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.

Man, playing this again as an adult was a lot less fun than it was when I was younger. Some bosses were still really fun, but a far larger chunk of my time was spent being in a really bad mood. I love this game's story and atmosphere, but actually playing the game is not fun the majority of the time for me. I think my mental health may have played a part in me not enjoying this quite as much though, I have been dealing with a herniated disc for 3 months and it's preventing me from doing a lot of things I enjoy, it's been really wearing at me, and I think a game that really tests your patience is not what I needed right now.

Truly baffled as to why this was recommended to me so highly. I love the other GBA FE games, as well as Tellius and FE4, and I heard so many people gas this game up and recommend it as the peak of this era of FE. On the contrary, this is my least favorite FE game that I have played. Painfully bland characters, mediocre maps, absurd requirements for actually fighting the final boss, horrible ambush reinforcements and worst of all are the bosses. Too many instances of bosses with 30+ crit rates, making them effectively a coin flip at the end of the chapter. Having your own coin flip to combat them with Rutger is very little consolation, I had to reset at the very end of a chapter due to the boss getting a lucky crit too many times. Just obnoxious while offering nothing to bring me back to it over another FE game. Do not play this on original hardware like I did, at least not on a first playthrough, because this game is so full of garbage, unfair bullshit you could never properly prepare for without prior knowledge of the game, forcing you to reset. Play on an emulator and savestate every turn. I am not joking, it is truly cruel. The visuals are all that saves this from being lower, as a GBA FE game, it is full of gorgeous animations and character designs, and deserves credit for being the basis upon which the other GBA FE games built off of/reused.

Shocked how much I enjoyed this game after how put off I was by everything I saw before the game's launch. The gameplay and mechanics are strong enough to offset my issues with this game, of which there are many. I do not like the aesthetics, the story, or the characters, but that doesn't matter as much as how great the maps and mechanics are. I will praise this game's score as well, it's not on the same level as 3 Houses was (few games are), but this game definitely contains its fair share of solid tracks.

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.

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.

Great combat just like the previous game, but falls behind in a few places. The early game feels extremely un-polished with cutscenes featuring almost no SFX or music, the main antagonist is uninteresting and it has even more tedious things to grind in the postgame than Xenoblade 2. Where this game shines is the character writing, combat and the score. The main cast is a dramatic improvement over the last game, making Xenoblade 2 look a bit like a black sheep in comparison to the rest of the Xeno games, where many of the main characters were reduced to tropes and the characters who had room for depth were given little to no screen time. In spite of all this, the DLC, which adds a very replayable roguelike mode as well as a massive story expansion, elevates this game to a masterpiece in my opinion. The final DLC alone is some of the most fun I have ever had in an RPG, I found myself nearly completing it 100% before getting to the ending just because I was having so much fun. Xenoblade 2 may have felt a bit like a black sheep if it weren't for its DLC which elevated it to an excellent game, but this game's DLC elevated a great game into something truly phenomenal.

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.

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'm glad so many people liked it, but the more I think about this game, the more I remember how much of my time was spent not having fun. I wanted to like this game, I wanted to be on the hype train with everyone else, I wanted this to be what Dark Souls 2 and 3 weren't and actually make me enjoy a Souls-style game as I did with Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 1 and Bloodborne, but it just doesn't do it for me. Perhaps the DLC will change my feelings toward it, but as a total package, only the first 10-20 hours were truly fun for me, and I regret how much time I spent trying to enjoy this game instead of just accepting my feelings and stepping away after the first playthrough.