Interesting. Frequently, feels more like a puzzle game than an actual platformer: no run button, no momentum, no tough jumps. Instead, getting through every level revolves around picking up on a series of little stage-specific tricks. Take the bosses for example- Ristar's extremely slow movement means 90% of the challenge is figuring out how to avoid their attacks, and the remaining 10% is execution, which seems to be the exact inverse ratio from pretty much every other platformer ever. The focus on learning rather than motor skill makes it nearly impossible to fail a section that you've already beaten, which, combined with the game's short length overall, means that redoing levels after a game over is an absolute breeze, even if you lose your last life on the final boss. The tradeoff here is that, aside from each stage's bonus area, it doesn't feel like there's much to strive for on repeat runs. There is a scoring system, but, from what I gather, it mostly consists of bonking your head on walls at random and hoping they drop gems, which doesn't much interest me personally. I vastly prefer the Sonic or Mario approach where you can feel yourself completing each portion of the game faster or more adeptly each time. But it's hard to argue against its design philosophy- having to pay close attention to the details of your surroundings rather than running past them as speedily as possible- as a vehicle for embracing the Genesis's bouncy, stylish presentation; six-and-a-half bite-sized worlds and every single one is memorable. Even if not my cup of tea personally, it's pretty easy to see why this one is among the more fondly remembered games on the system.

The "New" was only ever entirely literal: disappointingly, that subseries was essentially a Mario highlight reel rather than anything actually new. Of course, novelty isn't tantamount to quality, but it often feels like Nintendo's only strength as a developer in the modern age is their willingness to experiment. We'll never see another first-party Nintendo game that's not painfully easy and overtutorialized, or one that pushes its mechanics and is at all willing to punish you, or even one that feels mysterious, but buy a Nintendo console and you'll still always end up with a handful of exclusives that are at least fresh conceptually. Just... without "Mario" in any of their titles. Galaxy is far from my favorite Mario game, but it's the most recent one that actually felt like something new, which is concerning considering that it released when most of this site's userbase was still in diapers. We're in the mid 2020s now and traditional, lives-and-continues-based 2D platformers are basically dead and buried, but here comes Super Mario Bros. Wonder with what seems to be a singular, concentrated effort to be new and not just New. You can turn into an elephant in this one!

Unfortunately, though, the elephant powerup is even more emblematic of the entire game than anyone could've anticipated. It looks completely unique to Mario, and, I guess, technically, it is, as he's never had an upgrade that requires him to reload his projectiles before, but does it actually change the gameplay in any meaningful capacity? No. It's just another way to break blocks and attack enemies horizontally. The whole game is preoccupied with appearing new instead of actually being new, and, I mean, it succeeded in this regard, considering I actually bought it after skipping both New Super Mario Bros. U and Bowser's Fury. Wonder flowers feel less like a central gameplay hook and more like short bonus sections that are part of already minuscule levels. The only way they were ever gonna work from a mechanical perspective was if they all happened during high-pressure situations and forced you to adapt to unpredictable twists on the fly (although that would just be a rehash of Wario Land 4) and the only way they were ever gonna work from a spectacle perspective was if they actually went all in. For every wonder section that genuinely took me by surprise- switching the point-of-view to top-down or putting me in outer space or making Mario really, really tall- there'd be five that would just turn the level into an autoscroller, or just make the enemies bigger, or just move the geometry around more than usual. Too often, it's weird in the same way that Mario Land 2 is weird: visually, and that's it. Ultimately, it's far prettier than the New Super Mario Bros. games, but it's no less bland.

And outside of the wonder sections, there really just isn’t all that much to talk about. The badge system makes Mario’s moveset loose and flexible akin to something like Yoshi’s Island, but it’s missing the level variety and mechanical experimentation that made that game work. A few stages have bonus exits, but they lack any of Super Mario World’s pseudo-puzzle solving or sense of mystery. What’s left? The fact that it has a handful of decent stage-specific mechanics? (All of the other New games do, too.) Those one-screen puzzle levels? (Didn’t care for them in Mario Maker, still don’t here.) The weird, Dark Souls-ass asynchronous co-op? (I refuse to pay for Nintendo’s online service, so I can’t comment.) How every individual world feels like its own little adventure? (Alright, I admit it, I liked this one.) If you’re not going to be new, you could at least be cohesive- I’m a big fan of both 3D World and Odyssey, but I’d hesitate to call either of them particularly revolutionary, instead focusing on being a conduit for co-op shenanigans and a modernization of Mario 64’s mechanics, respectively. Besides being bright and colorful, is there a similar underlying summary that you could apply to Wonder? More and more, it feels like Mario is becoming Kirby: not striving for anything beyond a vaguely pleasant experience and producing no bad games, but no great ones either. Maybe my standards are just too high- after all, we don't expect Star Wars or The Simpsons or Halloween to be cutting-edge anymore, even though they were at one point, so why should we Mario? But, in 2024, this franchise is unrecognizable from the one that gave us 3's level map and World's secret exits and 64's moveset. And that just saddens me more than anything else.

You ever go back and watch, like, Shrek or some shit and then you're like "wait a second, since when was 'Bad Reputation' in this? And how does it work so well?" That's every single stage in Elite Beat Agents. A dozen and a half action-packed vignettes concerning characters trying to do anything from babysitting to drilling for oil to surviving on a remote island, accompanied by a licensed music track that, more often than not, feels lyrically contradictory to what's actually going on in the story. And as you're walkin'-and-a-talkin'-and-a-movin'-and-a-groovin'-and-a-hippin'-and-a-hoppin'-and-a-pickin'-and-a-poppin', you might ask yourself... How? How is it that these specific soundwaves, produced by these low-quality DS speakers, originally devised by pop stars who were already outdated by the time this game released, are able to compel my stylus to fly across the bottom screen so quickly? And with such precision? Because, even if you ignore how genuinely witty this game is, parodying at once both American movie montages and the concept of rhythm gaming itself, it's so utterly mechanically satisfying at a base level. There are few, if any, video games that bring me more joy than what I feel whenever I manage to drag myself out of the red with a perfect string of beats as the EBAs pick their heads up and start chanting in tandem to my actions during the most frantic section of "Sk8er Boy" or "Material Girl." And, yeah, the two scoring systems are at odds with each other, on higher difficulties you can die just because there's too large of a gap in between notes, and spin beats don't serve much of a purpose. But, having just now finally completed the game with the Divas after leaving them sitting on "Without a Fight" for the last who-knows-how-many years, I think I can safely admit to myself that I simply do not care. Most of the time, whenever I'm playing a different rhythm game, I just think about how I could be playing Elite Beat Agents instead. And whenever I think about Elite Beat Agents, I usually think about how they managed to cram three minutes of blatant sexual innuendo into a Nintendo game, and how it happens to air while you're playing as an anthropomorphic representation of a teenager's bloodstream. Or I think about how it presents the most painfully melodramatic Christmas story of all time, focused on an anonymous family that you have absolutely no connection to... and how it still works on an emotional level just because Chicago happens to be playing in the background. But, mostly, I just think about how, whenever I hear any of these songs in isolation, I can still visualize the pattern of in-game beats that appear during each section of the track. Music lives.

