You need a Buddha level of willpower to not get frustrated here. I often hear competitive Pokemon players describe the game as, "Chess but your pieces are dragons." yet no Bishop has a 50% chance to sleep, poison or paralyze you. It's possible to become better at the game by taking these percentages into account and minimizing their possible effect on your strategy, but no matter what there's also some randomness.

Casually the game is very fun though. Easy to make a team, lots of different formats to try, plenty of resources to help you understand the huge amount of knowledge needed to be decent, and overall it's an incredible feat that this is all free and fan made.

It's essentially a worse Mario 3D World. It has the same level design; basically 2D levels with some added depth rather than full 3D worlds.
Getting all the Waddle Dees is much more annoying than getting 3D World's green stars. I missed some on nearly every level because the Waddle Dees are locked behind obtuse requirements like beating a boss with a certain ability or touching five small flowers.
The co-op is disappointing. Rather than player 2 being able to also be a Kirby, or at least have copy abilities, they are stuck with Bandana Dee who can only use the spear. 1997's Kirby's Dream Land 3 let player 2 have copy abilities as Gooey so it's bizarre that this game in 2022 doesn't. I understand there's Mouthful Mode but Kirby's Epic Yarn let player 2 have unique interactions with the large transformations so I feel there's no excuse here.
The game is cute, simple fun. There's lots of set pieces and the gimmicks change often enough to be entertaining. It's just good, not great.

Too much backtracking/repetition and the gameplay is interrupted too often. The other aspects of the game are 10/10 for me.
The game is incredibly dense with puzzles. There's no wide open fields of nothing like Twilight Princess, while the sky is much quicker to traverse than Wind Waker's exhaustively open ocean.
The dungeons are similarly great. Ancient Cistern and Sandship being two of my favorite dungeons in the series. Not only do these have unique locations and interesting gimmicks but there's a wide variety of puzzle types. Sometimes there's a riddle, sometimes looking at the map is required, sometimes using an older item is needed, etc.
Skyloft is second only to Clock Town for the most detailed Zelda town. Seemingly all of the NPCs have some interesting character quirk. The shopkeeper isn't just some generic greedy guy, his wife spends all their money and he is exhausted trying to appease her. The potion sellers aren't just a couple, it's about a dedicated husband trying to help his wife's business even though he's up all night with their baby.
I love the music. Having a fully orchestrated soundtrack would already be a breath of fresh air, but the music is also dynamic. Having the instruments detract when you're in the side rooms of a dungeon only to be brought back to the full ensemble when you're in the main room helps orient the player without needing to check the map constantly.
The visuals are similarly great. Having the game in HD shows off how beautiful and unique the art style is. I also love how expressive characters are with their eyes. It gives a lot of personality to Zelda's expressions.
Speaking off, I like the main cast of characters too. None of them get a lot of time but they're efficient with their stories. Groose has a fun redemption arc, Zelda's feeling for Link feel genuine, Girahim immediately has a distinct personality to prior series baddies, and I like how incompetent Link starts out. The first half of the game is about how Link sleeps too much, how Link is too slow to save Zelda, how Link needs Fi to help with puzzles, etc.. It makes the ending really feel like Link grew up rather than being destined from birth to be great.
Overall the game just came out at a really unfortunate time. Too many players of the original hadn't used the Wii in a long time which added to the frustration of trying to use motion controls again. The Kinect had come out the year prior making the Wii's controls look dated. This game was made hand-holdy so the families who's first video game system was a Wii could play it easily, but by 2011 many of them had moved onto mobile games. This Switch re-release is on a system with BotW but not WW or TP. Rather than players who only like open world Zelda trying out multiple linear Zelda games, they'll all try just this one and bring down the score.
I'm still glad Nintendo moved away from this formula to make Breath of the Wild, but overall I think this is an amazing game.

Follow a fox. Follow a bird. Follow an ally. Follow some tracks. Follow an enemy but from a distance. Do some "platforming" which is just jumping in a linear path to clearly marked ledges. Kill camps of the same enemy types over and over. Collect glowing materials to use in a linear equipment upgrade system. Level up to unlock points on short skill trees.
The game is gorgeous, as not only is the world design beautiful but the game knows when to hide the UI. The sound design is superb and the voice acting is solid. The story is surprisingly great when compared to others in its genre. It's well polished and I didn't encounter any glitches.
There's just nothing innovative or unique about the gameplay. It's close to amazing but just missing something to set it apart from other third person open world action adventure games.

