There's something I find so addictive about the Pikmin series (at least 1 and 3). To me one of the worst feelings I can have is when I waste time. The idea that I just spent a resource as limited as time doing literally nothing just makes me feel awful. Pikmin 1 and 3 are all about using your time efficiently, and there's something so viscerally satisfying when you finish a day or something, and you look back on all that you've accomplished. There's one thing that only this series does to me, where I'm put in a trance where I'm so focused and immersed in the game, and doing everything as efficiently as possible. It feels fucking amazing.

Pikmin 3 is easily the peak of the series. It has the best levels, best bosses, best puzzles, and more, as well as looking gorgeous all the time. The ability to make other leaders walk to places on the map while you control someone else too, contributes to the feeling of efficiency that I love. The feeling is the best in Pikmin 3 because the game allows you to multitask way better than any other game in the series, and that could be why it's my favorite in the series, but even aside from that I think basically everything about the game is amazing.

The game isn't perfect, gyro can be annoying sometimes because it moves on its own and the lock on feature just doesn't work half the time and you'll miss even if you lock on to an enemy because the lock on is aimed at the air next to the enemy for some reason, but overall it's a game totally worth getting and I'd recommend it to anyone. I'd go as far as to say it's one of the best games Nintendo has put out in recent years, if not ever.

At its best it's some of the most fun I've had in a while and at its worst it's a massive slog. I really enjoy the gameplay of Okami, I find the dungeons fun, I like the side quests, I enjoy the bosses, even just running around in the fields I really liked. This game is also one of the most beautiful I've played, visually. I love the brush painted style of the game, and how much small attention to detail was put in, with things like the outlines of objects not being consistently sized, how a lot of things are slightly blurry, the way the game uses 2D objects, how sometimes you can see a paper texture on the moon, it's all just so cool.

What really brings the game down for me is the writing. So many scenes of people just saying the same shit to each other over and over again, a lot of dialogue is so clearly written in the way it is to make the player understand what's happening with zero subtlety and it's really annoying, and these dialogue scenes aren't short either. They can last up to minutes at a time, which might not sound like a long time, but when you're just reading through text boxes for 5 minutes, and you're faced with multiple dialogue scenes in a row because the game all of a sudden decides it really wants to progress the story, you really start to feel the minutes crawl. There's also a boss you fight 3 times which also happens to be the longest boss in the game, and when I say you fight the same boss 3 times I don't mean it like how it is in Skyward Sword where you fight the Imprisoned 3 times with slight variations, I literally mean fighting the same boss 3 times with no differences and that isn't a whole lot of fun.

There's also a lot of smaller problems I have with the game but still, the game does a whole lot more right than it does wrong. As expected from a Kamiya game it's so consistently and constantly creative that I can't help but love it.

tl;dr: the dog is cute

My first Armored Core game as a long time From fan. It wasn't at all a "mech Dark Souls" like I heard it would be, but for what it was it was great. What it is is a mission based game where you're supposed to customize your mech to find the best load out to handle each mission, while also replaying them to get S ranks. As an even bigger Platinum Games fan than I am a From fan, it feels like a crossover I never knew I needed. Even when I would get burnt out during a long play session, I just couldn't stop myself from playing because of how addictive the game was. While there are some flaws, like how unclear the criteria for an S rank is early on, a somewhat interesting story that is told very poorly (another unfortunate trait that is shared with many Platinum games), and the fact that you need to play the game three times without major difference for most of the play through to get the true ending, this game still gave me some of the most fun I've had this year. Some of the most fun I had with this game is making a mech based on Kirby, complete with a custom decal of Kirby's face. It was gorgeous.

Klonoa is cool as fuck! The two games included in this collection are incredibly creative with its mix of 2D and 3D, as well as various stage gimmicks that the game always finds ways to make feel fresh. While neither game is very long, nothing overstays its welcome and from beginning to end they’re just really fun games. Of course, this what I would say in a review of the two games as games, and not as a modern remake.

I don’t mind that the game doesn’t look as polished as other 2D platformers that have released in even the last decade because the art direction makes up for it, aside from a few ugly looking areas. I just really wish this game ran at a stable frame rate. Even as someone who can barely tell the difference between 60 and 30 fps, this game’s frame rate bothered me at times. Aside from the frame rate overall not being smooth, there are occasional frame drops when there’s too much on the screen, and for a remake of a game that’s over 20 years old, and a game that doesn’t look like a modern release, it’s a bit of a problem. Especially for a game with the mechanics of Klonoa, with really fun aerial momentum based puzzles and platforming. The mechanics are so fun that I’d almost buy a whole game in the style of the optional unlockable challenge levels.

Overall, while I can’t say much about how it compares to the original games, I can see how long time Klonoa fans could have been disappointed by this. However, as my first time playing a Klonoa game, I loved this. Although the first game has a much stronger story that almost made me tear up at the end (I probably could have cried if I wasn’t holding back my tears with every bit of my soul because of the embarrassment I would have felt crying to Klonoa), the second game has such better level design that I have to say I liked the second game more. If you have any interest in the game or enjoy other 2D platformers, I’d recommend playing this, or emulating the original games. Here’s to hoping for a new Klonoa game.

a lot of the bosses have a shit ton of health, especially later on. a lot of copy abilities are worse than just playing as normal kirby because of how much of an unsafe position you have to put yourself in to use their moves. theres like an 7 copy abilities in the game too, which I guess is supposed to be made up for with the fact that the game has animal friends, but Coo is the only one I found fun to use. Levels are also a lot more boring than other kirby games ive played. you have to keep fighting the same mid bosses throughout the game over and over again. game would be like a 1 or 1.5 stars if it werent for the final boss being goated because its a kirby game of course the final boss is gonna be goated.

