i love the wario land series and really really wanted to like this game more than i do

it has two major flaws that spoil an otherwise near perfect game for me:

1. it's so fast. seriously, the sprint speed in this game is absurd, and it really tests your level memorization and reaction speed. this generally isn't a huge problem for me since most of the game isn't timed and doesn't have any death mechanics, and the escape sequences generally have fairly generous timers.

2. this is the big one. what the heck is up with the boss fights. the 4 main bosses all have 8 HP then they come back with a second form that's way more chaotic and have another 8 HP. and 3 of the bosses have a QTE at the end of the 2nd form to actually kill them. the final boss is a 7 part boss fight: 3 new bosses and all 4 previous bosses (with reduced health, at least), followed by a timed escape sequence.

i love that this game is trying for a la carte difficulty, where you choose how many "extras" to get, and how fast to beat the level, and your combo meter and such, but the boss fights are absolutely unnecessarily difficult.

i think an "easy" mode that reduced the amount of onscreen enemies would be helpful, because a lot of bosses cover the whole screen in enemies and it becomes extremely hard to dodge things and even tell what's happening. or heck, even a mode where all the bosses had half the HP would be a godsend.

i'm still waiting for a good wario land successor, and i really wish this could've been it.

I really wanted to like this game. I'm a big fan of this developer's other Metroidvania, Touhou Luna Nights.

This game also incorporates bullet hell shmup mechanics, Ikaruga in particular. Your character can be in Wind mode or Fire mode, and you deal and receive elemental damage accordingly.

I made it to the 3rd boss, which is a pair of elemental spirits. You have to dodge projectiles of one element while absorbing projectiles of the other.

I dropped this game for the same reason I dropped Ikaruga: it's way too hard to mentally store which "state" you're in, and switch accordingly. Modal interfaces are not well suited for my brain in high-stress combat situations.

Also, the controls are kind of horrible. You can remap every button, even on Switch, but there's no way to make things comfortable, as the game requires too many simultaneous button presses.

At least the pixel art is beautiful!

So good I've played it thrice.

This Castlevania has it all: cool bosses, great environments, and tons of stuff to collect.

The story isn't amazing, but it is a fun twist on the series expectations.

Not incredibly challenging as far as modern Metroidvanias go, but I think it's a breath of fresh air after replaying it.

I wish I liked this game more.

The Game Boy Color is my favorite gaming device and the 2D Zelda games are massively important to me.

Sadly, the game is a lot less like Zelda than I expected. The game gives you all 3 items very quickly (like in Breath of the Wild) and then everything after that is just about making the puzzles more annoying and littered with distractions and enemies and traps, rather than building on top of things or challenging you to solve new types of puzzles.

The combat is nothing special, but that's par for the course with a topdown Zelda-like.

Weirdly this game has a marriage mechanic. I married the bunny girl, but it all felt very sudden. It's not a visual novel, so there's not a lot of time to develop characters. That being said, it does way better at that than you'd expect given that it looks like a GBC Zelda game.

Difficulty was really weird. It's mostly not that hard, but the game never lets you heal inside of dungeons. Not potions or heart pickups or anything. You can buy an item that resurrects you once, for 100g. Money is plentiful since nothing else drops in this game, but it's tedious having to go back and buy that constantly, or use the teleporter to go home and get your HP back before a boss.

I managed to get the credits to roll, but the post-credits game is very uh, "self directed". The game appears to be full to the brim with secrets and bonus dungeons and stuff, but it's all a bit obtuse for me and I was losing steam on the puzzle/dungoen design, so I decided to skip most of the post credits stuff.

I love the new protagonist. Kiryu's stoic personality is so much less interesting than Ichiban's stubborn straightforward nature. The party members are fun. The story starts off really good. It kinda meanders for a while, but it massively picks up steam again for the final arc. Over the top cheesy drama like you'd hope from the series. Music is pretty good.

OK BUT. I don't hate JRPG combat, and I even love lots of JRPGs. This one is mediocre at best. Painfully slow combat animations. Extremely punishing job system. Horribly balanced classes. Later chapters need massive grinding. Enemies and bosses become massive health sponges. The 6 attack types are horribly distributed, with most attacks just being physical, and certain bosses resist that in order to ruin your fun. The dungeons are basically completely linear and you can't save in them. Fortunately I only died to a boss once. You can retry a boss by sacrificing half of the money you carry, or retry the entire dungeon. Luckily you can store excess money in an ATM before doing a dungeon.

I don't think Ijincho was as cool as Kamurocho, but it was cool that we visit Kamurocho, Ijincho, and Sotenbori all in one game.

BTW give the English voices a shot, I think the voice acting is great. My only complaint about English voices is a lot of random voice clips are not localized, so during battle you often get a mix of languages at once.

OH and. OK so how did I not mention yet? I want to shake the person who calibrated the SFX spawn rate. Battles are like a nonstop stream of every single character saying some 1-liner quip. It's infuriating. In addition to the combat not being fun, I frequently had the game on mute during the fights. It's absurd.