Chrono Trigger is a bad game to spiritually succeed- not because I consider it insurmountable, but because there's not really anything to succeed. Its greatness mostly stems from an intangible combination of structure, pacing, and presentation instead of any single concrete gameplay or narrative hook. From a game design standpoint, the lessons to take away from Chrono Trigger aren't exclusive to JRPGs, as evidenced by the fact that New Game Plus, as a concept, is now a mainstay across a wide range of genres. Fortunately, Sabotage has a good track record here, considering The Messenger was a Ninja Gaiden clone that played nothing at all like Ninja Gaiden, and this game similarly manages to avoid feeling derivative. Chrono Trigger's combat was fun but not particularly deep or complex, and instead focused on trying to make fights feel dynamic and fast-paced by expanding on Final Fantasy's ATB system, a feat that it accomplished better than most actual action RPGs from its era. Sea of Stars opts for a more standard turn-based approach, and borrows inspiration from Chrono Trigger's fluid character positioning, the Mario RPGs' action commands, and, against all odds, Octopath Traveler's lock/break system, and it actually ends up working out great! There was clearly real thought put into how all of these ideas fit together in ways that might not be obvious at first. For example, the Koopa shell special move from Mario & Luigi is repurposed here, but the fact that enemies aren't in static positions means that using it requires foresight about how long it'll take to hit each one in order for it to be most effective. Underlining these three core mechanics is the fact that health and mana pools are both small, but easily replenished. You die in three hits but are revived automatically after a few turns, regenerate magic on using normal attacks, and can swap out party members freely. It's a really unique combat system where you really feel like your decisions cause the flow of battle to turn on a dime. Missing a single action command can, and often does, mean that your opponent's turn isn't skipped, which means he hits and kills you, which means you lose. And so, with this solid foundation in place, Sea of Stars then expands on its gameplay throughout the course of its runtime by doing... absolutely nothing. There aren't any status effects, every piece of equipment just boosts one of your stats, and enemy variety is extremely low. The only two things you can do to your opponents during your turn is damage them or delay their turns, which means the gameplay plateaus in complexity once you get all your party members about halfway in. It's a bizarre, extreme example of constructing a genuinely compelling set of mechanics, and then missing the landing and letting your game slip into the doldrums anyway. But it's not like it tried and failed here: the game isn't boring because of balance issues or some other oversight, instead it feels like the dev team came up with the battle system and then immediately gave up. And, even more strangely, this sentiment feels like it applies to every other area. The combat is great mechanically but battles are still bland. The pixel art is outstanding but there's pretty much zero optional content or NPC flavor dialog, meaning that locations look pretty but have no texture. The music is solid but the story is barebones (mostly comprised of endless Proper Noun namedrops that I haven't been given reason to care about) and characters have no personality, so none of the narrative beats feel memorable or climactic. What makes this game so uniquely disappointing is that it seems like every aspect of it that Sabotage actually gave a shit about turned out great, but they just put in zero effort everywhere else. In hindsight, I regret calling Signalis "rudderless," because by copying an existing experience you're at least going for something. This game feels like a rough sketch of a JRPG with only a few portions colored in and no apparent plan to fully capture the genre's likeness. And, really, that's about as far from Chrono Trigger as you can get.

In a day and age where every turn-based game with comedic elements of some kind is labeled as "inspired by Earthbound," it's ironic that one of the few indie games to actually give me Earthbound vibes isn't even an RPG at all. The Mother series's reframing of JRPG tropes through contemporary American towns is succeeded in Yuppie Psycho with survival horror and a gigantic, labyrinthine office building- you save your game by making a photocopy of your face, brew coffee for health instead of combining herbs, and scavenge for these limited supplies by searching through desks and filing cabinets. The survival horror elements, though, aren't exactly a highlight, as it's often more funny than unnerving, and it focuses on experimentation and pure exploration rather than making getting from point A to point B as draining as possible. I'd instead summarize it as a game where the fun comes from accessing new areas and seeing weird things happen all around you. Most of it is downright dumb, a lot of it is cool, but all of it is entertaining. Where else can you trade slices of cheese for printer paper with the creepy guy upstairs, talk to your sexy coworker who literally can't speak in anything besides innuendo, or realize that your guiding partner character has completely bailed on you after an hour? But again, like Earthbound, Yuppie Psycho acknowledges that the humor should stem less from wackiness and more from how people react to said wackiness. The game's story revolves around tracking down an actual, literal, broom-riding, cauldron-stirring witch who's supposedly corrupting the corporation you were hired by from the inside, but the crushing stupidity of this premise is downplayed by the player character, who is instead more concerned about concealing the fact that he's a witch hunter from the people he works with. The end result is a genuinely refreshing experience compared to the current landscape of indie game writing, which is paired with a surprisingly deep pool of secrets and optional content that never diminishes in quality from the rest of the game's sense of pure creativity. Unfortunately, however, by the end of the game it becomes clear that this stuff is there to set up the good endings, which require doing really specific actions at specific points, a design pattern that's, as a general rule, not my cup of coffee. But this inclusion doesn't revoke Yuppie Psycho's status in my mind as a bona fide hidden gem.

