Understands a beautiful line between the brevity of arcade shmup design and the lofty cinematic flair of its console sisters. The fantastic scaling and depth effects create a world with a real sense of gravity - you not only feel like you're there, but you experience that awe and discomfort that comes from the vastness of space. Definitely one of the most visually-powerful vertical shooters ever made.

And the lock-on mechanic's just cool as shit: Very well-integrated into the game's visual style. And to trade-off the increased difficulty of having to manage two visual spaces at once, the game eases up on the speed and claustrophobia of the bullet patterns compared to other shooters. It's still hard as shit, but it's not immediately overwhelming in the way other games could be.

Top-tier shmup that EVERYONE needs to try.

Sonic CD is good and people misunderstand what makes it good.

Sonic already kind of has a problem where people want an extremely specific form of gameplay out of it and mentally disengage whenever it's not scratching that itch. So it's not really surprising that people dislike CD so much with its 'playground' mentality to level design; aimless and chaotic routes that weave inorganically with each other doesn't facilitate the speedrunning flow that people want from the classic sonic model. But that's kind of the point from an aesthetic sense? I always took the ruptured level design as a complement to the game's narrative themes of untainted nature becoming abruptly industrialized, and that messy stylistic relationship gets reinforced further by both soundtracks: JP bringing out the dreamlike pop that NiGHTS would later champion, while US is more overtly ominous and uncomfortable. The game wants you to feel that environmental conflict between the harmonious chaos of Little Planet's flora while being corrupted by Robotnik's bizarre machines. Even from a gameplay standpoint, there's still a lot of fun to be had in learning how to workshop optimal routes for time trials. There's a reason the stages are so short and the game rewards you so heavily for those time attack scores.

The only major failing that I think makes CD hard to come back to is that for how open-ended its levels are, it doesn't give you a lot of incentive to explore them. The metal Sonic generators and transporters are the only objects that occupy these stages and reward you for trekking around. But I also don't really know what the design solution to this would be: Adding spontaneous collectibles could easily turn exploration into a begrudging chore and take away from the freedom of exploring levels at your own pace. On the flipside, I think the existence of special stages as an alternate means for unlocking the true ending is kind of genius: You can take the exploration route, or stick to the Sonic formula of platforming fast, and this duality supports the franchise's long-running depiction of their character's agency and motivations. Sonic is more than just being the hero; he's doing it his own style and he won't change.

I hope CD being ported again via Origins doesn't introduce another wave of jaded thinkpiecers trying to tout CD as the 'overrated letdown' of the franchise. It deserves more appreciation for the ways Sonic's framework allows for experimental design.

Metroid prime was the 1st game I ever properly owned that was built around the first person perspective (I got this game through the prime trilogy on wii). And as a kid this was probably my favorite video game ever. So it's good to know that after coming back and doing a full playthrough for the 1st time in 5+ years, and after falling in love with both first person shooters and immersive sims as a genre that this game still holds up as well as I thought it did.

Now that's to say this game is flawless. Locking hard mode until after you've already beat the game is unnecessary. Going for 100% of scans is frustrating due to having one too many scans you only get one shot at (bosses are fine it's everything else that's a problem). The artifact hunt is fine on repeat playthroughs but clear padding for 1st time players (though out of all the bad gamecube fetch quests it's probably the least bad) And you can tell on repeat playthroughs where the devs had to crunch for time since the middle third of this game both ramps up backtracking and stops having new boss fights. It's not a bad section of the game but it does stick out.


But while I did notice these problems for a while they weren't enough to keep me from giving this game the 5/5 it deserves. Metroid prime does an almost unparalled job at creating a living breathing alien ecosystem. I would say that prime 1 went unmatched in this regard until subnautica. Which released 16 years later (the other 2 prime games are still good at this but they have to split their focus between multiple planets)

While I wouldn't call metroid prime an immersive sim. The game does a fantastic job at bringing elements of the genre to consoles. The games puzzles and morphball rooms are fun and add good down time. The story being slowly pieced together through scattered lore drops with the game occasionally throwing you red herrings by giving them to you out of order makes the final climax feel more earned.

