Full analysis of the game on my YT if you'd like to support my efforts there!

The Misadventures of Tron Bonne is a game with a lot of charm and fun times but is quite a bit of a hollow feeling mess in ways as well.

Most times games like this for me can skate by on charm and their narratives if they're good or interesting enough but for me while that tended to work fairly well for me in Mega Man Legends with the way it tends to balance everything it has going on, here everything feels disconnected and disjointed, something about it didn't click for me in the same way even if I still enjoyed aspects of it.

The mission variety is there but the combat still feels like a bit of a mess, the lock on is sporadic, controlling the Gustaff can feel stiff, the enemy placement and types you fight do tend to feel a lot better at least which is nice.

Now though there's other parts to this whole shebang that tries to spice things up which I respect. There's puzzle levels which feel really great actually. Never thought I'd fuck with it but trying to find the best route to get the crate to the ship genuinely felt satisfying even when I got stumped on one or another.

The dungeon crawly segments are a fun idea with really fun character interactions but the gameplay itself is severly hollow and mad boring just watching your servbots essentially do everything for you, anytime combat happened I was so fuckin bored, I would've actually been way more into it if they went all in with it and just made it turn based or something! I just feel like there had to be a better way and more of a genuine incentive to level up your little guys.

Then there's animal abduction missions which just kinda feel like shit to play to me. Trying to keep your servbots on the animals, trying to make sure they don't keep running away from you when you are in a MECH that can LIFT things just feels real weird! Also the whole thing being a glorified escort mission feels real bad, not a fan!

The servbot management is cute, there's fun interactions and fun little ideas there but honestly it just kinda felt like it didn't matter at all. Managing these little guys felt largerly unnecessary outside of one or two things (bringing a brainy servbot to the puzzle missions in order to get actual hints is probably my favorite thing). It's good for upgrading the Gustaff and getting upgrades for it, though the materials you get for upgrading it I'm pretty sure are mandatory anyway so idk man. But everything else again while cute felt so disconnected from the actual missions and anything I was actually doing that I just didn't feel like it added anything majorly to the whole of this experience. Honestly it just made me wanna play Peace Walker again and experience the variety and structure and replayability that game offered. Ya can't even replay missions here without restarting the entire game which idk man.

The side characters here are great, loved interacting with pretty much all of them and learning a little more about the world but something about it felt like it was lacking that oomph that Legends had, like some 3rd piece was missing. Maybe that ominous mystery Legends was constantly rocking?

I feel like there's good ways they could've expanded upon this but for what it is it's like fine. I enjoyed myself, it wasn't bad or anything but after how fuckin good Legends was it's hard to hop into this honestly.

I wanna smooch Glyde and cosplay as Roxette.

This game kinda means the world to me.

3 by extension does too but there's something in that cold mysterious almost endless seeming hell walk that Aqua is on that really sits in my spirit, especially more around the holidays where I feel like my depression and anxiety can end up spiking quite a bit.

Cause I would frankly say that this whole short journey is about depression. This is a story about feeling like a complete and total failure. It's about feeling like you have no one, constantly grasping for some kind of grand connection but not being able to tangibly hold onto anything really around you, constantly doubting the reality you once could trust. Your foundation is shaky, you're rocky, you're falling apart at the seams but you still keep walking because what else are you supposed to do?

Your world has been stripped from you, everyone you once knew is gone or lost, all you can do is keep moving and keep pushing on, hoping to find some way out of the hole in your soul.

Creeping doubt, self destruction, pain, it's all constantly there. The way Aqua's self doubt and own self destruction is physically manifested especially clicks with me. Constant situation after situation, exhausted but unable to truly rest, looking for any rescue, any break.

It's rough out there.

I used to be waaaaay more cold on this game quite honestly.

I played it all the way back on the 3DS and could not finish it cause it caused really bad hand cramps for me (do your wrist stretches everybody) to the point where I could play it in fairly small bursts until I eventually gave up because I just wasn't enjoying myself all that much with it.

So I waited for a remaster or cutscene compilation given the remasters steadily coming out at the time, plus 0.2 cause like hot DAMN that shit is fire I cannot wait to write about that one.

So eventually I picked up the 2.8 collection but didn't really finally get around to it until KH3 was almost out which in hindsight was kind of a stupid decision. I was rushing the first real playthrough of this game so that I'd be ready and prepped for 3. I feel like I wasn't quite the most charitable to this game in my excitement and overall more direct want of 3 which sucks but sometimes ya get caught up in the moment ya know!

Something about this game didn't really click into place for me at the time, everything with Sora annoyed me initially, I had at the time felt like the game meandered a bit too much, I didn't really love the worlds, the one thing I DID majorly love was the ending mainly because of how much it goes about setting up for 3.

So going into this I had my worries and concerns about it given the last time though I was still open to trying to really give it that second look and I'm really glad I did especially after playing 3+ReMind.

Dream Drop Distance is such an improvement over Birth By Sleep from a gameplay standpoint that it's kinda fuckin wild that this is seemingly from the same team. They clearly learned a loooot of really good lessons from developing that game and its systems. The movement and feel of the game feels a lot faster and looser, the addition of flowmotion as a system has ya bouncing and zooming around levels like nobodies business, the way it flows into the combat and meshes with how you tangibly interact with the game even brings back a tiny bit of that 1 style exploration and curiosity of its landscapes in my eyes though not to the full degree it could. Honestly I think 3 does that better but again still not to the 3D platformer experimental way that 1 specifically did it.

Dream Eaters are such a good choice for both allies and enemies here. They cute, they hunger, they attack, they heal, they defend. They're really cool and I like them! I like that you can name them whatever ya want and really make them your own. KhimarisSon was a real one and got me through many a battle by the end.

