects of the game I’ve seen people comment positively on is the writing, and I honestly don’t get it. There are some funny jokes here and there, but I’m so done with everyone in this universe being self-aware of the fact that they’re made of paper. Paper Mario originally wasn’t supposed to be a universe where everyone is made of paper, it was just supposed to be an aesthetic. It was supposed to look like a pop-up book. Sure, TTYD played into the paper stuff more by having those transformations, but it was mainly just a gag and was treated as unnatural. It wasn’t until Sticker Star that they really went hard into the meta, self aware paper nonsense. On top of that, the game feels like it’s trying too hard to be funny or wacky at times. There were multiple occasions where the characters would just start dancing or singing, which is the most lazy way to attempt to add wackiness to something. The wacky moments of the past Mario RPGs were always more subtle and few and far between. If everything is wacky, not only does it start to wear off and get annoying, you also can’t take what are supposed to be serious moments seriously.

The actual story itself is a little better I suppose, but the game itself was so tedious and filled with padding that it hurt any attempts to make me care about the characters. Everyone talks about Bobby, and I didn’t really like him much at all. He sucks as a partner, he ends up being a liability more than anything, and his sacrifice had to completely abandon the established lore of how Bob-Ombs work in the Paper Mario universe to even make sense. On top of that, there’s a moment later on where you control Bowser’s airship and shoot literally dozens of Bob-Ombs at enemies, which I guess means Mario is willingly committing Bob-Omb genocide. Definitely doesn’t undermine the sad Bobby death scene at all. It’s not even like the developers forgot about this, Olivia literally refers to the other Bob-Ombs as Bobbys. People can cope and say “oh well it’s only manufactured Bob-Ombs that die when they explode. There are normal Bob-Ombs that can explode as much as they want,” which just sounds like a stupid retcon to me. I’m pretty sure that’s not even consistent with the past games anyway. The writers were trying too hard to have an emotional aspect of the game that ends up feeling more comical than anything due to how out of left field it is. The only part of this that kind of works is Olivia’s reaction to it, which is admittedly sad and sets up a cute moment shortly after. Regardless, it’s nowhere near the same level of quality of the emotional moments that happen in TTYD and Super Paper Mario.

The game does have really good production value. Graphically it looks fantastic, and the music is definitely good stuff. It also controls well I guess. Other than one weird instance where the music randomly stopped playing, it’s bug free, which is commendable in this day and age where games come out with all kinds of issues. With that said, I feel like that’s the bare minimum for these games at this point. All the Paper Mario games look great for the respective platform they’re on. All of them are, as far as I recall, stable and not glitchy. Doesn’t really matter if the game itself isn’t good.

Origami King feels like one step forward and three steps back. The developers seem to have no idea what to do with Paper Mario and seem to just be throwing random crap in a hat and seeing what sticks. The irony is that all people really want is a traditional, simple, turn-based RPG like the original two games in the series. Maybe both the Super Mario RPG and TTYD remakes will be successful and finally open Tanabe’s eyes to the fact that traditional RPGs are what people want instead of all this gimmicky garbage. Or maybe they can focus Paper Mario on being a pure action RPG and expand on that with an actual RPG progression system. Or maybe he’ll once again double down on the Sticker Star shit out of spite and make Sticker Star 4. At least those remakes are coming out and zoomers can finally play an actual good Mario RPG and stop pretending trash like Origami King is good.

Despite the Gamecube being a pretty significant part of my life growing up, I never did play this or any Luigi's Mansion game for that matter. There's a lot of charm to the game so I get why people are nostalgic for it, but I think it's decent at best.

The game definitely nails the atmosphere. It looks extremely good with great lighting and animations. Genuinely feels like Nintendo was trying to make a kid-friendly survival horror game. The music is also fantastic, and I can never get enough of that really low, kind of farty bass sound they use a lot. The game's overall creepy but also goofy tone works extremely well.

