Still my favorite Zelda game, both this and the original Game Boy version.

Link to the Past may have been where the series really built a foundation, but I always felt like this is where a lot of the heart of Zelda really began. Stuff like a bigger focus on story, a cast of quirky characters, wider variety of dungeon mechanics and puzzles, etc.

The remake as far as I'm concerned is basically just a better version of the original. There's way more content and the QOL changes are a godsend. As much as I love the original game, having to constantly swap around your items is a pain in the ass. Having dedicated buttons for certain items makes it difficult to go back to the original sometimes.

I never really understood the complaints about the remake's visuals. Sure the frame drops can be distracting, but the actual art style is fine. I do kind of prefer the Game Boy aesthetics, but that's purely a nostalgia thing.

I do find it weird that they put this whole dungeon maker thing in the game, then just never did anything else with the concept. I was kind of expecting that to be the testing grounds for a Zelda maker, yet here we are years later with nothing. I actually kind of found this part of the remake fun, but I would have preferred them to keep the photograph house from the GBC version.

Overall, still my personal favorite Zelda, even after the goliaths that were Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. I've always loved how quaint Link's Awakening was compared to the other games. Still wishing they eventually make more 2D Zelda games, or at least have Grezzo do more remakes.

I wish someone told me Final Fantasy XII was actually a Xenoblade in disguise, because I would have played this shit years ago. Adding to that are some of the clear inspirations taken from Star Wars (despite some apparent insistence to the contrary) and you have an RPG experience that's hitting all the right buttons for me. I genuinely thought people were memeing about the Star Wars thing but some of the scenes and characterizations are so on the nose you can't help but laugh. Yes, I know a sizeable part of that likely comes instead from The Hidden Fortress (itself one of the biggest inspirations for George Lucas's epic) but when your story culminates with you attacking a Death Star, you lose a bit of plausible deniability.

In terms of the actual game, while Final Fantasy XII obviously existed before Xenoblade, my previous experience with that series more than prepared me to enjoy the more automated style of combat employed here. I can understand how this might have put people off back in 2006 but I can't help but think of Marty McFly going "Guess you guys aren't ready for that yet, but your kids are going to love it." It's aged remarkably well, with a fast, free-flowing combat system and a ton of flexibility and customization available to build your party to your liking. And while the gambit system has largely been superseded in later years by developers simply becoming more proficient at designing better AI companions, I can appreciate how wild it is that a game from this era gave you so much specific control over how your party operates. Seriously, this came out the same year as Persona 3, a game with notoriously awful automated party members. Ahead of its time.

If I could point to any major criticisms of this game, it would be:

1) The license system goes a bit overboard in terms of things you need to unlock; would have preferred they scaled back some of the armor and accessory slots because you don't need 30 of those.

2) Later story beats felt a bit too spaced out or lacking the impact I think they were intended to have, as the game gets a little too bogged down with chasing one MacGuffin after another.

3) I hate to echo complaints people have been making for almost two decades now but Vaan was a pretty weak main protagonist and it didn't surprise me at all to learn he wasn't originally intended to be one. I loved the party overall and thought they had great chemistry together but it is held back when certain characters feel more like they're along for the ride than possessing agency in the story's events.

Beyond that, I truly enjoyed my time with Final Fantasy XII. There likely would have been more quibbles with a few gameplay design choices but this remaster does a fantastic job at mitigating many of those, making for an overall smooth experience. Great game and I wish more people would have sung its praises because it probably deserves a bigger seat at the Final Fantasy table than it's been given over the years.

Every now and then you get that 4 AM stroke of inspiration to go and play a licensed GBA game based on the feature film adaptation of one of your favorite television shows as a child. I'm sure this is a universal experience.

+1 Soul Point for having the primary item Arnold collects be footballs. A genuinely inspired choice.

-1 Soul Point for committing the cardinal sin of any licensed game of a children's cartoon, which is failure to have a cheap midi version of the theme song play when you boot up the title screen.

The final level has you do battle with evil businessman Alphonse Perrier du von Scheck (whom the Hey Arnold! wiki describes as the "secondary antagonist of the Nickelodeon animated Hey Arnold! franchise") for control of Arnold's neighborhood. He walks back and forth, lazily throwing handkerchiefs at you while you toss wadded-up chewing gum in return. In defeat, he stomps his foot and exits stage left. A scene before the credits depicts him in handcuffs, loaded into the back of a police paddy wagon, presumably for selling nuclear secrets to Iran.

I can now slumber in peace.

The discourse surrounding Tears of the Kingdom, especially in regards to Breath of the Wild, has been somewhat odd to me. I keep seeing people say that it “replaced” BotW, or saying BotW feels like a tech demo in comparison, or that they disliked BotW but are loving TotK (which is especially weird because TotK does little to nothing to alleviate the most common albeit often braindead criticisms of the prior game). For me, Tears of the Kingdom isn’t a straight up improvement, but more of something that complements BotW. I do think TotK is the better game, but not so much that it invalidates BotW’s existence.

When I first heard that this game was going to be reusing the map from BotW, I was a bit concerned that it’d feel too samey, but those concerns vanished instantly once I got out of the Great Sky Island area. Nintendo did a fantastic job going out of their way to make the map of this game feel completely different. Obviously a lot of it is familiar, but it’s amazing how a lot of little changes here and there create such a different atmosphere. Whereas BotW felt more like a relatively empty post-apocalyptic wasteland where humanity was just starting to get back on its feet, TotK makes you feel like civilization is actually fighting back and even on the offensive. You have a big home base right in front of Hyrule Castle, squads of soldiers are out and about attacking monster encampments, Tarrey Town is expanding dramatically, and in general the world feels significantly livelier. Probably helps that there aren’t dozens of laser shooting, robot spiders running around the center of the map too.

Caves and wells help at giving the game a vastly different feel too. Finding a new cave or well to explore can be just as satisfying as finding a new shrine. Since silver enemies no longer drop gems like rubies, sapphires, etc., it’s always worth exploring them if only just to mine. There’s also of course the bubbul gems, which, even if you aren’t a completionist, are worth going for early game for the monster parts you get from Koltin. There’s also the masks and armor set you get from him, but honestly I never really experimented with these at all. Considering how much more difficult it is to come across rupees in this game compared to BotW, using the armor set that depletes money instead of health doesn’t seem like a great tradeoff.

I really loved the way they handled the four main regions and their respective cities in this game. They took a very Majora’s Mask-esque route in having each region being plagued by a major dilemma that once solved reverts them back to a peaceful state. The Ritos are dealing with an endless winter, Gorons are lazing about due to what is essentially a crack epidemic, the Zoras are being literally shit on, and Gerudo Town is basically experiencing a zombie apocalypse. Really helps create a bigger sense of urgency than what BotW did. Gerudo Town, and the entire Gerudo region honestly, gets a pretty significant glow up thanks to the underground tombs and sinkholes.

As for dungeons, this is where I start to differ from the general opinion. While I don’t dislike this game’s dungeons, I think I still prefer BotW’s divine beasts. TotK’s dungeons are cool and it’s nice to go back to them having different themes, but more often than not I found myself enjoying the lead up to each dungeon significantly more fun than the actual dungeons themselves. The only one that wasn’t the case was the Lightning Temple, which might be one of my favorites in the series now. I think my main problem is that they felt too cramped and sometimes even disorganized. Fire Temple was probably my least favorite since it felt like a mess of rails and gave my ADHD brain information overload for some reason. It running at what felt like a silky smooth sub-20 fps didn’t really help either. I also miss the cool feature from the divine beasts of being able to control them to a certain extent to reach certain areas. You could argue that the zonai parts make that gameplay element obsolete, but it’s still something unique that made those dungeons stand out.

I do, however, really appreciate the boss fights in this game compared to BotW. I liked the Blight Ganons, but having four similar looking bosses with pretty similar strategies was a little lame. These bosses are significantly better in that they feel more like traditional Zelda boss fights while allowing the player to experiment a bit with different playstyles. You could dive into all of Colgera’s weak points, or you can shoot them all with your bow. You could use Sidon’s water ability to get rid of the goop in the Mucktorok fight, or you can use splash fruits or even the hydrant zonai device to get rid of it. There’s a lot more going on in these fights that makes them more interesting.

Sky Islands for the most part are cool, although I do wish there were more of them. I do find it odd that they felt like such a major part of the marketing, and yet the Depths ended up being far more expansive. That being said, getting launched into the air from a sky tower and diving back down to the earth never gets old. If there’s one thing the developers get, it’s that falling from absurdly high heights is extremely fun.

Speaking of the Depths, it might be one of the coolest things they’ve put in a Zelda game in a while. It’s brimming with atmosphere and filled with stuff that makes it really rewarding to explore. Going down there for the first time and being surrounded in pitch blackness, along with the danger of gloom damage from enemies, creates a sense of dread I don’t think I ever really felt in a Zelda game before. This lessens as you get stronger and as you brighten up the place with lightroots, but it still continues to be a fun area to explore and gather materials as you progress through the game. Also the Depths has boss refights which I always welcome in any game.