The level scaling this time works pretty well as the game goes on, at no point did I ever feel like I was behind after finishing a location, I felt like the game gave me more than enough in each world to do in terms of battles that by the end I felt properly leveled and ready for whatever was going to pop up next.

The real only gameplay downsides are that some bosses still have the Birth By Sleep problem of just not being able to get hitstunned or any kind of real major knockback at points, making you essentially wait for your turn to do anything before waiting 5 minutes for your next swing which is a bit lame! I know this problem is fixed in 3 at least but it was still pretty annoying to deal with and I feel like this problem more-so only majorly popped up near the end but it was absolutely still there in a way that annoyed.

As for the narrative, I dig the dual split drop in style of the entire thing. This dual perspective seemingly parallel world perspective of both Sora and Riku's adventure. I remember the first time I played through this I was confused on how exactly the world split stuff works even though the game quite literally tells you multiple times so that was on me!

I also used to think that they made Sora WAY too dumb in this game for his own good and to at least be fair to that, he still kinda is for like the first half of the game. I feel like while Sora has always been a real one who takes to other people really easily, there are multiple times here where he almost feels like a parody of himself at points. Maybe that's supposed to play into something of the dream logic kinda weird vibes going on but idk it felt too off in a way that felt wrong at points. Tron onwards though I feel like that problem goes away for the most part at least which I was thankful for.

Sora is dealing with an insecurity about his connections with others that has been deep in there but hasn't really been dug out until now. This tends to be reflected within all the worlds in some capacity ESPECIALLY TRON but especially given that most of the worlds are about some kind of outcast trying their best to connect with others in some kinda way, trying to get some kinda recognition or some kind of value. The pain that others in his life are facing and how much he wants to help them from having to feel any of that pain or despair. It's real good!

Riku's story is a continuation of his arc from the other games, his insecurities around falling to the darkness and the fear it inspires, his want to keep distance out of fear but others not letting him, him learning to rely on others and especially the one he looks up to the most, him choosing to fight on despite the deepest despair he could possibly fall into, seeing others fall prey to similar situations that ailed him and going out of his way to stop them from going through the same. This game has him really look in a mirror again and really dig through a lot of what he's done and was manipulated to do again and really find that groove within himself.

There's a really good moment near the end that's a callback to 1's beginning questionnaire with him and I really think it's a perfect tail end to his entire story within this game and all the games that led up to this point. I think Riku's half of the story is the best part of the game and that while Sora's half is also very important, he's the real protagonist of this particular story with everything that it's doing by the end especially.

If I had any major story complaint, it's that some of the world's (MAINLY TRON) sometimes don't give Riku much of anything which is a bit strange. Tron especially feeling like Riku's section gives more to the movie while Riku kinda hangs around which is a bummer and a bit of a problem with 1 or 2 worlds in 3's case.

Also I just wanna say, the end of this game is absolutely fuckin BONKERS dude, like you've probably seen some shit floating around from it at this point, the reveals, the setup for 3, mickey mouse getting slammed against a pillar like a DBZ fight, it's all here.

Things setup all the way in the first game are reintegrated in order to be paid off or used in a completely new way, characters reveal themselves, new mysteries are setup, seeds are planted, it's so fuckin cool, I genuinely think the end of this game narratively is up there with KH2's in just how much it throws at you and how much it pays off by the end. It's fuckin rad as hell.

Also we wanna talk banger fuckin music. Holy F U C K they brought it hard yet again. That fuckin violin man. An absolute treat of the senses from beginning to end, I really gotta make an OST ranking list for this series on here at some point. 2, 3, DDD and BBS are all a bit tied though so I dunno lol.

This is my constant reminder that I finally need to play The World Ends With You sometime I love the cast here.

Played with Appreciations and Weatherby

I have a lot of memories with Mario Party when I was a kid. I'm sure I played 3 and 4 somewhere for some reason but most of my core partyin memories lie with Mario Party 6 and 7. I would boot em up in between a fresh sesh of Dance Dance Revolution Mario Mix and trying to perfect Always Smiling cause that shit is fuckin FIRE. I would play with the AI cause I didn't really have many who wanted to play party games like this with me and even though those motherfuckers cheated I still had a time with them.

As I've grown older though I tend not to find it that fun to go back to these games in the same way. Dealing with cheating AI that will absolutely dunk on you alone just sounds frustrating in a way that kid me could deal with but the me now just doesn't have the time or patience for.

Now what I do have time for is making friends and having experiences though! When played with friends and especially as like something to bond over it's such a fuckin funny experience. Bowser Jr, that son of a bitch, steamrolling all of us in the first game without any effort, causing us each subsequent game to ignore our goofy deceptions and instead go all in on making sure that little bastard doesn't win. It was so funny the lengths to which we would go to make sure Bowser Jr would lose (or at least not get 1st) while doing small things here and there to benefit ourselves.

The mini-games themselves causing even more laughter as a good chunk of them are absolutely based on luck and shit completely out of your control, which in a way is the fun of a chaotic board game, but can be frustrating when the game can end up being "hey asshole hope ya get first in the turn order/hope your opponents can't read or you lose".

We had so many funny things happen constantly, the amount of times it was Toad Time was pretty funny, the amount of times Bowser Jr was denied anything had me dying, the Board Loop strat being deployed, the happening spaces completely keeping me from doing anything constantly. It all adds to this very funny and very chaotic experience that is Mario Party.

So I know it's kinda weird that in spite of all of that and the clear fun I did have in spite of the actual game itself I'm giving this such a low score. The real answer to that is that I would never play this again on my own really, but for something really comfy like a friend hangout that ain't too serious it's a really funny time and a pretty solid way to get to know people you've been wanting to get to know for a bit.

Anyway, fuck Bowser Jr. If I see Bowser Jr in the streets it's on sight.