Remember that moment in Breath of the Wild's tutorial where you have to chop down a tree and then use it as a bridge to cross a river? Remember thinking 'woah, that was neat!' and then not doing that again for the rest of your 80-hour playthrough? Remember when you unlocked Revali's Gale and then realized you would never have to actually work to gain height again? Remember how everyone, even Breath of the Wild's biggest fans, unanimously considered Eventide Island the best part of the entire game?

It wasn't until I played Rain World, a game so dedicated to its survivalist philosophy that it forces you to become intimately familiar with every facet of how its world works if you want to make even the slightest bit of progress, that I fully realized why all of this stuff bothered me so much. At first it was simple: what good was one of the most robust physics systems ever conceived without any challenges that tested your mastery over it? But Rain World, by counterexample, honed this down, helping me understand just how much Breath of the Wild takes every opportunity possible to provide you with means to avoid actually feeling like you're part of Hyrule. The first item you're handed prevents fall damage from ever being an issue. Beating any of the Divine Beasts "rewards" you with ways to avoid engaging in climbing and combat for the rest of your adventure. Harsh climates may pose a threat at first, but, quickly enough, you'll find clothes that (using a menu!!) completely neutralize them. There's a difference in philosophy here that doesn't necessarily come down to their respective levels of difficulty: Breath of the Wild gives you abilities, while Rain World gives you tools. Breath of the Wild makes you lord of your environment, while Rain World puts you at the mercy of it. I could grasp why so many were enchanted by the former, but, for me, Rain World was enchanting, and Breath of the Wild was boring. Why would I chop down a tree and waste my axe's durability when I could, with the press of a button, raise a magic platform out of the water and use that instead? Obviously, the game deserved credit for even allowing you to do any of these things, but I'd rather see a Hyrule where Link felt just as governed by the forces of nature as everybody else.

The last thing I wanted this game to be was more Breath of the Wild (in my eyes there was already far too much of it) and, at first glance, it is. Same Link, same Hyrule, same aesthetic, same general structure. Squint and it passes as an extensive set of DLC for the 2017 release, but, it's only a few hours into the Great Sky Islands when these potential fears get put to rest for good. For me, it happened as I walked out of the penultimate tutorial shrine, stepped onto a Zonai Wing, and used it to fly all the way back to the Temple of Time. Because here's the big open secret that nobody (except for me, apparently) wants to admit: traversal in Breath of the Wild sucks. Having to walk every five seconds to manage your stamina isn't fun, climbing isn't fun, and hopefully I don't have to tell you that fast travel isn't fun. Y'know what is fun, though? Shield surfing. Even though it's generally impractical, usually ending in a broken shield rather than any sort of speedy forward movement, I still found myself doing it nearly every time I was on top of a steep enough hill. Something about just letting it fly and relinquishing control over to the game's physics and hoping for the best never got old, and Tears of the Kingdom is like if they designed an entire game around shield surfing. Zonai Devices are essentially adaptations of traditional Zelda items into the open-air formula, as each has a specific intended use- a spring helps you gain height, a wheel moves objects, and a head targets enemies- but can be creatively applied to other, potentially unrelated scenarios. Whereas Breath of the Wild felt like a set of mechanics without any real structure to encourage you to get the most out of them (and that was a large part of its mass appeal, I get it) Tears comes with one built in. Whenever you're running or swimming or climbing a long distance without first constructing some kind of car or boat or hovercraft, you're losing. And while these vehicles could have just turned out to be another way to bypass Hyrule's rules, they're really the opposite, as Link never feels more at the mercy of his environment than when he's piloting one. Gliders have to be initially propelled in some fashion since they can't gain momentum from a sitting position, fans move your craft in circles instead of forward if placed at a slightly off angle, wheels get caught on awkward terrain, boats are in danger of sinking if their cargo isn't balanced correctly. Controlling a vehicle always means going toe-to-toe with the game's physics, and it's the simple fact that nothing seems to work perfectly that makes this game great. Ultrahand was a turn off at first because of how long it felt like it took to build anything, but, somehow, even this flaw turns into a strength. I often found myself getting impatient and slapping a vehicle together haphazardly, which tends to lead to the most entertaining results. The best parts of the open-air Zeldas are when a harebrained scheme somehow works (or fails in humorous fashion) and figuring out the nuances of how every device works by watching them move around in ways I didn't expect is some of the most pure fun I've had with a game in a long time. Likewise, it's no surprise that you can't purchase any specific device individually and instead have to work with what the gacha dispensaries provide you with, as it's really about making-do rather than having a clean solution for any particular problem. If Breath of the Wild was about giving you ways to manipulate your environment, Tears of the Kingdom is about giving you ways to be manipulated by your environment.