This game’s new abilities add a lot to the game too and are pretty ingenious. I don’t really have much to say about them other than Ascend, which may have ruined certain games for me. When I’m playing other games and see a ceiling above me, I keep thinking to myself “man I wish I could just ascend up there.”

It is a technical marvel that Nintendo managed to get the building aspect of the game working as well as they did on the Switch of all things. My first impressions of it were a bit mixed since I didn’t think I’d put much effort into building vehicles and whatnot, but I ended up loving it. I’m not doing anything crazy like making Gundams or anything, however it’s fun to experiment and see what kind of wild contraptions manage to work.

A lot of people have been shit-talking the story, and while I don’t think it’s great or anything, it’s definitely better than what I expected. There’s some time travel shenanigans that you could argue don’t make sense or whatever, but honestly it’s difficult for me to really care when it’s the story for a Zelda game. There’s also the whole timeline thing which again I really couldn’t care less and it’s pretty clear that Nintendo doesn’t either. Ganondorf being Evil McBadguy again and not having much depth to his motivations I guess is a little disappointing, but it’s not like he’s ever been a deep character to begin with. I don’t care how many times you post that image of him coveting winds, Wind Waker Dorf is still an evil maniac who tried to murder a pair of 12-year-olds.

Shrines are mostly better than BotW. I do think there are far too many “bring the green rock to the shrine entrance” ones, which always end up being blessing shrines. Combat shrines are definitely better, having specific gimmicks tied to them often using the various devices instead of just being “beat the shit out of this enemy you’ve killed 1000 times.”

If there are any notable criticisms I have, it’s definitely the UI and how they handled the summons. For the UI, while they did do a bit to mitigate having to scroll through a billion items to attach to weapons, I feel like it could have been done a little bit smoother. This is especially annoying for arrows, where you have to hit up on the D-pad and select the material for every single arrow you shoot. I think for arrows, they could have done something like allowing you to craft fire, ice, and shock arrows that differ in damage depending on the material used. Summons are a really notable oddity to me. It’s really cool to have these spirit versions of the sages follow you around and fight alongside you, but all too often they get in the way and you’ll most likely end up accidentally triggering their abilities. Or they’ll run away from you when you need them near you the most. Oh whoops, Tulin decided to jump in front of you while you were mashing A trying to collect this enemy’s drops. Now they all got blown off the cliff. I’d really like a lightning strike right now on this Queen Gibdo, but Riju decided to run as far away from me as possible. It’s odd how awkwardly implemented these are compared to BotW, which did the special abilities you unlock pretty much perfectly. These aren’t that big of a deal, but there’s a clunkiness to this that you don’t really expect in a modern Nintendo game.

I’ll also say that, as strange of an opinion as this may be, there is a simplicity to BotW that I do miss in this game. TotK is almost overwhelming with how many things there are to find and collect, and having to constantly fuse monster parts to weapons for them to do any semblance of good damage could get exhausting sometimes. Sometimes you just want to pick up a sword and not have to worry about fusing shit to it. This is where I argue that TotK won’t completely overshadow BotW, because some people do like and may even prefer that simplicity. Personally, I do like TotK more, but I can still see myself replaying BotW again, even after playing through it 3 times now.

To wrap things up, Tears of the Kingdom once again proves that Nintendo, despite all the stupid shit they do, continue to be the masters of game design. With that being said, as much as I love this version of Hyrule, man am I ready to leave it. I really hope we get a 100% brand new open world to explore for the next iteration, and hopefully this one won’t take another 6 years to come out. Still crossing my fingers on getting a new top-down Zelda.

It's an almost unheard of experience for a game sequel to completely obsolete its predecessor. To drive this home, let's actually examine that claim.

Iterative sequels are the first to spring to mind when considering where this phenomena might happen, but they often come with a revolving door of features between every couple of releases that ensures some instances of the franchise will excel in different areas. Sometimes the game engine will receive minor tweaks in ways that take two steps back while graphics or gameplay options take one forward.

Other, more narrative games will generally be more of a side grade at best. Judge a game for its story, and the next game most likely has a different story rather than an objectively better or worse one.

Other sequels, poised to put their older siblings in the trash are hobbled by outside hands. A famous voice actor getting fired or upper management pulling funding, time, or creatives. Maybe there's simply a bold creative direction taken in good faith that does not pan out.

It's not really a mystery that I've been building towards Tears of the Kingdom completely obsoleting Breath of the Wild, but I hope you have a sense of how miraculous that is. The timbre of games development is so intrinsically hostile to this happening, and the fact that Tears surpasses one of the highest quality releases of the last decade only solidifies the achievement.

"I'm never playing Breath of the Wild again." was a persistent thought throughout my time with Tears, so let's see why that is.

The spirit of exploration has essentially served as the mission statement for this current iteration of the franchise, and it was extremely pleasing to see the continued embrace of the ethos. New, extremely hostile environments are introduced in Tears in addition to the base Hyrule map we knew from Breath of the Wild. This is a good choice, of course you want new content, but Nintendo played it perfectly by being hush on 50% of the world map prior to release.

What better way to make the player feel like an explorer than to present them with literally an unknown land?

The theme of exploration is a perfect fit for the amount of agency the game trusts the player with. Tears is a game with a lot of content. A lot! Killing all monsters, finding all caves, finding all Koroks, all shrines, all light roots, upgrading all equipment, all the side quests, all the side adventures…

A lot!

But the game is smart enough to not let this get discouraging. A daunting number like 900 Koroks turns off all but a select few players. Nintendo recognized this and did the smart thing of not gating a substantial reward behind it. The same goes for basically all of these “check list” items: If the only players who are going to bother are the players who feel intrinsically rewarded by the journey to get it done and the subsequent knowledge that it is done, why not let that be the main reward? The game knows players will curate their own experiences insofar as what is and is not worth their time to complete. Just as an explorer chooses and makes their own way through the world, a player of Tears of the Kingdom can be an agent of the type of experience they want to create.

It's an extremely good example of ludothematic harmony. Games often tout an adventure focus or an exploration tag, but it's one thing to ship a copy of Horizon Zero Dawn with a preorder bonus of the game map showing all the places to find treasure trundles lest the player ever really be surprised, and another entirely to let the player control Link for about five hours before accidentally falling into a hole and stumbling upon the other half of the entire world.

Breath of the Wild was another game with a lot to discover, but, save for the first moment encountering a dragon, nothing was ever as surprising or truly unknown as some of what one will come across in Tears. I try not to phrase this as anything too derogatory; my point isn't that Breath of the Wild has shortcomings, but rather that Tears has surpassed a masterful game.

Let's go back to those dragons from Breath of the Wild. Cool, right? The devs agreed, so they brought them back, made them easier to interact with, gave them (and others) a much more prominent place in the game's story and let them figure into the climax. If you want a cool dragon moment, Breath of the Wild has been once again made redundant.

It's this ability to perfectly hone in on what worked, why it worked, and how to rework it beyond that to be even better that pervades Tears. Shrines are another example. Fun physics puzzles that regrettably included a few too many samey combat challenges? How about replacing all of those with extremely unique no equipment scenarios? Too many shrines dotting the landscape reducing the fun of finding them? Much more of them are hidden in caves or in the sky to restore the fun challenge of accessing them. Shrine quests were pretty fun little puzzles and those stick around largely unchanged.

The Great Fairy fountains were a favorite, of some, in the first game. Upgrading gear was fun, for some, and most people were a fan of Great Fairy redesigns. Of course Nintendo would bring these elements back, but they did so with the good sense to attach fun, meaningful quests for unlocking each fountain. One more thing they identified as worthy of bringing forward and spared no expense improving. The fact that said quests gel perfectly with Tears’s new physics tools is particularly inspired.

These physics powers are yet another aspect of Tears that obsoletes Breath of the Wild. How quaint is making an ice block when you can scale through solid matter? How blaise is picking something up when you can now pick it up and attach it to anything? What is the more impressive invention: Localized time travel, or a bomb?

Could I tempt you with a square bomb?

Not all of these are intended direct comparisons, nor are all of these questions fair, but it’s pretty clear that Link has a larger variety of options this time around with his powerset.

The tools in Breath of the Wild were impressive in how they played with each other. Bombs could jettison the things one put in stasis, or the ice blocks would elevate objects placed onto them. It was a cohesive kit that gave players the most powerful iteration of Link to date, save for Soul Calibur 2.

Tears kicks things up a notch by not focusing on the intra-activity of Link’s kit, but the interactivity of all the ways it can modify the various objects occupying Hyrule. This is most easily seen with the contraptions one can build with any interactable object, but the weapon fusing system goes even deeper. I imagine it will take players cumulative years before they stop seeing videos of new possibilities posted online.

Did you know a wing shield gives you a higher jump out of a shield surf? Did you know a floating platform arrow will fly for a bit before spawning a platform for link to use, thus grating stable ground in midair? Have you ever made the butter sword?

