Rating still holds. Something is special about this game and Squeak Squad for me. My childhood is built around the Flagship Kirby titles, and while not everyone is down with Amazing Mirror and Squeak Squad, I am. It isn’t a perfect Metroidvania, your CPU allies are negligible and stupid when they hold weight, and it isn’t mapped particularly well, but it’s far less bad map wise than little me remembered. Finished it with 95% completion, and in 2 days. My little cousin got me the Switch Online expansion, and say what you will, but the GBA emulator, and filter are rather excellent with the OLED. It’s rare you see me hyping up a graphics filter, but this put CRT filters to shame. I’ll always love this game; it’s charming with its unique bestiary, its soundtrack, and its structure. I think it’s a really nice game, emblematic of the era in the early 2000s where Nintendo outsourced a lot of handheld titles, and they still tended to slap. This slapped.

The gaming equivalent of a nourishing meal.
I mean, there's nothing wrong with occasionally indulging in greasy junk food, but when you put it side by side with a delicious, homemade, hot meal for dinner you can't help but to notice which of them is the real deal.
Chants of Sennaar is the real deal.

It's smart, it's beautiful, it's intuitive, it's touching, it has no business having such a mesmerizing soundtrack. It's also crisp as heck on its fine quality of life detail, with a polishment that is rare to find nowadays.
I couldn't get enough of it; the game spoke to me, especially because it's so rare to find good puzzle games more focused on the Humanities field of knowledge. The only con, if I was inclined to point it out, is that it becomes a bit too easy especially by the last level. I can't really hold it against the game for not wanting their player base ragequitting because they couldn't learn some made-up ideogram system, though. Making things more complex than they needed to be would probably be a steep price to pay just to appease a few etymology enthusiasts (that being me).

The end result is exquisite. In its elegant approachability, Chants of Sennaar is one of those games that makes you happy for loving video games in the first place. I, for one, know that I am.