Luigi Raceway
Pretty simple oval layout with little else going on

Moo Moo Farm
FEATURES COWS!!!!
And monty moles that are more dangerous than I remember. It's another oval though :/

Koopa Troopa Beach
This has a super cool shortcut through a tunnel and waterfall after a series of ramps!

Kalimari Desert
The train is cool, especially when it cuts across your path but this is another very simple course

Toad's Turnpike
Iconic for introducing other vehicles to a race track, making a simple figure 8 much more dangerous

Frappe Snowland
SNOW COURSE!!!! WIth a cool leap over a river and a dangerous snowman section!!!

Choco Mountain
Banger music, awesome section where if you fall off you have to drive back round and giant choco boulders!!!!

Mario Raceway
Solid raceway course with a neat pipe tunnel

Wario Stadium
Really long course with lots of twists and turns and plenty of bumps

Sherbet Land
Solid ice course with plenty of water to fall into and penguins to avoid

Royal Raceway
Best raceway course with a cool jump section and the ability to drive up to Peach's Castle

Bowser's Castle
Has everything you need, from dangerous Thwomps and rickety bridges, this is one of the best Bowser's Castles

DK's Jungle Parkway
Incredible course with a jump over a boat and an awesome corner cut on the final turn in the cave as well as a neat narrow bridge for placing items on

Yoshi Valley
An absolute maze of a course with a giant deadly Yoshi egg ready to crush all in it's path

Banshee Boardwalk
Solid ghost themed level with bats that fly towards you near the end of the course

Rainbow Road
Super long but an iconic course with massive chain chomps to avoid through out

On a Mario Kart kick so I'm going through all the games and giving thoughts on every course

Mario Circuit 1
Iconic and a simple layout. Love the big dirt patch near the end that you can boost over with a mushroom for a quick short cut

Donut Plains 1
Not a huge fan of the Donut Plains courses because of the gravely bits that make you slide. This one is fine, not much else to it

Ghost Valley 1
Ghost Valley courses are great because the walls disappear after being bumped into making the course more dangerous as time goes on. GV1 also features a neat jump feather shortcut

Bowser Castle 1
I LOVE BOWSER CASTLE COURSES!!! BC1 is all 90 degrees turns which is cool and the thwomps crashing down to squash/block you makes this an engaging course

Mario Circuit 2
The jump at the end makes this one stand out. It has a solid layout too, with plenty of turns

Choco Mountain 1
Similar to Donut Plains where you slide everywhere. There's little hops too but this is kind of a dull course

Ghost Valley 2
Like GV1 with a jump feather shortcut too, only with tighter turns meaning more edges getting knocked down for more chaos

Donut Plains 2
Donut Plains returns with even more slippery corners and now annoying monty moles that latch onto your kart :)

Bowser Castle 2
Split paths, dangerous jumps over lava, even more difficult thwomp placements and a cool jump feather shortcut. Pretty cool course

Mario Circuit 3
Some really tight turns and a decent shortcut makes this one of more interesting Mario Circuits

Koopa Beach 1
It is circle

Choco Island 2
Slightly more interesting with the large choco patch but not much else going on here

Vanilla Lake 1
I love snow/ice themed stuff so this is cool. There's a crack in the surface allowing you to fall into water and while the ice blocks blocking your path can be annoying, there's only a handful in this layout

Bowser Castle 3
The multi jump section and three way path split at the end is cool but this is probably the weakest of the BC tracks here

Mario Circuit 4
Another Mario Circuit and it doesn't really do much to stand out from the rest unfortunately

Donut Plains 3
Fuck the broken bridge you have to jump over. You will always fall into the water when it hurts the most

Koopa Beach 2
There's a cool section of water with cheep cheeps and dark patches you can sink in but it's another simple layout

Ghost Valley 3
Less walls and holes in the floor make this more of an annoying course to navigate than anything else

Vanilla Lake 2
Cracked ice all in the centre and a portion of large ice blocks to make this a frustrating course

Rainbow Road
No walls and the thwomps make you spin make this the perfect challenging course to finish the game on

How do you celebrate a franchise's 30th anniversary? By delivering the best game in it's series so far.