Gameplay is mostly good, but it gets really repetitive despite the game's short length. The controls felt a bit on the clunky side at times, especially whenever you had to actually aim. There isn't much of a difference with how to handle the ghosts, and your reward is either keys or money, the latter of which is purely for score. The only ghosts that have a different strategy are the ones associated with a certain element. Fighting these guys sucked because if you didn't have the right element, you had to backtrack to where you can find an element to suck up to use against them. Luckily, you don't deal with them too often.

With that being said, hunting ghosts can still be fun. However, that final boss really was an unnecessary spike in difficulty. The game is pretty easy for the most part, then they suddenly throw a boss at you that hits really hard, is tricky to put in its vulnerability phase, and can still attack you when you're trying to suck him up. I just didn't feel like the game properly prepares you for the level of precision necessary to fight him.

Luigi's Mansion is okay, but it definitely feels like one of those types of launch title games that's really only there to hold people over until the really good stuff comes out. Great atmosphere and lots of charm, but lack of variety and repetitiveness makes it a bit of a chore about halfway through.

Was gonna do the post-game before reviewing this, but I think I'm good for now.

Surprisingly fun metroidvania that is clearly heavily inspired by Touhou. Exploring the world is fun and, for the most part, never gets too difficult other than a few obnoxious areas. Boss fights are clearly where most of the focus went, and they're all pretty memorable. I do think the game has a similar problem that many other metroidvanias have where it takes a few upgrades for things to really open up. Once you've gotten more abilities, the game gets much more addictive as both movement and combat improve quite a bit.

This game does have a bit of a weird, inverted difficulty curve. I was getting a bit frustrated with the bosses at first, but as I unlocked more stuff and got more upgrades things became a lot more manageable. That healing staff weapon was a goddamn lifesaver for a few battles.

I do think there are some boss attacks that are a little too unclear on how to avoid them (that and sometimes bullets are a little too difficult to make out against the backgrounds), but for the most part they're all well designed and unique. I do wish they were a little less spongy once you get close to the end. It can feel like it's taking forever to whittle down their health bars sometimes, although it is satisfying pulling off massive combos.

The game's very colorful art style and peppy music also help in making the game not feel too frustrating as well. I guess there's the cutesy story as well, but I honestly kind of stopped paying attention to it after a certain point. It's mostly kind of just dumb anime bullshit where despite beating the shit out of everyone with a hammer, you all become friends and everything's happy.

I do find it funny that so many people complain about the character designs. It's a game where the main character is wearing a playboy bunny outfit. What the hell were you expecting? Other than a couple characters, none of them are even that lewd. Sometimes I wonder how people like this would react if they went to a beach. Probably have a brain aneurysm.

Anyway, Rabi-Ribi is very good. Much better than I expected it to be. I'd even say it's one of the better metroidvanias I've played. Unironically better than Hollow Knight. Don't @ me.

The best thing I can say about Mass Effect Andromeda is that it's playable.

To press deeper, this game represents the absolute worst of the modern video game industry. In BioWare's infinite wisdom, they decided to strip away everything they built in the original trilogy, sacrificing its tight, streamlined gameplay experience for open-world AAA garbage. Andromeda is like a bad future timeline that split off from the first Mass Effect, where instead of what we got in 2 they chose to double down on the boring, monotonous planetary exploration of 1. This is open-world design in its most tedious and least interesting form, and on top of that, hey let's pile on other features that everyone loves, like endless resource collecting, crafting mods and consumable powerups, equipment rarity, pointless 2% percentage upgrades to your powers, and a ton of side content that never amounts to anything more than bottom of the barrel fetch quests. Thus, a memorable action-RPG transforms into a goddamn loot shooter.

Anything you loved about the core experience of the Mass Effect trilogy is practically gone, and the vestiges that remain only serve to remind you how inferior the product is in comparison. Mass Effect was all about hanging out with your cool squadmates in space, getting to know them and becoming invested in their stories, and being presented with difficult decisions that challenge your morals and understanding of the story. Here, your crew are all merely different flavors of bland. I did not care to learn about any of them. I cannot think of a single choice presented that I felt I needed to consider for more than a second. And while I had my issues with the morality system of the original games, replacing it with four personality types that do absolutely nothing to color your character or their experience was a piss-poor alternative.

