Need to make this a better review, but I am leaving bullet points for now to flesh out later
Upsides:
World is so dense
Combat is fun
Fights felt climatic
Sense of exploration is insane (as a result of the world density) and how you are directed through that exploration is very good
Myriad of ways to solve things good
Music is good
Slate abilities are awesome
Loved the little bits of story

Downsides:
Tutorial long and boring
80-90% mark is a slog
Boss fights get significantly easier after beating first couple
Durability mechanics are lame, particularly at the start of the game. Bombs help mitigate this however.


I can see why people say it's GOAT material. Glad I tried again after bouncing off the tutorial and it not being what I expected from a Zelda game.

Unfortunately, the sequel to monster prom is less engaging than the original - I think it's still a solid enough game, particularly if you enjoy the characters enough to want to see more than them. I can imagine this still being fun for playing casually with friends also, it just wouldn't have hooked me like monprom did.

The upsides:
- The routes continue to be fun. Highlights are darkest ending and Liam father.
- aaravi and dahlia here
- campfire is cute
- special events
- drinks are fun first time round

Downsides:
- event length
- no of events
- the drinks shop
- side characters feel less integrated into the game.
- no wolfpack :(
- no Miri :(

I am gonna come back and edit this review into non bullet points I need to do other stuff

What a game. I didn't expect a Pokémon game to have such an engaging story or a deep cast of fleshed out characters. Chatot getting a moment in the sunlight, your partner's growth, team skull feeling like villains with motivations.
The game is beautiful, from the artwork during cut scenes to the gorgeously animated pixel art of the Pokémon.
The future section was a highlight, it felt extremely odd and foreboding, and getting back to the guild and the eating dinner scene was a sight for sore eyes.
It's not a perfect game, though. It is frustrating that despite building a team you spend the majority of the game not adventuring with them. And the difficulty is low enough that the boss battles are cheesable and the main gameplay loop of doing a dungeon can get tiresome if you play too much at once. This doesn't even mean you can always consistently get through a dungeon - random critical hits can ohkos you or your partner with very little possible mitigation. The game also goes "wow, you actually lost" after near enough every boss battle, which kind of just feels odd, especially if the battle was a tough one.
Overall, these complaints are relatively minor in comparison- this game slaps and if you like pokemon you should play it. Preferably when you're 8-9 years old (so you can imagine being a part of the explorers guild all the time for at least a year) and then again in your mind 20s, to appreciate all the other things that make this game rock.

Also. Chatot and wigglytuff are gay. As are the MC and your partner. I don't make the rules.

