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.

I don't think it's without problems, but god is it great to finally be playing a full 3D Kirby game, and an amazing one at that. I don't really have much say about the game other than that it's creative all the way through and it's a lot of fun, and even going back through most of the levels to get all of the collectibles, the levels still felt fresh and never got boring. It has a pretty great post-game too, probably the best in the series.

If there is one problem I have with the game it's that the movesets for most copy ability feel really limited. For some abilities like fire, it almost felt like playing the early Kirby games where every ability only has one or two moves. They're definitely capable of making more expanded movesets, the sword ability and especially its last upgrade are proof of that, but I have the feeling this game won't age as well as the next few Kirby games come out where each copy ability does have a deeper moveset.

Is this peak Kirby? I won't blame anyone for thinking that way but for me personally it's still Robobot. Part of what I love so much about Robobot is the weird level themes like a train, a factory, a robotic city, a casino, all that, and Forgotten Land's level themes, aside from like the amusement park world levels, were mostly pretty standard. I don't hold that against Forgotten Land, I think that's perfect for the first game in what is basically a soft reboot of a franchise, what I'm trying to say is that if you think Forgotten Land is crazy, the next 3D Kirby game is gonna be even crazier as they're allowed to play things in weirder, riskier ways. I hope at least.

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

I certainly admit this game isn't entirely for me. I love the From Soft games, and I love exploring the areas within them, but I don't love it enough that it's all I want to do in them. For me the bosses and the combat and the customization options and all that were what I love most about the other games. I still enjoyed exploring most of the time in Elden Ring, but I can't tell you how many times, especially after around 40-50 hours that I found a new area and fucking dreaded exploring it. I just got tired of it after a while.

Another problem I have is with the bosses being incredibly repetitive, especially the smaller dungeon bosses. A few bosses even just get used later on as normal enemies, and pretty often too. Even aside from being repetitive, I'm just not the biggest fan of the bosses in this game. This is definitely more of a personal preference thing, but bosses are designed around summoning spirit ashes, but I just find the bosses from other From Soft games that are designed around only having 1 person to target so much more satisfying than the Elden Ring bosses where you're expected to use time that the boss targets your spirit to heal or attack them from behind.

But still, I can't deny what this game does well. Even though I got tired of the game because the map was so huge, a lot of people will fucking love the game for it. The game's side quests are also as great, there's so much customization available (for better or for worse because it seems to have become a bit of a balancing nightmare), a lot of the bosses are great, music, art direction, enemy designs, cool armor, different locations, fucking hell. Even though I got tired around 40-50 hours in, at the same time it was strangely a game I never wanted to stop playing. I didn't consistently enjoy it as much as I enjoy a lot of other games, but I can't bring myself to give this game anything below a 9/10. Up until I got tired of the game I was considering it for my top 10 favorite games. It's a fucking amazing game.

The combat is a lot more fun than the base FF7R and the side quests aren't bad, but I don't think I have a lot of good to say other than that. I think Yuffie is annoying and I don't care about any of the other characters, I think the story is pretty pointless, it's basically Yuffie going to Shinra to steal the "ultimate materia" and I kinda don't care. I still think it's a lot of fun especially with Yuffie's combat style because god Yuffie's combat is fun. I just. Don't care for it. Maybe I expected the wrong thing because I expected it to be the continuation of FF7R and not like a side story that happens during the game. I don't think much happened in the story that had to be in a 5 hour long campaign, and couldn't just be explained in like a couple of sentences when Yuffie meets with the rest of the characters, if it even has to be explained at all because nothing really happens.

There's a lot about this game I really love and really don't like. When it released people called it a lazy cash grab, and I really couldn't disagree more. The lazier cash grab thing to do would've been to just make a safe 1:1 remake of the original game and not add as much as this game did. I like the story a lot, even if the ending doesn't make a lot of sense, the combat is great. The graphics are cool too I guess but really my shit with the graphics is when you hit an enemy and sparks fly in like two million different directions I'm a big fan of that.

I'm not sure if it's the voice acting or the writing or the animations or the direction or what, but in nearly every dialogue scene something just feels so unnatural. Side quests also aren't great. I've played this game three times, once on hard mode, and there's a lot of parts of the game I legitimately dread and never want to play again. This game's pacing can be quite awful, with some parts of the game where you just go from one place to another being stretched out to like an entire hour and it's so fucking boring. Of the 18 chapters I'd say there's like 4 that I fucking despise.

Hard mode is also a lot of fun. All of the enemies are harder yeah, but also you can't use items. You can recover health with magic or resting on benches, but you can't recover MP as easily so there's another layer of difficulty with managing your MP like that. There's also a few secret bosses exclusive to hard mode that are pretty ridiculously hard, and I just used a guide on how to beat those because I would be stuck on them for a fucking long time if I didn't but it's cool that they added that. I don't think I would ever play hard mode again, but it's a fun thing to do once.

There's a lot the game doesn't do well, but hey, the story is good and the combat is fun. That's pretty cool.

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.

