Realistically, I don't know if I would have finished this if I hadn't started it the day it was leaving Game Pass. Since I had a deadline, I did it more or less in one sitting.

I enjoyed it, but unfortunately the parts I was most interested in were not the parts the game was most interested in. Meena's story never felt like anything more than something I had to get through to unlock new chapters for Donna and John. And for those two stories, what I enjoyed the most was the interpersonal stuff, all their relationships with the people in their lives, and it was unfortunate to see that get ignored completely for the hour and change before the epilogue. Combining the final chapters like that just led to none of the arcs having an especially satisfying conclusion.

Mechanically there's not much going on here, but I'd argue there should be even less. Almost any time I had something to do that wasn't just choosing a dialogue option, it was superfluous and often clunky - busy work that was put into the game to pacify people who think it doesn't count as a game if it doesn't have enough opportunities to push a button. I would've been fine if they'd just owned how little control the player has and saved me the trouble.

Overall: I'm glad I played this on Game Pass instead of buying it, but I did enjoy my time with it! I have NOTES on how my "Molly has two dads" dreams turned out but that's neither here nor there.

Oof. I really wanted to love this one, but there's just so much unnecessary inconvenience and bad pacing. I wish I could play the game as it was originally released, because I've since found out that a lot of things I loathed about the back half of the game were added in the last six months.

I went through most of the game thinking this was an "I enjoyed it enough that I'm sad it's not executed better" 3.5 star rating, but after the mess of old and new content colliding that I went through at the end, I'm wondering if 3 is too high.

I'm not giving this a star rating because completing it felt like a huge chore, but I don't think that's really the game's fault. I was playing singleplayer and that's just not the experience the game is built around. Most of the issues I had were things that either wouldn't be a problem in multiplayer (as a quick example, there are a lot of enemy swarms that presume the swarm's attention will be split between multiple players), or they were general "this isn't what I usually want from Zelda" things that I wouldn't have minded if I were having the multiplayer experience instead.

I can't really review the multiplayer mode, but it seems like it would be great. This is several massive steps up from Four Swords in terms of scope and ambition and it's really impressive what they did here - I just wish I had a handful of GBAs lying around so I could have had the intended experience.

Revisited this because recently I’d seen a lot of references to it being really difficult. “What are people talking about? I loved this when I was a kid and I don’t remember it being super hard.”

Then I died fifteen times trying to get through Snow Barrel Blast before accidentally falling into the shortcut barrel.

Anyway, still a great game, but I did miss the relative polish of DKC2 - the foundation is here but the sequel really perfected things.