This game gets less praise than it deserves. Since New Super Mario Bros. 2 and New Super Mario Bros. U both look so similar, and did so little to innovate the series, people tend to look down on the New series as a whole. This game however has unique aspects compared to the rest of the 2D Mario series prior, and is overall a good game.
While Mario Bros. 3 has the Tanooki Suit, and World has the Cape, this game doesn't have any game breaking power up that lets you just fly over the whole level. Also, even though Star Coins were introduced in the New Super Mario Bros. on the DS, Star Coins were mostly pointless there as they mainly opened up Toad houses to get a power up. Here, star coins are now required to open up the levels in World 9.
These aspects come together to give this game a more methodical pace than prior entries. No longer do you want to just hold the run button the whole level, instead you want to inspect for secrets to find the Star Coins. This slower pace works well with the multiplayer too.
The problems I have with this game are issues with the whole series. Boss battles are boring, I don't like auto-scrolling levels, and it's annoying to need a specific rare power up to get a Star Coin/exit only to get hit on the way and lose it. Still, it's a good 2D Mario and shouldn't be skipped.

-Story mode director Naoki Yoshida is the director of Final Fantasy 14.
-For the composers: Yasunori Mitsudaalso did the music for Xenogears, Yoshitaka Hirota worked on Shadow Hearts, while Tomori Kudo and Hiroyo Yamanaka worked on Xenoblade.
-There's money and a shop to buy stat upgrades.
-There's a monster sidekick, Pommy, who you can evolve into multiple forms by giving different kinds of food.
-Attacks are elemental and enemies have weaknesses.
-Character names are based on Christian texts like Lilith, Angel, Bulzeeb, Baelfael, etc.
-Costs over $200 on ebay.
-Final boss is God.
Yep, this is a JRPG.

I love the concept of having a story sequel to the mainline games in a rom hack. It's like a fully realized fan fiction. Unova still feels fresh to explore because the order you explore the region is completely different, not to mention the landscape changes that have happened because of story.
The difficultly was just right for me. It takes into account that anyone playing this has likely played dozens of Pokemon games, but it's not so hard that you get frustrated. It just took me two or three tries on each gym.
Really the only negative aspect of the game is that it's made in Crystal. There's some updates, like Physical/Special split, reusable TMs, and Fairy type, but there's no Abilities, Natures, Double Battles, etc. If all else was the same but it was made in Pokemon Essentials for some modern updates, better graphics, and better post game then it would be one of my favorite rom hacks ever. As it stands though it's still worth playing for any Unova fan.

I don't like Kanto. Mt. Moon is too long of a dungeon for that early in the game. There's too much reliance on HMs like Cut that are awful moves but you're expected to use at various points in the game. Getting a drink from a vending machine on the roof of a building to give to the gate guards is obtuse. The dungeons inside buildings like Rocket Hideout and Silph Co. use annoying mechanics like warp tiles and auto-moving panels that are just trial and error. There's 33 Poison types, that's more than 20% of the whole regional dex! The Sevii Islands are bizarrely easy, even on the last couple islands the trainers will use pathetic teams like a Level 49 Sunkern.

At the time this came out it was a much better version of Kanto, but judging it compared to the whole series I don't like it nearly as much as other titles.

I don't like Kanto. Mt. Moon is too long of a dungeon for that early in the game. There's too much reliance on HMs like Cut that are awful moves but you're expected to use at various points in the game. Getting a drink from a vending machine on the roof of a building to give to the gate guards is obtuse. The dungeons inside buildings like Rocket Hideout and Silph Co. use annoying mechanics like warp tiles and auto-moving panels that are just trial and error. There's 33 Poison types, that's more than 20% of the whole regional dex! The Sevii Islands are bizarrely easy, even on the last couple islands the trainers will use pathetic teams like a Level 49 Sunkern.