It's just a great kirby game. great level design consistently introducing new and creative mechanics. first 3d kirby game to actually take advantage of it being 3d with the levels playing with the foreground and background a lot, which is something I really love even in robobot and also they completely take away in star allies for some reason I have no fucking idea why. When hypernova was first introduced I thought it was gonna be like the super abilities in return to dreamland, where you just go up to the place where you use the ability and then you use the ability and then go forward and thats it, and to an extent hypernova is also like that, but they keep introducing new ways to use the big succ throughout the game which always made it fun to use. I could see those sections being boring on repeat playthroughs but overall it's an extremely well made game. Maybe im just biased because I just got off playing star allies so the goods of this game feel especially good, who knows.

this is an interesting game. theres a lot that i love about this game. I love the visual style and the ui, i love the new copy abilities, i love the advancements it makes in the lore, i love the music, i love the new friend mechanics and how the level design is a lot more focused around having friends than super star or amazing mirror was, and i love the mechanic of mixing your copy ability with your friend's copy ability to infuse your weapon with some element or do a special move. the new mechanics that they introduce are great, and if the level design was good i honestly think this couldve been one of the best kirby games.

I like the puzzles in this game because they use the new mechanics and I like the new mechanics, but the puzzles themselves are bad. theres one puzzle where youre supposed to have a friend light a rope on fire while you do a special move with the parasol copy ability, with a newly introduced mechanic, to block water from falling on the rope so it can keep burning. this one puzzle takes advantage of two new mechanics, and it wouldve been a great puzzle if the answer wasnt literally right in front of you. for every puzzle in the game the copy abilities that you need to solve them are either in the room or right outside of it. its not a puzzle if the answer is right in front of you. obviously this could work if the game did something like having the requirement to solve the puzzle be the weirdest combination of copy abilities that uses them in a really creative way, but that just isnt the case. most puzzles are solved with the most obvious application of the copy abilities. because of how the levels are set up, it conditions you to think about levels in a fucked up reverse puzzle way, where instead of you thinking "there's running water here, I wonder how I block it", you think of it as "there's a lot of parasol abilities here, I wonder if i'm going to use it in a puzzle in a second", and with that you've solved the puzzle before you've even seen it. isnt that fucking stupid? the puzzles could've been a way to make certain levels stand out, and that is what they try do, but because almost every puzzle is optional the puzzles dont feel really rewarding to do. most puzzles just reward you, ironically enough, with a random puzzle piece, and puzzle pieces are just a collectible that exists because they need some collectible in the game to reward you with when you complete puzzles. with most of the puzzles just being optional you barely have to engage with the level design, and with the reward being so small for completing the puzzles and with how brainless the puzzles are to solve most puzzles are just forgettable. The level designs aside from the puzzles aren't great either a lot of it is very hold forward gameplay. you dont have to put any thought in the game to beat most levels. it's just way too easy. obviously kirby games are meant to be easy, but this game pushes too hard in the easy direction to the point where it almost feels like it plays itself. And when a game feels like it plays itself, i dont feel like playing it. it's this weird conflict of them trying to appeal to young children by making the game really easy, which I guess in that sense it succeeds, but it also has more fan service than any other kirby game, appealing to long time fans of the kirby series, who is the exact opposite of young children. long time kirby fans are going to find the level design extremely boring, and people playing a kirby game for the first time are going to wonder why the game thinks its so important that you can play as gooey that they announce it at every chance they get.

Guest star mode is a mode where you can play as most enemies or a fan favorite character from one of the previous games and play through the game. conceptually I like it a lot. its just a shame that this is the game that this mode is on. The mode encourages you to go through the levels as fast as possible with a timer in the corner at all times and ll, and that means most of the puzzles, the one thing that gives the levels the slightest bit of identity, are meant to be skipped or are impossible. This is the mode that really shows how dull the games level design is, with being able to autopilot your way through everything. Playing guest star mode is like playing the game for the first time again, but not in the way the game intended. All of the levels are so forgettable that when you play them in guest star mode youve completely forgotten the level so everything is new. Guest star mode is everything it should be. All of the playable characters are given a full moveset that is fun to use. The only problem is that the levels themselves are not good, and playing through them as daroach from squeak squad doesnt solve this problem. it is a mode that was doomed to be bad from the start.

the one saving grace of this game is the "heroes in another dimension" mode, which was added months after the game's release so most people probably never played it. for this mode you're forced to play as whatever copy ability or dream friend the game wants you to, and whats great about this mode is that even though you are given all of the copy abilities that you need to solve every puzzle in the room that the puzzle is in, it makes you solve puzzles by taking advantage of your moveset in ways that aren't initially obvious and solving puzzles leads the path forward, like a game with good design. In this mode the collectibles are hearts, and if you collect at least 100 of the 120 hearts you can fight a secret boss, like a rewarding collectibles system. heroes in another dimension's level design is actually great, and it takes advantage of all of the game's new mechanics in somewhat challenging ways that makes it actually memorable. In the few months between the game's release and the release of the patch this mode came out on, they remembered what good game design is.

anyway. praying like shit that they learn what they did wrong with this game and that forgotten land is a banger.

remake of an already great game. great level design and movement, except for turning around being shit. When you're running and you hit the oppsite direction you slide like you hit a fucking luigi wavedash and you're not even facing in the direction that you pressed. would've also been nice if they brought the full moveset of the copy abilities instead of all of them only having one move because that's what they had in the original, but it's not the worst because the game was designed around that moveset.

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.