I can respect Super Mario RPG for the mountain of a hurdle it had to take on in order to work. Taking the world's most popular platformer, one of the most beginner friendly genres in the industry, and turning it into a genre known for slow, strategic decision-making is no easy feat. Many of the design sensibilities are inherently opposing of one another. Despite the clear effort put into fusing these two together, Super Mario RPG misses the mark and ends up with an experience that fails to satisfy the strengths of either, sticking too close to the conventions of its genre. Instead of adapting or innovating on it to create something truly new, it waters down everything that makes RPGs great and leaves a half baked mess, creating a wholly unsatisfying and forgettable experience.

Combat is very simple, even by 1996 standards. Everything that you'd expect is here, with very little done to spice up the flow or structure of battle. New moves are often just direct upgrades of old moves at a slightly higher cost. The party members don't rarely anything unique to the table that other characters don't have access to. Unique additions to the formula such as a shared MP gauge and action commands get no room to shine do to the lack of any required strategy or thought. While bosses do commonly have gimmicks in an attempt to make battles feel more unique, I can not remember a single one that caused me to rethink my strategy. Every battle just feels like you're going through the motions, requiring the bare minimum amount of thought needed to progress. Even outside the realm of battles, Super Mario RPG fails to deliver much in gameplay. The overworld is generally very bland with little room to explore and discover. The whole game is set on one linear path with very minimal splits. Any other form of gameplay such as platforming or the various minigames feel very underdeveloped, the former being consistently annoying due to the stereoscopic 3D angle.

Most of the things I’ve mentioned up until now is stuff I expected. Even Chrono Trigger, a game that had less of a wide net to toss, rarely satisfied me in combat or gameplay. No, the true thing I looked forward to was the story and characters. Though it has been a few years, I remember the other Mario RPGs I had dabbled in prior consistently delivering decent stories and charming characters, as well as plenty of memorable moments along the way. And with this game being from Square, a company that had satisfied me in those same areas both before and after this game, I had solid expectation set, which makes it all the more disheartening when I met all those aspects with a resounding “meh”. The actual story itself is also pretty much nothing and could be summarized in a single sentence, but I think that's the lesser issue. Most of the characters and antagonists I felt were kinda forgettable, likely due to the generally short amount of time given to each antagonist (there's 7 big bads, not including Smithy himself which, mixed with the game's 10 hour run time, means you usually get one or two short scenes and a battle with each within areas that barely last an hour), as well as there being only one consistent threat to fight against that's only loosely tied to everything else in the game. This tied with practically no recurring characters makes the entire game just feel like a string of random, generally forgettable moments held together by said loose thread of a central threat (the aforementioned thread could be removed and very little would change). Even in its best moments, such as exploring Star Hill, the game is heavily tainted by this disconnect.

While the game does have its few upsides, particularly in the visuals, music, and the insanely impressive battle animations, I just feel dissatisfied by Super Mario RPG. It didn’t do enough.

The fact that this is even remember positively, let alone considered a "timeless masterpiece", endlessly eludes me to this day. Even as a child, I could tell just how shit Petscop was. I wish I could type paragraphs upon paragraphs about how terrible it is, but there is genuinely so little depth that I can barely type a few sentences.

To give you the full picture; in Petscop, there is only one level. And said level has maybe 4 or 5 one minute dead-brained puzzles. That's it. No other levels. No extras menu. No easter eggs. That is ALL of content in this game. Anything else is either unfinished menu options or scrapped pets (which are all left in the game and do nothing).

The only reason I can conjure up that this unfinished, buggy mess of a game is so beloved is either 1. it's one big ironic joke that I'm out of the loop of, 2. I somehow received an unfinished build of the game, but judging by a YouTube video I skimmed through, I don't think that's the case, or 3. some people for some reason REALLY love the visuals, music, and general aesthetic of the game. The ladder is the only case in which I can understand liking this game, but even then, why not give your attention to other actually good, well crafted games instead of this shovelware scam game?

I do not recommend this game under any circumstance. Life is short, go obsess over something else.

(Note: I played about 40 hours before dropping the game. Might finish in the future.)

Instead of making an effort to improve on all the issues with the base BOTW, Nintendo instead opted to just add a bunch of stuff on top of it and hope you don't notice. And even then, the new content itself isn't particularly great. It focuses too much on adding "more" instead of adding anything with substance of depth. The sky islands? Starts out good, until they quickly start reusing the exact same islands over and over again to fill out space, with puzzles even more shallow than shrines. The depths? Very cool to drop into for the first time, until you realize it offers nothing new in terms of enemy variety and is just a blander version of the overworld with a dark atmosphere.

Both the depths and the sky suffer from a major issues of spread out, bland content. Personally, I really think they should've cut out one and expanded on the other. Or hell, cut out both and give us a new map, with small underground and sky areas to explore.

Speaking of that, the reused map removes one of the best aspects of the original BOTW; the feeling of an undiscovered world. While I had many issues with BOTW, the pure feeling of running around this open space for the first time, not knowing what to do or where to go and discovering the content and mechanics was an incredibly unique feeling I've never felt in another game before. Reusing the map inherently removes the potential for bringing back this feeling for any returning player. And as I said, the two new sides of the overworld suffer too much from reuse and lack of variety to feel like you're exploring anything new.

The building mechanics are probably the best part of the game, yet they're still mishandled. It's very technically impressive and you can do a lot with it, but the game actively demotivates you from using it. To build actual machines, you have to use parts. Parts are a limited but renewable resources that you have to use a material found in the depths for. However, since this resource is also used to upgrade battery space, I ended up wanting to conserve this material, and so I stopped using parts out of worry of needing them in the future. This caused me to stop experimenting and having fun with the mechanic designed to experiment and have fun with due to this arbitrary restriction.

I think a much better solution would be having parts act as an upgrade of sorts. You can unlock parts and use them at any time with no cost, however you start with only one each at a time. You have to upgrade them using materials to use more at the same time. Keep the battery and its upgrading system the exact same as well. This both still gives incentive to collect materials from the depths and encouraging more experimentation due to reduced risk of wasting resources (there still is a slight issue about worrying about which part to upgrade, but I'd take that over TOTK's system any day).

A lot of the games other issues boils down to the reused or unchanged content. Despite the shrines having a lot more to work with and generally being more creative, the actual puzzles in them are still unbelievably shallow. Korok seeds have some new variety, however the way they work is completely unchanged. The backpack one just sucks too. It's fun at first to make machines, but the game always gives you the pieces you need. There's no puzzle solving or trying to find the right pieces, you're effectively told the answer. The sign guy isn't really worth mentioning; another thing neat at first that is ran into the ground.

Overall TOTK is just a bad sequel, if you can even call it that. I wasn't expecting much from this game already, but it irks me so much to see so little issues from the base game actually addressed. You could say "oh if you already didn't enjoy BOTW much of course you wouldn't enjoy the sequel", isn't that what a sequel should aim to do? To improve on the issues of the previous game while offering something new? Because if that's the case, TOTK fails at being a sequel.