Far from perfect, there are a bunch of things throughout this game that didn't work for me; the intense proliferation of fetch-quests, food instantly healing you whenever you want making a lot of battles about little more than doing a bunch of cooking beforehand, the lack of in-game motivation to explore cooking beyond the same 3 or 4 simple dishes, the negative difficulty curve, forgettable boss battles (all the Ganon-variants having the same aesthetic really works poorly here), moments of overly obtuse reasoning, deeply uncomfortable usage of transphobic tropes, occasional frustrating or unsatisfying challenge design (Lost Woods was particularly rough for this).

All that said, the highs in this game are incredible; this world is one imbued with a very real feeling of magic, many of the views are breathtaking, and I never tired of clambering up yet another mountain to watch as the morning light breaks on the horizon and scout the land from high up for my next goal. I can't remember the last time a game not only created such genuine thrill over exploration but managed to maintain that thrill and excitement for most of its 50 hours. Not only is the world just wonderful to explore, with new secrets around every corner and over every hill, but the game is incredible at providing you a sense of direction in this gigantic world without ever holding your hand and rarely explicitly telling you what to do. That the game's world feels awe-inspiring yet never paralysing in all its options and potential experiences is a real achievement.

All this is to say I am more forgiving towards the game's moments of frustration or disappointment than I would normally be as the positive moments are really something special.

The only open world zelda game so far. The world is gorgeous and traversing it is fun for the most part. However, as most abilities are granted at the start and weapons degrade quickly, there is very little sense of progression outside of stat increases. I really wish there were more interesting things to find than fairly repetitive shrines. Because of this, it feels fundamentally different to all other zelda games so far. I find the nonlinearity of the game fascinating and unique, but the actual story was very simple and not very engaging. I ended up enjoying the game overall, but I feel a part of it was the birds. I like birds.

I serve 200 customers their orders perfectly but for the 201st customer I forget to put the pickles on their chicken sandwich. Cleaver calls me a piece of shit worthless excuse for a chef.

The game is really fun but I feel like the balancing of the various foods is a bit off. Any holding station food that requires extra prep to be served feels like it adds so much more effort than the ones who don't but might be marked as a higher tier. This also means that some of the levels that basically force you to use these foods (such as the burger levels) are wayyyyy harder than the rest of the levels.

It's kind of hard for me to overstate how big a part of my childhood and very-early teenage years the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series was. I would play basically every game released, 100%'d 2, 3 and Underground 2 more times than I can count, and so much of my early music taste came from this series too. No doubt I'm one of countless people who in their childhood excitedly started trying to learn to skateboard after too-much-time playing these games only to be quickly rushed to hospital due to breaking a bone (my poor arm).

Playing THPS 1+2 was understandably an intense nostalgia-trip. Even just beyond being really cool to impressionable-young-me, the two games that were remade here were such a wonderful mixture of sports game, arcade game, and 3d platformer, blending genres in a way that was legitimately exciting at the time and would spawn a wave of imitators in the following few years. THPS 1+2 is extremely faithful to these originals in terms of feel and intent, whilst updating it in ways that are nearly unanimously positive; adding in the best portions of the move-sets from later games so that you can flow around levels much more naturally, and reworking the visual design of the game to compliment the much-improved graphics.

Sadly these games have lost something through the years, and whilst this game is certainly an improvement over the originals (it's hard for me to imagine returning to the first Tony Hawk's game's extremely limited move-set) there are certainly moments when it feels like all these updates somehow make some of the wrinkles more noticeable; some of the fetch-quest items just blend into their surroundings for how detailed everything surrounding them is. Maybe trying to hunt down five "don't skate" signs hidden throughout a level on a 2 minute timer only to be forced to find them all again when you can't for the life of you figure out where the fifth one is just fundamentally hits a bit different over two decades later. Being asked to locate five homeless people and jump over them in a specific order definitely hits different (seriously, how not punk can you possibly get??). Time is not always kind.

So the experience was certainly largely fun, and great to return to after all these years, but also very much flawed, bearing the weight of time on its shoulders. It took me about four hours to 100% the first and second game content after which I struggled to find much more to do. I could play through the game again with a different character, something that appealed to me greatly when I was a kid, but there's so much else I can do with my time nowadays that it's hard to sell me on what largely amounts to running back the same experience all over again. I put a few hours into the speedrun mode and it was fine, but trying to find scripted routes through levels really detracts from the free-flowing, expressive nature of the movement for me. The game seems to have an expectation that you'll put a lot of time into it considering its levelling and challenge systems, but I think I'm largely done with the game for now; content with my experience, grateful to have had this opportunity to revisit a freshened-up version of something that was once very important to me, but also very ready to move on to something a bit more substantial.

Marred by my very personal distaste of its handling of the subject matter and exacerbated by my slight gripes with this style of dialogue. I felt emotionally manipulated into fixing my "mistake" on the second attempt.
At the very least, I couldn't find an ill-meaning bone in Missed Messages' body, leaving its brief runtime to feel a little too out of its own depth to competently navigate its story and offer anything besides momentary catharsis. This is the type of thing that'll hit different people in wildly different ways - I can't say it accomplished what it clearly set out to do for me, but it failed in style and with heart.