Forgotten Land oozes imagination and wonder across each of it's perfectly crafted levels, designed with plenty of hidden collectibles to find to power up abilities and expand the hub world that is Waddle Dee town. Every level is accompanied by the perfect musical score, including a vocal opening song!!!!

Bringing Kirby into 3D allowed them to streamline Kirby's moveset. You no longer have to double tap to run allowing you to explore levels much more smoothly. Sucking up enemies and spitting them out is incredibly accurate for a 3D plane, and Kirby now has a dodge roll ability which allow boss fights to be dynamic, engaging, and a lot more challenging than in previous games.

Honestly it's so impressive just how tightly designed the whole game is. Levels are similar to Mario 3D World in that they're essentially "reach the goal" and don't offer much in the way of going off the main track but the levels are so much larger in scope, design, and imagination, along with near Tropical Freeze levels of attention to detail with the surrounding environment.

The only slight fault I personally have with the game is distant enemies and moving objects clearly skip frames of animation until you get closer and it's noticeable all the time which is kind of annoying but yeah, other than that, the game is perfect to me.

Really looking forward to seeing where HAL go from here with Kirby because topping this would be some achievement

Excellent game with a fantastic and memorable cast of characters. I found the combat to be engaging with all the cool SAS combinations and while it did start to drag on towards the end, the final boss fight made great use of everything.
The story was pretty good too. It gets a little too busy for it's own good towards the end which makes it hard to keep track of everything but the characters and the main plot thread are engaging enough to push through the messier aspects.

Also Kasane is left handed which makes her awesome, I don't make the rules

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

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

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

The first Fire Emblem to ever be localised for the West and my gosh did they hit the ground running with this one.

I decided to revisit this immediately after playing FE6 to see what kind of improvements the series made with it's 7th entry and I was surprised by how much they built off from FE6.

FE6 was Int Sys finding their feet after losing a huge influence in Kaga. You can see that with how limited the scope of the game is and how basic it feels in aspects. That game was mostly just getting something up and running on the GBA so they could build off that foundation and my gosh did they do that with FE7.

For the first time in the series we're following 3 Lords and each one has their own "mode" to play, unlocked in order when you first play the game.

Lyn mode is essentially a tutorial for all the newcomers to the series with it being the first worldwide FE. Each map introduces a mechanic and holds the players hand while they get used to everything. For newcomers this is perfect. At this point there was 7 games worth of mechanics to learn so dropping the West in blind would've been very off putting for a lot of people. I know that it's not the most fun thing to play through (though it is skippable after clearing it) but it is a very important introduction to the series.
The story itself for Lyn mode is only 10 chapters long but it's a really nice and personal story and one that I honestly have a lot of love for, so much so that I can't bring myself to skip Lyn mode on repeat playthroughs.

Her story also shows aspects improved upon over FE6. We have different map objectives return with defend and rout maps on top of seize ones. The characters are more fleshed out with a lot more personality over what we got in FE6. Kent and Sain alone are so much fun here but we also get Florina who has a nice relationship with Lyn too. There's also a new weather mechanic where rain or snow will pop up every few turns and limit units movement until it stops. It's an interesting idea but it's execution just makes a couple of turns slower and it becomes annoying. It only appears a handful of times throughout but yeah, not that fun.

The meat of the game follows in Eliwood mode which is the immediate story unlocked after beating Lyn's one. This is more of the standard FE campaign, with 20+ chapters and more in depth maps and gameplay on offer. Here we get a much more interesting narrative that is pretty ambitious for a GBA game as well as a good look at some stuff briefly spoken about in FE6 as this is a prequel. Seeing Zephiel and his abusive parents hits so much harder when you've seen what he's like in FE6.
It's a very solid affair, Eliwood himself is very much a typical FE lord but Lyn and Hector help bring an interesting dynamic and characters like Ninian and Nino play really good roles in the story. The Black Fang are also very interesting as antagonists and Sonia makes for a memorable villain (more so than Nergal himself unfortunately)
But yeah Eliwood mode is very solid and a nice step up from what came before.

