This game is brimming with atmosphere, looks quite beautiful and the puzzles are quite clever! I had a good time just wandering around, finding new items, discovering secrets left and right. The atmosphere is both unnerving and relaxing in equal measure, and the encounters with the titular animals are all quite interesting, even if they're brief. It's very well made, has an identity all its own, it's a good time... but I admittedly don't get where all the high praise this game got came from. As I said, it's a good time, plenty of secrets and mystery, but nothing particularly that stuck with me or really made me go 'wow'. It's not that long and fairly priced, so definitely give it a go.

It’s pretty nice, nicer than the base ACNH game for me since there’s an actual goal the game seems built around, but I guess due to my lack of fondness for the villagers and their lack of personality besides… being cute, I didn’t feel compelled to keep playing for long. Small limitations also got on my nerves rather quickly and made the immersion kind of shatter early on (If I put two chairs side to side, it really shouldn’t be impossible for my character to go from one to the other, it feels so cramped) so though I think this is super well made and I had my bit of fun, don’t think I’ll be returning to this one. Still, I could get behind an entire game based around this concept with a bit more to it.

A frankly terrible retelling of one piece, where knowledge of the manga is mandatory to even know what's going on because the cutscenes do such a poor job at it. Of course, if you already know the plot points, the cutscenes become even more useless, because the presentation is rather terrible. Besides the cutscenes, I actually like the presentation of battles with the limitations of the 3DS in mind, and having seen how bombastic the special moves get, I think they're animated rather well. There's just not much to the battle system, the 'dungeons' if you'd call them that are just straight hallways... I didn't get very far into this one, but from what I have played, it looks like One Piece Odyssey is essentially doing what this game wanted to do, but actually delivering quality. So, go play that instead.

- Played on NSO -
So the general opinion I heard on this game was that it was well-liked and people were really happy to see the first mario land make it over to NSO when we previously only had the second one. I kinda liked the chunky aesthetic of it so I gave it a go and it… is definitely a game. The controls are extremely stiff to the point where making a very simple jump can still lead to you falling down a pit, while also being kind of slippery where I slipped down a platform at light speed. Yeah, mario DROPS in this game as soon as there’s no solid ground, so slide an inch of that platform and he’ll be off to his death in a flash. The shooter segments were actually a nice change of pace in that regard, enjoyed them quite a bit more than the usual levels… and then it just abruptly ends. I expected a little more, especially because levels aren’t shy to re-use the exact same segments by copy pasting them within that same level.
Short, stiff, not really that fun to play, but at least I see why they call it quirky. The random bamboo forest levels had a nice aesthetic, but the rest didn’t leave much of an impression.