Finally while metroid prime's fps gameplay isn't the best at the time it's still more then competent. The 4 main beams all feel punchy and satisfying and pair well with the beam combos and the game has tons of memorable set pieces like the fantastic boss fights, or any of the times where you have to head into space pirate territory. Plus metroid prime's platforming is still the gold standard for a 1st person game.

Now while I don't know if metroid prime is my favorite metroid game. I can say it's the best transition to 3d any nintendo series has pulled off if not the best transition any game series has pulled off period

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is the worst AAA game I have ever experienced.

Xenoblade Chronicles X for the Wii U is my definition of “a flawed masterpiece.” It had all the pieces there to make a near perfect game, but didn’t quite connect them. Still, There’s a special place in my heart for it. The first Xenoblade Chronicles is one of the best JRPG's of all time.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is not that. If you are not familiar with the game, it takes place in another world where all civilizations rest on the backs of titans in the sky, endlessly swimming around the World Tree. Besides that you have pretty typical JRPG fare, like unexplained magic, talking animals, and girls with cat ears. It has a some good points to it, but at the end of the day, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is just a bad game.

Look, I love anime. I’ve seen quite a lot of it. Too much, even, my friends tell me. But there is a line, and maybe I’m the one who’s got to draw it. Pyra’s boobs are literally larger than her head. If you watch a video of Pyra, you’ll see quickly how ridiculous her character is. The proportions of her figure are completely inhuman in any way, shape, or form. JRPGs can get pretty bad with this stuff, but look at this shit. This is the most egregiously over-sexualized depiction of a woman I’ve ever seen. And not just the breasts, but the whole costume ensemble. She’s wearing half a pair of short shorts with a metal bikini top. This character is meant to be the awakened persona of an ancient, powerful weapon, the Aegis. I spent 30 hours trying to take her or this game seriously and was never able to do it. Japan does some fucked up stuff, but when your female characters are this unrealistic I’m unable to suspend my disbelief any further. Any character development done for Pyra is thrown to the wayside as I’m trying to figure out how her back isn’t broken. It’s a damn shame too, because Pyra’s voice actor is excellent and probably the only competent actor in the entire cast. The fact that anyone fetishizes human women to this degree is kind of revolting. This is the horniest game I’ve ever played, and I played Danganronpa.

Unfortunately, for many reasons other than Pyra’s chest size, this game can only be described as an anime garbage cringe fest. This game is everything that the general public thinks anime is: perverted, badly dubbed, full of screaming fights and big explosions, all style and no substance. The over-dramatic reactions to every small line of dialogue, the nonsensical gobbledygook language the characters use when describing ancient wars or distant gods that have no bearing on the present situation, the constant reduction of female characters to sex objects. This is the stuff that people who don’t engage with the medium see when they look at anime, even though it only pertains to a small portion of shows/manga. If you’re not an actual weeaboo in possession of a waifu body pillow and you managed to stomach all this, then I applaud you for your patience. I am a lesser man.

There are gacha mechanics, and your rewards are women. Wow. Don't know how much more on the nose you can be with "women are objects", but there are legitimately loot boxes with big-breasted, bouncing anime girls that are often teenagers or younger. I am not lying.

If you have the stomach for this kind of stuff, congrats! Let’s talk about the game. You’ll take control of Rex, a recently resurrected scavenger with a horrible English voice actor, who sets out to return the aforementioned Pyra to Elysium, which is heaven, I guess. Rex is a “Driver,” which is what we call people that can harness the power of Blades. Blades are humanoid people, of which a disproportionate amount are hot teenage girls with big ole anime tiddies. Pyra is a Blade, and is sort of a manifestation of the power of the Aegis, Rex’s big red sword. So long as Rex holds that sword, he is inexorably linked with Pyra.

Pyra wishes to return to the top of the World Tree, so they join up with a cat girl who is riding a talking tiger and a perverted raccoon with a sex robot. I apologize for the bitterness that is so clearly seeping into my review.

The above scene, while only 5 minutes, kind of sums of the vibe of the whole game nicely. This broke me. I think from this point on I was destined to hate the game, and there probably was no going back. I had to call my mom after this, just to tell her I love her. Poppi is indeed a sex-maid robot built in the image of a 10 year old girl that Tora, the raccoon idiot, built to refer to him as Master. What the fuck, MonolithSoft. I will not sit here and let this be normalized.

