This game has a tough learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, is a pretty fun little game! 100%ing this takes FOR-E-VER, and I may never get there. A lot of your success in the minigames depends on how responsive your Wii remotes still are. That, combined with some minigames being brutally unforgiving, like the deep-frying one, makes this game legitimately kinda hard.

Mama's voice lines are very charming, and I enjoy the friends from around the world. The fact that they all speak their native language is something that hits me in the heart, that's something I have a weakness for. They all have cute music too, which is nice, except the start of the British friend's song is super grating on the ears, and you have to hear it a whole lot.

You have to make the recipes using motion controls, which are responsive enough, but can definitely troll you sometimes. You have to discover a method to the madness. This is, for all intents and purposes, a rage game. You must stay calm on the battlefield and make mama proud.

Fighting against the friends around the world is very............... interesting. Sometimes the game will award a bonus and you'll never be able to replicate it. Sometimes they'll utterly beat your ass so badly it's shocking. Other times it's like they'll have a stroke in the middle of working and hand you a free win. The scoring for the minigames is pretty funny here: you have three main ones: a perfect, a good enough, and a fail. On some minigames, you'll rarely ever fail, and on others, messing up even a LITTLE will give you an instant fail. It's genuinely brutal.

Of course, that scoring system is something you only need to worry about in the friends around the world mode. For normal recipes, you just need all perfects, as harsh as it is. Challenge mode is incredibly silly, you just need a passing grade, but you have a super short time limit on each game.

It's a chill game! One I can pick up and kill two hours easily. It's not a masterpiece, but I think it's a game emblematic of the Wii era and is still fun for that if nothing else. Great game to get mad at with your friends.

The original Zombies Ate My Neighbors had a ton of flaws, so I'm glad to see this game is even worse. Absolutely ABYSMAL tank controls, awful level design, and the graphics, while having a nice artstyle, are incredibly unclear, and it's difficult to easily tell what's going on in the level's layout. Instead of having a convenient minimap to tell you where the neighbors are, you instead have this cluttered, annoying, and inaccurate mess of speech bubbles going around the screen telling you vaguely where to go. The weapons feel much worse to use, largely because the game just feels unresponsive. This game has some nice ideas, like running (even if it is bound to the action button) and jumping are pretty sick additions, and I love the new transformation potion, but the game just sucks too much otherwise. Straight poopoo.

This was recommended to me by a friend of mine, and I can definitely say I'm glad she did. I know the term "quirky Earthbound-inspired RPG about depression" gets thrown around as a derogatory term, but that string of words doesn't necessarily entail a bad game, no?

The game is split into two "worlds," one is the "Earthbound" part of the game, and the other is the "depression" part of the game. The Earthbound part is chill, it didn't exactly grab my attention immediately; I do feel the start of the game is pretty slow. But once you get to Sweetheart's Castle, it picks up a lot more and becomes very solid, solid enough that I ended up enjoying the RPG part throughout. The game is full of silly character interactions and a TON of sidequests, including a couple badass hidden bosses. There's a lot of stuff to do in this game if you're going for 100%! It's all optional though, but I tackled a lot of it cause I like wandering. The battle system is chill. I didn't feel the game was that difficult, but it definitely threw curveballs here and there, and it's not like I didn't beat the game without game over-ing a couple times.

The "depression" part of the game is honestly pretty cool, and is definitely the larger appeal of the game. Weird, mysterious shit happens, and it leaves you wondering what is going on? What are all these details we're missing here? The story of the game is built heavily around concealed information that you'll only get trickles of.

The ending of this game is the true selling point. It was INCREDIBLY gripping, the final reveals and final boss were both... mwah. Beautiful. Of course, if you aren't enjoying the game at all, don't force yourself to slog to the ending. For reference, the game took me about 25 hours to reach the ending (with many of those hours being spent dicking around), so it's decently long but not overbearing.

The game has some minor flaws, like how the battle system and RPG-parts of the game are alright, but nothing super interesting. The emotion system is pretty neat, and it's not like it was unfun, it's just definitely not the appeal of the game. I guess that makes it pretty faithfully inspired by Earthbound, huh?

In addition, the game has two artstyles. One is hand-drawn, and is very nice looking, I always thought it fit the game quit well. The other is a pixel artstyle, which I didn't care for. Lots of 1x1 pixeling and most things just don't stand out that much to me. I'm not usually picky about artstyle at all, but the pixel art could've used a little work. In my eyes at least.

It's a solid game though! Enjoyed my time with it, and might even pick it up again at some point and go for full 100%. I could definitely recommend this to certain people.

Also Pet Rock is badass.

Edit: music's pretty good too