Birthright is one of the simpler and more breezy Fire Emblem experiences and I think that's ok.
Fates as a whole introduced and changed many things to the FE experience. Weapon being unbreakable and having various effects and debuffs, skills being even more important with reclassing allowing access to different ones, and pair up being rebalanced and available for enemy units to use means there is a lot to learn and master in Fates and it's Birthright that offers a place to experiment with things and learn the mechanics with little frustration or punishment for your curiosity.
Nearly all of Birthright's maps are rout/kill the boss and with unlimited exp skirmish maps too Birthright is the perfect place to experiment with Fates unique mechanics. The enemies aren't as skill heavy or challenging and it gives you just enough of a taste of everything that this is the best place to play with the Fates toolbox. What you learn here can then be taken over to Conquest to help make that game less of a frustrating experience.

I can also say that as someone who doesn't like messing about with skills and reclassing and pair up, Birthright can still offer me an engaging experience despite being somewhat easy. I was still caught off guard at times and playing my way still made this a fun experience for me. I do completely understand that for players with a better understanding of mechanics than me and that are used to playing on harder difficulties that Birthright is probably a dull and boring experience. For me though, there's still plenty to love and I personally enjoy the game.

Storywise Birthright is a pretty standard FE affair of stop the evil person invading other kingdoms but it does add it's own flair to the story. Hosido being an Eastern inspired country means the units you use have designs and weapons that stand out from the rest of the series. Iago is free to be the nasty piece of work he is and ham things up and the Norhian siblings falling apart after losing Corrin to Hosido is handled really well, with Xander in particular being a standout.

Despite its simplicity, there is a lot to love about Birthright and if you can appreciate it on its own merits then there's a really fun game here that often gets overlooked when Fates is talked about

This is an interesting game in the series.
Structurally it borrows a lot from FE2 with it's dual protagonists, abundance of monster enemies, and it's world map layout allowing you to grind freely if you wish, with a tower that helps incentivise that even more.
Personally, I have always felt that the structures and mechanics borrowed from FE2 were implemented in a way I didn't like as much. Take the dual protagonists for example. Here you follow Eirika for the first 8 chapters with one Ephiram side chapter thrown in before the two decide to take on different challenges for the next 6 chapters before meeting back up for the final few chapters. Unlike FE2 were you would play as Alm and Celica at the same time, interchanging as you progressed, here you're forced to pick one sibling to follow while the other has to played on another save file. It's frustrating to have a sizable part of the narrative locked away during a playthrough, losing important context. Where this route split does work though is in the final set of chapters when the twins are back together and you get to experience the story from either perspective. Here they alter a few scenes that really add to the characters and narrative of FE8 and that's where I can appreciate the route split.

Other things added into this game are skills making a return. These are locked to a few promoted units and are utilised pretty well. Promotions now split into two different classes allowing you to diversify your multiple playthroughs (eg, pegasus knights can promote into either falcon knights or wyvern knight)
Other than that this is mostly building off FE7 with a variety of map styles coming back and more of that good old GBA Fire Emblem animation.

It also kinda suffers with being the third GBA FE too. Graphically and artistically it looks very similar to the two games before it and it does feel a little tired. Even it's music I sometimes mix up with FE7 because the GBA really limits how different the music can sound.
While the SNES and 3DS have both had 3 FE games too, these games managed to differentiate themselves enough to prevent that feeling of fatigue setting in while Sacred Stones struggles a bit with that for me.

That's not to say FE8 is a bad game though, far from it! It still manages to craft an engaging experience that is fun to play. The story is interesting enough while not being super exciting, it does however manage to craft a lot of wonderful and interesting characters. The villains in Sacred Stones are really well done, with each of Grado's generals having great development and contrasting ideals from each other, making the likes of Selena and Valter pretty memorable. Lyon is really well done, and when you have the full context from both story routes, you find a tragic character that you can't help but feel for. And the supporting cast is really good too! L'Arachel is an incredibly fun character and Joshua gets some great story beats too.
The lords as individuals don't land high up for me, but together with Lyon there's a nice dynamic between the three that lets them shine as a group.

FE8 also has a cool piece of post game content that lets you recruit and use some of the enemy characters from the main game. It's not something I've personally looked into yet but I think it is an exciting piece of content that adds a bit more to the package.