The game is composed of several small open worlds that are disconnected, and as you progress through the game more of them open up. You can fast travel between worlds to jump between them, but on each one you’ll find plenty of stuff to do. Some are tiny and others large, but the actual design of the landscapes relative to the mobility of your character is great design. MonolithSoft built the map for Breath of the Wild, so it’s not surprising that the map in their own game is so impressive. Even in the first world, you see rolling hills, arching mountains, bottomless lakes, and vividly colored plant life of all kinds. The art direction of the settings is one of the best parts of the game.

The monsters are, as always, amazing. They are carried over mostly from the previous games, and Xenoblade has always had a knack for making believable looking fauna in the right environments. This is the high point of the game. If you want amazing fantasy animals from a distant planet, there is no better place to find them. Seeing new creatures was the only thing that carried me through 30 hours of this game. The music is solid as well, but honestly I really thought it was a downgrade from XCX.

That was the last good thing I’ve got to say. Combat in this game is convoluted beyond belief. There is no way you could understand anything that’s going on without reading about it online, because there are so many systems layered on top of each other that everything you do during a fight loses all meaning. Despite the fact that there are 5 hours of tutorials at the beginning, you’re not adequately taught how to configure your party to achieve the most powerful combos. With accessories, equipment, party callouts, elemental combinations, skill trees, auto-attack cycles, status effects, weapon types, combat arts, art levels, weapon upgrades, and Blade attachments all working in the background together, it takes more than a few hours of mashing buttons in the dark before you have any sense of what Rex is actually doing. I know it seems like a very simple thing, but there’s a huge disconnect between the player and game when your character doesn’t seem to be responding to the inputs you hit. And it’s not because the game doesn’t work, it’s just such an insane explosion of color, badly dubbed screaming, and ugly UI that you don’t actually feel like you’re doing anything.

The UI for menus needs to be mentioned. It moves really slowly for some reason. It’s ugly, it’s hard to navigate, and totally unintuitive.

The game also runs at 480p undocked, leaving all the tiny onscreen text literally unreadable. Are we meant to scan through three different onscreen menus during fights without being able to even read the text? The game also runs at 30 FPS maximum but is bugged with constant frame rate drops. I don’t think I made it more than 20 minutes in handheld without a single digit frame rate drop. Maybe that’s been fixed by now, you can correct me if it has.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is both a technical and narrative failure. This game absolutely fails its predecessors and has cheapened the brand. While the worlds and monsters are imaginative and beautiful, the cringey anime garbage stuff is enough to turn off most people. If you overlook that, the actual gameplay creates a huge disconnect between the player and Rex. Combat relies on over a dozen different bloated systems and feels like button mashing, even when you do it strategically. The characters are impossible to relate to or care about, even setting aside the unacceptable designs of the female characters. The English voice acting and dubbing is the worst I have seen in a decade. If I have to watch Poppi, the robot sex-slave maid modeled to look like a 10 year old girl, call that alien raccoon “Master” one more time, I will throw up. Do not buy this game.

Gotta give credit where it's due: where other, less ballsy companies would see a conceptual early build of this and say, "nah, scrap it," Treasure says, "fuck it, we're going for it." Gotta love that about them... their bad games are always interesting bad.

Here they go for broke on an absolutely bizarre mechanic (left stick controls character, right stick independently controls scarf-hand which can grab and stretch anything in the environment like taffy), and a disconcerting artstyle to match, complete with random pencil shading and weird character proportions (to say the least) and nonsensical saturday-morning-cartoon bosses. It's all a big mess, a series of failed experiments... some of which still manage to charm in spite of their failure.

Honestly, if it weren't for the absolutely dead-brained "platforming"(?) levels, and for the unfortunate, inexplicable decision to have the game's main enemies be ladies with balloon breasts (????) I might say it's pretty alright.