I find this DLC immensely frustrating and mostly just play with it off. As much as I love monster prom, everything added by this DLC apart from the secret endings (which, unfortunately, are good) detracts from the playing experience.
Before I get into the bad, the good: Dahlia, The Slayer, Cal, Miri, The Interdimensional Prince and Dmitri's secret endings are wonderful and an exciting extra selection for playing through. Good art, good stories, good fun. The couple showing up at lunch are pretty funny, if scarce, and if this was the entirety of the dlc it would be a strong 4/4.5 out of 5.
The worst of this mod is Leonard, and everything about why I find him frustrating has the same symptoms as my other more minor gripes. Leonard is a new side character antagonist, who is a typical obnoxious gamer gate type reactionary. He is openly misogynistic in a much more real and less cartoonist/trope-fuelled way than say The IDP or The Wolfpack, and he shows up throughout events to say something truly awful and get shot down by the player. This is, on the face of it, supposed to be fun and funny, and I believe it is because the writers are the kind of people who think that retweets to dunk on are the funniest and best thing in the whole world. Never mind that your game has to write in failure states, where you don't manage to shut him up and he continues to spout his awful opinions but now it's your fault. Never mind that your players now have to sit through "yes, there are people out there who hate you" when they're trying to relax and play a fun party game. Never mind that the jokes aren't even funny! Leonard single-handedly makes this DLC not worth touching.
My gripes around Leonard unfortunately extend to the way the game treats Zoe, the second DLC love interest. Zoe is a former eldritch being that has given up on that in order to become a normal(ish) high school girl. That framing is then used as an extremely shallow metaphor for transness within the game. Zoe is treated almost entirely like a trans woman - for example, Vera makes a comment that she's her sister, not her cis-ter - but without ever explicitly saying that she is trans. This cowardice and choice to make Vera explicitly cisgender would be enough to mildly annoy me, but the game also struggles to explore Zoe's transgender experiences through anything other than showing off the difficulties she faces. A large enough majority of Zoe's events feature Leonard appearing to tell her that she's not a woman that it is incredibly unlikely to complete a run dating her without him showing up. The player character, as usual, then has to defend her from him and make him go away. Yes, trans people get bullied, but it is both incredibly out of tone with the rest of the game and not fun to play, as a trans person, or even I imagine as a cis person who cares about trans people at all. Zoe doesn't even get a secret ending where she gets to just be unquestionably happy. Her first secret ending deals with her cult, who are a metaphor for a trans persons family, struggling to accept her as her new self. Her second secret ending is just more bullying from Leonard! It's lazy, not fun, not reflective of the trans experience, and overall I think is informed solely by the impression you get of trans people following the same people who love to quote tweet and dunk.
Zoe does not even have much redeeming her as a character. Zoe's primary character trait is that she loves fanfiction, and she particularly loves writing fanfiction about the other love interests at spooky high. She enjoys telling people about this and quizzing them on niche aspects of their personality so that her fics can be more realistic. This is all treated as very stupid and silly. Pointing at your target audience and telling them that enjoying your product is bad is rarely a move that makes your product more fun and this is no exception. Additionally, Zoe writing smut about the other characters and telling them about it explicitly makes the majority of them very uncomfortable. In a game where all the other love interests say a wide variety of zany and very horny things to each other and it is treated as cool fun and sexy to have the transgender woman love interest do it and it is treated as weird and off-putting is blatant transmisogyny. The easy and funny fix to this would have been to simply make everyone into it, but this game chooses not to do that (note: this context is also why the wolfpack does not work as well as a villain without some heavy gesturing at tropes, because with the in-univerae rules what he does and says is broadly very okay). I also don't like that Zoe was previously a monster who destroys the world in one of the games previous very few number of bad endings. Making trans woman before transition out to be monstrous (in a way that goes far above and beyond the monstrousness otherwise on display at monster high) only really serves to reinforce gender essentialism.
All of these negative aspects are why I leave the dlc off most times I play this game. It's difficult to leave a star review here, because it's pretty split between 0.5 stars (the stuff I detailed) and 4.5 stars (the stuff I covered at the start, and the wolfpack/dahlia lunchtime event). Overall, I've given it one star because I think your dlc has overall been a failure if it's better to leave it off than on when playing your game.

This game has kept me occupied for so long I find it really charming in general and I love the characters a lot. The exploration of discovering new routes playing with my friends is great. Much better without the dlc (which I will rate separately).
I do think this is best played as a couch co-op and it does have some hit or miss moments but once you're invested in the characters a lot of the jokes are much funnier in my opinion. The game is definitely strongest when you're doing a route, as just dating the main 6 normally can be repetitive.

I enjoyed this game a fair amount - the art and the soundtrack are particular high points and work very well stylistically with the story.
My only gripe is that I think that the writing was simultaneously superficially dense and relatively shallow. So while I enjoyed the story and was interested by the points it was making, I felt that it was trying to make it seem like it has more to say than it actually does.
Worth the time to play for sure if you like the subject matters of mechs, queerness, or sci-fi politics, and can put up with deliberately obtuse language.

God it's really hard to rate this game properly, and I'm not sure I'm going to say anything new in my review. It would be a 4.5 or 5 star game were it not for the glaring technical and graphical issues. It's a Pokémon game with a strong story, the opportunity for challenging battles due to a freeform gym order with no auto scaling, and fun open world exploration. The new Pokémon designs are great, the gimmick is fun, and the characters are a lot of fun.

One thing I noticed was due to a lack of unique locations and enterable buildings, cities felt somewhat bland and uninteresting to visit.

I enjoyed sayonara wild hearts a great deal - I was entranced for it's entire runtime, despite typically not being very good at rhythm games to the point of finding them frustrating. Luckily, the game is very forgiving to playing poorly (in fact the worst part of losing is that they ask you if you want to skip the section after a few deaths, which in of itself is a good feature to have), and the beautiful graphics and music help with keeping you engaged.
I enjoyed how the game frequently switched between various mechanics without feeling clunky at any point, and managed to keep itself new and interesting for the most part - the only exception to this being the subspace levels, which I found repetitive by the last one. Particularly enjoyed the final levels culmination of all the previous mechanics.
The only other small complaint i have was that at some points it was really difficult to see what was coming up, but that didn't detract from the experience enough to stop me enjoying the game.

also i want to look like half the cast lol