Ultimately Sacred Stones is a very solid and fun FE title. It doesn't hit it's potential to be one of my favourites in the series but it still manages to craft an experience that is fun and enjoyable for me and at the end of the day, that's all that really matters

Revelation has garnered a reputation for being gimmicky since I last played it and that is true. Nearly every map has some sort of gimmick to it, whether it's breaking snow to move forward or activating dragon veins to reach bosses but does that really make it a bad game? I personally had a lot of fun going through each map and seeing what kind of twist awaited me. Some were awful and some were super interesting but none of them made me think the game was bad in any capacity. My two least favourite maps here were also used in Birthright (the bamboo trap forest) and Conquest (the wind temple blowing units across the map) but other than that most of them were fine at worst.
I can appreciate that if you're aiming for an LTC then yeah, these maps are annoying to play but for a regular playthrough? I think these are fun and interesting with a few having some really good potential if they were implemented better.
The maps here help make this more interesting than Birthright but not as brutally challenging as Conquest for me. Revelation sits nicely in the middle in what it offers for me difficulty wise. Replaying the 3 games in quick succession made one thing about Revelation stand out to me: the enemies never use pair up on Normal difficulty. It's weird that a mechanic so strongly tied to Fates isn't used but as someone who has never fully gotten on board with pair up, it makes Revelation's difficulty curve the smoothest for me. Conquest felt like it would randomly spike and dip throughout while Birthright has a decent jump towards the end with Revelation gave me the smoothest experience which makes a huge difference.
Part of that is definitely down to having all 8 royals in your ranks but it's also part of the fun.
Revelation is designed to be played after Birthright and Conquest and the focus is put in its maps. It's very experimental and I can understand why it puts some people off but I legit love the approach. Constantly seeing new ideas from the devs is fun for me.

Storywise it's mostly just to give some answers to mysteries left over from Birthright/Conquest. The start is a little messy with how Corrin has to convince people to join them without saying why they should because of the curse but once everyone gets together and heads to Valla, I think it's perfectly fine. You don't get much from the Royals in the main story (thankfully we have support interactions) unfortunately but we do get a nice focus on Corrin as a character and their strengths and flaws. Playing Fates this time round, I deliberately detached myself from the role of the avatar character. My first run through these games had Corrin leave a poor impression on me. I couldn't connect with them and found some of the decisions they made to be frustrating, however pulling myself out the shoes of Corrin allowed me to view and understand Corrin as their own unique character and I've come to love Corrin a lot. They wear their heart on their sleeve, placing their trust in people no matter how naive or foolish it may come across and for me it's really endearing. In a world filled with so much strife and conflict, Corrin never wavers from their core beliefs and I love that.

Fates is messy, there is no doubt about that. The story written for the games was so overly ambitious that condensing it into a videogame format was always going to be an impossible challenge but while the story is messy overall, if you can clear your way through that mess and look hard enough, there is a lot of great stuff to love about Fates. These characters have so much more depth under their often tropey surface.

Having revisited all 3 Fates games again I can safely say Revelation is my favourite. It strikes the best balance of what I like in FE.
I don't think any of the 3 games deserve the amount of vitriol that has been thrown towards them throughout the years, they're not bad games. At worst they failed to meet expectations after the hype garnered from Awakening's success and the marketing but at their core, these are perfectly fine FE titles, with their own unique mechanics and if you go into them with an open mind, you will probably find something to love

Figure-8 Circuit
What it says on the tin lmao

Yoshi Falls
An oval with waterfall shortcuts to keep on the inner course. Tis alright

Cheep Cheep Beach
Pretty interesting beach course, driving along piers and a wooded area. Good shortcuts through the water too if you have the mushrooms for it

Luigi's Mansion
IT'S LUIGI'S MANSION!!!!!! Driving through the mansion and then into the garden with muddy roads and moving trees is so cool

Desert Hills
Pretty cool desert course featuring the SMB3 sun sending down fireballs on the second lap and of course the standard pokeys to deal with

Delfino Square
Awesome town based circuit with plenty of diverging routes and a cool drawbridge at the end. Incredible course

Waluigi Pinball
IT'S WALUIGI PINBALL!!!! GOAT!!!! Racing through a pinball table, avoiding the balls, bumpers and flippers. it's incredible

Shroom Ridge
The king of drifting courses. Legit just so much fun thanks to it's layout and having to weave between traffic

DK Pass
Snow course that features an item box with a guaranteed mushroom/star on top of a hill for some reason. Very cool layout too along with snowmen to avoid

Tick Tock Clock
TICK TOCK CLOCK FROM MARIO 64!!!! Clock hands to avoid and swinging pendulums to knock you off course, this is a fantastic course

Mario Circuit
Standard circuit course with piranha plants that spit fire. There's been better and worse Mario Circuits

Airship Fortress
IT'S THE SMB3 AIRSHIP!!!! Monty moles popping out the ground, bullet bills fired towards you, and firing out of the cannon for the final portion..... holy shit this is so good

Wario Stadium
Solid stadium course with lots of jumps and firebars to to dodge

Peach Gardens
Really lovely garden course with chain chomps on the lose. Some cool shortcuts to take through the flowers too!