But, perhaps the bigger accomplishment here is that Tears somehow manages to justify reusing Breath of the Wild's map. Since the main theme this time around is efficient traversal, an entirely new Hyrule would have likely resulted in players neglecting vehicles to exhaustively explore each region first, whereas now you're already familiar with points of interest and the onus of enjoyment is shifted from the destination to the journey. And if you've forgotten where you should be going, the game makes sure to remind you, as the bubbulfrog and stable quests, which you'll want to activate ASAP, are located in Akkala and Hebra, two of the last areas I went to the first time I played Breath of the Wild, respectively. You're essentially nudged into doing a breadth-first search of the world instead of a depth-first one, and when your players are reaching the exterior of the map before the interior, you're free to fill that interior with... challenges! Despite my Breath of the Wild veteranship, my first dozen or so hours of Tears had me run up a tree to escape angry bokoblins, struggle against a stone talus in a cave because I was used to fighting them in open areas, and be genuinely perplexed on how to reach a floating shrine. Likewise, I actually felt like I had to prepare and come back to the siege on Lurelin Village, the Great Deku Tree quest, and that test-your-strength bell ringing minigame. It never gets especially difficult (not that I expected or even wanted it to) but there's clearly an effort to set up hurdles that players may not be able to jump on their first lap around the track. And while you could argue that these are simply iterative improvements, to me they're complimentary to the vehicle construction's philosophy of being restricted by the wild instead of empowered by it. Fuse does a good chunk of the heavy lifting here, and marks a shift away from pure sandbox and towards survival-sandbox, as all it really is is menu-free crafting. It's not only enjoyable on a base level, fostering experimentation for both useful and useless combinations to the same degree, but it also provides a sense of scarcity that wasn't really present in Breath of the Wild. Gems are no longer abstract materials that exist only to be sold or traded in exchange for armor, but real objects that have a real effect when fused. Drops from keese, chuchus, and moblins actually feel valuable. Elemental arrows aren't gifted via chests, but created on the fly depending on the situation. This time around, you scavenge with purpose. Out of bombs? Find a cave. Need stronger weapons? Kill stronger monsters. Want to upgrade your battery? Test your luck mining Zonaite in the depths. Revali's Gale exists in this game, though you don't perform it by waiting for a cooldown and then holding the jump button, instead by burning a pinecone using wood and flint that you had to harvest from somewhere in the world. Unfortunately, the presence of unlimited fast travel, universal menu use, and generous autosave means that this survivalist mindset isn't seen through to its fullest potential. It feels like a very Miyamotian design choice to subtract as little from a character's inherent moveset as possible in between games, so hopefully the next Zelda will star a new Link (on a new, more powerful console.) But one persistent ability stings more than the rest: the paraglider. Replacing it would've been easy- a shield fused with some kind of cloth could have been made to have the same effect, and I can only imagine how much more interesting this game would've gotten if descents actually took planning. But, even when you get to the point where nothing can realistically touch you, your other powers never stop feeling like tools and not abilities. There's a reason why this game's runes don't have cooldowns- all of them require external factors to actually be useful. Whereas Sheikah Slate bombs provided a consistent source of weaponless damage, stasis could be used on enemies directly, and cryonis, while requiring a body of water, always produced a static pillar indifferent to its source's movement, their Purah Pad equivalents call for more awareness. Ultrahand necessitates an understanding of how environmental building blocks could potentially fit together to achieve a specific goal, fuse relies on extrapolating an object's behavior and reasoning out as to how it would work when attached to a weapon or shield, and ascend extends your arsenal of means of creative traversal, asking you to survey the surroundings around a height that you want to reach without having to climb. Maybe I'm just lacking a certain creative ligament, but recall's main use for me was to retrieve devices that fell off of a cliff as I was trying to use them, which, to be fair, happens all the time, but it's still disappointing that there's not much to it outside of the puzzles designed around it. Even so, it doesn't break the throughline that happens to be my best guess as to why I enjoy messing around with the chemistry system in this game so much more than in Breath of the Wild: everything you're able to do here comes directly from the world itself.

And what a world it is! Caves were a no-brainer for a sequel, but their implementation here is fantastic. Add an underworld and all of a sudden your overworld doesn't feel bland anymore; constantly checking just around the corner for ways that natural features might open up or connect to others. Bubbulfrogs, at first, felt too carrot-on-a-stick-y to me, but the reward for collecting them is so insignificant that their main purpose instead becomes just to mark caves as fully explored on your map. Unless, of course, you go for all of them, which I personally have no desire to do. If you imagine a scale of collectables from shrines, which you're given enough tools to find all of without an egregious time commitment, to koroks, which you should be institutionalized if you even consider 100%ing, caves sit comfortably in the middle. Their quantity is limited to the point that they're all sufficiently detailed and memorable, but high enough that I feel like I could replay this game and still make significant new discoveries, which was very much not the case for my second run of Breath of the Wild. That sentiment also extends to the depths, which is the only location in either of these games where Link actually feels out of his element, and thus automatically the most enjoyable to explore. In the dark, surrounded by bizarre, hard-to-internalize geography, with tough enemies and an actually punishing status effect... or, what would be one if the game didn't chicken out and make gloom poisoning curable simply by going outside. Though, that's really only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the not-so-invisible hand of modern Nintendo's design philosophy inevitably making its presence known. Every beach has a sail, every hill a sled, every sky island enough materials to get to the next without hitch. When vehicles are this fun to use by themselves, I don't mind all that much, though it does occasionally feel like I'm just doing something the game wants me to do instead of playing by my own rules. It bothers me more in shrines, which, unfortunately, took a massive hit in between games. I've always held the opinion that they don't have to contain amazing puzzles, but should instead serve to prod players towards ways of interacting with open-air mechanics that they might not have thought of themselves. Unfortunately, here, they're neither, being solvable about five seconds after you walk in the door, and teaching you things that you'd already known, or, even worse, wish you'd discovered yourself. I felt pretty damn clever the first time I fused a spring to my shield and surfed on it to gain height, but that feeling was diminished when I was given a pre-fused spring/shield after beating a combat shrine. There's enough going on in the overworld at this point that I'd honestly have been fine if shrines were done away with altogether, except for maybe those mini-Eventide immersive sim ones, which were great all the way through. The lost koroks and crystal missions (because, let's be real, they're the same thing) turn out to be better puzzles than anything inside a shrine without even needing a loading screen or a change of scenery. Didn't think it was possible, but the story is somehow also a downgrade. Breath of the Wild's memories meant that Zelda herself could be characterized in a variety of ways depending on which order you found them in. It didn't do much for me personally, but at least it was going for something. Tears's just feel like watching a series of cutscenes out of order, and by the time you've seen two or three of them you know exactly where the story's going, and also that it's godawful. I'm not sure if it's the dreadful voice acting, or just holdovers from Skyward Sword's writing staff, but it's bizarre to see a series struggle this hard with sentimentality when it used to come so naturally to it. Chibi Link waving bye to his grandma while leaving Outset Island makes me feel more than all of the cutscenes in both of these games do combined. Not that it actually matters, of course, until it starts affecting the gameplay. Locking you into scripted sequences for every Divine Beast was already an egregious clash against player freedom, but they at least made sense logistically. Link could easily reach Vah Medoh by himself if it was in this game, and you actually can get to the water temple (and possibly the others... I didn't bother to check) without completing the corresponding sidequest, only to be arbitrarily rejected from starting the dungeon. Considering the sages only grant you slightly better versions of things you can already do, going through the dungeons without unlocking any of them could've been an enjoyable challenge on subsequent playthroughs. Unfortunately, it's not the only aspect of the game left out of the player's hands.