Every object in Tears asks the implicit question: “What can I do with this?” The options are indeed exponential in scope, but the genius is how optional it all is. If you answered “No” to all of the previous questions, you likely didn’t struggle with the game. Everything is designed to be possible at the “base level” of gameplay; the skill floor is relatively low. The skill ceiling, or perhaps the nonsense equity, is extremely high to match.

A little knowledge goes a long way in Tears, and I imagine subsequent playthroughs will involve a lot of sideways thinking for the seasoned player. BotW had this too, but whereas in that game it involved the mechanical skill of pulling off unintended jobs from odd angles, Tears makes the edge gained feel much more organic as it simply stems from knowhow.

In this section of the review I will discuss the dungeons.

What a success! I was in the crowd (Minority?) that was happy to see dungeons replaced with Divine Beasts in BotW. They were relatively open ended, featured inspired designs, and had exciting attack sequences leading up to them. Unfortunately the nature of the puzzles involving moving the beasts wasn’t so exciting intellectually, and the boss encounters lacked personality. While the dungeons in Tears don’t require a rocket surgeon on hand to solve, they do largely ameliorate both issues.

Puzzles, save for one exception I still wake up in the dead of night thinking about, have a clear intended solution that of course does not boil down to “Move the beast this way”. As mentioned they aren’t difficult, but the need to find a new solution each time is just enough mental effort to keep the player engaged. As for the boss fights, they are simply night and day with BotW as they feature unique enemies that call for special tactics to take down. Fitting climaxes for the dungeons preceding them.

To find flaw, which I am almost (Almost!) loathe to do, the choice to repeat these fights in the Depths does not sit right with me. It’s never exciting to find the second copy of what was presumed to be a unique encounter, and the fights are involved enough to make taking them down multiple times a nontrivial task. These subsequent encounters lack coolness and demand time, which is a truly dreadful combination.

Coolness is salvaged, however, in terms of lore. Each dungeon is contextualized within the local lore of each tribe to varying degrees of subtlety. My first visit to any of the peoples of Hyrule saw me interacting with Gorons, and without the context of what was to come, I blew off Gorondia as a silly joke. Egg on my face when I rolled up there with my fat fuck boyfriend only to find it’s a literal Fire Temple. It was a cool moment, and while the surprise factor wasn’t there, the rest of the dungeons earned similar respect to their names.

What’s in a name, anyway? In Tears, the answer would be epithets. It’s somewhat standard practice to subtitle bosses like “Steve, Lord of the Clyde”, or “Brendan, Bane of Twitter”, but Zelda has oscillated between having these and not. Perhaps it’s their flakiness that makes their appearance cool, but the reason I bring them up at all is that the dungeons also have epithets in Tears. It’s the smallest thing, but it is quite enjoyable to know that the fire temple is “Lost Gorondia, Rediscovered” rather than just…the fire temple.

These small yet effective elements of presentation are omnipresent in the game. If the words of the devs are true and the game had a year plus of just polish, these are the types of tweaks I imagine they made in that time period. Or maybe Ganon’s health bar always grew longer and harder as his blood flowed into it. It’s hard to say!

From large to small, there really is not an element of Tears that I would not call a success. There are some lumps in the gravy as there always are, for example trying to corner the member of your ghost posse whose ability you need to use is a needlessly tedious process, and the control remains just as clunky as it was in BotW. There are some other flaws as well, but what I need you to understand is that it just does not matter.

A theoretically perfect game doesn’t exist, and thinking about games in that way only serves to devalue your experiences and tarnish your impression of the world. Tears of the Kingdom cleanly surpassed what I considered to be one of the greatest games of all time; the fact that it has minor foibles is as irrelevant as it gets. Taken holistically, the game is a 10, or a 5 as this site would say.

Put another way, in 6 months I’m not going to remember the awkward claw grip I had to employ at times, I’m going to remember how terrifying it was when my second foray into the Depths saw a Frox jump up to greet me, and the wave of fear that single encounter set off that lasted for dozens of hours.

Games, like art, as art, are experiential. I just had a perfect experience.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is magic. And I don't mean in the sense of Nintendo Magic™ where it's the type of game only they could make (though that's still true). I mean that this game's existence is beyond comprehension; that they could not only make a sequel to one of the greatest games ever released and top it handily but also achieve what it does on hardware that's three generations obsolete while only suffering minor drawbacks. What Nintendo has achieved here is truly awe-inspiring, and Tears of the Kingdom is now unquestionably the benchmark for all open-world games going forward.

However, the story of this game can not be told without dissecting its predecessor, Breath of the Wild. I did not write a review of that game, so in large part, this breakdown of Tears of the Kingdom will also be somewhat of a retrospective of that which came before it. You'll have to forgive me for that. There are also some things I desperately need to get off my chest about how people are now discussing BOTW in the context of its sequel, but I'll save that for later.

Tears of the Kingdom begins quite bizarrely for a Nintendo-produced title, with a walk-and-talk sequence where Link and Zelda explore a new threat that has emerged from beneath Hyrule Castle following their victory over Calamity Ganon in the first game. Honestly, I don't even really have much to say about this choice of setup, other than noting how unusual it is to see it in a Nintendo game. It's also the only time the game employs this method of storytelling. Novel, I suppose.

Under the castle they find the mummified remains of Ganondorf, who quickly establishes himself as a greater threat than we've ever seen him before as he effortlessly and mercilessly destroys the Master Sword, leaving Link for dead and Zelda to disappear into the void below. It's an intense opening that not only hooks you but also gives a reasonable explanation for the ensuing Metroid situation, where Link is robbed of his strength and set back to the status quo so you can begin your journey anew.

Link then awakes high in the sky, in an area very creatively called the Sky Islands, where he is promptly given a new arm to replace the one rotted away by Ganondorf's initial attack. He is told by the spirit Rauru that it's his arm and he'll be watching everything that Link does with it so don't get any funny ideas. (Okay, he doesn't say that, but it's fun to imagine). From here the game transitions into a more familiar setup, where you must venture out into this enclosed tutorial section, discover new abilities, and get reacclimated with how these games work (if you're like me and haven't played Breath of the Wild in ages). You'll spend a good 3-4 hours in this location, which for any game would probably elicit groans upon hearing that, but trust me, it's the most I've enjoyed a tutorial for any game I've ever played.

A big part of that is those powers I alluded to. They form one of the biggest differentiating factors between this game and its predecessor, and they are true game changers in every sense of the term. Not only are they more fun than the powers you got in Breath of the Wild, but they work much better in tandem as well. Sure, the Statis power was a lot of fun to experiment with (and, looking back on it, is probably the biggest reason why Tears of the Kingdom exists), however, it didn't really have much interactivity with your Cryonis power, for example. But in Tears, you'll have to regularly make use of these powers in concert with each other, and by the end of exploring the island, you'll probably have the hang of it. I certainly don't envy the task of teaching players creativity that Nintendo faced in constructing this opening area.

The best example I can give of their success is that early during your trek through the starting islands, you'll come across a Korok that needs to reach its friend. If you're like most social media users, you'll probably torture this guy in as many ways as your imagination will allow, but once you're done with that, you'll notice a steel hook that you can attach to a wooden plank with your Ultrahand ability, then put the Korok on it and have the contraption slide down a rail to meet the patiently waiting friend. Later on in the game, you'll come across a puzzle shrine (which serves the same function they did in BOTW) with a similar concept: get a big round ball to travel down a solitary rail. But this time, you don't have the prefabricated hook. Instead, you have a bunch of steel plating, which you can then fasten together into a makeshift hook, attach the ball to it, and watch it travel to paydirt.

Or, you can do what I did, because I am dumb and slow to learn anything and come up with the most cursed amalgamation of cobbled-together assets that looks like it could topple over at any moment yet somehow makes it down the rail. It's the kind of made-up monstrosity that would put Homer Simpson's Le Grill to shame, but it got the job done god dammit. And the best part? The game is filled to the brim with situations exactly like that. You can be as creative or as boring with your abilities as you want because it feels like the developers looked at the insane bullshit people came up with using the more limited powerset in Breath of the Wild and said "Let's lean into that."

See, in Breath of the Wild, shrine puzzles like that usually had an intended solution. However, you could also brute force a lot of them in ways the developers didn't account for, which naturally was a lot of fun. It was that great feeling of "getting one over" on the person who contrived this puzzle you beat yourself over the head trying to solve for half an hour. But in Tears of the Kingdom, very few of these puzzles seem to have an "intended solution." Instead, they've given you a bunch of tools and said "Have at it, go wild." Many situations are deliberately open-ended to encourage this kind of experimentation, and that not only serves true for puzzles, but exploration as well. The Ascend ability, which you can (near) instantly warp to the top of any roof that's above your head, lets you straight-up break certain locations and get to places far more easily than you'd expect. But again, I don't think the developers mind this at all. It was clearly their goal to massage this mindset into players throughout the game. And the feeling of satisfaction that comes with using these powers in new and unique ways never gets old. Nintendo has created a true open-world playground here unlike anything else out there.

