I love this game. I want to take a semester-long course devoted to discussing this game. I am at most six months out from wishing I could Eternal Sunshine this game out of my head so I could discover it all over again.

It's incredible how well this story unfolds given that it's split into hundreds of pieces that no two players will experience in the same order. I never felt like One Big Question was the only thing driving me; I chased my curiosity in dozens of directions and the more I did, the more my understanding of the overall geography of the story formed without me even having to try. Pieces of the story would rearrange themselves in my mind and fall into place even when I wasn't playing. More than once I'd be going about my day and suddenly make a connection between two clips I'd seen the night before, and that would inform what I went looking for the next time I sat down to play.

I hit credits about five hours in, and by seven or eight I was pretty confident I'd uncovered all of the game's major secrets, but I'm a completionist at heart and I kept wanting to do more and more. I chased down every clip, I unlocked every achievement, and then I rewatched all the game's footage in chronological order. And honestly, even being the kind of person who would do that, I was surprised by how much that paid off. I'd understood the broad strokes of the story before, but so many smaller moments came into focus that it was like discovering them all over again. Completionism usually involves diminishing returns, but the closer I looked the more Immortality rewarded me for it. I'll be thinking about this one for a long time.

i wholeheartedly believe that xenoblade chronicles is this generation's final fantasy 7. a jrpg epic with an incredible cast with enjoyable dynamics between every character, and a story that will be praised to high hell for years, and very deservedly. you really don't know what you've gotten yourself into until the end and it's so good. my only complaints are that the jp dub is pretty bland but the english dub falls off in quality closer to the end, but otherwise xenoblade chronicles is a consistently amazing game from start to finish.

(5-year-old's review, typed by her dad)

You get to go on a slide and at the end you gotta beat Bowser, because you get to MOVE and MOVE if there's turns, and also there's a slide in the snowy place!

[Dad's note: She would use the Wii U gamepad to go do the secret slide in Peach's Castle over and over again, every day for the entire summer of 2020]

If there's one thing that can be said about the average Backloggd user, it's that they likely have Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles in their top five games. I can't say that's too surprising, because I too think it's the perfect platformer, and expands brilliantly on every mechanic and design concept of the previous three games. It's so good, in fact, that the entire series earned an extended rest until 2016's Sonic Mania. Yup, it's hard to believe but there were no Sonic games between 1994 and 2016! It's a little something called "going out on top."

Of course, Sonic 3 & Knuckles is two games in one, or rather two halves made whole again. Thanks to the power of Lock-On Technology™, it's literally one game's contents stacked on top of another with a few additional bug fixes, layout changes, and music swaps thrown in for good measure. Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles both have value on their own, but it's hard not to argue that Sonic 3 & Knuckles is the definitive way to play.

Levels are utterly massive, with single acts taking just as long to complete as full zones in previous Sonic games, and yet they never feel like they overstay their welcome. Tails and Knuckles come with their own unique movesets that open additional pathways inaccessible to Sonic, and similar to Sonic 2, special stage portals are scattered throughout levels rather than being an end-of-stage reward for keeping your rings. What you end up with is a game that takes multiple runs to see completely, and each subsequent jog through S3&K's 13 zones feels better than the last. I touched on the importance of exploration in Sonic games without losing sight of the game's pacing, how finding new paths and hidden areas should continue to push you forward, and I think Sonic 3 & Knuckles is the absolute zenith of this design philosophy in the Sonic series. There's always something new to find, but the game just flows in a way that discovery never comes at the expense of progress.

The zones themselves look incredible, with much more richly detailed sprites than anything seen in the series prior. Mid-act set pieces help change the flow and appearance of levels, like Robotnik's bombing run on Angel Island casting the rest of the level in flames, or an attack from the Death Egg heating up the previously cooled off interior of Lava Reef. Sonic 3 & Knuckles is well known for its cutscenes, which tell a story quite effectively without relying on dialog to give context to character actions or plot twists. Even small details in the backgrounds of levels help flesh out the narrative, like statues of Sonic in the upper portion of Hydrocity serving as an early hint of Sonic's prophesized arrival on the island. This focus on story never gets in the way of the game itself and actually does a remarkably good job at making the adventure feel big. I praised Sonic 1's gradual transition from natural to industrial locations for how it makes you feel like you're working your way from the outskirts of South Island towards the heart of Robotnik's headquarters, but Sonic 3 & Knuckles takes that concept and runs with it. Each Zone features an interstitial cutscene that connects the previous level to the next, making you feel like you're actually chasing Robotnik across the island rather than popping up in unrelated locations because video games. Indeed, the entire premise of the story is built off the back of Sonic 2, with Sonic and Tails following the decommissioned Death Egg in their biplane as it crashes on Angel Island. All of this adds so much character, I don't think you can really go back and do a retro style Sonic game anymore and chunk out these narrative elements. It's one of those things that was done so well it effectively becomes part of the series DNA, an expectation rather than a one-off.

Sonic 3 & Knuckles also features my favorite boss battles in the series. Each encounter offers something unique, and are a fair deal more threatening than those in Sonic 2 while still being intuitive enough so as to not be roadblocks. I also really enjoy the mid-bosses and think it was a smart idea to add these as a way to break up each act. In terms of pacing, these serve as climaxes to the first act as well as pallet cleansers, giving Sonic a reason to stop and plant his feet for a second before transitioning into the next act. This is far more effective than simply having him run through a goal post and fading to black, and actually quite necessary given that doing so after a 4 minute level would just kind of feel awkward.