Waypoints still have no place in a Zelda game. Sidequest lists still have no place in a Zelda game. Loading screen tips still have no place in a Zelda game. And don't get it twisted: this is my favorite game with "Zelda" in its title since '02, but it's still not a Zelda game. Breath of the Wild's marketing as a modern reimagining of Zelda 1 has always struck me as phony, because, aside from not being confined to the series's formula, they're not at all alike. That game, to me, is characterized less by unlimited freedom and more by the fact that you had to find everything yourself, whereas every point of interest in both of the open-air Zeldas is signposted to some degree. Even if you love these games, you have to admit that the appeal has shifted. It's not about exploring to learn more about the world anymore, it's about exploring to find unique scenarios. Aside from a certain way that the depths and overworld are connected (that took me an embarrassingly long time to put together) there's nothing to figure out here. I don't want Impa to tell me that geoglyphs should be viewed from the sky, I want to see them on the ground and logically reason that out for myself. Talking to villagers used to be one of my favorite parts of Zelda games, but now it's something that I actively avoid doing. But this general overhaul isn't my problem; my problem is that Nintendo thinks that no aspects of the previous games are worth carrying over. What if certain caves had Dark Souls-style illusory walls, and you could get the Lens of Truth at some point to see through them? What if there was one guardian left alive in the deepest wilds of Hyrule that you could just stumble upon? What if there was an especially difficult, especially complex shrine somewhere in the world that no NPC even hinted at? Why is there still no hookshot? It feels like Nintendo's terrified to implement anything unique that some players might miss, but the point of a world this vast should be to conceal secrets. I want to travel to a far-off outskirt of the map and find something that doesn't exist anywhere else. A Link to the Past gives me that feeling. The Wind Waker gives me that feeling. Neither of the open-air games do. The closest Tears comes is with the Misko treasures (which are much more fun if you haven't found the hints leading to them) and the costumes in the depths (which are much more fun if you haven't found the maps pointing to them.) And not because of the reward, but because they're housed in cave systems and defunct buildings that are architecturally distinct enough to feel memorable. Exploration in this game is far more varied than in Breath of the Wild, but this Hyrule still doesn't feel mysterious. I can't help my mind from drifting back to Rain World, which went the distance to fill every corner of its universe with unique entities that most players won't even see, let alone meaningfully interact with, part of the reason why it'll continue running laps around every other open world until the end of time. This game consistently delighted me, but it never enchanted me. We may never see a traditional Zelda again, and, if we don't, I'll genuinely feel like something is missing from the series (alongside an actual soundtrack.) If Tears of the Kingdom was, like, 20% more cryptic, I think it'd be my favorite game of all time, but, if I'm being honest with you, it comes pretty close anyway.

In many ways, I don't understand it. This is likely the longest review I've written on this site, but everything above is just an attempt at rationalization as to how this game was able to capture me for four months of nightly sessions when I got sick of Breath of the Wild about a third of the way in. I bounced between an eight and a nine throughout my playthrough, but I don't think I can earnestly not consider this game one of my favorites when it contains so many activities that I just love doing. I love exploring caves. I love trying new fuse combinations. I love picking up korok hitchhikers. I love gathering my party of sages. I love putting my map together in the depths. I love sailing to new sky islands. I love chucking shock fruits at a lizalfos standing in a knee-high pond until it dies. I love watching bots take out monster camps for me. I love using Sidon's ability and making my water warrior marbled gohma hammer do 200 damage. I love riding a Half-Life 2 airboat through flooded tunnels. I love perching a Zonai Cannon on top of a hill at just the right height to stunlock an ice talus. I love driving a monster truck around and sniping bokoblins with Yunobo. I love ascending to the top of mountains. It's not the risky endeavor I asked for back in 2020, and it's still far cry from Nintendo's best sequels- Majora's Mask, Yoshi's Island, and even Mario Sunshine- which may straight up piss off faithfuls of the original. I have a hard time imagining any fans of Breath of the Wild outright disliking this game, though it has succeeded in converting a skeptic in yours truly to the religion of open-air Zelda. It's nowhere near perfect, but perfection is overrated anyway.

Consider me pleasantly surprised! Everything I'd heard about this game prior was that it was an iterative sequel with worse level design, and I guess that is true if you approach it exactly like you did with Banjo-Oneie. But these levels aren't meant to be compact, easily sight-read, or fully completed in a single sitting. Try to do so and you'll only end up frustrated, because Tooie is really closer to a 3D Zelda game than a collectathon. Worlds are laid out more like Kakariko Village than Treasure Trove Cove, with a few obvious points of interests in each that conceal lengthy, labyrinthine subareas. Oneie essentially guaranteed that any major task would reward you with a major collectible, while Tooie leaves it more up in the air. Being used to the first game, I assumed beating the timer challenge in Glitter Gulch Mine would earn me a jiggy, so I left it for when I ran out of anything else to do, but it actually unlocks a long series of rooms that significantly increases the scope of the level. Shifting this precedent means there's genuine anticipation as to what you're going to find whenever you make progress, and once you realize the game's designed around masking secrets and hidden areas with occasionally difficult to internalize architecture, a lot of baffling-at-first decisions make complete sense. Why do you need a certain number of notes to learn new moves this time? Well, it's not about actually making players earn upgrades, considering I was always well beyond each respective note threshold, but rather creating an association between notes and Jamjars. The first thing you want to do whenever entering a new world is find its new moves, because they're never gated behind moves from later levels, and are theoretically more valuable than any item. Tooie takes this mindset and uses it to give players a guided preliminary tour of the location, strategically placing Jamjars's bunkers in major areas that might not have been apparent at first. There's less notes in every level because they're generally only used to signify Jamjars's presence- whenever you see some, he's probably nearby. The first trip to every world consists of finding new moves by way of finding notes, which has the intended side effect of giving the player enough information to begin to sketch a mental map. Of course, you can only complete a fraction of every level on your first go-round, so you'll probably poke around just a bit and grab a few Jinjos before calling it quits and returning to a previous world to flesh out one of your earlier pieces of Jamjars-assisted layout knowledge. And these revisits, layered several times for every area throughout the game, are where Tooie's unique blend of collectathoning and progression gates separates itself most from other adventure game subgenres. In a search-action game, you have to evaluate whether or not you have enough upgrades to make it to an out of reach area. In a point-and-click, you have to think about what kind of contextual event will allow you to get where you want to go. In a Zelda game, you have to consider both, but Link's lack of mobility doesn't obfuscate the seams between these two factors as much as it would if he was in, say, a platformer. That's not to imply that the puzzles in here are ever particularly great on their own merits, but it's still fun to feel out what exactly you can and can't do before eventually putting everything together. Though, it seems that's where Tooie loses a lot of people. My favorite parts of Zelda games are when you're wandering around without any idea of how to progress, so maybe I just have an immunity to it, but is the backtracking really that bad? I'd assumed early on that the in-level teleporters were a QoL change added in the Xbox version, because fast travel in this game feels... pretty generous! That being said, I didn't come close to 100%ing this game, and I probably would've liked it less if I did. While Oneie's worlds felt appropriately shallow so as to not detract from the joy of fully completing them, Tooie's come chock-full of surprises, and, as a result, it's more fun to skirt by with just as many jiggies as you need to unlock the next level. In my eyes, Oneie fills its niche as an easygoing collectathon better than Tooie fills its niche as a 3D adventure game, but I'd still argue that it's a great sequel. And even when it falters, and, boy does it falter- I haven't mentioned the over reliance on minigames, or the mostly pointless transformations, or the entirely pointless parts where you play as Mumbo- there's enough raw fifth-gen ambition to keep things interesting throughout.