It's quite amazing, isn't it? That there exists a game in the current year that has confidence in its players to give them these tools with minimal instruction and trust them to figure out the solution. If this were any other AAA game, the protagonist would have told you the puzzle solution within five seconds of encountering it. I can think of no better reason for Link to remain mute than this fact alone. Those games treat you like an idiot, but I think Tears of the Kingdom will ultimately prove that even idiots (of which I certainly count myself) can persevere if actually given the chance. And the feeling that comes with it is one of the most rewarding satisfactions a developer can give the player.

Speaking of rewarding, that was the term I loved to use to best describe Breath of the Wild, and now its sequel has made that feeling even stronger. Now, people loved to claim that Breath of the Wild felt "empty" but to me, that was never the case. No matter where you went in that game, you were going to find something. I loved pulling up the map, seeing a unique piece of geography, traveling there, and lo and behold there was something to find. Many times it was merely another Korok, but it was at least something. And it's that joy of discovery and exploration that formed the heart of what made BOTW so special. It was the purest encapsulation of the open-world formula. Any other game would fill your map with icon vomit, showing you where everything in the game is and leaving little to the imagination.

In Breath of the Wild, and now Tears of the Kingdom, you have to discover almost everything yourself. That feeling of wanderlust is unlike anything else I've experienced in gaming; spending five hours getting lost on the way to the next objective but never caring because of all the cool shit I saw in-between. But now in Tears, the rewards for that discovery and wanderlust feel so much more fulfilling, so much more vast. The addition of the cave system alone expands the scope of the game significantly and was one of those things that I didn't realize was missing from the first game until I started exploring them in Tears. On top of that, there is simply a larger array of treasures, items, and enemy variety that you gain from doing all this which ensures it's going to be a long time until you run out of new things to find. It's truly a game where all its systems come together to form one amazing, cohesive adventure.

That leads me into talking about the Fuse mechanic, another one of Link's new powers, in which he can fuse any item he finds onto his sword, his shield, or his arrows, thus greatly increasing your weapon variety too. In Breath of the Wild, every item had a use, but here they all have MULTIPLE uses, so you're never discouraged from picking something up. It also helps smooth out complaints around the durability system, which truthfully was never an issue for me, and I understood and appreciated exactly what it brought to the game. However, there were still times when I felt like I shouldn't be using some of the weapons I found, in case I needed them later. Who knows, for example, the next time I'd come across a fire rod if my current one breaks. In Tears? You have multiple items that you can fuse to any weapon and have an instant fire rod. The same goes for hammers to break rocks, or axes to chop wood. It takes something that wasn't really an issue for me in the first game, yet still had some rough edges that needed smoothing over, and they've done just that here.

The mind-blowing part is that practically all of this is available to you in that tutorial location. It's part of why I mentioned you'll be stuck there for hours but not care because you'll have so much fun discovering all this game has to offer. That said, once you dive off those islands into the lands of Hyrule below, you will discover a very similar story structure to the first game, in which you'll meet some important characters, they'll give you a location in the four main geographic regions to head to, you'll take on a quest to clear a dungeon alongside your friends, and you'll move on to the endgame of defeating Ganon(dorf) afterward. Along the way, you'll discover locations that possess memories of things that happened in the past that are relevant to the current plot, though this time they're not your memories, they're someone else's.

These memories form the bigger story elements Tears of the Kingdom has to offer, and though similar in structure to the first game, I appreciate that Tears doesn't jump into outright spoiling what happens from the beginning like Breath of the Wild does. It made those memories feel less impactful, whereas here they culminate into some fascinating reveals and end with one of the stronger story beats the Zelda series has ever offered. The overall ending to the game, which of course I won't spoil, is truly spectacular as well, a decided step above BOTW and something I would put on par with the ending of Twilight Princess for my favorite moments in the franchise.

Also, like in Breath of the Wild, completing temples (or their equivalent in that game, the divine beasts) awards you with a power, but a new twist on them involves the power also spawning an avatar of the sage you befriend on these quests. These avatars fight alongside you in combat, which is super useful against the larger enemy encounters Tears of the Kingdom loves to throw at you, but also comes with perhaps my only real criticism of this game, which is the clunkiness of their implementation.

Powers are activated by walking up to the sage's avatar and pressing A. However, the avatars act independently of you, so often you'll have to run around and chase them down in the heat of battle to use their ability. This is often more trouble than it's worth, particularly when they are all active at once. I'm sure it's because they ran out of buttons by this point, requiring a more contextual activation, but these powers really needed a more dedicated solution to use them.

There's also one other gameplay element I want to touch on, and that's The Depths. This part of the game, which was barely shown before release and not elaborated on at all by Nintendo, expands the scope of Tears of Kingdom in an almost unfathomable way. Beneath the world map of Hyrule is an ENTIRE secondary world map, exactly as big as the one above it. It's not nearly as dense with things to discover but also offers a completely new way to engage with exploration that I thoroughly loved.

The Depths are dark. Like, pitch-blank dark. It's unnerving and unsettling and you have to light the entire thing as you explore. It's full of gloom, a substance that saps your hearts and ups the difficulty in the process. Twisted and dangerous things are lurking down there too. The first chasm I dropped down (after the initial one that serves as the tutorial), I fell into a boss battle against the strongest version of the big new monster created exclusively for the Depths. I was woefully unprepared but after getting my ass kicked several times, I managed to eke out a win against it and continue my exploration into the abyss. It's one of my best memories of the 150 hours I took to complete the game.

But that exploration of the Depths is what I enjoyed the most about my time down there. Unlike Hyrule, a known and explored land, everything in the Depths is entirely new to Link. You're ostensibly setting foot on a land no one has been to in eons and that feeling of having to carve a path in this harsh environment and see things no one else has was such a fantastic treat that I was not expecting to get out of this. Tears of the Kingdom is one of the biggest games ever created but none of it feels like wasted space; it all has a purpose and is not simply big for the sake of being big.

Now, let's talk performance, so I can circle back around to what I was mentioning before in terms of magic. Tears of the Kingdom runs more smoothly than Breath of the Wild ever did, even after the multiple patches it received. I suppose that makes sense, as they did have years to optimize this engine, but it's still ridiculously impressive when you consider all that's going on under the hood in terms of this game's physics. The rewind ability alone needs to capture the movements and trajectories of all objects in your vicinity for minutes at a time so you can recall them back to their previous state at any moment. Some of the physics-based puzzles in Tears of the Kingdom also seem to exist merely for the flex of doing them, as they'll often appear in just that one part of the game and involve mechanics that have no real use outside that. But to be fair, if I created a game as technically impressive as this one, I'd want to flex too.

It's certainly not perfect, however. Using Ultrahand tends to tank the framerate when first used and the more objects you stick together, the more the game struggles to hold itself stable. Fighting large groups of enemies also causes strain, and isolated areas (like the Water dungeon where, naturally, there's a lot of water physics going on) also dip the framerate to frustratingly low levels. For as ridiculous as it is that this game even exists on the Switch, you will occasionally remember how outdated this platform is and how the rumored Switch 2 can't come soon enough.

That said, I'll take that tradeoff. For everything Tears of the Kingdom has to offer, you largely won't care about slight losses in performance. It's a reminder that creating great games easily trumps these sorts of issues, and even on the Switch you can still construct these amazing clockwork open worlds full of beautiful landscapes, creative gameplay, and endless things to do...or you rest on brand recognition and settle for perpetual mediocrity when designing your open-world title. It's kind of humorous how people were blaming the current state of a popular monster-catching franchise on being a Switch game when six months later an experience like Tears of the Kingdom comes along to show just how much you can still do with obsolete hardware. Please re-evaluate your stance on video games if you think these titles are at all on the same level.

Finally, I wanted to say a few words about Breath of the Wild. Quite frankly, I've been a little ticked off around the discussion of that game in the wake of its sequel's release, with it frequently described in terms like being a "prototype" or a "proof of concept" for what Tears of the Kingdom ultimately became. I think that's a little insulting because a LOT of what makes TOTK special is also what made BOTW special. Many of Tear's strengths are not its own, but either a borrowing or evolution of what the previous game had to offer. Breath of the Wild is STILL one of the greatest games ever made, and it continues to blow my mind how much they got right the first time around despite having to completely reimagine the Zelda formula from the ground up. The feeling of playing it for the first time remains unmatched. Tears of the Kingdom is 100% the better game, but its existence does not invalidate Breath of the Wild, and in fact, I can't wait to go back and explore that game again. It's the ultimate proof in my mind how amazing the formula they've established is, and all I want now is more of it.

So, there you have it. After all these years of waiting, all this anticipation that had accumulated to ridiculous levels, Nintendo has managed to do it again and craft another Zelda title that is worthy of discussion as one of the greatest games ever made. We're only two weeks out from release and I already feel more than comfortable saying that. Bravo, Nintendo. Despite all the frustrations I may have with you as a company, you steam a good Zelda.

