both very much for me yet so overboard with the pandering-to-excessively-online-people that I quickly started to hate it.
the gameplay is fun and the world is colorful. I ABSOLUTELY NEED more games with great movement that are entirely about chatting with neat characters without any extra systems or challenges that get in the way.
my problem is how elbow-nudgingly aware the presentation felt. you make friends with furries! you collect cassette tapes! there's a Tamagotchi you can play with! the coins say "MEOW! MEOW!"! the shipping container island is filled with default cubes (us silly game developers)! one of the cute characters is actually DARK!!
I found the fox who had four screens of Discord open and closed the game.
even with the pronounced spotlight on the precious characters and pastel world, the game has moments where it gets in the way of itself being able to do so. the helper frog box that appeared in the corner stating that I seemed to be stuck when I was just exploring the island on my own terms was notable, but the more prevalent hiccup was with camera angles during dialogue. the camera during gameplay is fantastic and never gave me an awkward view, but so many times when I talked to a character did the camera flip around to some weird shot where characters were covering each other and I couldn't clearly see what I thought the game was touting as its strongest selling point.
if you love this game, I totally get it; I know there's an ever so slightly different version of myself that does too.

definitely a clear "something's wrong" with the hit detection on notes, but I don't think it's as broken as people make it out to be. a lot of the notes are phrased in really bizarre rhythms compared to how you might initially expect them to be based on how parappa actually raps each phrase, which is the big reason I think people struggle with gameplay. I also feel like the game can kinda cheat you at times with certain second/fourth phrases (looking at you, last two lines of cheap cheap and the freestyle section of the final concert).
regardless, the overall Parappa Energy baked within every aspect of this game's design brings me insane amounts of joy and makes this one of the few titles I can fail repeatedly and still have a great time. this silly whatever-animal-he-is has a permanent place in my heart.

played this again. incredibly witty and silly to the point where I wanted to include a quote somewhere here review but every line is pure gold. probably not the best from a balance standpoint with certain attacks being far better than others, but I can’t think about this game and not take in all of the love this project pulses with.

it feels strange to say, but this game has deeply affected me on how I want to experience stories, especially those through video games. RPGs have a too-often tendency to be interesting to me for the first hour but completely lose me once battles start happening and I just get too overwhelmed by it all. I don’t want that anymore.

RPGs scare me. the concept of starting into a 50+ hour questline is a monolithic challenge to mentally accept before I get past a title screen. but I place great importance in taking in the loves of others, and I want to be able to experience all of these wonderful stories told via an interactable medium. this ridiculously stupid little story about b-ball has made me want to try to better appreciate what I ultimately consider the largest part of my life. and for any creative project to be able to conjure that determination in me, I can’t consider it as anything less than perfect.