After beating Eliwood mode, you unlock Hector mode which is essentially the same but from Hector's pov and more challenging. There's also a few exclusive maps and characters to help make the mode more enticing because it is a second playthrough thing.
Hector makes for a more interesting Lord character as well, so seeing his reactions and hearing more of his thoughts makes this mode a more interesting experience imo.
The cool thing about beating Eliwood mode is that you're free to pick Lyn/Eliwood/Hector mode when you start a new game which means you don't need to bother with the tutorial stuff if you don't want to.

Ultimately, I think FE7 is one of the best games in the series. It does everything it can to be the best possible FE experience on GBA, with a memorable cast and well varied map objectives as well as a decent amount of replay incentive without holding too much from those only wanting to play once

Very safe remakes of Diamond/Pearl which I can appreciate on some levels after ORAS changed a little too much to my liking but also disappointing in many other aspects.

The good includes making Sinnoh a lot more fun to navigate and explore with HMs being useable from the Poketch. The underground being expanded upon to include a large variety of wild Pokemon to find. I personally think the artstyle is really cute and the map being 1 to 1 means no dumbing down of puzzles or layouts keeping Sinnoh in tact. All the post game content is here though nothing from Platinum is included and they managed to at least make Cynthia challenging despite not balancing the rest of the game around the always on exp share. It's also very cool that nearly all of the 493 Pokemon in the Gen 4 dex are available in this game with only a few unavailable Mythical Pokemon.

The issues with this remake start to crop up when compared with previous Pokemon remakes. There's very little new content here. The Pokedex doesn't include any Pokemon past gen 4 meaning no rematches with Gym Leaders or Elite 4 members that would normally incorporate newer Pokemon into their teams (though the rematches here are cool)
While the chibi aesthetic is cute, it does undercut the events on Mt Coronet a lot. Going back to full random encounters outside of the Grand Underground kinda sucks after Sword/Shield had a neat balance of both random and overworld. Sticking with the D/P dex instead of the improved Platinum dex means Pokemon like Eevee and Rotom are unavailable until post game despite the Grand Underground allowing access to stuff like Elekid and Togepi.

At the end of the day though despite my grievances with the games, I still really really enjoy playing Pokemon games. There's a lot of aspects that they should really be improving upon (like difficulty options please) but when I'm actually playing the games I'm having too much fun to care about my issues with them and at the end of the day, fun is really why we all play videogames anyway

The first game after Kaga's departure from Intelligent Systems and you can kind of tell that the team weren't quite sure what direction to take the series in.

FE6 scales things back in a lot of departments to make for a mostly safe and familiar FE experience. Gone are the varied map objectives, in depth narrative, skill system and capture mechanics from the previous game, focussing more on finding their feet after losing a big influence.

Every map is a seize objective, lacking the variety that Thracia introduced before it. Fog of War has been kept for a little variety but aside from that it feels very FE1 like in that department.
The story also feels FE1 like with it's big focus on dragons and trying to bring them back into the world. It's definitely told better though and Zephiel in particular is one of the more interesting villains in the series, with a pretty good backstory.

While the game is a pretty solid experience it does have a handful of annoying gameplay designs and choices to dampen that experience. There is a heavy over reliance on same turn reinforcements here that serve only to catch the player unaware and punish them without much chance to do anything about it.
The story also locks its true ending behind a requirement to get all of the legendary weapons (similar to FE3) and I don't like that. It requires every side chapter to be visited and the side chapter maps in this game are quite gimmick inspired from water swallowing up tiles to prevent land based units from moving or arrows of light piercing down the screen damaging every unit in its way. On top of this, the regular ending is one of the most unsatisfactory endings they could've given.

FE6 is definitely a game where the development team were trying to find their feet. It's a pretty flawed experience in some areas but still manages to be a solid game despite those flaws.