P.S. I need Purah carnally.

Color me impressed.

Kingdom Hearts is the impossible game. I’ve been looking back on how the hell something like this came into existence for years and still fail to come up with a proper answer. If Square Enix tried to go through Disney to get something like this made today, Disney wouldn’t even do them the courtesy of laughing at them. Square would just be completely ignored. 2002 Square though? Those guys were kings of the ring. People thought they were the BEST storytellers, the BEST game designers. Nothing could possibly go wrong when it came to a crossover between the biggest name in animation and the biggest name in video game RPGs.

And honestly? Not that much went wrong here. Yeah, I went into this fully aware of the series’ reputation. “It’s convoluted,” they said. “It’s cringe,” they said. Yeah, those things are kind of true, but this first game isn’t dragged down much by some earnest silliness. I’m sure a lot of people decry that this isn’t a more explicit crossover of IPs, as the Disney worlds and characters are isolated from each other and the FF characters are full-on reinterpretations that play pretty small roles, but the presence of the original characters competently stands in for how you might imagine something more explicitly Japanese colliding with western products would go. Having a new character act as the lead allows both newcomers to and fans of one or both of the IPs involved to have some kind of anchor. While the worlds you visit generally retread the content of their film counterparts, they were also an opportunity to see a different angle of each setting and respective principal character, something a kid who knows those stories would probably be wowed by compared to a normal video game adaptation.

Among KH’s many surprises was its combat. Something that was called “mashy” even close to its original release date. While that can be true, and you can have a good enough time just running up against a wall until it breaks, I found the combat’s quirks fun to master. Your basic three hit combo can have its level of commitment reduced by timing swings correctly. Your air combos are faster and can be sped up even further by canceling them with short hops. You have a quick select menu for spells that adds a layer of decision-making to major encounters. You have a spell that grants greater protection from damage but costs more than a normal healing spell. Get caught in the wrong string of attacks and you’ll be reeling over having picked the wrong defensive spell between the two. Your weapon of choice has different passive abilities like a higher critical hit rate or more slots for MP, and comes in a variety of lengths that act as compensation for or counter to their other qualities. So you now have to make a choice over how much keeping a little bit of space between you and a boss means to you.

A bit less intuitive are your party members. By default, Donald and Goofy are programmed to commit suicide in front of you. I understand that classic cartoons are very different from what we expect from our modern, sanitized lives, but watching beloved single father Goofy Goof repeatedly set himself aflame as Bill Farmer screamed in anguish was a little much for me. You will have to set Donald to favor defensive actions to make sure your party is of any use to you.

Outside of wanting to forget Donald's attempts at "help" as readily as Disney wants to forget Song of the South, this simple combat system gives you a surprising amount of control over the flow of fights, and you can make conscious optimizations to reward yourself with more expedient encounters. This includes some added replayability with what kind of build you select at the start, favoring attack, defense, or magic while limiting one of those traits in turn. Beginners are told to pick the shield and discard the staff, while players going for pure speed grab the staff and discard the shield. You can have a pretty distinct experience based on your play style despite seeming fairly limited to start with. I don’t think a game that wasn’t confident in its combat would give me the option to completely disable gaining exp. While I think that is an addition rom the Final Mix version that I played, it’s still a pretty incredible testament to how far this game lept from the turn-based games that inspired it. I don’t think there would be a game that really captured the ideas around Final Fantasy’s active time battle system in a fully real-time format until FF7R, but KH was a strong early outing.

Kingdom Hearts was apparently out to prove it really was an RPG, because unlike most action games, it leads with its weaker material and ends much stronger. A straightforward tutorial is followed up with a leisurely stroll around an island doing some fetch quests. This would be mostly inoffensive, if not for one brief attempt at a “race” that clued me into how odd some of the platforming was going to feel. Sora lands like a rock, so jumping from platform to platform felt far from fluid. This sequence and the optional fight with your friend/rival Riku is meant to be revisited and trivialized on subsequent playthroughs of the game, but I know with certainty I would neve get these right, especially after getting used to my other abilities gained down the road.

Trouble in paradise arises as the island is enveloped in darkness, Sora’s oneitis is whisked away, and Riku is absorbed into a Lovecraftian ether assuring us that he’s just going to ask some perfectly reasonable questions about the history of central banking. The slow pace of the game continues as we are made to walk around Traverse Town. Combat encounters are not going to feel very exciting here. I feel like the game waiting to give you a dodge roll was a mistake. Even when you aren’t getting much use out of it, it can add a bit of dynamism to the flow of each fight. This is where I first picked up on how the game spares me the horror of having to deal with enemies respawning every time I reenter a room. It takes a couple of reentries before they rear their heads again, and they can often be ignored once you know where to go.

So you link up with Donald and Goofy, deciding to need it rather than keep it. You blitz on over to Wonderland, and this first Disney world does a solid job translating the film’s content into a video game setting. It only takes two-ish locales from Alice in Wonderland, the room with the potions and the queen’s garden, but a decent amount of variety is pulled from them. Negotiating with flowers is thankfully straightforward as they will just tell you what they want, so no guesswork is needed. This is one of the better examples of back-and-forth tasks the game is going to burden you with. It’s a short checklist of things that tend to open up a little more of the area as you go. We are not at the worst of this yet. The boss fight here can sadly take a while if you’re a bit sheepish over your capabilities or did not spec into magic. However if you’re willing to just dive in on this lanky fella then it’ll be over quickly.

Your next options are the jungle and the colosseum. The colosseum can come off as a fat load of nothing to those just trying to get through the game normally, but it’s the source of a substantial amount of optional content and some of the game’s best boss fights. If you do not make an attempt at Sephiroth, you will have sorely missed out. Interesting to note that this is actually the first time a character like him or Cloud would even be shown in a real-time format, so it’s no wonder these depictions had such a huge impact on their later incarnations. Though I wouldn’t be a real FF fan if I did not take a moment to seethe over “emo Cloud” being such a cool guy when his original depiction was much more of a dweeby weirdo getting made fun of for trying way too hard to act cool.

The jungle kind of sucks. I have trouble finding much defense for how much needless backtracking there is in this one just to activate cutscenes. In fact it’s often a bit unclear that’s what you need to be doing so you could waste even more time unnecessarily. I have seen some pretty neat optimized routing for this section but it’s sadly not quite enough to salvage it for me. I do get to take a moment to look at Jane, the best Disney girl, so it was kind of worth it in the end. I also got to beat up a leopard, which is something I always wanted to do in real life. Also, did you know that leopards only have a lifespan of 10-12 years? If a leopard killed Tarzan’s parents twenty years ago, then who the fuck did Tarzan kill in the movie?

As another aside, Tarzan claims that the boss here is “ooh ah ooh ah Not-Clayton” but what did he mean by this exactly? Is it a heartless posing as Clayton? Is he merely referencing that Clayton is not alone and is accompanied by a giant chameleon? Is it physically Clayton but possessed or enhanced by the power of darkness in some way? My friend Mike (whom I have blocked on twitter) insists that it is literally not Clayton. I think the following cutscene where the chameleon falls on Clayton implies that it was the real Clayton. If he was possessed, then we have just killed a man who was mostly innocent in this version of the story and even the actions of his own agency could have been manipulated by the heartless. Even Kerchek gets to live here. Clayton was tragically cast as the villain of this story because a higher power deemed it so. In another life, we could have been friends.

Revisiting Traverse Town demands a fair amount of busy work, but you do get to open up an optional minigame world to communist China and climb trees with Xi Jinping and friends. You also get to run into Riku again. It seems that, since we last saw him, Riku has been doing a lot of reading and insists that we should read the passages from Deuteronomy that he texted us earlier. He’s also believing every word from someone who has literal devil horns adorned to her head. I am a huge Sleeping Beauty fan, so getting to see Maleficent be so involved in the greater scope of the game is fun for me, especially since many of the other Disney characters seem more confined to their own worlds.

Agrabah is another generally well designed world. The combat here implements a bit of platforming so you think more about your positioning and try not to fall from your advantageous spot. You also have a nice variety of areas within the streets, outside the Cave of Wonders, the upper level of the cave, the lower level, and the treasure trove. The only thing that’s really missing is the palace interior. You also have to get a truncated version of the film’s character arc for Aladdin, rushing us to his third wish to free Genie. So Al wastes his first two wishes with shit we could have accomplished easily. This is one of those retreads that I accept as a necessary concession. It’s not just the film’s plot, but if you stray too far and have us dealing with like, animated series Aladdin, people who aren’t me wouldn’t be that interested

Jafar’s boss fight is a bit of a dud. The preceding sorcerer Jafar fight isn’t bad, but genie Jafar has the worst aim of all time and you’re mostly waiting for Iago to pass by so you can eviscerate Gilbert Gottfried.

