I gosh darn hate the motion controls in this, simply because I suck at using them, and since the wii-wheel was the new hot thing… yeah, my first experience with this game was a bit rocky.

Coming back to it years later, with the genius intellect to realise I could just… not play with the motion controls, I had an absolute blast. The track selection is amazing, kart selection is nice and snappy compared to 8 Deluxe, but more than all of that, I just relish in the absolute chaos that this game brings. I’ve played a lot of different mario kart games and I feel like the balancing in this one has to be on drugs, because it feels like a total warzone on the track, and I love it. Keeps things fresh and makes for a great time with buddies.

ARMS was free to play as one of those NSO trial things for like a week or so, and I had my fill of it in that time. Beat the hardest difficulty of the arcade mode, fooled around online a bit, and that’s where my interest faltered and I felt like I had done everything the game had to offer, pretty much. It’s pretty fun, rather creative and in terms of presentation and personality, it has both down great! There’s just not much content to keep you engaged, so though I don’t regret playing it, the fact I had my fill during that trial period says it all.

This is probably not a 10/10 game, but it was a 10/10 experience for me. It introduced me to Etrian Odyssey, a series I now love and own every game for. The music ABSOLUTELY blew me away, I was flabbergasted by how good it is, both in terms of creating a calming atmosphere as you walk around and very smoothly shifting that over to high-octane battle music. The art style is so, so nice too, both for characters and for backgrounds. The story mode was a brand new addition, but it really helped me ease into the genre, while also just keeping me engaged with loveable characters and a story that has a surprisingly effective hook, even if the story itself isn’t anything groundbreaking. Props to the voice actors too, they did a great job, and though there aren’t many of them, the anime cutscenes are just sublime.

Drawing your map, fighting monsters, selling their parts for better gear so you can explore further, constantly cutting it close with how you use your money on what equipment… it’s a constant balancing act. I even dropped the game twice because I couldn’t manage to beat a boss and didn’t feel like grinding, but I’m very glad I came back to it and managed to beat it after all. I didn’t do all the optional and post-game content, since I had my fill, but as the very first Etrian Odyssey game I ever played, this one has a special place in my heart.

The concept alone is still so wild, Mario jumping around from planet to planet in space. I got this at a bargain price for my Wii U having never played it when it originally released, and it had not lost any of it’s shine. I loved shooting from planet to planet through launch stars, I think Bee Mario is such an underrated power-up and the orchestral soundtrack with plenty of bopping tunes is still one of the best. Not many Mario OST’s that have music this grand and dramatic, haha.

It can be a tad gimmicky with its levels, but I personally didn’t mind these too much, and always had at the very least a decent bit of fun with them!

Funnily enough, the story and the atmosphere surrounding these story beats really pulled me in on this one. Yeah, story in a Mario game, who cares about that? I apparently do, and Rosalina’s little bedtime story as well as the ending to the game really left me quite surprised with how much more it immersed me in the game world, where Mario is usually full steam ahead with bombastic fun. Here there’s moments that are more subdued and calm, with even a slight melancholic tone to it, which felt oddly fitting for a game set in the vastness of space.

In either case, anyone and everyone owe it to themselves to give this one a go.

This game holds a ton of memories for me, and thanks to it, I still love the inazuma eleven franchise to this day. I had never played the first entry, so at first I was kind of lost, but thankfully it worked rather well as a standalone story too. A bunch of ‘aliens’ destroying your school by kicking a football around was such a wild moment, I was instantly hooked. This is one of the first games I played which had some anime cutscenes included at critical moments, and I would always sit on the edge of my seat whenever one of those would pop up. Suffice to say, I was never disappointed. The crazy special moves that keep ramping up in spectacle throughout the entire game and the frankly excellent character designs never let up, with an oddly dramatic plot that that kept me hooked all the way through. Though the gameplay is nothing to be scoffed at, it’s the rather insane story and hype character moments that really made this something special.

Speaking of the gameplay, it’s essentially a bunch of smaller battles against four man teams, with then big matches where it just comes down to passing the ball along and using your special moves whenever possible to get past the opponent or score goals. Though the gameplay is quite fun and getting new special moves was always a treat, it does get repetitive quite quickly. What helps is that matches throughout the story have a bunch of plot happening as you go, which keeps things fresh and unexpected, though if you fail to win then you’ll often have to sit through all of the same story beats to get another shot at actually winning the match.

Though the series would only get more insane in the following entries, I’m definitely still very nostalgic towards this one, and I think they never quite hit the same in terms of having such a central antagonist that kept me interested and engaged the entire time. It got me to play all the following games and even check out the anime, and as the game where it all started, I definitely got one of the best.