Bowser Castle
Solid BC course with a cool cylinder part to stay on and moving platforms at the end

Rainbow Road
Has loop de loops and everything. It's kind of an MK8 course before anti grav was a thing

Tried playing this with a beta patch that I found but unfortunately the game crashed whenever the textbox would shake from a character expressing shock (and that happened a lot)
That said, I did beat the main story and had a great time with it. It's what you would expect from a quick follow up game: builds and improves upon the original in everyway.
V2 makes it kinda sound like "Version 2" rather than a full sequel but this is a proper sequel with it's own story taking place a year after the events of the first game and while you play as a new protagonist with a new group of friends, you'll bump into a few familiar faces from the first game along the way.
There's a huge post game to dig into after beating the story and multiplayer now supports 2V2 matches. Single player adds the ability to swap out your Robos main body now so you don't have to stick with Ray and there's a few new arenas to fight in as well as a bunch of returning ones.

Great follow up to the original game, hopefully a fully working English patch gets done some day

I know this isn't for everyone. I know people don't like how much grinding is involved in raising your Digimon or that your Digimon dies in these kinds of games but my gosh I absolutely love the blend of virtual pet raising and RPG mechanics.
It's such a unique experience, you're always building for the future, whether its building up the city by recruiting Digimon, gathering resources to help raise your Digimon or even just training your Digimon at the gym. If you're treating your Digimon properly and doing what you can in each generation, then raising your next generation becomes easier and your Digimon can become even stronger, allowing you to progress even further. It's such a satisfying gameplay loop for me. Yeah I might be spending a couple of hours in the gym raising my Digimon to Mega but by doing so I get a good 10 or so hours exploring the world and recruiting more and more powerful Digimon for the city. I love it so much

Samba De Amigo: Party Central, as it hints at in the name, is a party focused rhythm game. Using the Joy Con like maracas, you have to shake them in time with the music to try and get a good score. Notes are sent to 6 different directions on screen (top, middle, bottom, on both left and right sides) and to hit these different notes you have to tilt the Joy Con in the right direction. Straight up for the top notes, horizontal for the middle notes, and titled down for the bottom notes. While this does work to a surprising degree, it does also lead to frustrating moments as notes are missed because the gyro of the Joy Con had become desynced. This issue is more frequent when songs ask you to make big gestures like arcs or zigzags because you don't get enough time to realign the Joy Con once you notice it's been knocked off centre from doing a lot of motion with it.
Now there is an option for button controls which could be helpful for those who don't like the motion controls but personally I found the beat maps to have been designed around shaking which meant the button controls never quite felt comfortable to me.
Despite my issues with the controls, I did manage hit some perfect scores with the motion controls and it nails that rhythm game feeling of achievement when you do manage a perfect.

The song selection is mostly a bunch of greatest hits from recent pop culture with artists like Ke$ha and Carly Rae Jepsen and whether you like that or not is down to personal taste in music. For me the selection was fine, I found a decent amount of tracks that were fun to play along to but the dlc songs were a lot more to my liking with songs from Sega games like Sonic, Yakuza, and Space Channel 5 as well as a Japanese selection with stuff from Jujutsu Kaisen and Hatsune Miku.

There's a bunch of things to unlock through playing the songs like costumes and different styles of maracas as well as a generous amount of online multiplayer stuff and leaderboards to compete in if that sort of thing interests you, so it's a pretty comprehensive rhythm game package.

If you have an itch for a fun party rhythm game, then this should provide a decent scratch for it. However some issues with the control scheme stops this game from reaching its potential, though it still manages to provide a decent experience despite that.

From the development team that brought us a return to peak 2D Sonic with Sonic Mania, comes Penny's Big Breakaway, an original IP and an attempt to test their skills in 3D platforming.

