I want to preface this review by saying I have never played a dragon quest game. So everything in this game was new to me and even if its a "series staple" those elements were still new to me so I cant comment on how they were iterated upon or anything like that. Anyways, lets get into it.

DQIX is one of, if not the, most visually and technically impressive games I've ever seen on the DS. Fully explorable 3D world with countless 3D animated cutscenes, this kind of stuff just wasnt being done on the DS and despite some framerate issues they pulled it off really well. I wanted to start with the technical aspect so that when I go over the rest of what the game has to offer you can get a better idea of truly how impressive it was.

The game features a self insert custom character that starts the game off as an Angel sort of being and quickly finds himself thrust down to earth with no wings or halo. From there he is tasked with helping the people of the Protetorate and locating 7 golden fyggs scattered across the world. This isnt too terribly important but it does give you a good reason to travel the world so I cant fault it too much. From this point on you go from town to town helping the people solve whatever issue is at hand. From posing as a detective to find lost students to saving a town from a widespread disease, this is where the game really shines. Each new town introduces its own set of characters and stakes so the whole time youre playing everything feels fresh and livley. None of them drag on too long and its perfect for the pick up and play / portable nature of the game. This aspect of the game being so good really helps to aleviate one of its biggest could-be-issues in my opinion, that being the party.

This game is almost MMO like in nature as it was designed to be played with friends and online. The entire party is a blank slate with not a single one of them having a single line of dialouge. Very unlike any RPG I had ever played and at first I was really put off by it. Youre supposed to be able to group up with friends and they would make up your party instead of the random characters but in big 2024 that just wasnt going to happen for me. So I went on with the random characters the game gave me. But as I spent more and more time with the game, I didnt mind it as much. The plot is so focused on the story of your character and everything going on in the towns, the rest of the party are never really needed and start to feel like other adventurers that just tagged along for the ride. So as I was kitting them out with new gear and weapons, I started to make up my own stories for them and give them their own personalities. By the end of the game I had no problem with it at all. Now thats just me and I can totally see how this sort of party system would be offputting for people but I really didnt end up minding it.

To finish this off I want to go over some of the other things I really liked about the game. Something that is really inconsequential but offers a lot of charm is changing characters appearence based on what gear they have equiped. This is so cool to me and ensures that your party is entirely unique to you and will look different that anyone elses you see. This in tandem with the job system offer such an awesome suite of customizability. Its really easy to change jobs and each one of them have a large range of abilities that is really unique from one to the next. Leveling up feels meaningful in this game and there is always some new ability or spell to unlock next. This leads me into the combat. Pretty simple turn based action with a handful of different buff and debuff systems thrown on top. What really makes it so intruiging though is how flashy it is. The fights are all full 3D and every turn you get to see your party and the enemies running around duking it out on the top screen as you select what moves to use next. Its purely a visual flourish but it adds a lot to the heat of battle.
Another thing I though was really cool was the overworld. Unlike most RPGs on the DS, the enemy encounters arent random. Instead they appear on the overworld running around with you and the party. So now you can choose to fight or avoid them and know what monster youre going to fight going in.

I wanna finish this off by saying this game is just full of charm, top to bottom. It knows when to be silly and when to be serious. Its a beautiful game visually and a lot of fun to play. There is so much side content I think you could play for upwards of 700 hours and not do everything. The music is great and sounds amazing even out of crappy DS speakers. If you have a DS and havnt played this, please do yourself a favor and pick this up, such and underrated gem.

When I was younger I would play this game all the time. One of my favorites for road trips or just sitting around the house. I was never that good and would mostly just play 50 or 100cc grand prixs because I knew I would be able to win them. I recently bought a DSiXL and have been revisiting a lot of the DS library and last time I was home I grabbed my old copy of MKDS and got to work on everything I ignored as a kid(which was most of the game).

