Undertale wasn't a revolution in gaming, just the acknowledgement gaming had changed. In an era desperate to convince itself that gaming needed a return to form, Undertale made a case for the modern game as it could be: a soft colorful gorgeous romp through bit after bit, joke after joke, all while telling a meaningful thoughtful story about why people love stories.

Undertale wasn't the game that formed me, but the game I'd been formed to like- when it came out and spoke it spoke in my language and I understood all its quirks. I didn't need to dig in to "get it", I dug in because I wanted more, because I was a dumb kid who didn't quite get that "wanting more" was kinda the whole point.

Undertale is an RPG with bullet hell elements where you talk to the monsters and save them from themselves. It has a lot of jokes and a skeleton named Sans

Kid Icarus Uprising is, on every level possible, Masahiro Sakurai's masterpiece. There's something to be said about the fact that I think if this game came out today, it would be clowned relentlessly for its controls, its cheesy nonsense script, its over the top voice acting, and all the self indulgent weirdness Sakurai has been chomping at the bit to add to a game since Iwata first tossed him into the Smash Brothers dungeons. It is often said that there are many games we "weren't ready for at the time", but it's rare to find a game that we aren't ready for now.

Plenty of the reviews already wax poetic about Rivals' gorgeous modding scene that transforms Rivals into the greatest casual fighting game experience this side of Smash Bros Brawl, and honestly if you factor in the gorgeous underpinning mechanics Rivals is built on you could probably call it the single best casual fighting game experience for competitive and semi-competitive players.

But enough on that.

Rivals of Aether is a reevaluation of the platform fighter, stripping back the bombastic scale and explosive presentation of the Smash franchise to rebuild it from the ground up. Systems are simplified, combined, streamlined as much as possible to take the best parts and polish them to a razor's edge. But really that's nothing that you won't hear from more experienced and advanced players, and with more precise and specific language to boot.

Instead, I'll say what I can say: Rivals of Aether is a game that feels good. It feels good because the physics are good, because the controls are responsive, because every character moves in their own unique distinct way that turns matches into beautiful dances, because every character's moveset builds upon those unique movement tools with zoning tools and weird cancels and all sorts of other gimmicks that build upon the simple (but bottomless) universal mechanics in turn. It feels good because the sprites pop against vibrant stages and rockin tracks.

It feels so good that even if you don't care about competitive scenes, that even if words like "ranked mode" and "tournament settings" don't stir your heart, I still would recommend popping it in for a spin because damn does it feel good to take a spin on it. There's an endless list of beautifully designed custom characters to pop in with more every month because it just feels good to play and good to control and good to watch because Rivals is at it's core a good game, and that's really all there is to say on the matter.

Let's be real Brawl plays like shit. It plays like dogshit on a casual level and we are all legitimately better off that every smash game since has done as much as possible to move away from it. No good reason for this beyond spite, and on almost every level Project M is a straight upgrade to Brawl.

THIS SAID, Brawl is the closest I think that Smash as a franchise ever got to what Sakurai wanted it to be- a crazy party game that doubled as a love letter to gaming that doubled as a raw template canvas for all his strange bizarre ideas of what video game design is. Brawl is PACKED with shit, just packed with layers upon layers of pointless descriptions and pointless stickers, expansive levels of a story whose main selling point is repeating "what if THIS GUY and THIS GUY met and FOUGHT but then they had to TEAM UP to fight THAT GUY" fifteen times over again.

But while Ultimate is a moreness that just kinda expands outwards like a flat plain, Brawl's moreness is a sort of depth, one that lets you come back to it over and over to find new weird minigames and play more weird 15 minute demos of real actual Nintendo games, a hyperperfected casual fighting game experience I truly believe no other fighting game has come close to matching.

Also Mario looks hyperrealistic and that kinda goes CRAZY hard

For what it's worth, Kingdom Hearts owns. I love Kid Icarus Uprising, I love Danganronpa for christssake. When I say "Neon White's writing sucks", I do not mean "it's too over the top or sincere or cheesy for me", I mean "when I saw that one of the game's lead writers worked on a mediocre failed Cartoon Network pilot, it was like the last piece in a long drawn puzzle connected in my head". Because I think few terms describe the game's meh writing better than "decent kids cartoon struggling to wrap their heads around visual novels".

That said, I think it still serves an important tonal role in making this game absolutely sparkle, because god damn "speedrunning puzzle game" is such a dynamite novel concept that does so fucking much with its limits that I feel dazzled by its brilliance even now. I had to delete the game off my computer because it was getting to the point where I would just pour hours of my life in to try to get my times perfectly low, finding new tricks and optimizations in my runs to see if I could sink just sliiiiightly lower, just get ooooone more good run in. Life ruining video game. There is a demon locked within Neon White, and if you get filtered by its campy 4kids dub it is perhaps for the best you do

EDIT: Holy FUCK does Trick Moon suck nuts as a pilot I redact my statement somewhat Neon White is like if the guys who wrote your least favorite episode in every cartoon released in the 2010s were the same guy and tried to write their own spin on Cowboy Bebop. That this exact chain of events also led to Netflix's own adaptation of Cowboy Bebop is, at most, pure coincidence.