This game makes up for where Origins left off. Look, I'm going to be honest, the last AC game I played prior to Origins this year was AC Brotherhood way back in 2010. A decade later and my gaming preferences have changed quite a bit. Jumping in with Origins, I didn't feel the whiplash that many of the fans felt, and if I'm going to be completely honest, I welcomed the OWRPG elements with open arms.

With that said, Odyssey feels like it has everything I wanted out of a great open word rpg, even if it was repetitive at time. It truly felt like I was exploring the Greek country side and I absolutely loved it for that. To top it off, this game had the fantasy elements that I was definitely missing from Origins.

By the end of the game and all of the DLCs, you feel as if you truly are a god, and to me, that was what made it so much fun. Enemies felt consistently difficult, even with your godly powers at max.

Overall, I had a lot of fun with this game. While the overarching story of the Assassins vs The Templars is...camp? at best, Kassandra's story was actually incredibly heart wrenching at times. Also, Kassandra is probably one of my favorite video characters of all time now.

Generation 4. The leap into 2.5D artstyle for the Pokémon franchise, and what I personally find to be the precursor to the peak of the series. Pokémon Platinum was actually the last mainline game I played before hopping out, but I have tons of nostalgia for this era of Nintendo. And that's just what The Pokémon Company thrives off nowadays, right? Cheap nostalgia? Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, the next remakes in line for the traditional nostalgia trip, aren't bad by any means...but the execution wasn't right this time around.

Game Freak didn't develop this one, first and foremost. This remake was outsourced to ILCA, a company known for mobile-quality games and applications (notably Pokémon Home), running off Unity. The major issue with this title seems to be the lack of polish from a studio inexperienced with mainline Pokémon games. We'll get into artistic choices in a bit, but there's just something here that doesn't feel right when translating DS controls to those of the Switch. Alongside a few visual bugs, I ran into certain instances where using the d-pad for movement was more beneficial than the analog stick, due to certain collisions and triggers placed on the maps. Even the additional feature of having your monsters follow you can lead to some odd moments where they'd be blocking your path.
Now, it's a shame that these rough spots are present, because the rest of the translation is actually quite nice. I skipped out on Sword/Shield where this feature was supposedly introduced, but I really dug the new gameplay feature of move types being labeled as effect/non-effective when a monster is logged into the Pokédex. That, along with the EXP share leveling (which I understand some people hate), are nice ways of continuing making these JRPGs less tedious. And one neat thing that I found myself doing during some endgame grind was finding the game's controls to be completely playable with one hand; neat for accessibility.

Now that all the bad things are out of the way, I gotta say this might be one of the better Pokémon remakes I've played in a while. HG/SS was beautiful in presentation, but the level spikes were incredibly annoying. Even OR/AS, as much as I loved Gen 3, had some god-awful character models that pulled me out of it. The fact that BD/SP is just a straight-shot remake, rather than one that adds monsters and locations from later generations, is an excellent choice because they didn't fix what was already not broken. It doesn't fall too far into nostalgia like OR/AS did, but it also stays faithful to what made the original a magical experience; chibi sprites, nice variety in environmental design, INCREDIBLY charming music, and a neat story about the "gods" that created the Pokémon universe. Plus, this is one of the mainline games I remember having some really cool post-game monster encounters, which are all still present here.

ILCA did what needed to be done here: create a faithful remake. Aside from the Unity-related bugs and lack of polish on the technical side, Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are solid ways to return to the Japanese-inspired Sinnoh region. Are the visuals and quality worth the $60 entry point? I don't think so. But if you're looking for a charming 25-hour JRPG with incredible DS-era music, then I think you shouldn't pass this one up.