Monstro is one of those worlds I had heard was infamous, only to find it totally inoffensive. It’s a small maze. What was so objectionable about this? Is it just one of those things people blow up because they got lost as kids? Why don’t I hear that about the following world? The fucking water one. Anyway, Riku is here again and this time he’s going on about how his ideology is totally predicated on economic reform only. Pinnochio is here, btw. He and Gepetto have been swallowed up here. Pinnochio is then swallowed up by a big heartless and you have to save him. Now, from my understanding, KH fans like some guy called “Chibi” really enjoy this kind of thing. I am personally not a huge fan of witnessing double-vore, but we end up leaving Gepetto and Pinnochio in this place to supposedly digest for all eternity anyway. Mission accomplished, boys. We entered the belly of the beast and took responsibility for our capital B Being, cleaning our room and slaying the dragon, bucko. (Note: We really will be slaying a dragon later)

The next world is Atlantica. Thankfully this is KH1 so dad is yet to walk in on us having a dance party with Princess Ariel the pretty mermaid. First and foremost, this world is a better example of the abridged/altered plots of the movies. Atlantica wisely ignores the movie’s plot of Ariel wanting to walk on land so she can get laid. However it successfully honors the spirit of the film with its cliff notes still focusing on the conflict between the free-spirited Ariel and her overbearing father, which leads to a deal with Ursula. Maybe praise for such sparse storytelling is unnecessary, but when you have to do something like this eight times per game you should give credit where it’s due.

I’m not really sure how much of Atlantica’s issues are its own versus mine. There are literal arrows pointing me in the right direction for the Final Mix version of this game, and I still managed to get lost trying to find my way back to Ariel’s hideout so I can progress the story. I don’t know how people feel about the swimming here, but it seems deliberately designed to not be as frustrating as underwater segments of the previous era. You move quickly and combat moves about as fluidly as it does on land. Still, the world is a little too large and there are too many enemies to fight per room in order to progress with a shy dolphin to the next area. Twice. I still found this meandering more engaging than the jungle, and I thought it ended pretty strong with both Ursula boss fights. I hear the second one, against giant Ursula, is infamous online for being incredibly frustrating. I’m assuming this must be referencing the original release which has a less free camera, because I found this to be a fun challenge among the required boss fights of the game. There’s plenty of healthy telegraphing of attacks, and conditioning that teaches you to not be greedy with openings. Ariel is also one of the more useful guest party members. I’m sure many peculiar folks online were saddened to find out she did not whip out her feet in this version of the tale, but she can absolutely throw hands.

Halloweentown is here. It is in this game. I liked it. I certainly didn’t dislike it. It’s like if the jungle section was less of a slog. A lot of quick back-and-forth running around to trigger cutscenes before you open up another small area. The combat here against the trash mobs can actually get a little dicey, with these guys who leap down and slash to deal huge damage. So the game is officially not pulling punches at this point. You also have another gimmicky boss fight waiting for you at the end of this segment. While the flow here is notably more in the game’s corner than your own, you still have a lot of control over how quickly this fight concludes. Again, whatever distaste I saw for this online prior to playing for the first time seems to be a projection of childhood frustrations. There’s also an additional fight against a house because the developers really wanted you to appreciate the exterior of this environment and not just run by all the enemies. Fair.

I don’t know if making Neverland the final world in a game about coming of age and loss of innocence was intentional, but I like to pretend it was. Of course, Neverland being last in line here means that apparently Captain fucking Hook has a higher in-universe power level than the likes of Jafar, Ursula, Oogie Boogie, (possibly) Hades, and Not-Clayton. He truly has climbed the competency hierarchy and channeled his inner chaos. Neverland is a fairly brief and confined world, and I can imagine it might’ve been frustrating with the original release’s camera, but it works fine in Final Mix. You are even granted the ability to fly freely here, something the swimming section preps you for. The movement feels very natural even if you only have access to a downgraded version of it outside of this world. Hook’s fight, like several others, is fairly accommodating in granting you extra enemies to beat up on in order to restore your magic. Pan is another one of the more fun guest party members with the ability to freeze enemies in place the way Bobby Driscol wishes he could have frozen time before getting blacklisted. There’s also a pretty neat optional gimmick fight here with a super boss that demands hyper awareness of a ticking clock that will kill your party one by one. It’s a great use of an iconic setpiece from Disney’s catalog.

You get a pocket Tinker Bell here. I have no comment. I just want you to know that you will have Tinker Bell available to summon and there is nothing else to think about in regards to Tinker Bell but she is literally right there in your pocket like seriously imagine though.

Hollow Bastion is where the game goes from pretty good to outright excellent for a while. Your movement is all freed up now, so traversal through the area is about as smooth as it’s going to get. The rooms here vary in size to let you judge the space between you and enemies in a variety of ways. The enemy types are split between bulkier damage dealers and flying enemies, both of which force you to reposition constantly. Beast is here as the only guest party member to not be present in their own world. While I was deprived of a Gaston boss fight, I could still breathe a sigh of relief as the game reassured me that the entire country of France had been obliterated by the Heartless.
The string of boss fights here are all high quality. Dragon Maleficent is a great example of how broken Tinker Bell is, but can be defeated without assistance once you understand that the massive tail whip attack is actually telegraphed. It’s just tough to see because it’s a giant dragon that takes up 75% of the screen. Riku is fully possessed here after going on a rant about how Bob Chapek “cucked out and deserved what he got” without any elaboration. The fight is a 1v1 that puts your understanding of the mechanics to the test. You can either totally crush it or struggle for longer than necessary. The original release is notorious for an unskippable cutscene preceding this fairly tough fight. Although this boss only took me a couple of tries, an unskippable cutscene probably would have made this totally intolerable and borderline drop-worthy as an adult. As a kid in 2002 with much fewer games to play, it would have been incredibly frustrating but probably something I would have stomached.

So Riku is then transformed into a chiseled greek god by the powers of evil and we bail on the Hollow Bastion. After a brief reprieve we dive right back in and head to the endgame so we can take on Ron DarknesSantis and stop him from taking over Disney World. Some of the newer enemies here are a real challenge to get through, but they also outstay their welcome after a while. They have a tendency to shield themselves or outright disappear, so you have to constantly shift focus to new targets and come back to finish off the previous enemy later. It starts out pretty interesting but becomes tiring after a while. The Chernobog reveal completely blew my socks off as I had no idea it was in this game, it helps that the fight itself was pretty damn good. The following room is a seemingly endless gauntlet of enemies that would have utterly destroyed my will to continue had I died in there, on account of the aforementioned defensive enemies, but thankfully I got through it on the first try. Apparently you can also just summon Simba to clear each wave near-instantly. So fuck me.

All that’s left of the game are a couple of fights with Ansem. It’s a pretty strong finish but the second phase is what really feels like the final boss in terms of difficulty. Some might hate the borderline un-reactable attack that virtually incapacitates you and drains your resources to stay alive while it’s active, but I think this lends the encounter a distinct sense of danger not present anywhere else in the game’s required fights. If everyone had something like this, then I’d hate it. As a single endgame boss fight, I love it. A final boss with a few things that are oppressive or unfair makes it more satisfying when you realize they can be beaten. The boss is also very generous with checkpoints and does not force you to redo any phases.

Ansem ends up turning into a giant flesh monster devil god with a sexy Billy Zane proxy attached to it, and watching Donald Duck and Goofy go toe-to-toe with this kind of thing is the stuff not even my dreams could have come up with. I’m sure this bizarre juxtaposition will not become a trend with the series going forward.

Idk the ending is nonsense. Kingdom Hearts is light but also we still have to close that door and Riku has to be on the other side of it rather than just pushing it with you and Michael Mouse is here and we’re gonna explain why he’s shirtless later thank you Nomura very cool.

So suffice to say I was actually pretty pleased with this one. While familiarity with the IPs will certainly enhance enjoyment, and I wouldn’t really recommend the game to someone who hasn’t seen or played any of the source material, it’s shocking to think the aesthetics and gameplay might be enough to carry this experience. If you’re used to more modern games deftly blending snappier combat and customization then you might not click with it, but it’s not hard to imagine why this game is a favorite of so many people who played it near release. Not just because of its recognizable foundations, but because it takes those things and earnestly crafts something totally new and novel with them.

Try not to take its storytelling all that seriously and lecture people over how this ridiculous concept is, in fact, ridiculous to watch unfold. There’s value in the absurd, and not just in an ironic sense. If a group of people made an enjoyable piece of entertainment out of an utterly insane idea with bizarrely broad, abstract, and robotic storytelling that it confidently seems to think is none of those things, then that is absolutely worth giving some thought to, even with a few laughs at its expense.

An absolutely astonishing failure of a game. The fact that this game is regarded fondly by anyone for any reason is a fact I will never wrap my head around. My run through the game, or rather my run through the 60% of the game I could stomach before tapping out, was a revolving cycle of boredom, frustration, and bewilderment. I think it's worth going through each of those in turn to get to the core of why Metroid Prime just does not work as a game.