The blue sphere special stages are perhaps the best in the classic series. I've previously commented on how Sonic special stages are just technical showpieces that Sonic Team couldn't be bothered with actually making fun, but I think blue spheres actually manages to be a good time while still looking impressive. If you smack another cart on top of Sonic & Knuckles you can access a new mode where blue sphere levels are randomly generated. I don't recall the exact number of possible permutations, but there's enough content there that you could go grey before completing them all. And yet, there was a period of my life where I would run through a few of them each day just to see how many I could knock out. I love blue spheres. I'm a danger to myself an others.

Sonic 3 & Knuckles is such an incredible game. Thanks to fans, there's also Sonic 3 Complete and Angel Island Revisted which add various tweaks and improvements to the base game, and I think both are definitely worth checking out. It's fun to play around with Complete's restoration of the original intended level order, and AIR provides so many granular options for tweaking the Sonic 3 experience that you can more or less build your perfect version of the game. Plus it has wide screen sport and the music is crystal clear. The Michael Jackson-like voice samples found in many tracks have all their compression removed, it is almost startling how clear they sound. However, I don't want to get too into the weeds on either of these games. Suffice it to say, I think they're worth checking out.

I could talk about this game forever. At the same time, it's also one that I find difficult to discuss in a focused or nuanced way, because every time I start to describe one element I like it ends up reminding me of another I enjoy just as much, and then my thoughts just become scattered until I'm gushing incoherently about how much I love this game. I just think it's that good. I mean, I like Sandopolis for chrissake. Even people who give this a 5 out of 5 would tell you they don't like Sandopolis. That could've been the whole review and it'd give you just as good an idea of how great I think Sonic 3 & Knuckles is without wasting your whole morning on this essay.

Also, it's pronounced high-draw-city. It's not a city! It clearly looks like an aqueduct that's carrying water to Marble Garden, which is the ruins of an ancient city. It's also a water level that focuses on being fast, Hydrocity is a play on the word "velocity!" Yes I know Yuji Naka said it's actually Hydro City, but he made Balan Wonderworld, are you seriously going to tell me that's who you trust!? I will punch you in the nose if you say "Hydro City" to me, I promise you this.

A rare breed of maximally-political video game that is seemingly unashamed to throw around terms like 'traditional conservative' and literally laugh in the face of anarchists, even if it isn't entirely sure of what these words mean or imply. Essentially the Metal Gear Solid 4 of the Ace Combat franchise - throws ideas up into the air and then scrambles desperately to pick them up whenever they create conveniently-epic but emotionally/politically-incoherent "moments", perhaps best embodied in a late-game cutscene where two preteen girls grab a glock and shoot up a hard drive of flight data based on a king-turned-pilot in order to preserve the dignified human memory of a monarch who ran bombing missions during the Strangereal World's equivalent of the Kosovo War. Moreso than other Ace Combats, 7 is adamant in siloing fighter jets away from the universe they exist in, licensing and lionising pilots as apolitical titans of the sky who are simply following vocational orders from higher powers - something the godless unmanned drones could never understand.

Another king has more or less sewn up this game's ideology, so I won't bore you with The Implications (if any) of what this game's story chaotically tries to talk about. Mission 16: Last Hope - wherein a global communications outage renders your IFF useless during a mission to save a defecting general - is a real tragedy, though: a mission that perfectly captures the tone of the franchise's overarching "we're all blind pawns on the world's stage" themes in its gameplay, but is then almost immediately nullified by an announcement an hour later that you've unlocked some United States Air Force emblems to plaster all over your fictional fighter jets. No other real-world nation is represented in the game, and coupled with the game's recent Top Gun: Maverick DLC, it's hard not to think the franchise has set a hard course in the opposite direction of highly-conscious predecessors like Electrosphere and The Belkan War. The great thing about these games, at least, is that they have played exactly the same for over 20 years - you can pick and choose the ones that suit your preferred interpretations of strangereality and be none the worse off for it.

When THATCHER'S TECHBASE accidentally landed me in a bunch of newspapers and magazines last year, one question came up in every interview - "Do you think politics belong in video games?". The smart-arse non-committal wise-guy pseud-response I gave people went something along the lines of: well, games are art and art is personal and the personal is a product of the environment and environment is a product of political decisions and therefore every video game is political on some level, blah blah blah, etc. etc. etc. A nice vague answer the stands safely beyond reproach, a politican's response to a question about politics. Ace Combat 7 kinda throws that question into inverted flight by showing us what happens when affairs of state are injected directly into the Unreal Engine, bypassing environmental and personal factors to create pure political product. Sure, Call of Duty and its alikes have pulled this trick before, but they didn't lay down explicit dogma; it was all just set-dressing to make the murder more satisfyingly "real"istic. Project Aces have actually dared to pull up a pulpit here, and throughout the game's latter half I desperately waited for a series-trademark rug-pull moment where we'd learn it was all just a lesson in the blinding effects of radical-technocratic nationalism or whatever political theory the game was mulling over in that particular moment... but it never came. At least the game ends with Reiko Nagase descending from Heaven to tell you how sick your post-stall maneuvers were. That's something I can really believe in.

echo-commentary, cyberpunk platformer. really good, even if odd designed - very labyrinthine levels that may seem strange if you play this after 2 and "worse" when thinking about it on 3. turns out, though, that it is way better replaying it than playing for the first time - some levels that may seem gigantic, after recognition, you can finish them pretty quickly. the future/past mechanics are very well implemented, because it not only sustains the environmentalist message but also the levels has big linear spaces and loops for you to use or creates challenge where losing your momentum is losing the time-travel. love the bosses!! they are fast and smartly designed. the music rocks too!! really a sonic masterpiece and after replaying, thinking if it could be my new favorite . . .