You're trying too hard, bro! More or less, the main reason as to why I'm generally disinterested in modern horror games, which tend to serve as vehicles for cryptic lore dumps for YouTube analysts to pore over rather than fright-enhanced decision making. I don't want mindfuckery, I want regular fuckery, something that I was hopeful would be present in this kind of return to form. This game was sold to me as the best of Resident Evil meets the best of Silent Hill, but, in reality, it's the worst of both: Resident Evil's cramped item management without any of the brilliant circular level design that makes Spencer Mansion thrilling to route through even after dozens of playthroughs, and Silent Hill's scary-because-it's-scary imagery without any of the dread that defines each and every one of Harry Mason's fog-enveloped footsteps. Instead, we've got jumpcuts to character closeups and spooky stanzas of poetry, pulsating masses of flesh on the ground, and handwritten notes conveniently censored at the most ominous places- surface-level stuff that makes horror games effective for people who don't understand what makes horror games effective. I'm not engaged enough to decipher your jumbled-up story, I'm not interested in your generic sci-fi setting, and I'm not even scared! But, maybe if I actually felt like the character I was playing as, I would be! Fast movement speed and wide hallways make enemies pitifully easy to juke, and thus not at all intimidating. Exploration isn't exciting or intriguing because of how straightforward it is on a grand scale. Plentiful items and infinite saves mean there's not any pressure on you even if you do wind up making a mistake somehow. I initially chalked this all up to misguided attempts at balance, but they get harder and harder to defend once you realize that all you're really doing is (often literally) opening up a locked door just to find a key for another locked door somewhere else on the map, which makes the experience feel more like a parody of classic survival horror games rather than an earnest attempt at recapturing the magic. I hardly took out any enemies, I didn't burn a single body, and, on several occasions, I killed myself on purpose because doing that was quicker than having to run back to the save room to retrieve the specific contextual item I needed, which is about as damning as you can get for this kind of game. The only strategy to pick up on is keeping nothing at all on your person in between storage box visits so that you can handle when the game inevitably dumps five key items on you in successive rooms. Mikami's rolling in his grave!

The lone bright spots are the traditional puzzles, which, although are few and far between, frequently nail the physical satisfaction of fiddling around with a piece of old, analog equipment that you're half familiar with and half in the dark on. If this game had understood its strengths better, it would've been a fully-fledged point-and-click or even a Myst-style free-roaming puzzler. The actual survivor horror feels tacked on, as though it's obligated to be this kind of game because it's attempting to tell a story in the same emotional vein as the Silent Hill series and the player needs to have something to do before being shown the next deep, thought-provoking cutscene. I can't even say that it understands the classics from a visual standpoint, forgoing the fixed-camera perspective that gives each of Resident Evil's individual rooms a distinct cinematographic personality and instead opting for a generic top-down approach that makes every location feel the same. Though, that's not to say the art direction itself is bad. In fact, it's phenomenal, and easily the standout of the game's features, but it doesn't make up for how bland everything else is. At some point, this one demoted itself in my eyes from 'mostly boring but worth playing just for the aesthetic' to 'downright painful.' Maybe it was after the game pretentiously transitioned into a first-person walking simulator one too many times. Or, more likely, it was when some of the small details- red-light save screens, items conveniently located right on top of their respective instruction manuals, and even the sound effect of equipping your pistol- started feeling less like homages and more like creative crutches, indicators of an entirely rudderless experience. I really feel terrible for ragging on something that's evidently a passion project and extremely competent from a technical standpoint, and I sincerely hope the devs keep at it. But, man. I wish I got anything at all out of this. The one game I've played that's managed get this done, I mean, spiritually succeeding an era/genre rather than a specific series by remixing several blatant inspirations so proficiently that it ends up feeling like something entirely new, is still Shovel Knight, but I'm not sure the world's ready for that conversation quite yet...