Boredom. The game is most easily broken down into two distinct gameplay experiences: Exploration and combat. Both of them, for different reasons, refuse to offer any excitement to the player. The game progresses on a completely linear path, which at best simply blunts any sense of adventure and at worst actively discourages players from exploring. Why take the time to travel down new paths when the vast, vast majority of them are locked behind progression checks in the form of various items? The game presents itself as having an open world, however it's anything but, and the mismatch of expectations to the reality of the experience does not serve Metroid Prime well.

Combat is another way the game attempts to lull players to sleep. The over reliance on lock-on mechanics removes the need to exert any amount of effort in the enemy encounters, while the abundance of health makes strategy unnecessary. The resulting combat systems are brainless, with every encounter playing out identically.

And man are there a lot of encounters!

Perhaps sensing how unfulfilling it is to wander the world, the devs opted to put a plethora of respawning enemies just about everywhere, thereby ensuring the player will be engaged in endless combat. The mental exertion of switching tracks from one brainless endeavor to the other is just about the only aspect of Metroid Prime that stops a Drinking Bird Toy from clearing the game.

These respawning enemies really highlight the most frustrating aspects of the game: backtracking and all the baggage that comes with it. It's a difficult topic to discuss, as backtracking is not inherently problematic, yet "Oh you just didn't like the backtracking" is a relatively easy cop-out. Backtracking is no problem at all in older (and newer) Metroid titles, so why is Prime different?

Being a first-person game, the movement in Prime is much clunkier than in any of the other titles in the series. The result of this is that movement is slower and avoiding enemies is more difficult. Both of these drastically change the dynamic of backtracking. Whereas in other games one could quickly (and skillfully) dash past or jump over enemies they've fought before whilst backtracking to an old area, Prime sees the player clumsily fumble through the arena. Combat, being as boring as it is, simply is not an option, but taking some damage while slowly bunny hopping through an area barely registers as a better experience.

So at this point, we can see that the player clearly does not want to explore unnecessarily. This is where Prime has the brilliant idea of giving less than zero direction on what the current objective is. Thus, the player has to wander around to every area they've been to before acquiring their latest item. What's beautiful are the amount of item checks that have a second item check right behind them.

Acquire the spider ball? Cool, just wander back to that area from two hours ago that has the spider ball track you remember. You trek around, trip over some enemies, arrive, and spider ball up only to find that you also need the grapple beam to do anything here, and thus have wasted your time. Then you have to plan your next move, again uncertain if you'll even be making any progress.

This tableau plays itself out endlessly over the run time of Metroid Prime. It's a hollow, frustrating experience. There is a hint system that kicks in after a variable number of minutes exploring. This only serves to soften the blow somewhat, as the dominant strategy becomes waiting around for the hint to show up, which is about as fun as it sounds .

What bewilders me is the reputation this game carries. What do people like about it? The clunky, meaningless, punishing exploration? The brainlessly simple combat? It's always good to make lists of three while writing, but there's literally nothing else going on here.

Scanning???

I've never failed so completely to grasp a game before Metroid Prime. It's not an emperor's clothes situation; I believe people are completely genuine in their admiration for the game. But I don't get it, and at this point, I don't want to get it.

A video game. An honest-to-god video game!

That was my initial reaction after a mere hour of playing Pokémon Legends: Arceus. I cannot express to you what a refreshing surprise this game was, especially coming off the heels of having played the latest phoned-in generation. What's this, a Pokémon game with an open environment that actually has things to do in it? A game that gives your character agency in the world? Fucking SIDE QUESTS?! My expectations were undoubtedly low but my enjoyment of this game had nothing to do with that; it's a genuinely GOOD video game, something I had long given up hope for in this series.

PLA does a lot of great things but they're all (mostly) the result of the domino effect induced by its setup. This game serves as a prequel, of sorts, to Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, where you're a time-displaced trainer sent back to a era where Pokémon training isn't even a thing yet. Honestly, I could have easily done without the faux-isekai framing device, but I can't deny how much I absolutely adored the feudal-Japan inspired setting. It finally allowed for an exploration of the Pokémon world where everything isn't just candy and rainbows with these things. These are feral, dangerous creatures, and the game continually makes you aware of that. I've never seen the words "die" and "kill" used so many times in a Pokémon story, and Legends: Arceus doesn't shy away from the reality of the time period its based on. You really are exploring a new frontier here, and in so doing allowed for the freshest interpretation of Pokémon in 20 years.

The world of Pokémon Legends: Arceus is one that feels like it lives up to the fantasy these games try to pander to. It's a living, breathing world full of exploration and opportunity. Seeing the little village of Jublife grow as the game progressed was a genuine joy. Having each zone actually possess varied and interesting geography made wanting to seek out every little corner a meaningful affair. I wish varying species of Pokémon interacted with each other more, but how they interact with YOU is what ultimately sells the immersive experience this game offers. They'll run, or hide, or attack you, or just stare at you dumbfoundedly, depending on the species. It's all simple in its variety but incredibly fresh in its execution. And that all bleeds into the gameplay loop, which is where I found the most enjoyment.

All Pokémon games, really after the first generation, became less about catching all these little critters, and more about simply battling them with others. PLA flips the script, instead making the catching and documentation of them the real meat of the experience. Not since Gen 1 did I feel motivated in this pursuit, and while there are battles here, they're kept to a minimum, and the real focus becomes on completing your Pokedex. This is done in a variety of ways, such as catching Pokémon, defeating them a certain number of times, witnessing them using specific moves, fighting alpha variants, etc. Given this is a world where people are still afraid of Pokémon and lack understanding of them, it perfectly ties into the setting and forms a charming basis for your adventure. I felt extra strongly about this after playing Pokémon Violet, where it really hit me how trivial and inconsequential catching Pokémon had become. Legends: Arceus finally gives meaning and purpose to that side of the franchise again.

You can really tell how much they thought about how the setting influenced everything else around it too. It wasn't just something slapped on to differentiate the game, like the school setting in Scarlet and Violet. For example, it wouldn't make sense for random items to be strew about in these lands where people have barely settled, so instead it offers up a crafting system where the items to gather are natural and you construct your Poke Balls and medicines out of them. It's really simple but it's another way to make you feel immersed in this game's world, not to mention actively giving you other things to seek out beside just Pokémon. Hell even the presentation goes the extra mile, with bold Japanese calligraphy highlighting text and UI elements, and a healthy dose of classical Japanese instruments and sound effects to help remix beloved Diamond and Pearl music. As someone really into that sort of thing, it goes a long way.

Legends: Arceus also features a revamped battle system, another element of the game that seeks to add a new perspective. Instead of a simple turn-based system, an action order is introduced alongside it to help move things along, complete with strong and agile versions of existing moves to influence it. The end result are battles that don't feel hindered by the same sluggish systems the mainline games have traditionally used, and the simplification of a lot of moves and effects also contribute to that. Normal stat calculations have also seemingly been thrown out the window, so matchups between Pokémon can still be intense and hard-hitting even with a vast difference in level. It never broaches the level of what I'd call "difficult" but I certainly did have Pokémon fainting a lot more than usual, so there's that.

I also can't tell you how much just adding simple side quests benefits a game like this. Even for the older generation Pokémon games, I always felt this aspect was something missing from the series, and I'm so glad to finally find one that leans into its JRPG origins. Not only does it offer more content to engage with, but allows the characters of this world to shine in their personalities, which they absolutely do. This has one of the best cast of characters any Pokémon game has ever had, and it was cute to see the little twists and nods they gave to them (many of them referencing future characters from the Diamond and Pearl games). Charm has seriously been lacking from the past couple of generations but I suppose it all went here instead.

Honestly, I'm just baffled. It's hard to believe Game Freak made something like this. Not from a technical perspective, of course; while I do like how a lot of this game looks, it's still rather simple overall, and some of the pop-in and draw distance problems can become genuinely annoying at times. But this game has vision! It has ideas! It has ambition! It has EFFORT! These are all things recent Pokémon games have lacked, but if they can make a game like this, it's obvious those traits exist within the people who make them. It's even more of a head-scratcher here, as Pokémon Legends: Arceus was made concurrently with the 9th generation Scarlet and Violet games, and yet this one answers every criticism I had following my playthrough of Violet! Did the two teams working on these titles never talk to each other? No one develops games like that anymore, and it shows why here.

Either way, this game rocks, and even someone as thoroughly jaded with this franchise as I am came around to it after initially discounting it when it first released. Pokémon Legends: Arceus feels like an extremely well-made GameCube game, and I say that with the highest respect. In fact, it feels like the kind of game Nintendo would have refused to localize 20 years ago. You almost don't feel like it's real when you're playing it. Whatever minor nitpicks I might have about my time with it (like the laborious inventory management), they ultimately don't amount to much. I can safely say I enjoyed this game and don't need to put some kind of caveat on that. Pokémon Legends: Arceus is proof that this series might still have some magic left in it after all.

