bounced right off the original back in 02 but this was a pretty fun time. i played this with a walkthrough as i wanted to experience the vibe without having to worry about keeping track of routing and completion. maybe that makes me soft but i think it helped this games strengths shine through. they really nailed the whole isolated, space anthropologist-with-an-arm-cannon feel of metroid, and the unforgiving and sometimes janky difficulty was just present enough to be nostalgic instead of frustrating.

Came into this one straight off a SOTN luck run and this one surprisingly really holds its own! A bit more of a Hollow Knight-style MV than SOTN-style since there's no RPG elements but this may actually be a little bigger than HK, and I think I might even prefer this to HK as the setting and environments are a little more compelling to me, there's no Soulslike mechanics (thank fuck) and I appreciate that this game swaps HK's mute world for thoughtful, interesting dialogue.

The platforming is no joke, and there was definitely a point about 70% of the way through where I never wanted to see another hallway filled with rotating knives again, and a LOT of those hallways led to a specific type of currency that I didn't ever come close to running out of. In retrospect it wasn't that bad but in the moment my patience was running a little thin.

I invested all of my resources into the amulets that increased sword power, cultivating athra and boosting athra surge damage, and that enabled me to kind of inelegantly brute-force myself through a lot of late-game battles. So maybe I didn't embrace the combat system as much as I could have, but there's a big difference between appreciating a cool boss fight and having to master the timing of a dozen different attacks just to scrape by—so I regret nothing.

I really appreciated how reasonable the difficulty was, and I felt a deep respect for the player through a lot of really great QoL mechanics—the memory shards, a liberal view of 'resetting' double jump and air dash abilities, being able to respawn right back into a failed boss fight and the ability to swing my sword and shoot arrows while perched on a wall. All of that really helps your mood when you're staring down your 3000th rotating knife hallway.

visuals that got a genuine 'wow' out of me and good music but almost everything else is beyond bare bones. the setting, such as it is, is a lot of alice in wonderland and surprisingly, coraline (did anyone else clock that?). i could easily see this game captivating an 8- or 9-year old and eventually leading to other action rpgs with a little more depth.

it's easy to overlook a lot of this game's shortcomings but one actively got under my skin: as pointed out by another reviewer, your attacks make exactly one sound effect. by the end of the game you are hitting enemies 5-15 times and it's just that same sound effect over and over. i also have thoughts about the typography (cococucumber hire me to do your typography)

This game has had so much potential. The combat rules. It's so unique, it looks great, it feels great, it just rules. They thank the Street Fighter 3 artists and animators in the credits and you can see and feel the influence. They did a good job of making any team composition viable—maybe too good of a job? Should I be bummed they're isn't a definitive best comp (unless you're speedrunning)? You have a LOT of options for combat and everyone levels up at roughly the same pace, which makes leveling up pointless but opens you up to experiment the whole time if you want.

The characters really carry the whole experience. Though some of them are more endearing or interesting than others, all of them look cool and have beautifully animated movesets full of clever details and personality. The characterization and VO is really top-notch, with a bunch of unknown-to-me actors in the lead roles, and Star Trek: The Next Generation's own Lieutenant Worf, Michael Dorn, as Ravannavar, the boss of the first 1/3 or so of the game.

The platforming aspires to Metroidvania but we don't quite make it there. The movement never really feels fluid and the maps are difficult to navigate. Everything looks the same, getting from one end of a map to the other takes forever and the minimap is not helpful. They tried to do linear paths through big sandboxes but they should have picked one or the other. The settings are cool and exciting but moving through them was my least favorite part of the game.

One of the things that makes this game so compelling is that you can see the ambition, you can see the lack of resources, you can see that they had a vision and some of it really works! And some of it doesn't. Like why go to the trouble of making an innovative, gorgeously animated combat system and then make combat so infrequent after the first half of the game? Why have exp at all if it doesn't really do anything? They tried to cram so much stuff in and while i love that ambition—doubly so because some of it is realized—it just needed more time in the oven. It's a shame what happened with the studio because a sequel could have been something very special.

This was my second playthrough and I finally put down Qadira and Tungar to try Nuna and Ginseng & Honey. I'm not sure you really need a healer or support characters at all to be successful in this game but they're just adorable so we keep them around. I also enjoyed playing with Thorani a bit, she has fun mechanics. Maybe next time I'll finally figure out Zebei, Baozhai or Kushi. Razmi still rules.

Nintendo doubles down on the movie with this delightful, inspired take on 2D Mario, using a relentless parade of new ideas, mechanics and environments to bring back the original series' (particularly 3 and World) feeling of joyous exploration and discovery. This is the next-gen 2D Mario that we've waited 30 years for.

I've seen people doing discourse about the diffculty, but I don't want to hear a word until you beat the final final level. The last bit of the optional endgame is the toughest, most hardcore Mario this side of Maker. I got all the medals except the standee one-I should have started working on that earlier but alas.

I'm always saying I want something different—and this was quite different indeed. A really lovely experience of exploration and solitude with a unique movement mechanic that puts a welcome twist on the 'explore and read letters to get the story' genre. The environmental allegory is a little on-the-nose but still carries an impact. As someone who gets shaky climbing up to the roof of my one-story house, I found the scale of this game exhilarating and the setting was so well-realized that I had a tough time not blowing through in one sitting. Yet another decisive Game Pass victory!