Finished up the main story today, so I think I can safely say that I don't get it, or at least not fully. To me, this feels like two completely unrelated games grafted together, a claim that Yakuza 0 itself likely wouldn't dispute given how intentionally it contrasts its overwhelmingly dramatic narrative with the over-the-top goofiness of... everything else. Though, these two halves clearly don't carry equal mass (the vast majority of content lies in the optional stuff) or weight (you're free to go through the entire campaign without at all engaging in any of the sidequests, minigames, or either business system, but not vice versa). I found myself interested in Kiryu and Majima's story but not in anything else, and it wasn't until I forced myself to try and get the 'full' experience near the end of the game that I felt like I at least understood the appeal. The business management is addicting in the same way something like Cookie Clicker is- spend money to earn money at a higher rate, rinse, repeat- and there's a near infinite amount of stuff to occupy yourself with while you're waiting for cash to roll in. But because of the sheer amount of stuff to do, all of it is incredibly basic, and I think my problem is that I'm only willing to stomach tasks this menial when I'm at least interested in the world that they take place in. Kamurocho and Sotenbori look the part but don't feel it, instead of being populated with sidequests that feel organic and serve to flesh out the setting, they're filled with, in essence, whoopee cushions for Kiryu and Majima to sit on. Wacky, short-winded, painfully predictable punchlines that the protagonists reject their no-nonsense attitudes to indulge in, for some reason. I get that that's the joke, I just don't find it particularly funny- maybe if their overly serious natures were played off of instead of completely overwritten, it would've worked out better, but as it stands, I can only recall two out of the fifty or so that I did that even rose to the level of "entertaining." The combat, at the very least, grew on me over time, cleverly centering itself around manipulating enemies into certain conditions for both monetary bonuses and getting the most out of your heat meter, but it was still repetitive enough that I avoided every encounter I could for most of the game, a mentality that I regret not extending to the sidequests. At the end of it all, the only two aspects of the yakuza life that I can truthfully claim that I enjoyed were the cutscenes and some of the fights leading up to the cutscenes, two small portions of my thirty hours. Part of me is glad that a series this prominent finally managed to break through in the west, but I can't say that I'm particularly interested in checking out the other entries myself. I'd rather sit in the arcade and play some Outrun.

The black sheep moniker is certainly earned, but I'd hesitate to say that it's deserved. What many overlook is that this is where Zelda's core contextual puzzle solving gameplay really got its start. By that, I mean, generally, the pattern of hanging out in the local town's rumor mill and then using its citizens' chatter to plan your exploration of the overworld. Of course, you could argue that this started in Zelda I, but this game manages to have more convincing inhabitants than geezers in caves. That's not to say the copy/paste villagers here really feel like much more than dressed-up hints, but it's still hard to imagine Kakariko or Clock Town or Windfall existing in the future without them. A lady in Nabooru tells you she's thirsty and it's not like you have to brave a dungeon to fetch her a pail of water, instead you pick some up at a fountain about ten feet from her house, a sort of semi-realistic logic that later games in the series would expand on as technology progressed. Unfortunately, in 2023 this one's best played with at least a world map pulled up, which ruins the positive side of its cryptic nature. Stumbling upon Bagu's cabin in the middle of the woods is a great moment, but it's diminished when you realize that doing so unlocks the shameless trial-and-error section on Death Mountain. Though, the combat is what remains especially interesting 35 years later and dungeons are where it shines- combining the unconventional core of platforming, twitch reactions, space management, and strategic resource utilization with classic dungeon-crawling route development in an extremely challenging but always encouraging adventure. The Dark Souls ancestry is obvious on the surface level (leveling stats individually, having to internalize an enemy's rhythm to effectively block and avoid attacks, being able to clear roadblocks to create world shortcuts) but I'd contend that this general feeling is the two's biggest shared element. Despite how difficult (often egregiously so) both can get, you can make consistent progress as long as you're skilled and clever enough, and stuff like the one-time use extra lives and EXP pickups really add to that. Beneath it all is a gratifying power fantasy- every new spell, every heart container, every magic upgrade is a genuine triumph, a new notch in Link's belt, a permanent enhancement that you really just feel. But, like nearly every other NES game, this one's difficulty curve devolves into absolute insanity at the eleventh hour. This kind of stuff makes it prime material for a remake with a few more modern sensibilities, but, if Zero Mission is any indicator, the soul of these 80s games tends to get lost in adaptation. Guess I'll have to settle for the inevitable indie spiritual successor...

Replaying this one made me want to see an alternate history where the series applied its anthological story approach to its gameplay genres while retaining the same core philosophies for each entry. For better or for worse, the one-two punch of A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time etched the franchise's formula into the most solid stone known to man. Of course, Breath of the Wild would eventually come along and shatter this set of traditions into a million pieces, but this came at the expense of.... it not really being a Zelda game at all! Can't have my cake and eat it too, I suppose.

Easily my favorite Metroid game, and that might have something to do with the fact that it hardly even is one. Advanced movement tech, sequence breaks, and everything else that, from what I've gathered, makes Super an all-timer according to its fans is notably absent, and that's not even mentioning the fact that you barely have to consider the entire map at large until the very end of the game. Probably a contentious take, especially on this site, but I've always preferred when this series leans into its experiential side rather than its mechanical side, an ideal that Prime relentlessly pursues at the expense of any interesting combat or, frankly, complex exploration. Instead, it's phazon-focused on translating one of Metroid's most essential angles into the third dimension: the sense of Samus's physical presence in the worlds she explores. Here, that's not only the responsibility of rigid controls and weighty jumps, but of the player's very perspective. It's no surprise that so much of this game boils down to how you see things- scanning and X-rays and thermal vision- stuff that really could only be done in an FPS. Prime's about being a first-person game just as much as it's about being a three-dimensional game, and Retro truly went above and beyond the call of duty in terms of reinforcing this theme. Electronic interference scrambling your view, water taking a moment to drip off of your visor after being submerged, and even Samus's half-translucent reflection appearing in certain lighting are just a few of the immersive details that the team managed to cram in here. To me, this is the closest a video game has come to conveying a sense of touch, but the mystique doesn't stop with the visuals. The utterly bone-chilling main menu theme sets the stage for what I believe to be not just an atmospheric experience, but the atmospheric experience, the benchmark that all future atmospheres must be compared to. No game transports me somewhere new to the degree that Metroid Prime does, and the sound contributes a sizeable chunk of the heavy lifting. Phendrana Drifts, for all intents and purposes, is a generic snow level, but it doesn't feel like one. Something about the almost ominously gentle piano as Samus first steps foot into the cold and its evolution into an outright suffocating electronic track as she reaches the area's depths just represents a fundamentally remarkable grasp on how to make foreign environments exciting to explore. The variance in terrain doesn't hurt, either, in terms of keeping traversal skills sharp and sparking area memorability, and even the in-game map makes itself useful. In a series (and genre) where it can occasionally feel like the map is playing the game for you, deciphering Prime's 3D map practically feels like its own little ability that must be learned, another mark on the long list of the game's successes. I was recently underwhelmed by its sequel, but, in hindsight, I almost don't blame it for mostly treading the same ground- the first game really accomplished everything it set out to do.

