Cute and relaxing!! And very strange. It has the most melancholic main menu music I've ever heard in a game. It's so cute and I love making a little world for dinosaurs and other animals to live in. And then you just watch millions years pass by while extremely melancholic music plays, with some of them facing extinction and some new creatures popping up with a colourful "HAPPY BIRTHDAY!" message. Haha. It's such a weird mix of tone, I like it. And then you play the four main scenarios and all of them have endings that results in what is essentially an existential crisis? This game has been played by like 5 people in the world so I haven't even been able to find out if there are "good" endings to these scenarios, maybe I'll never know. But it's fun!
I do wish the main scenarios followed one continuous storyline, and maybe had other end goals other than "create humans" because that meant that most of these scenarios played the same in the 2nd half. But the mini challenges have different goals and restrictions which is nice!

Anyway I think more people should play this game because 1) it's fun 2) we have to figure out if the main character can have a happy ending or is doomed to live as a stranger in a strange land for the rest of their life

This is cool and I think it could be an interesting game to really sink your teeth into, but it will have to wait for me. I saw so many people (and even the game itself, iirc?) saying that the game mechanics are supposed to be hidden and obscure, that figuring out everything for yourself is the joy of the game, that you absolutely should NOT look up anything online -- but after a fun start and then hours and hours and hours of just doing the same thing over and over without progressing or understanding what I was doing/was supposed to do, I finally looked up some base mechanics which REALLY improved the experience for me. Unfortunately it was too little too late, and I have to put it away for the time being until I find it in me to play it again. So many hours on this and I haven't even done any rituals yet! But I do like the feel of it so I'll probably return to it, and possibly give it a higher score if I enjoy it.

I do love me some mysterious and unknowable games, but for me this was just a little too much - figuring things out is fun, but if you're going that route I think you need to give your players at least enough information to get things rolling, especially when your game has this level of complexity to it. I feel like it's extra important if your game uses one single mechanic, in this case placing cards, because if a player (me) doesn't understand that one mechanic then they don't understand how to play the game at all.
Maybe my brain is just too small, but I think I would have a much greater experience with this overall if the game wasn't so intent on not telling me its most basic gameplay elements - or at least, if I wasn't discouraged from looking up tips online. Those last hours I played after actually learning basic gameplay were much more fun than the 7-10 hours or so that came before it.

(Also I played the switch version and feel robbed, the card table looks MUCH cooler on PC. Too bad playing games on my desktop computer is the bane of my existence)

This is so cute and charming. The sprites and environments are so pretty, they really pushed the GBC graphics to the limit! I especially adored the love that went into the fish sprites. The game's dialogue is nonsensical at times in a way I find really funny. Pupil of the Raft Master, how cool you are.

Also not to be cranky but when people call older games like these "obtuse" and "confusing" I just wanna shake their shoulders (lovingly) and say READ THE MANUALS. Pretty much all old games had manuals and you were expected to read them to learn the gameplay, not through in-game tutorials and such. Legend of the River King's manual has maps to ALL its areas (save for a small bonus one) and shows ALL the spots where you can catch different kinds of fish. It also shows and describes almost all of the games' items, rods, buildings, how you fish and such. Sometimes old games aren't confusing, you're just missing critical information that you're supposed to have access to. Pretty much all old game manuals can be found online so use them!!

The most confusing part for me was getting the wind chime, and since it was the only thing i couldn't understand even with a manual I looked it up online and stumbled into a nigh incomprehensible section of a gamefaqs guide from '99 that (after trying to make sense of it for a few minutes) managed to help me. I feel like the '99 gamefaqs guide only heightened the entire vibe of my Legend of the River King playthrough, so thank you Keith (the main writer's fake cousin(??)) who wrote the part of the guide I used. Fake cousin of the Gamefaqs Writer, how cool you are.

I feel bad giving it a lower score when I was so obsessed with this game at the start, but after the first 10 maps or so it all started to feel the same, with no variations in mechanics. The maps themselves change, but they all look fairly similar and have exactly the same elements — stations, lines and tunnels. This super minimalistic approach to gameplay has its appeal of course! But for me personally, I would've wanted something just a little more to make the maps feel different from each other. But still, I quite liked this little game, and I loved it during the first 2-3 hours or so! Don't be like me and set out with a goal to clear all the maps, take things slow and do a map now and then and I think you'll have a pretty good time!

As someone who has only played the very first Ace Attorney game before, this kind of blew me away. The presentation is so fantastic, the music is absolutely amazing and while I usually prefer 2D sprites to 3D models in games like these, the 3D models were so expressive and full of life! Very cool. The story in this engaged me with its longer sort of storytelling rather than in AA1 where the stories were (mostly) contained to their episodic formats. And while TGAA was plenty serious and dramatic, it was also funny and delightful. The game has a few issues for me, mostly contained to ch.4, but on the whole I had a very cozy and fun experience with this. Chapter 3 is a masterpiece, do not @ me it just is.

