A charming little adventure game. The mechanic of collecting words instead of items to solve puzzles is honestly pretty clever. I wish there was a little more nuance to the puzzles, but I can’t really fault a kid’s game for being too simple. The game also has a bit of the stink of early adventure game jank, where you kinda just need to go up to every NPC and do every verb to them to progress. The slight jankiness aside, the presentation is really cute, and having bespoke animations for each of the 85 Hamchat words is honestly pretty impressive. Overall, there are definitely worse ways to spend an afternoon

It is pretty astounding how effortless Nintendo made it look to transition from 2D to 3D. This game feels almost exactly like playing a 2D Metroid game despite all the extra design and gameplay considerations that come with a 3D, first-person experience. There are so many amazing little touches, like Samus’s face reflecting off her visor when there are bright flashes of light (definitely startled me the first time it happened) or the x-ray visor showing Samus shifting her hand in her gun to select the different beams. Just very cool, very immersive, very engaging.

I will say, I think the back half of the game loses its shine just a bit. The scavenger hunt for the Chozo Artifacts just feels like unnecessary padding, especially because traversing the map never really stops being a little slow and clunky. If you’re going to have us scour the entire world for the last few of these artifacts, I would have appreciated some kind of limited fast travel a la Symphony of the Night, or even just something like the space jump / screw attack combo you get at the end of Super Metroid that simultaneously eases the monotony of traversal and makes you feel immensely powerful.

I know there’s an argument to be made that having no fast travel makes it a more immersive experience, but personally I don’t think trudging through those first few rooms of the Chozo Ruins or Magmoor Caverns 40 times is any more immersive than doing them 20 times. You reach a point where you’re just slowly walking through a dozen huge rooms with basically no threats, which I just found to be pretty tedious, and tedium generally ruins immersion for me.

I feel like I’m being really down on this game, so I’m gonna try to end on a positive note. The exploration is some of the finest that I’ve seen in the series. For the first few hours, the game feels absolutely bottomless, and the rate at which you acquire new items sets a pretty much perfect pace of drip-feeding you new ways to open up more and more of these giant areas. Going through the Phazon Mines for the first time was a highlight, as the jump up in combat difficulty made me actually desperate to find a checkpoint, a pretty rare feeling in an age of autosaves and scripted near-death experiences.

So yeah, maybe unsurprising, but the game did in fact pretty much live up to the hype. It really reminds you why there’s a whole genre named after this series. Check it out if it passed you by like it did for me.

This is absolutely everything I want out of an action RPG. A combat system that requires quick reflexes and thinking on your feet while also rewarding strategy and tactics. An enormous world filled with bespoke quests with actual writing and variety (looking at you, FFXVI). Party members that all interact in fun and interesting ways, both on and off the battlefield. The step up in scope and quality between Remake and this game feels comparable to the way that Elden Ring expanded on the Dark Souls trilogy, or Breath of the Wild elevated 3D Zelda games.

The sheer audacity on display is truly astounding. It respects the source material without putting it on a pedestal. It breaks up the melodrama of the main plot with insane dance numbers and wacky side stories. It stuffs every nook and cranny of the world with engaging and rewarding content. I spent about 70 hours in this game’s world, doing a majority of the side content, and I was left still wanting more. That’s a very rare feeling for me, especially with RPGs.

I got pretty much exactly what I was hoping for with this game: a variety of cute little levels where Peach gets to wear a bunch of fun costumes. The gameplay’s not much to write home about, but it was a fun, chill game that did just enough to keep things interesting and didn’t overstay its welcome.

I only had one major gripe, which was the final boss. I know it’s a bit silly to complain about a lack of challenge in a game that’s clearly meant for children, but boy was the final boss an absolute nothing-burger. The previous bosses were okay at best, but they at least had more going on than “hold A until you win.”

Anyway, an overall fun time. If you go into this with a similar mindset as you would going into Kirby’s Epic Yarn or Yoshi’s Crafted World, you’ll probably have a fun time too.

I never played much of the original GBA game, but now I'm considering going back and playing some other games in this strange little miniseries (no pun intended).

I think I actually prefer when Nintendo leans heavier on the puzzle side of the puzzle-platformer, like in this game or something like Captain Toad. Something about having a more stripped-down design that requires you to stop and think appeals to me more than the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach that mainline Mario games like Wonder go for. Also, the soundtrack for this game kinda goes, in a way that I'm not used to hearing in a Mario game.

I'm not saying this game is perfect. The handstand/triple jump feels kind of extraneous - the only uses I found for it were to just completely bypass parts of levels in a way that didn't feel intentional. And of course I don't know what we're doing with a lives system in the year of our lord twenty-twenty-four, but that's Nintendo for ya.