Backloggd phenomena report: you ever notice a discrepancy between a game's average rating and what the top reviews have to say about it? Both prior Bayonettas are pretty good examples of this. Reading through the original's reviews would have you convinced it's one of the highest rated games on the site, but it's sitting at a good-but-not-great 3.9/5. Conversely, its sequel, by all accounts, must've featured a puppy getting stiletto'd in the opening cutscene or something, but it's got a more impressive 4.1 average. Personally, I chalk this up to the casual-hardcore dichotomy. Leisurely gamers make up a larger portion of the collective unconscious, but passionate players are more likely to both write in-depth analyses and spend time voting up reviews that they agree with. I don't claim to be an expert on high-level gameplay or anything (my 'about me' on here isn't at all facetious) but I like to think of myself as someone who can see both sides of the spectrum, and I can at least anecdotally vouch for my theory being correct here. My appreciation for the first game's nuances only grows with each revisit, but, at the same time, I have several friends that consider it among their favorites who were surprised when I told them that you can continue a combo after dodging. On the other hand, I remember genuinely enjoying 2's story the first time around, but I wasn't able to finish a replay in preparation for this...

Bayonetta 3 manages to break this pattern, apparently finding common ground with its relatively low (at time of writing) 3.7 average and generally underwhelmed top reviews. Obviously, this doesn't actually mean anything, but, to me, it's representative of how so many decisions in here bafflingly appeal to neither audience. Demon Slave, the game's major new mechanic, had potential in expanding Bayonetta's moveset by giving her another avenue to creatively set up finishers, but every kaiju's overbearing nature, not to mention the fact that enemies don't seem to respond to them at all, make them feel like just another strong attack. This wouldn't have mattered as much if they at least looked cool in action, but it's usually hard to tell what they're even doing- the camera zooming in on Bayonetta even when a demon gets the encounter's final blow is a telltale sign that this wasn't thought through. They also mean that enemies lack an intimidation factor, a pitfall that could've been similarly avoided to some degree if they weren't incredibly generic visually. This extends to bosses, which primarily just feel like big enemies- at no point during a Bayonetta game should I be surprised that I got a boss bonus at the end of a verse. And there's also the smaller stuff. Retaining 1's lack of interest in an intelligible narrative without any of the energy that made its cutscenes at least watchable. The multiverse setting, which I (perhaps generously) attribute to bad timing and not any kind of trend chasing, is, at times, novel, but it lacks the showmanship of a Psychonauts or a Travis Strikes Again to really make its worlds exiting from a casual perspective. But far and away the most insulting is the implementation of the gimmick sections. A staple of high-action games that, at their best, satisfy both pros (by offering pacing reprieves and remixes of core mechanics) and casuals (by offering memorable, eye-catching spectacle) but here don't even attempt to do either. Instead, they're boring, slow-moving, time-consuming, utterly bizarre affairs that make you wonder if the minds behind them even knew what game they were working on.

But, against all odds, I ended up enjoying myself. It could just be because Bayonetta's core moveset is so great that I'll never outright dislike any of her games, but I think the alternate weapons deserve their due credit. Nearly all of them are genuinely remarkable in how outlandishly they're designed, completely distinct yet somehow perfectly in tune with how our Umbran Witch operates, and ultimately just great fun to mess around with. Maybe the true lesson to be learned here is that if you throw enough darts at the board, you're bound to get at least one bullseye. Considering she's just received her own prequel spinoff, Bayonetta is the leading lady of a capital-F franchise now, and I'd much rather see her flinging ideas about haphazardly than indulging in another round of playing it safe.

The fourth Wario Land is a personal classic, but even I must bow my head and acknowledge 3's superior dedication to unconventional platforming status. The experiment that began with Wario Land II reached its natural conclusion here, and the end result makes 4's health meter look bog standard in comparison. In this land, reward and punishment are one and the same- bizarre, often grotesque perversions of Wario's sprite and, by proxy, the way that he has to look at the world around him. Whether these transformations are powerups or power... downs depends entirely on the situation. Becoming a spring allows Wario to reach higher-up areas, just make sure to avoid it when trying to make your way downwards. Invisibility lets him bypass motion-detecting security doors, but incidentally turns rudimentary platforming into a challenge. Each of the dozen-or-so abilities can be described in a similar double-edged fashion, but their cleverness really has to be seen to be believed. Figuring out which transformation you need while figuring out which key you need while also figuring out how to get that transformation in the appropriate spot (and, if necessary, even how to get rid of it once you're done) as every bite-sized stage unravels and reveals its deliciously tricky nature. When state transitions, the very foundation of a platformer, are a puzzle in and of themselves, the level design comes naturally, and Wario Land 3 leaves no stone unturned while constructing its areas to enhance the game's supreme mechanical cohesion. Well, except...

Where it loses me: returning to previous stages after an unlock. These come in the form of Samus Aranesque moveset additions or more unique contextual changes to the world map, and are all almost unanimously disappointing. Instead of requiring the player to evaluate what's different when coming back to a familiar place, usually some obstacle near the entrance has been removed, which lets Wario access, in essence, an entirely new level. It's hard to fault the game for this decision, as forcing inter-playsession analysis is typically seen as a sin against the tenants of handheld gaming, but it still feels like the only blight on its otherwise hyper-focused design. In retrospect, 4's "hurry up" sections present a solution to this problem: portions of the game that reward observant players who are able to predict level mutations before they happen without breaking the pick-up-and-play mantra. Of course, including these means Wario has to be capable of getting the lead out, which, also in retrospect, creates another conundrum. 3's sluggish Wario is hardly bothered by traditional platforming punishments that serve to slow him down, as he can barely even move in the first place, but 4's agile Wario clashes with the inherently time-consuming nature of transformations. It's an issue that, I, in my infinite wisdom, don't have the solution to, but perhaps it's one that indicates how distinct the series is above all else- it's hard to imagine that guy in red running into anything similar.