There seems to be a push to redefine this game as being "overhated" or somehow not as bad as originally characterized, but let me tell you, the massive technical disaster Mass Effect Andromeda was at launch only served to hide that this thing was absolutely rotten to the core. Even with the (slightly) cleaned-up presentation, there's almost nothing redeeming about it. Like many open-world games, it throws a lot at you, keeping you on that grind, where there's always something to do and you never have to stop and ponder about how little thought was put into any of this. It's like fast food, where you can keep shoving it into your mouth, never getting full but never feeling fulfilled.

Congrats to BioWare on developing the Arby's of video games.

After playing literally hundreds of hours of Genshin, I was very interested in seeing how Mihoyo could handle a turn-based rpg style game, something that seemed like a pretty radical departure from their more action oriented roots. Turns out they did it well… kind of.

The gameplay is overall pretty good. It’s your typical “4 dudes in a row” game only with abilities similar to Genshin. You have a basic attack, skill, and an ultimate. Most strategy comes down to exploiting enemy weakness to bring down their toughness bar and stagger them, allowing you to do more damage and delay the enemy from attacking back. Also much like Genshin, a lot of strategy comes from team composition. Generally speaking, the game isn’t that hard, but certain enemies will definitely give you a hard time if you go into a fight without putting some thought into what characters you’re using.

Honestly, that’s pretty much all there is to the gameplay. There are some other things like techniques you can use outside of battle that can temporarily buff you, and the overworld has some simple puzzles here and there, but nothing crazy. I mean, this is a mobile game after all.

The game does look pretty good, and has great animations in battle. Production values seem overall a bit better than Genshin, especially in certain cutscenes. However, that could easily be attributed to the fact that Genshin is an open world game, whereas this game’s exploration pretty much amounts to walking down hallways.

The game’s story is mostly good, but man does it go downhill once you get to the Luofu. Herta Space Station works well as a simple prologue that still manages to have interesting characters and interactions. Belobog is a story that everyone has seen before: big city split into two in which one section is oppressed by the other and you have to figure out why and try to stop it. Not exactly original, but the pacing and character writing is good enough to feel an emotional connection by the end and actually want to stay.

Luofu meanwhile lacks any emotional connection whatsoever. The whole story just feels like a bunch of lore dumps until a couple twists happen that you don’t really care about because there’s no real build up to them at all. They just sort of happen. Even the final boss of this chapter is lame because you not only have to use a specific character, you also have to make sure he doesn’t die or else it’s game over. The boss is annoying as shit to fight with awful mechanics as well, so it really just turns into you using support characters to keep the one guy alive as he carries the fight for you. Massive step down from the final battle in the previous chapter.

I will say that at least the gacha aspects of the game are a little bit better than Genshin’s, but not by much. The stamina system is better, and you now get overflow stamina too which is something I really hope gets added to Genshin, but probably won’t until the game stops printing money. This game’s version of artifact grinding still sucks, might be even worse than Genshin in fact, but everything else is at least less annoying to grind for thanks to being able to speed up battle and autoplay. Problem is that this does ultimately make Star Rail feel more like a side game where you just log in, let the game play itself for a bit, then log off. Other than some side quests and the little roguelike mode it has, the game really doesn’t have much to offer after beating the main story stuff.

Star Rail is good, but I can’t say it has quite hooked me in the same way Genshin did yet. I can’t see myself obsessively logging on to Star Rail every day for over a year like I did with Genshin, let alone playing for several hours straight when a new region drops. Luofu is definitely a major blemish on what had been an enjoyable story up to that point, so hopefully they learn from that mistake. The game has only been out for a few months now, so it certainly has a chance to improve in that regard. I am at least interested enough to see where they go from here.