Minor spoilers, but not spoilery enough to put a spoiler tag on in my opinion. I'll be describing some of the basic story from the early game.

Buried somewhere in here is an amazing game. The most criticized thing about this game is the graphics and frame rate, and it's easy to see why, even by switch standards it's pretty bad. At its core, the gameplay is really fun. As someone who didn't play PLA, I really liked being able to catch Pokemon in the environment and have a huge world to explore. The only other praise I can really give this game is that the story is good for Pokemon standards. It's not amazing, but it's interesting enough to not completely forget everything the second you finish the game like with Sword and Shield.

Speaking of the story, I wish everything interesting didn't happen in the last hour of the game. Until then there's three main "storylines" that you can follow in any order to complete the game. One is of collecting 8 gym badges to become the champion, which is nothing special if you've played another Pokemon game and is barely a story. The other is a story of taking down the bases of this game's villainous team, team star, which is probably the worst team in a Pokemon game yet. They're literally just school bullies, and the storyline doesn't even make a lot of sense. The last of the three is one of collecting Herba Mystica for a character named Arven, and I actually liked this storyline. Every Pokemon game I've played has exactly one character I actually like, and Arven fills that quota. It's the only storyline that made me feel something other than complete void in my heart. If you've played the game you'll know what I mean when I say the game's story only really gets interesting in the last hour. I consider this a complaint because I think at least some of the concepts could have been sprinkled throughout the game to make it more of a main part of the story. Overall though, the story is fine. It's passable, which makes it a huge step above most other modern Pokemon games.

One of the weirder problems with this game is that you can't go inside the vast majority of buildings. Even shops are just menus that open up when you enter the building, without an interior. It might seem like a minor complaint, but it really bothers me. Obviously Game Freak has a horrible schedule to make these games, this game is very clearly undercooked, but really? It's an open world game! This is the one Pokemon game where they should focus on making a great world to explore, including cities! When you can't go inside buildings, you have much less to explore in each city you visit. Maybe it's unrealistic to be able to go inside building in the world, but when you can't go inside buildings in this game while you can in every other Pokemon game, it makes the cities in Scarlet and Violet feel lifeless in comparison.

For other minor complaints I have, I don't think a lot of the music is really memorable, but some if it is okay, the good songs were probably composed by Toby Fox but whatever. The game doesn't have voice acting, which I don't have a huge problem with unlike some people, but it is pretty disturbing when characters in cutscenes are fully animated with moving mouths but there's no voice coming out of them. There's not a lot of post game content, which I don't have a huge problem with because it's an open world game, you probably didn't explore everything so I think in a lot of open world games the post game content is whatever you didn't do on your first run. I don't like how gym leaders all have the same type Pokemon because if you have one slightly over leveled Pokemon that's super effective towards them that one Pokemon completely sweeps them and the battles become easy and boring, but at this point it's just the formula they've followed for 30 years. Also the Ed Sheeran song that plays in the credits is really boring.

It might sound like I have more negative things to say than positive things, and I do, but the gameplay is so fun that I can look past the bad parts of the game. I mean, I completed the dex. That's gotta count for something. After playing Pokemon Sword, I was so emotionally divorced from the Pokemon series that I thought I would never play a Pokemon game again. I don't think Sword and Shield is a horrible game, it's just mediocre, but playing that game made me realize I was just sick of the Pokemon formula. I'm saying this as someone who started playing from XY, so I can't imagine how people who grew up playing the series from even earlier felt playing such a mediocre game. This game was enough of a change in the formula that I feel interested in Pokemon again.

I love the art, writing (of the english translated version at least), world and storytelling of the game, but most of the puzzles aren't good, especially early on, being really easy to understand but just taking a long time to find the answer because you have to traverse an entire area to find the different parts of the answer, the combat is really boring, every enemy encounter including bosses can just be beat by flowcharting "attack and then heal when health low", and I hate random encounters. It has cool ideas but it just isn't a well made game.

Especially by today's standards EarthBound doesn't have the deepest story or gameplay, but what does make this game special is that there's a really unique charm with the game. Even though this game has inspired a lot of other games, there's really nothing quite like EarthBound. There could be a million quirky silly little rpgs made and none of them could be EarthBound, and even after playing the game twice I still don't completely know why. I think part of it is that EarthBound has a really unique sense of humor. It's hard to explain, but with a lot of jokes in this game you can sort of tell it was written by a bunch of middle aged men thinking "haha what if this happened that would be kinda funny lmao" and I really like it. The game's charm comes through in more ways than that though, with its constant wackiness, the music, the writing, and more. At the end of the day there's no game that does it like EarthBound does, and there'll probably never be one.