I don’t know if there’s ever been a truly bad Kirby game; for a series that’s had a relatively consistent dev team cranking out at least one new, frequently full-sized game almost annually for precisely thirty years now, it’s kind of wild that the worst thing you ever hear about them is “this one is a little bit uninspired.” The fact that several of the most recent titles in the franchise are among its highest regarded is equally impressive considering how much the series has adhered to its roots for all this time. There’s generally a spin on the formula, some more transformative than others, but any given Kirby game is going to look and play more or less the same as any other Kirby game regardless of what year it came out and what console it’s on. It makes Kirby one of those series where these small iterative changes - in art style and control scheme, in which copy abilities are included, in which silo of level design is utilized this time – feel a lot more impactful than maybe they actually are in practice. But we all have our favorite little quirks of Kirby game design, even as from the outside they may, somewhat accurately, come off looking very similar. I’ve been going back and playing the very earliest Kirby games lately, most of them for the first time, and it’s solidified these opinions in my head. It’s a series that’s largely unchanging but that’s fine! It’s also largely excellent, obviously aesthetically but also in terms of play and design.

So it was hugely exciting but also maybe a little daunting when Kirby and the Forgotten Land was announced to be taking Kirby into the third dimension only twenty years later than most of their contemporaries. There had been stabs with perspective in Kirby 64 and the 3DS saw the bite-sized experiment in Kirby’s Blowout Blast, but this could have gone so disastrously wrong, right? Kirby’s formula is so tried and true at this point that translating that game feel into a whole other mode of play and getting it to feel as perfect as it does must have been a monumental challenge. But it DOES feel perfect. Kirby moves better than maybe they ever have, movement speed just as quick as you want (Kirby being too slow is a recurring problem in these games imo), wisely capping flight height from whatever ground you jump on, and my god MY GOD find the specific person on the dev team who first wrote “bayonetta witch time dodge roll” on the ideas whiteboard and give them a one million dollar bonus, it’s incredible, the perfect addition.

The game is surprisingly full featured, too. AAA games are a plague of resources at the best of times, and I don’t think anyone would have been surprised if this game had been stripped back in Da Big Transition as so many similar games were and are, even just between hardware generations. Forgotten Land, though, has a meaty campaign with varied extra mission objectives, plenty of side content, a pleasant suite of minigames, a boss rush, the kind of things you expect from the average mainline Kirby game. It’s gorgeous to look at too, surely to do in part with its adherence to fixed camera angles in its tightly authored levels, a wise choice that I would love to see implemented in more 3D platformers.

You CAN see the seams here and there; relatively few enemy types and bosses here in a way that starts to feel conspicuous given the variety of aesthetics in the levels even within the themes of the worlds. There are only twelve copy abilities here, something that I didn’t mind particularly as a lot of extra little functions get baked into a limited upgrade system that keeps several of them fresh throughout the game (some certainly more than others though, and idk that there is as much strategic value in choosing between old and new upgrade tiers as the game thinks there is), and you can definitely see that a few other things got foisted into the scripted Mouthful Mode bits, but for what it’s worth those are varied enough that I never got tired of them and oftentimes they offer enough of a little puzzle or challenge as to be a welcome break in the normal flow of a level. Most of the time when there is an obvious compromise in this game it feels like there’s been a smart way to paper over that potential weakness with clever design.

That’s ultimately Forgotten Land’s greatest strength – even though it reveals most of the tricks in its bag relatively early on in the experience, it consistently finds ways to remix its toolset in ways that feel, if not FRESH throughout the entire game, then never unclever and always fun. There are secrets and optional challenges that I think actually do offer a challenge if you want that (something Kirby has struggled to provide even in moments where it has tried to), but no requirements are so strict as to gate any content in the game; it’s as breezy or stiff as you want it to be and makes for the most balanced difficulty experience a Kirby game has offered. That’s the word that defines the experience: balanced. The highs are high, and what lows are here are also, it turns out, pretty high. I don’t think we could have asked for any better, honestly.

After about fifty hours I think I’ve seen enough to conclude that everything I like here is stuff that I can get more fully formed in previous souls games and everything that’s new and unique here is actively subtractive from the experience.

I could write a lot here but this game feels like it’s been discussed to death already and honestly I just want to stop thinking about it.

I’m like 30% of the way through a Dark Souls 1 character on my switch. Might get back to that.