Full disclosure: Watched a full let's play, did not play myself, but it doesn't seem like it matters considering you don't get to actually choose in the majority of the places where dialogue options show up. In terms of technical shit, this is a train wreck, terrible persective on the art all over, assets loading in incorrectly, late or not at all, failing rhythm sections have no consequences, audio clipping, abrupt audio cutoffs, audio failing to load in at all, almost every technical aspect of this game is flawed in some way. I liked the soundtrack overall though it's not anything I feel compelled to revisit on its own. Some of the character designs are cute but most have atrocious perspective and animation errors as previously mentioned.
None of that is super important for a game like this though, what really matters is the writing, right? Unfortunately that too was underwhelming for me. I can see how some people could really connect with something with this tone though. I had the same sort of reaction to this as Night in the Woods, where I get why this setting and tone could really gel with some people, but for me personally, I just don't.

This game is both an eyesore and has some of the worst dialogue in any game I have played, and on top of that, there is SO MUCH dialogue. The biggest thing that puts this over Platinum for me is that this game is almost two times faster in almost every way. The battles, dialogue, movement, all of it is blissfully quick, you can mash through the inane, repetitive dialogue so fast and the battles are not an absolute slog like Platinum and HeartGold were. This game has a lot of issues, but I certainly enjoyed it far more than gen 4, which was difficult to even finish. I will be playing Black 2 next, which I have heard good things about, though I do not have high hopes that it will be much of an improvement over this.

I generally do not play hacks or fangames, but I made an exception for this. Really the only thing that holds this back from being as good as Zero Mission for me is a few aesthetic things like the higher-level Metroids being a bit too detailed compared to other assets. This is leagues better than the official Return of Samus on 3DS, which I have a pretty strong dislike for. I can't stand how much that game really wants to make Samus a flashy badass action game hero as opposed to the the traditional, more subdued style of previous Metroid games.

Despite being a remake of my favorite Pokemon games, I think I like these games less than Platinum overall. I find gens 4 and 5 quite ugly, I generally dislike the remixes and I don't like any of the additional dialogue HG/SS added, of which there is quite a bit. In addition to this, HG/SS made the menus significantly less convenient than DPPt, which was one of the best things about gen 4 previously. The idea was seemingly to just put all the menus on the touch screen, but the console has 2 screens, which DPPt utilized far better. The PC box system in particular was absolutely butchered when all they had to do was copy what they already had from DPPt. The real kicker is, despite all the comparison to DPPt, I don't even really like those games in the first place, they were the games that made me give up on Pokemon. Everything about these games just makes me wish I was playing the original GSC instead.

I didn't dislike this as much as I did when I was younger, but the parts that are bad seemed even worse.
Really what saves this game for me is the Battle Frontier and the music, both of which are excellent.
Visually this is a pretty notable step down from gen 3 visually, which is pretty sad considering the gen 3 games do not look good for GBA games. So many Pokemon sprites just look off, the 3D and scaling look awful on such a low-resolution screen, making the sprites jitter around when they move, and this generation has the weakest set of new Pokemon designs of any generation in my opinion. There are a handful of good designs, but it is very highly outweighed by some of the all-time worst Pokemon designs like Acreus, Heatran and the lake trio.
I can excuse the visuals much more than I can excuse the atrocious, repetitive dialogue from the NPCs in this game. Gen 3 already was pushing how much I could tolerate the dialogue with the Team Magma/Aqua stuff, but this is way too much. I like games with a lot of dialogue, some of them like Summon Night Swordcraft Story 2 are among my favorite games, but the difference there is that the dialogue is actually good. This generation represents the point at which Pokemon lore was irreparably damaged, and my feelings toward it are very similar to my feelings about what Dark Souls 3 did to Dark Souls 1. Fleshing out a world to the point where absolutely every mysterious facet has been explored and explained robs players of the ability to engage with the world with theories or their imaginations. It's restrictive, it's boring, and Pokemon quite frankly didn't have that much going on to begin with. Trying to compensate for ironing out the mystery by adding like 14 new legendary Pokemon just feels like a slap in the face. When nearly 15% of the new Pokemon are legendaries, it makes the concept of legendary Pokemon a lot less special.
This was where I stopped playing Pokemon for over a decade because of how much I disliked it, but I am on a mission to play every mainline Pokemon game, and if this game is beloved by newer generation Pokemon fans, I am dreading what is coming next.

I was just a spectator/casual player of this game for over 2 decades, but after just a month of playing this game seriously, I now have a shitty Marth that loses 1-2 at weeklies. This game is a blast even when I lose because even when I get bodied by a sweaty Falco player with years more experience than myself, I still get to see some sick combos and see what I too can achieve someday.
Find your local Melee Discord server, go to some events, play friendlies, play online with Slippi and make new friends. This community is fantastic and super inviting, especially since Melee players tend to be a bit older than Ultimate players, which generally means more maturity and a less cliquey community.

I understand why so many people enjoy Dark Souls 2, Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring, but DS3 represents the point where I no longer enjoyed FromSoftware's Souls games. They fill me with a profound feeling of melancholy, a sadness over how tremendous the missed potential was for this series. The aspects I enjoyed in Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1 continue to be diluted as they release new Souls games, in favor of prioritizing elements that were never that important to my enjoyment. The challenging and cinematic boss fights are not what made me enjoy Dark Souls, it was the story, the interconnected world and the way the retro-inspired game design.
At this point I hoped FromSoftware would stop making games like this because they just kept doubling down on design choices that I disliked, and I figured Sekiro would usher in a new era of FromSoftware, that they would move on from this style, but Elden Ring was more of the same. It course-corrected some things, but continued to double down in other areas, to the point where I don't think I will play the next game they do in this style, and I am considering not even playing the Elden Ring DLC.

There was something magical about games back when I was young and didn't understand how they worked, didn't understand their limitations. Back when I thought there would be secret areas out of bounds, behind doors you couldn't open, back when I convinced myself that games just went on forever if you could just run fast enough to break through the walls in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, walk through walls in Pokemon Gold to find Celebi, or go underneath Ganon's castle to find the Triforce in Ocarina if Time. I feel like retro game design, and how so little was explained to the player in-game, fostered that imagination in me, and I have been searching for games that spark that same kind of intrigue, and that is the key thing that made Dark Souls so special to me.
No other game has given me that feeling of childlike wonder so strongly before, and it's a big part of what makes me dislike the later Souls games and Elden Ring in comparison. The feeling of being completely lost and slowly trying to figure out how things like covenants worked, why I would only get invaded sometimes, what a Gravelord is, what that weird white circle that looks like the lock-on icon is, what the little crab phantom I only saw once was, all completely blind, no guides or prior knowledge of the game, took me back to a state of mind which I never thought I could return to again. The slow pace, obtuse mechanics and carefully curated snippets of story make this game ironically feel magnitudes more grand than a game like Elden Ring to me.

I very rarely use the term "overrated", as it is not a substantive critique, but it very much fits this game. This game was hyped up to me by so many people that I was expecting this to be the best Zelda game by a significant margin, they truly circlejerked this game until they ripped the skin. The reputation of this game likely damaged my perception of this game somewhat, if it hadn't had so many people telling me how it was kino, the best Zelda, and one of the best games of all time, I may not have felt such disappointment. I definitely did enjoy many aspects of it, there were some very fun dungeons, I loved the aesthetic, and I loved the trading sidequest, but the later dungeons especially were a slog for me.