The story and writing is fun even if I'm sure I have terminal brainworms for laughing at some of the meta and fourthwall breaking humor in the game. I think my biggest complain is how simplistic the overall gameplay is. The monsters are just pile of stats, and unlike in Pokemon, there's no interesting abilities, items, or moves to differentiate the monsters from each other outside of there stats. It leads to you just wanting to use whichever monster has the highest rarity and hence, the highest base stats. Status effect moves are mostly useless with chances for them being so unreasonably low it's hard to justify remotely using them over moves that just do damage.
The game is definitely more challenging than the average pokemon game, trainers will frequently have full teams of monsters and will sometimes make you fight multiple trainers in a row. There's some sort of level scaling to keep things a decent challenge throughout, though I personally ended up being like 10 or so levels below every trainer in the endgame which led to me spamming the fuck out of healing items to get by. Overall though, I had fun. It's paced well, the story is surprisingly engaging, and the gameplay, while simplistic, is fun off to get you through the whole game.

What would have been easily my Game of The year is marred by a plethora of issues that happened to me in the last third of the game. Framerate tanking, graphical glitches, crashes, weird quest progression etc etc. As impressive as the game is (and it is quite impressive!) Act 3 definitely feels like it's held together by duct tape and paperclips and you can feel the game start to crumble a bit beneath the weight of everything it's trying to do. That said, outside of those flaws, this game goes crazy. The amount of interesting, unique and fun content in this game is absurd.

Finishe after about exactly 20 hours with about 75-80% of the side content done. This is a phenomenal expansion to Xenoblade 3 and an even better closing story to the entire series. It's chock full of fanservice for every game in the series which is great. Though, while you could enjoy XB3 without playing the other games in the series, with this expansion, you'll miss out on way too much if you haven't played the other games.

Gameplay wise, there's a lot of cool new features and QOL stuff. I really like the new system for character progression and affinity that rewards the player for exploring and doing side content in a way the series really hasn't before. The battle system is much the same from the base game with a few tweaks to keep it fresh but it has a lot of the same problems the original game had as well, especially with chain attacks. They still take too long and feel too strong and aren't particularly engaging.

Story wise, well.. Takahashi cooked. There's not much else to say.

Unlike the last game, this one removes the more explict metroidvania approach for a more linear stage based structure, but at the same time the main story still requires you to backtrack to these stages for items to progress, and going back to the older stages just isn't that fun. The bosses are hit and miss, with more leaning on the miss side. The actual level design is good however, and carries the game.

There's also a fair amount of extra modes with different characters and what not, but I personally didn't really mess with any of that stuff, but it's cool that it's there.

I have no qualms with calling this one of the best 2d platformers of all time. Every level oozes creativity, both visually and mechanically, each one with completely banger music to boot. Every level feels completely different from each other, with unique mechanics, enemies, powerups and a few cases, different characters to play with. The game never feels repetitive because it very rarely, if ever reuses any mechanics. This game even gets boss fights in a 2d platformer right.

And in addition to all of that, this game has some of, if not the best movement in any 2d platformer. It's fast-paced and controls well, and if you really want to master the games levels, you will spend hours upon hours trying to get highest ranks on each level, but you are never forced to. You can play the game casually (Which I did because I am bad) and get an thoroughly enjoyable 2d platformer experience, but for people who want a greater challenge, there's so much more to do.

There's a surprising amount to like in this game. The characters and story are interesting enough and the combat is good, however everything else surrounding it is not great.
It's a dungeon crawler where the dungeons you are exploring are the most boring things humanly imaginable, the ones I did were visually indistinct from each other with little to nothing interesting with them. No unique puzzles, hidden things to find or anything to explore. Resource management barely matters and the sidequests are the most banal, soul crushingingly boring thing. (The one interesting sidequest chain is locked behind paid DLC.)

I might come back to this at some point, but as of now there's so many more interesting JRPGs around.

i like the funny potatoes.
it's a good survivor-like (or whatever you want to call the genre of videogames) the mechanics are fun, the characters are interesting and all pretty unique. it lacks some of the meta-progression that other games in the genre have, which might be a bummer to some but i was fine with it. the game is quite addicting with a strong " just one more run" vibe to it, though by the end of completing it with every character I found myself kind of going through the motions. there's lots of different stats, items and weapons that interact with each other in cool ways, but for most characters you can win a run on the default difficulty pretty easily without having to interact with any of the cooler stuff in the game.

I debate back and forth whether or not I like this or pirate's curse more. I like the change to one single open Metroidvania world when compared to the separate segmented ones of the past. The way transformations work is probably the best in the series with how seamless and fluid they are, but the dances feel a bit lame. There's so many different rooms where you can use them and most of the time there's nothing more than gems that you get out of them.
I found the gameplay balancing to be a a bit out of wack as well. I played on the definitive mode that the game recommends and found the game much, much harder at the beginning. You are starved for healing items and resources, which made the beginning parts a lot more challenging than anything later. But by about 33% through the game I had more than enough money to keep myself capped on all of the healing items.
The progression feels a bit too formulaic as well, with the game constantly switching between having you find x amount of mcguffins and then doing a dungeon and then repeating till the end. That said, I enjoyed the game overall. The world is fun to explore, the powers are interesting and the music is great.