At the time this came out it was a much better version of Kanto, but judging it compared to the whole series I don't like it nearly as much as other titles.

The balancing is horrible. The Riovanes Castle fight is a huge difficultly spike. This is especially true if your protagonist isn't built to do a 1v1 fight, which is likely considering it's a party based game for all other maps.
Jobs like Dancer and Bard take a ton of investment to unlock but ultimately suck. Jobs that are easier to unlock like Monk and Black Mage are substantially better.
Even though games are supposed to get harder as you get towards the end, having Cid in the party completely trivialized the rest of the game and made it a cake walk.
The game is fantastic in most other aspects. Great dialogue, plot, music, graphics, etc. You should play it but I suggest looking up a simplified job guide just to eliminate any grinding needed for difficultly spikes or poor job choices.

Without mods it's a 8/10 but with mods it's a 10/10. The game is fantastic in most aspects but fails with UI and AI.

Policy cards are oddly vague about what their effects will be, but a simple mod like Extended Policy Cards fixes this. Likewise, choosing a trade route is a chore with the amount of options and limited sorting possibilities, so another simple mod like Better Trade Screen fixes this too.

As Civilization games get more complex it can be more fun for the player, but as a consequence the AI gets worse and worse at the game. The game tries to make up for the dumb AI by just giving them huge stat bonuses at the start of a run on higher difficulties. This just creates an inverse difficulty curve though. The first 50 turns are brutal as the AI starts with multiple cities and soldiers to easily kill you, but if you get past 50 turns then their poor decision making means you'll easily win after this. Another couple mods like Real Strategy AI and Late Game AI help with this to make the difficulty more consistent throughout the run rather than all at the start.

If you don't have access to a PC to play this game with mods then I would only recommend this game if you haven't played anything in this genre before. If you are familiar with 4X or Grand Strategy games before then you'll likely find this tedious because of the bad UI and boring because the AI won't challenge you. If you can use mods though then I recommend this to everyone. Of course there's tons of other mod options if you want to add more to the game, but just these four simple mods make a huge difference to me.

This is an amazing fighting game in most aspects. Two flaws:
First, the netcode sucks. I have great internet but games would often have significant lag, not to mention games just dropping mid way through. Hopefully won't be a problem with Tekken 8 with rollback.
Second, the move lists are needlessly complicated. Characters in this games have more moves than I've ever seen in a fighting game. That's fine in concept, it makes the game more interesting to have more options, but the inputs are what bothers me. For example, a character will have a single hit move with the input of d/b+3+4 ; yet they don't have anything on just d+4.
The game is already difficult enough with memorizing my character's moves, learning to read other characters, knowing how to get out of other combos, etc. The game doesn't need to be even more exhausting by requiring complex inputs when a more simple input isn't even used at all.

Just about every review here praises the gameplay. It fixes the map, companion, and smirk problems of SMTIV, while adding more difficultly options, more demons, more skills, etc. It wouldn't be controversial to say that this has the best gameplay in the series. The reason most people aren't also rating it 10/10 is the story, so let's focus on that.

Even though Megami Tensei games almost always have multiple endings there's usually one ending that has by far more content than all the other endings, like SMTIV's Netural or Nocturne's True Demon Ending. Many players, like myself, just want the ending with the most content, and therefore don't consider any other criteria for choosing an ending.

Apocalypse is somewhat unique because it has two bad endings, that end the game quite early; and two good endings, that both have the same amount of content. Though these two good endings have the same gameplay content the story differs significantly.

The reason many people dislike the story is because of the cast of teenage party members focused on the power of friendship. Some people like these characters as they get more developed character arcs and personalities compared to SMTIV's partners. Some people find them annoying and would prefer less dialogue though. No matter your stance I can't see this as being a negative. If you like them then there's a good ending where you join forces, and if you don't like them then there's a good ending where you go against them. Either way you still get the same amount of content and true final boss.

I recommend everyone who played SMTIV to play this game. The gameplay is better in every aspect. I think the backlash is just that people assumed that the ending where you turn against your party members would be a bad ending, so even though many people wanted to do that they didn't because they thought it wouldn't get the true final boss. Now that you know you can do either you should love this game like I did.