lol. lmao.

I seem to be in the minority here but this actually really sucks lol. Stupidly self-indulgent and nostalgia-pandering, like Look At All This Cool Old Stuff!!! But all it really does is showcase how far Fortnite's come in the many years since Chapter 1.

The most obvious change is the approach to balancing:
1. Zero Build is given pretty much zero consideration, and items range from borderline useless in it (the Jetpack and lower level grenade launchers) to comically and insanely overpowered (the hoverboard + a shotgun + decent tracking skills is hilariously broken and allows you to third party basically any fight with almost no effort). The map is also deeply unsuited for it, with tons of sheer cliffs and environments that would be trivial with building but stupid and frustrating without it. Also it's empty as fuck, there are a stupid amount of empty fields here even with the myriad of locations from different seasons of Chapter 1.

(addendum: I am not playing build mode. People have had too many years to get good at it and I'm not interested in going up against someone who's spent thousands of hours training it. During the chapter this season's trying to imitate, people weren't quite as cracked yet and you could get by fine if you could build a quick 1x1, but that's definitely no longer the case. And I just can't really be arsed to put so much time into getting good at something so specific to just one video game)

2. You're expected to play so much more conservatively. Which is usually just boring. Who ever thought "bringing back Fortnite to when it was trying to ape PUBG the hardest" was a good idea? No one talks about PUBG anymore, and for good reason--it was overlong, boring, and fights ended way too quickly. Bringing Fortnite right back to this by limiting movement options and making healing take so much longer than it has for years, just to indulge the nostalgia-blind teenagers playing this game who played the early seasons as pre-teens is lame, and the shorter season length makes me think they knew it sucked as well.

Anyways, in all honesty I am glad this is only half the length of a normal season! Fortnite's biggest strength has been its frequent updates and constantly shifting meta, which makes a season like this, where they just Play The Hits with no understanding that the hits were in a pretty much entirely different game, feel really odd. Hope they never do this again!

Out of basically nowhere this has handily become both (1) one of my favorite Mother-inspired indie RPGs and (2) one of my favorite "Save The World"-y JRPGs probably ever?

I mean, granted--I am a gay furry who tends to play and like a lot of these games (for reference, Mother 3, Undertale, and Omori are all in my top 10 lol), I am pretty much the exact target demographic here, but still, wow.

Insanely polished, amazing art direction and music, and some really heartfelt writing that's strong enough to both be sweet AND super emotionally real and poignant at the same time (reminded me a lot of Chicory, which is also one of my favorites). The battle mechanics here are pretty great too--tons of synergies to experiment with and options to try, which is something most other Mother-inspired indies tend to not really put any focus into. You can get a little OP by the end but that's a small nitpick to have when you can just run past enemies for a little while if you're feeling a bit too powerful.

Pretty much a hands-down recommendation for anyone even remotely interested. If you play a lot of Mother-inspired indies and/or are queer and/or a furry, you really owe it to yourself to give this one a go.

(Also, do the side content, it's just as good as the main questline is.)

audibly said "this is the song from the mr incredible becoming uncanny meme!" and thats such a terrible thing to say out loud i dont think i could ever score this higher than a 2/10 despite it being otherwise pretty inoffensive, certainly helped by the fact its just long enough to fit in one youtube let's play video. the OG joke game for lets players

also its a crime against humanity to throw the best klonoa song in here even if only for like 10 seconds, inexorably tying it to this game

This is a super hard game to rate, especially since I believe that the best (and only reasonable way to play on a world for more than 2 hours) is modded. The base game is good, but damn if I'm not tired of it after probably at least two thousand hours of it. Would recommend Material Energy^3 and Questing Mayhem.

update from Several years into the future:
vanilla survival is actually legit maybe like a 4 or 5/10. boring as shit and there's nothing to do. BUT mods make this game really good, and so do all the servers with minigames and whatnot. Adventure maps are great as well, don't know how much those really exist anymore but they're always fun. Everything here is good except the actual "main" game and it sucks that so many devs have taken the wrong message from this game's success and just made soooo many shitty, boring survival crafting games lol

Hilariously bad. I played like 30 or 40 minutes of this surrounding one of the daily streams and holy shit this is a mess lmao. The worst UI of all time, the main menu has more retail space taken up by the battle pass than the livestream, and the puzzles/minigames (the only thing you can do in the 23 hours and 50 minutes a livestream isn't running) is relegated to a tiny button in the bottom middle of the screen labeled "Arcane Library". They couldn't even make a decent version of Hashi, that's like the logic puzzle equivalent of fucking up a blackjack minigame lol. Deserves every bit of the mockery it's getting, it really is that much of a train wreck

early thoughts: definitely their best pack in a while but still far from the top. Honestly this says more about how mediocre 8 and especially 9 were, lol.

- Tee KO is great but it's not much different from the one released like 7 years ago. Addition of other kinds of shirts and fonts is cool
- TimeJinx is really fun, super simple but it's a neat permutation of a trivia game. Definitely done before but not in Jackbox before I believe which is cool
- Dodo Re Mi initially seems like it would be this pack's Zeeple Dome, but it's actually pretty decent. It's not, like, good, but it's funny and it works surprisingly well for a rhythm game on a website over the internet, and the ability to hear it playback at the end really makes it work. It's a fun novelty, definitely not something to buy this pack for but it's worth playing a couple games of it
- FixyText is... eh. I'm sure it does okay in some crowds but I gather a lot of people playing this especially right now (october 2023) are just going to have walls of "skibidi rizz gyatt ohio", lol. Playing it is kind of a clusterfuck but that's definitely the intent so i guess if you think clusterfucks are funny then it's ok!
- Hypnotorious is the bad game here. Every single one of these packs always has like at least one borderline unplayable game and it's this one this time. Sad, since it's probably their first truly shit social deduction game. It's long, it's boring, it's not funny, and everyone either answers in a way that totally gives away what they are or just types in nonsense. Multiple people groaned when the second round started. Avoid.

january 2021 replay:

yeah this is still a 10/10 for me. theres like 2 or 3 hours of filler near the beginning of the game (hence why game review sites panned this one so bad, cuz they played like 4 hours in and dropped it) but after a point like 5 hours in the story goes from ok to pretty cool, and a few hours after that you just get 10 hours straight of probably one of the best stories i've ever played in a game with like zero filler the entire time. this shit is GOATed

edit: if you are gonna play (or replay) this tho, definitely check out the skytemple patch that lets you use moves with l+abxy, such a small fix makes the game play so much better

march 2022 edit: sorry no more 10/10 because ive played more games that are much more consistent in their quality but this is still really fuckin good. definitely worth a playthrough if you're even marginally interested