Don't let the rating fool you; Pokemon Scarlet is a deeply flawed, frustrating experience that is dead set on sabotaging itself throughout its run time. It has earned four stars despite its best efforts, and in the hands of a competent studio the game would have easily been a five. Its only saving grace is a formula that is tailor made to psychologically satisfy people on the most base, primal level. Anything one's higher functions might appreciate or notice is woefully under-cooked.

I suppose the latter is the best place to start; what exactly doesn't work here? In a word: everything. The game's frame rate is extremely inconsistent. Whether in the over world, in a battle, in a cutscene, wherever, one will be dealing with varying degrees of sub-30 frames. This even causes an amount of desync with the audio in the cutscenes. Had the frame rate been locked to a low number, that would have been frustrating but mostly fine. Instead, the game oscillates wildly when determining which extremely low amount of FPS it wants to present at any given time thereby ensuring the player will never get used to it.

The speed of the game is another element that drags it down. The game is slow. Glacially, monumentally, horrifyingly slow. This mostly manifests in the battles, which seem shackled to an engine that predates most of the series's fan base. Any stat change in battle takes a couple of seconds to come across to the player. Any attack needs to have its animation play out. Status effects like poison or sleep add time to every turn when their effects are possibly the easiest to automate.

What's frustrating about the issue is that it had previously been solved. The ability to turn off all of these animations has been mysteriously removed. This is a vexing change as it presents literally no gain to the player at the cost of their agency. Put more simply: who wanted this? Who wanted to lose options? This one change likely adds more than an hour to the average player's time with the game.

I need to beleaguer this issue further: Not long into the game I caught a big crab guy. This guy's ability was that when he would get hit four of his stats would change. Rather than playing the stat change animation once for all four, or two times for both the positive and negative stat changes, it played it four times. Every time it got hit in battle! My ability to use my favorite guy was impacted by the 60 seconds of waiting he'd add to my fights. It quickly became apparent that the optimal strategy for playing Pokemon was to dick around on one's phone while the battle's various loading screens played themselves out.

Speaking of loading, for some reason there's a ton of that going on as well. Not the typical loading screen, but every action Pokemon take in battle has a one to two second bit of loading before it comes through. Even throwing a Pokeball has this issue. Nothing at all feels smooth in this game, and that weighs more heavily on the player the longer they play.

The dual release nature of the game is also a glaring problem. I don't know how Gamefreak has been enabled in doing this for years, but whatever, I bought this game too so I cannot complain. Still, it is a transparent way of gating content for dollars. The core conceit of the game, the reason it works at all, is the "catch them all" ethos. This just doesn't work when the player knows from the onset that several of their favorite guys aren't in the game so Gamefreak can sell marginally more units. It's an incredibly anti-consumer move that should be called out every release cycle.

The story of the game is also a fumble. The framing device for the proceedings is a school. The player character takes classes, bonds with their teachers, and picks up little sidequests from the school. Or, they would, if anyone knew that content was there. So much of this content is essentially hidden from the player, as they are never told it is there nor incentivized to explore the school and find it. I imagine most people completed their game with taking the final exams nor getting their bond with their teachers to the highest level. It's hard to categorize it as a throwaway when this school veneer is the loudest of the game's design. Your character can never change from their uniform yet they will almost never actually go to class? A missed opportunity for a more satisfying integration of the school elements with the larger game systems.

Adding to the frustration of all of these issues is that they were fixed. Pokemon Legends Arceus, a singular release that was solidly constructed, was a major step forward for the franchise. It was fresh, fun, and a new take on the same formula. Arceus was developed as Scarlet was coming together, so it's not shocking the Scarlet doesn't borrow anything from that game, but man does Scarlet feel like pure regression. Arceus's frame rate was fine. Battles were quick and smooth. It had no partner game that siphoned off content. Hell it didn't even have DLC. The time travel story, while not extremely satisfying, was thoroughly referenced through to the end. It was a rock solid experience that will surely be forgotten now that we can see the sales divide between it and Scarlet. Gamefreak had a perfect opportunity for evolution with their franchise, but unfortunately it looks like they're going to press 'B'.

So then, what saves Scarlet from being abject garbage? Well, it's a Pokemon game. The core conceit of exploring a world, catching guys, training guys to evolve, and bonding with a team is a fun one. If anything, Scarlet proves that formula is impossible to bomb. If anything, the formula is heightened by the open world, a change to the series (A change first seen in Arceus) that I quite enjoyed. That, plus the appearance of Pokemon in the open world rather than traditional tall grass, made hunting them down an enjoyable experience.

As always when I play these games, I completed my Pokedex, and unlike past games in the series this isn't a tedious endeavor. Only the holdover mistakes from ghosts of Christmas past rear their ugly heads: some Pokemon must be traded to evolve; others only appear in Violet. With 400 guys to find, doing so in an open world is a big upgrade from having to shuffle around tall grass and sit through encounter loading screens for hours on end.

Another system that benefits from the open world is the progression through the story, or stories. Pokemon Scarlet has three different campaign threads for the player to follow and complete at their leisure. All three of these were enjoyable on some level, though there is a clear ranking to the quality here. The Team Star battles come in last place, with the titan Pokemon hunt winning out. Still, the ability to complete these and there various stages in whatever order the player wishes is a level of freedom I truly was not expecting. It was a necessary step to follow through with the promise of open exploration, but I wouldn't have been surprised to see this bungled as well. Regardless, what we got is what works best for the conceit of the game, and this is probably what will stick with me most after finishing up with Scarlet.

It's hard to understate this. It was fun to leave the "first" gym battle for the last of my 18 events just so I could bully some bug Pokemon. It's fun to climb a mountain range you've never been to before only to fall off the other side and land on some new gym you weren't expecting. It's fun to make a plan and then have it get sidetracked because you got lost. I cannot possibly imagine a Pokemon game without this set up, at least not one in the mainline series. If anything sticks around from Scarlet, I hope this is it. Hopefully Gamefreak doesn't then remove the map feature for seemingly no reason.

The common discourse about Pokemon Scarlet is something along the lines of "Wow this game is buggy but I've having fun! Look at these wacky glitches!", which is an accurate sentiment, but it's also a dangerous one. This game is fun in spite of itself, and any amount of forgiveness levied simply because of enjoyment is an anti-consumer attitude. We should not accept games this broken. We should not overlook flaws that run this deep. This game is fun, yes, but it could have been so much more than it is right now. These "wacky" glitches actively detract from the experience, and in dunking on the game that should never be forgotten.

Gamefreak has continuously been enabled by Pokemon. People are psychologically primed to enjoy collecting. The Pokemon themselves are often designed by committee to appeal to the most people as possible. The studio does not have to try to have a hit with these elements, and it's difficult to say that they were trying with Scarlet. Regardless of the game's quality, that feeling pervades the experience: nobody cared when making this. They shipped a broken, chugging game and just didn't care because it would make a billion dollars anyway. And it did.

It's up to all of us to personally decide how we feel about this arrangement. I knowingly bought the game so I'm a culpable party, but voicing dissatisfaction is important. Enjoying a flawed, janky experience is fine too should one do it knowingly. But the "Don't care; had fun" sentiment that seems so popular is a destructive one, and the destruction wrought is on this franchise.

I'm done.

I'm done playing you Sonic. I'm bored. You're boring me.
You know, I can forgive a technical mess. I think it's quite frankly absurd that this is the most broken major release of a video game since Cyberpunk 2077 and if this was any other franchise we'd be talking about it in the breath as that game's disastrous launch. But at the same time, I'm the guy who likes Pokemon Scarlet/Violet. I think it's perfectly fine to enjoy a game even in spite of its overwhelming issues. I think it's important you acknowledge those issues, which a large portion of the Sonic fanbase refuses to, but it's entirely possible to see the good through the bad and find enjoyment in something so deeply flawed.

I'm much, MUCH less forgiving of a game that bores me, especially one that finally moved in the direction I had always hoped it would, only to massively drop the ball in the process. This game should have been a slam dunk in spite of Sonic Team's incompetence, and that it isn't means I'm going to be immensely harsh in my review of it. I really had to force myself to see this through to the end, something I once thought impossible for a franchise I truly loved. New Sonic games were an event for me. Something I looked forward to years in advance. But now I'm struggling to finish them. This was that uninteresting to me. It speaks volumes.

Fuck you Ed Sheeran.

Hey guys- I don't normally use this website, but I took some time to read your reviews and a lot of them are written how Mule used to post. Remember that overly long and stupidly complex sentence structure he would use? I'm seeing that way too much, and your reviews tend to be a real pain to read.

I'm not saying you have to publish sarcastic shitpost reviews. If you're writing an in-depth review of the game, that's great. But the reviews can be better.

Reread your reviews before posting them and think to yourself: can I get to the point more concisely? Ultimately your goal should be to make your sentences less wordy. Try practicing by typing a section of your review in Twitter and see if you can make it fit the character limit.

Doing all this will make your points pop and your arguments easier to follow. It will greatly improve your reviews, and your perspective/voice will become stronger.