The first thing I wanted to do was the mission mode. Everyone always talks about the mission mode in such a high regard. But even though I played this game to death, I never got around to the mission mode. But now I can confidently say it is worth the hype. Its such a unique mode and I dont really think we've gotten anything similar in MK outside of some stuff in Tour. There is such a wide variety of challenges on offer here nothing ever feels stale. There are also boss fights present which I was initially pretty skeptical of but they were pulled off shockingly well. I also found that, unlike the Grand Prix, I was really pushed to go for a better score and try to get three stars on all the missions. You always felt like you could do a little better and when you finally got a challenge down and got those three stars it felt extreamley satisfying.

Once I had wrapped up the mission mode I returned to what I spent to most time on as a kid, the Grand Prix mode. I still needed to unlock mirror mode, rob, and more karts for everyone so I jumped right into 150cc. This was the best thing I couldve done as the game felt so so so much better at high speeds. It felt like everything mattered. Every turn, drift, item and mistake felt like they really had concequences. As my goal was to get gold on all cups on all speeds, I was going to be playing some of the same tracks again and again. But honestly that didnt bothr me one bit. The track selection in this game is top notch and no matter if they were brand new tracks or retro tracks from prior mario kart games, they all felt and looked amazing. Despite this all being a bit repetitive, I never grew tired of it and felt like I was constantly improving. I had rough stretches here or there trying to get the hang of certain turns or tight tracks but by the end, the final two cups I played were some of my best racing to date (two stars on the leaf and lightning mirror cups :) ). Being able to get genuinley good at this game felt really great even with some of the bs item balancing.

Before I wrap this up there I dont want to ignore the battle mode. I played this a handful of times with friends as a kid but it was never one of my favorites. For my recent revisit, i didnt really touch it at all. I know a lot of people really love battle mode in mario kart but it never has really been my cup of tea (except for MK8D, that battle mode is godly) so even if I had played it I dont think I would be a very good judge for whats good or not.

Final thoughts. Mario Kart DS is all that. Great modes, great tracks, great controls, all in the palm of your hand. I think it often gets over looked by a lot of people who grew up on MK Wii or Double Dash but I genuinely thing MKDS is one of the best in the series and one of the best games on the DS. Please do yourself a favor and check this game out if you ever have the chance.

This was one of the first games I ever owned as a kid and I never really got that far into it. I would always get stressed out about dying and I found it just way too difficult (i did play the hound out of the minigames though). Now im older and revisiting a bunch of older mario titles and it was time for me to give this game another shot.

This was the game that brought Mario back into the limelight. His first big 2d adventure in a long time and it was aptly coined "New" Super Mario Bros. For the time it was a whole new look for mario and did crazy numbers on the DS, becoming one of the best selling titles on the system. Today a lot of people, myself included, have soured on the "New" smb style after Nintendo milked it to death during the 2010's. As a result I think a lot of people forgot that when it was fresh, it was actually really solid.

Going in without any preconceived notions about the game or style, this game absolutley rocks. It has so many creative ideas start to finish. interesting worlds, fun powerups (though i wish they were more prominent :/) and great music make this the perfect title to get Mario back up and running. The short levels are suited so well to the DS yet it somehow manages to keep everything that made the home console Mario games so appealing. My only real issue with the GB Mario titles was they were supremely easy and could be finished pretty quick. NSMB fixes this and offers a similer level of challenge as youd find in SMB3 or SMW. This is a full 2D Mario adventure on the go and even today I found that incredibly appealing.

This game does everything right so I can kinda see why Nintnedo was trying to replicate it for a decade straight. Its a shame that the game that (re)started it all for Mario is stuck on the DS but I seriously cannot reccomend it enough. Fantastic Mario title and a fantastic game.