Well for a first attempt, this is pretty good once you adapt to the limited control scheme. There's no camera movement and the shoulder and face buttons do the same things. Playing on a Switch controller for example, you can jump with B or R, attack with your yo-yo with Y or the Right Stick, and pseudo spin dash on the yo-yo with A or ZR. The yo-yo attack can offer a spin attack or a dash if you double tap the button and that's all the stuff you get. Working with a fixed camera can be difficult at first, especially when you're trying to dash in a direction but it's clear the team here understood what they wanted first and foremost - momentum.
I'll be honest and say I picked up the game because I knew it was from the Sonic Mania devs and when I saw it in the Nintendo Direct, I wanted to see how they handled a momentum based platformer. Well the answer is really, really well actually! Once you get used to how the camera works and how the level design works, you'll be dashing and riding the yo-yo down slopes at a brisk pace. The levels incorporate plenty of ramps so when you do gather a good bit of momentum you can really feel the height difference when launching off those ramps. It's incredible stuff and done with a level of control over Penny that I haven't felt from a momentum based 3D platformer like this since the Sonic Adventure days.

Nearly everything compliments the core design theme of momentum well. Every level's main objective is reaching the end goal. There's 3 hidden honeycomb-like objects that you can usually find just off the beaten path or in a higher path reached by maintaining a good bit of speed. There's also side objectives from the citizens of the worlds but even these are usually designed with keeping you moving forward in mind as they tend to require you to collect objects or deliver an object through a platforming challenge. The only thing I personally didn't like that much was the annoying penguins who hunt you down every level, slowing you down if they grab onto you and capturing you if enough of them grab you at once. It's a pressure I don't think a game like this needs in the majority of its levels.

On the boss battle front, these are fine and do the job they need to. There's one really inventive one that stood out which I won't spoil. The final boss has the annoying two phases and if you die in the second phase you have to do all of the first phase thing that I've grown to dislike more and more as I've gotten older. Like I've proven I can do the first phase fine, just let me do the phase I keep dying on please. But yeah, otherwise bosses are mostly enjoyable here and provide a break from the platforming.

I wasn't a huge fan of the character designs when I first saw them, they didn't appeal to my aesthetic tastes but over time they did grow on me a little bit. The artistic design of the levels, especially the colour choices, really make the levels pop. And the soundtrack is very good here too, which is to be expected when Tee Lopes is involved, that man really knows how to do catchy music.
There's a light story to the game too, involving Penny being accused of breaking the law or something, it's fine for giving a background on what's happening but it's not something that really held my attention, few platformer stories do that for me however so it's not a big point against the game. There's plenty of extras as incentives to collect everything and stuff to do, time attack modes and the like to keep you playing, so all in all a very complete platformer package.

On the technical side of things the Switch version did have a couple of issues I experienced. There were two or three occasions where I clipped through the level and got stuck in some geometry, thankfully restarting from the last checkpoint is quick and easy to do if you do find yourself stuck. The Switch version also runs at a locked 30fps which is fine for me personally. There is a 60fps patch on the way at the time of writing but as long as I have a solid framerate I find 30fps to be perfectly ok to play with. Some of the backgrounds do get a bit fuzzy, particularly when there's a lot happening which seems to be a design choice as I've seen it in footage of the game running on other platforms but it's not something I particularly like. Minor issues aside, the game is fluid and responsive which are the two most important aspects of a platformer in my opinion.

All in all it's a great 3D platformer from a relatively new development studio. They managed to nail momentum based movement in a 3D environment - something that many devs struggle with to this day - to bring a fun and charming platformer. There's room for improvement here and there but Penny's Big Breakaway leaves me excited to see how Evening Star builds upon this.

Finally having the opportunity to go through Nintendo's Virtual Boy library for the first time we begin with 3D Tetris and well it's functional I guess.

This is Tetris but the twist is you're viewing it from this awkward top down view that shifts around to give you a better view of the sides. Instead of being a flat 2D plane that your blocks build on, you now get a full cuboid like arena to put your blocks in. The aim is the same, fill one line of the cuboid to clear that line and earn points. You can build the stack higher to clear more lines at once and you can now rotate the blocks in full 3D directions by using the right d-pad.
It's a good idea on paper but when you need a simplified view to the right to show where your blocks are lined up, it kinda shows how awkward the constantly shifting view of the main arena.

There's a puzzle mode in addition to the main one where you use a set number of blocks to build a shape shown at the start. It's.... fine I guess.
The other mode places a spike like object in the centre that will delete blocks you place there so you can't place anything until the final block to clear the line. It's an interesting idea and it works well enough.