Hoo boy.

This game definitely deserves its reputation as the black sheep of the series. A weird redheaded stepchild from an era where Squenix was trying to figure out how to make Final Fantasy into an action series without pissing off its fans. A bizarre combination of action and turn-based elements that ends up as less than the sum of its parts.

For what it’s worth, the oft-repeated defense that “it gets good about twenty hours in” is true. When you finally have enough abilities and party members to play around with the paradigm system, it becomes a lot more tactically engaging. The final boss had me on the edge of my seat, frantically switching between my paradigms, trying to balance keeping everyone buffed and healthy with keeping a constant barrage of attacks. But the fact that you spend more than half the game being drip-fed new roles, abilities, and partner combinations at a glacial pace is a glaring flaw that cannot be overlooked.

If the game simply started at that midway point and skipped over everything up to that point, it would probably be a pretty good game. It’s not like any of the story makes any sense anyway, so jumping in halfway through wouldn’t take much away from the narrative anyway.

I wanted to give this game a higher score than I ended up at, but I just don’t think that it works very well as a video game. It’s definitely a beautiful experience. The calm, almost somber soundtrack, the interplay between mundane city life and fantastical little fables, the surprisingly dark places that the stories go, all come together into something unlike any other SNES/SFC game I’ve played.

The problem is that the player’s involvement in this world and these stories is minimal. This makes sense considering they’re adaptations of Kenji Hayazawa’s actual stories, but the result is that the game often struggles to find something to actually give the player to do. It gave me the same feeling that I got while playing through some of the less interesting Disney worlds in Kingdom Hearts games, the ones where Sora and co. just watch a Disney movie and occasionally do something very tangentially related to the plot.

I don’t really know what could have been done to alleviate this problem. It really just kind of feels like a video game isn’t a good medium for experiencing these stories. All that being said, I still enjoyed my time with the game and I’m glad to have been introduced to Miyazawa’s works. I’ve picked up a collection of his stories to read, and I can’t wait to dig into them.

I bounced off this game several times before finally getting properly into it, but boy am I glad I finally stuck with it (shoutouts to @unforeseenboy for picking it for my backlog “spring cleaning”). What starts off as a kind of slow, small RPG about a wizard school that doesn’t suck gradually expands into a pretty compelling story about coping with loss and messy teen relationships, bolstered by a robust and pretty unique grid/lane-based battle system.

The battle system is really what made this game shine for me. Basically every element was tailor-made for someone like me, who really enjoys small-number RPGs with timed button presses like your Mario RPGs (of both the Paper and & Luigi variety) as well as grid-based systems like Live A Live or Trails in the Sky.

The action commands for attacking and dodging are tuned basically perfectly - quick enough to keep the pacing of the battle nice and tight, and just tricky enough to stay engaging without being too taxing over a long period. My only complaint is that the first hour or two felt like a bit of a slog because your action vocabulary is very, very limited at first.

As for the story, I thought it was very fun to center it around the sister of the sort of Harry Potter stand-in character. It allowed for some interesting exploration of how the average YA protagonist engages in some pretty shitty behavior, but also gave some of the secondary characters the chance to experience some real growth. And of course, we love to see the sheer amount of diversity on display - not a straight white male in sight for the entire game.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention the killer soundtrack. There’s lots of fun little chiptunes, some beautiful piano pieces, and several tracks with vocals, which i wasn’t expecting. My standout tracks were Showtime (Gilda’s Theme), and the first battle theme, Rhythm of the Wild.

Anyway, if you’re itching for a game that scratches a similar itch as the early Mario & Luigi games, or one with a canon they/them AND a cannon ze/zir AND at least 3 canon gay relationships that get happy endings, I’ve got just the game for you.

The side missions are mostly chaff, but it works pretty well as a handheld game
— you pick it up, crank out a couple side missions, then go do something else. I found it very rewarding to get through all that and come out the other side with the ability to basically break the game over my knee with all the buffs you get from equipment and materia, and the last half dozen or so side missions pretty much require you to do just that.

I started this game to make sure I was up to speed on the story when Rebirth drops in February, but if anyone else is worried about it being required reading, it really doesn’t seem like it. There’s definitely some surprises for anyone who hasn’t played the original FF7, but for the most part the story is utter nonsense.

Edit: Having now played Rebirth, I guess this is actually pretty plot-important, huh. I will say, about 90% of this game still felt tangentially related at best. Basically everything that has to do with Angeal and Genesis just felt kind of confusing and pointless. But yeah, there is plenty of stuff in here that Rebirth builds on, so I guess it is actually a necessary part of the FF7R series.