This gets 4 stars because I can't give it 4¼. But just imagine it's somewhere between 4 and 4½ stars.
EDIT: Okay it's been a couple of days and i am listening to the OST constantly and can't stop thinking about this game and the few problems I had with it feels like barely anything in comparison to how much I enjoyed it, so congrats TGAA1 here are your 4½ stars

One of those games that I, ever since its release back in 2010, thought "I need to play that sometime!" about. It only took some 13-14 years (time is not real).

It feels like this was one of the Iconic Indie Games of that era and that i saw sceenshots of it everywhere, and it has (had?) very unique and quite beautiful graphics, so it's no wonder people talked about it. The indie scene wasn't as big as it is now and there weren't really a lot of games that looked like this. I appreciate this game for what it brought to the table in 2010, and I had a good time with it :) I just think that it would impress me more if i played it when it was new, since the uniqueness of Limbo doesn't feel quite as unique in 2024. Which is fine! The graphics are still as beautiful now as back then.
But I do think that the gameplay and puzzles, while fun enough, are just okay, and the "atmospheric silent storytelling" of this type has been done so often now that it doesn't really create the Wow factor that it might have done back in the day (I'm sorry Limbo! I know you were one of the first!).

But yeah definitely give it a try if you're curious about it! I'm glad I did, it was nice to finally play this piece of Indie Video Game History (TM). It has beautiful graphics and some fun puzzles (and spiders!). Grab it at a sale sometime if you feel like it! :^D





(the spider should have been in more parts of the game)

I wish I was cool and had this as my favourite Kirby game but unfortunately i just think it's pretty fun. On the other hand that's not bad either!!
Some great ideas are presented here which I like a lot (Big sprawling map with connecting points!! Focus on exploring!! Beautiful areas!!), but the way you traverse the map is just a bit too clunky for me to feel that pure Joy of Exploring (TM). And with "clunky" i don't mean the movement physics, which are great by the way, but stuff like one-way doors and how easy it is to lose an ability you need to open a new path somewhere, which sometimes means you have to redo several rooms again just to get back to that point. It can make exploring frustrating rather than satisfyingly challenging (imo of course) which I really think is a drawback in a game that's all about exploring a big map. The first few hours was me just running through the same areas over and over, absolutely confused, haha! But that might tell you more about my lack of skills rather than the game itself.

Anyway it feels like I've only complained but I really did like this a lot, especially in the latter half of the game when I really got the hang of things!! I'd still recommend this game, especially for Kirby fans. It's a very cool experience! Also Cupid Kirby is the second best Kirby skill design in the entire franchise (number one is Fridge Kirby from 64). Also this game gave us the Dark Meta Knight boss theme so I am forever in its debt (even though he's a pushover so you only hear it for 7 seconds. It's okay DMK I'll still be your friend).

I haven't played this for such a long time now that i think i will just have to give it a rating now and come back to it in like 2 years or something. Sorry.

This isn't actually a 2½ game!! It's technically a good & enjoyable & beautiful game. But for me it was pretty disappointing, which is why it gets a lower score. The starting area didn't vibe with me! It took forever to get the paraglider so i could explore properly! The sky islands were such a small part of the game! The main map was just botw's map with some differences! Building vehicles and devices didn't interest me! The story didn't really grab me either. I hate being one of those "lol totk is just botw dlc" people, but...... i mean........

All I'm saying is that the other direct Sequels i like in the series (Majora's Mask, A Link Between Worlds) had such huge differences from their predecessors that they really felt like new experiences. What I would have liked for totk would be like, either to move the main gameplay to a whole new area (the sky would be my first choice, but another region of the world would be cool as well) or, if they wanted to keep the same main map, put it in a whole other time period with new characters (like albw!), so you don't have to be constrained by "botw's landscape looked like this, so we can't change it TOO much". In my opinion (and yes this is subjective of course!), totk is just too much like botw for me to be able to enjoy it on its own merits. And what i liked in botw was the freedom and excitement in exploring this completely new, giant map, and the minimal story worked great for that.
Maybe it's no coincidence that what i liked most in totk was exploring the completely new wells (my beloved wells) and running around ignoring the story & being a nature photographer (which also has its limits with how little photos you can hold. Throw me a bone here nintendo)

I really wanted to love totk! I felt like i was living in some sort of bizarro dimension when comparing my feelings to everyone and everything who claimed that this was the best game ever created. And I'm sure that's true for those people! But for me it was just a bit disappointing.

Now that I've written out my ambivalent feelings on totk, watch me replay this in 2 years and giving it five stars for some reason i do not yet know of

i do like me some vaguely ps1-like fishes and musical numbers

also this game made me feel ill. not at all because of the gorey fish stuff, it was something about the camera that made me motion sick, which usually only happens when i play first person view-games. but for some reason this and mario kart 64 invokes that motion sickness in me as well.
anyway i liked when you get to roll around in a popcorn in the expansion

real winners go UP