Being a kid who loved melee and played off and on for years, being in middle school and getting a Smash Bros I could play anywhere was a dream come true. I seriously cannot overstate how insane it was to me that I could play Smash Bros on car rides now it was insane. Novelty aside, looking back this title still holds up in my opinion. I return to it quite often and its still fun to get a couple matches in here or there. That convenience factor and smash run totally validate this game existing as many would have you think its just a neutered version of the WII U version and isnt worth your time. The 3DS library is fantastic but I think this game should be brought up more in those conversations.

Took me a long time to finally get around to this DLC after being really hyped when it was announced but with Rebirth right around the corner, Im trying to cover all my bases (dirge of cerberus longplay video here i come...).

Its been a long time since remake so I was a bit shakey on the combat at first but I quickly found my footing and wow wow wow Yuffie's combat is so fun once you get the hang of it. I sat there and grinded out solo Ramuh before I even got Sonon and honestly a lot of the time if he died I wouldnt bother picking him bac up because solo Yuffie was just so much fun. This DLC also introduces the synergy system that were getting a lot more of in Rebirth and it was cool but felt a bit underbaked and never really ended up using it.

Overall the DLC was just a lot of fun. Short and sweet with cool look at what was going on in sector 7 while Cloud was kickin it with Aerith. Fort Condor mini game was FIRE and even the poster collecting sidequest was well done. This was our introduction to Yuffie and she was perfect I cant wait to get more of her in Rebirth. Just a real solid package and totally reccomend.

spoiler time
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Remake's ending had sort of a weird "uhhhhhh so is Zack alive now what's going on" kind of thing and Intermission does it too. Shows up a the sector 5 slums church going to meet Aerith and she is/isnt there??? I have no idea what theyre cooking right now but im dying to see more. That and the other couple CG cutscenes with the Yuffie watching sector 7 get dropped and the remake gang on their way to Kalm were a nice treat. Just wanted to touch on those ending bits too, good stuff, thanks for reading this far.

Im a huge fan of everything FFVII. Love the cast, the world, materia system, the movies, the games, all of it. I wanted to beat this in preperation for Rebirth since it looks like they're going to be touching a bit heavier on Zack and decided Id put it off for long enough. Over the course of a week and 14 hours of gameplay, I can confidetntly say this is one of the most annoying games I have ever played.

The combat is braindead and unfun and is made even worse by the absolute worst random encounter system I have ever experienced. All this just to feel zero progression outside of "number go up!". I kid you not I changed my materia loadout maybe twice this entire game. It was just the same rinse and repeat combat over and over, hour after hour. Im know there is deeper stuff with materia fusion and leveling up the DMW but there was nothing that couldnt be beat with just mashing and some magic so never felt compelled to check it out.
This made doing anything in any mission or dungeon extreamly tedious. I didnt want to explore these areas becaues I didnt want to participate in the awful combat loop. So every mission just boiled down to a "how can I finish this as quickly as possible to get to the next story beat." And those story beats, not that great either.

The story is a weird mix of showing you what you were told about already with Zacks backstory (him and aerith, stuff with cloud) and that part is a decent bit of fun. But the other half is giving him this halfbaked character arc that is presented in the most roundabout way imaginable. I could kind of see what they were going for and to the games credit it does stick the landing (ill talk about the ending in a sec) but for most of the games run time, its a lot of beating around the bush babbling about nothing or spewing ideals over and over again, thank you angeal (genesis's obsession with loveless was one of the worst parts of the game i dont care if the story is a parable or something it sucked).

The one redeaming aspect of this game was its ending. Not the final boss, thats up there with KH1 Ursala as my least favorite fights ever, but the actual closing scenes of the game. Zack's whole drive to be a hero pays off and we finally get to see Cloud become the guy we knew in FFVII. Spoilers - that whole scene of Zack's death and Cloud becoming his living legacy was really the whole reason I wanted to play this game and they really pulled it off really well, so genuine praise for that.

Overall, the ending was great, but it took 14 hours of some of the worst arpg gameplay to get there so even for the most diehard FFVII fans I can barely reccomend this.

(accidentally deleted this review, its back now)