As usual for a Yakuza/LAD game, very few women, and the ones who do exist are generally sex workers / hostess club hostesses / moms. I think Saeko is great though. Eri is technically a party member but because she's optional she has no story presence outside of her silly capitalism simulator side quest.

Eh. The story is OK, but takes some time to get interesting. The side quests mostly bored or annoyed me. The "girlfriend" system is cheesy, and the 3 girls I "girlfriended" were all the result of me saving them from sexual assault or similar situations, which felt really uncomfortable.

The combat is Not It. It's been a minute since I played Yakuza 0, which I remember liking the combat in, but this feels slow and clunky and there's way too much of it. Can't help but feel this game is padded out.

Maybe I'm just losing my excitement for the RGG Studio games. Yakuza: Like a Dragon didn't hit super well for me either. I know Infinite Wealth is super hot right now, but I just need a break from this shit, maybe forever.

Cool "walking around Japan" simulator, though, as always with these games.

i played etrian odyssey 1 hd on pc. i've played all the other mainline etrian odyssey games starting with 2 and i adore them.

eo1hd is a great repackaging with many of the modern convenience features of later etrian games (turbo mode, auto mapping, difficulty options, etc).

the skill trees are a bit underwhelming in this game and skill balance could use some work.

i played on "normal" or whatever which is actually easier than the original difficulty, but ultimately i was fine with that because it meant less grinding.

most of the floors were pretty fun, but the game leaned on tedium a bit more than the later games with how few fast travel nodes you get and the extreme rarity of shortcuts.

the music is still great but the monster art in the first game isn't as nice. yuzo koshiro is one of my favorite composers.

the story is shockingly good in this game. much better than later games. genuinely loved the whole 4th and 5th stratum from that angle.

sadly the 4th stratum's boss floor is a complete subversion of how FOEs and bosses work thus far in the game, but with essentially no explanation, and it's a slog.

i think toward the 4th and absolutely in the 5th stratum i was massively underleveled. the final boss could 1-shot my entire party with a single attack. so i used the auto walk + holding A to auto level 10 whole levels, which sadly trivalized the final boss.

wish there was more town dialogue and the town NPCs were more interesting like the later games.

there's certainly charm here and it's no surprise this game spawned a successful series, but i think it's definitely one of the series weakest entries. to be clear, a good game. and the 5th stratum is absurdly cool and memorable. they just added so much polish to the later games that i wouldn't recommend coming to eo1 until you've done at least eo2 and eo3 and decided you want more!

What a wild conclusion to the World of Assassination trilogy. I think overall I preferred the levels in Hitman 2, but Hitman 3 does some interesting changes to the formula that keep you on your toes. Without spoiling too much, the Berlin level was truly unique mechanically, and really intense the first time because of it. Subsequent replays of the level lose the element of the unknown and become more like a standard Hitman level, which is still good. I liked the murder mystery story in Dartmoor a lot. The twist ending of Chongqing was very tense. The final level was shockingly linear, though not unfun. I didn't really care for the bonus Ambrose Island level, though. So mechanically not as good as 2, but has enough unique flair and storytelling that I still give it full marks.

Played the entire game co-op except for the final boss, then did like half of another co-op campaign. I also beat the final boss solo.

I liked the first Remnant game, but based on initial reactions I thought Remnant II would be noticeably better. It really doesn't feel any better than the first game to me.

The randomized nature of the game is still awful imo. Extremely boring environments to walk around in as connective tissue for mediocre dungeons and roll-of-the-dice boss fights. Because each area has so many bosses, and each zone can appear in any order randomly, the entirety of difficulty is based on damage scaling, and frankly I think it doesn't feel good.

Especially in co-op the bosses get massively more health, and reviving your teammates requires several seconds of uninterrupted action. Many bosses can repeatedly attack you and move quickly, making it very hard to actually play this game co-op.

The medic class at least gets an ability to "shout" your teammates awake instantly, but it's got a long cooldown and so if your teammates fall repeatedly you're kinda stuck.

The loot is kinda laughable. Most stuff is absurdly buried in this game, and the trinkets you keep picking up give extremely meager upgrades most of the time.

The main character is written like they're in a Marvel film smiling at the camera as they spew snark... but everyone else is taking it very seriously.

The goat people are still cool btw.

Frankly I hated the final boss. Its second phase involves sooooo many flashing red lights and impossible to discern attacks, plus it employs intentionally glitched visuals and repeatedly teleports you along with changing forms. It's difficulty through extreme visual distress, rather than being about learning patterns and punishing you for being too bold. It's nearly impossible to resurrect your team in this fight, so if anyone goes down you're kinda screwed because the boss has an absurdly massive health pool in 3 player mode.

Also man do all the characters talk too much and just infodump weird shit at you.

Some of the puzzles were cool! Bit of a mixed bag though.