But yeah, puzzle games are at their best when they're simple and this one unfortunately complicates things a little too much to try and make it work in 3D. The shifting view point and everything being just red and black makes it awkward to keep track of where your blocks are and with higher speeds it's difficult to manage rotating your blocks quickly in a 3D space. Good idea on paper, just a little bit too complex to pull off on such limited hardware

A pretty solid pinball offering
This one makes use of the 3D by tilting the viewing angle of the table so that the bottom end is closer and the top end is off in the distance. There's good use of layering with rails appearing on different levels and the 3D effect is quite good overall. They also decided to go with a puck instead of a ball, possibly because it might be easier to animate in 3D? I'm not sure but the puck slides along the table with the physics you would expect, almost like it's an air hockey puck. Each D-pad controls one of the flippers and it plays a good game of pinball.

Each of the 4 available tables offers their own gimmicks to help keep each table feeling fresh and each one carries a space theme.
Cosmic is a pretty basic table, There's a planet like object in the top left you can enter for bonuses and bumpers in the top right but otherwise it is your standard pinball table
Colony is the the standout for me. A list of locations appear in the middle of the table and there's arrows pointing to which hole you need to hit the ball into to progress to the next area which helps keep you going for things other than a high score. On top of that you'll be attacked by asteroids every so often and your puck will lift off the table and transform into a shooter that will let you shoot the asteroids for bonus points. It's a really engaging table and I love it.
UFO starts off with a giant UFO at the top and you can earn bonus points by entering the left hole before it flies off. Otherwise it's a pretty standard table and may be a bit too small.
Alien is the other highlight. This one seems like your standard double flipper table but if you can get the ball into the hole at the top, you can cause the bumpers to morph into an alien that will net you plenty bonus points if you can hit it enough times and enter the right hole. It's a fun and engaging table overall.

4 tables for a pinball game from around this era isn't too bad and each one offering a unique experience is pretty cool too. On top of that Galactic Pinball makes pretty good use of the 3D effect, helping emphasise the layers of each table and making this a pretty solid Virtual Boy title

There's a decent game of Golf on offer here. 18 unique courses with Stroke and Tournament play modes and records for each course being recorded. The options for swinging are pretty in depth for a golf game of this era with direction, stances, and clubs all able to be set before a swing. The meter bar is hard to read with how they curve it out of the screen for the 3D effect and it makes it difficult to gauge how far you're going to hit the ball. Spin is also determined by pressing A while a marker zooms across the ball so if you stop it left or right of centre then you'll add spin to the ball. The core gameplay and what's on offer here is solid for a portable golf game of this era but there's one key area where it unfortunately all falls apart for me.

Graphically this is a headache inducing, eye straining mess of red and black lines, especially in 3D. There's just way too many lines for this kind of display with how they try to indicate different terrain and the slopes with the grid before you swing. I could barely stand playing for a few minutes in full 3D with the red and black display.
Thankfully, the Red Viper emulator on 3DS does allow you to change the colour scheme, with a black and white option being a standard. Unfortunately it doesn't help much with the 3D effect being an eyesore but turning that off on 3DS does make the game a bit more playable. It's still messy graphically to the point where it feels like it was rushed to market (which it probably was considering the Virtual Boy itself was) and it isn't enough to stop this being a sour experience overall for me

Had no idea what to expect from this one aside from recognising Bomberman on the cover. I was surprised to find a pretty fun puzzle game with a solid story mode to work through.

The core concept of this is a match 3 puzzle game where your blocks are linked in an L-shaped 3 blocks and you can rotate them as they fall. Once landed, if there's a gap below any blocks, they will fall onto the line below. It's kind of a mix between Tetris and Puyo Puyo in that way.
The better you do, the more you can fill you side up with bombs and by dropping a lit bomb onto that, you can explode a large portion of your field to send a bunch of junk blocks to your opponents side. It's incredibly satisfying and simple to pick up fun which is exactly what you want from a puzzle game. Throw in some chaotic items like giant bombs and making blocks fall much faster, and you've got a great puzzle game on your hands.

There's no messing with viewing angles to try and make an impressive 3D display here - this is exactly how a puzzle game would look in 2D but they added depth to a few layers like the characters in the middle of the screen or making explosions pop out of the screen and that simplicity, not complicating thing for the sake of being flashy, is what makes this on of the better Virtual Boy games.

Panic Bomber knows what it wants to be and doesn't compromise on that to chase a 3D effect that has minimal effect on the gameplay. It's simple puzzle fun and because of that it's a great experience.