Very fun game, I was a little surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It's very satisfying to take down enemies and build up an army to help you conquer the dangerous landscapes. My only gripes were the inconsistent difficulty and the AI of the pikmin which led to some disasters that weren't my fault. It can also get a little samey as the game goes on, but it doesn't overstay it's welcome and ends up being a fairly short game, so I didn't get very sick of the gameplay. Overall a great game and I'm excited to play the rest of the series

I'm not gonna give this game an official score since I didn't beat it (or get very far at all). But it's awful. The music is like if they took the Castlevania 1 OST and removed everything great about it. Simon's whip has such a weird hitbox and it always goes through enemies. And the new structure is just abysmal. Here, break every single tile in the level searching for a key so you can move on. From what I've seen, this game is a 2/10. I might come back to it, but I'm not gonna play this before I move on to Castlevania II anymore.

I absolutely loved this game, and I'd call it my new favorite game on the NES.

I think to really talk about why this game is special, you need to talk about the artistry that went into this game. In my opinion, this is one of the earliest examples of video games being an art form. The visuals are simply phenomenal. Each level has gorgeous backgrounds and tilesets. Level 3 in particular, when you get to the end and see Dracula's tower off in the distance against a dark sky illuminated by the moon... it's just fantastic. The enemy designs are also amazing. It's a weird hodgepodge of classic movie monsters all realized in amazing sprites, many with lots of animation. And the SOUNDTRACK. Every single track is an absolute banger, no exceptions. The music never gets old, never gets stale, which is especially impressive given how much you're going to hear each one. Every piece of music is extremely upbeat with surprisingly complicated rhythms and melodies that just perfectly evoke the haunted castle motif. The visuals and soundtrack come together to impeccably form the classic cheesy horror movie vibes. Absolutely incredible.

The gameplay is less fantastic, but still very good. Simon is extremely limited at all times. You walk fairly slowly, and you can only jump straight up or forward with fixed momentum, unable to move in midair. Your whip has decent range but using it stops you and leaves you vulnerable. You have access to a variety of subweapons (the holy water is insanely broken) but you have to find those in the level, and if you die, you lose it. Enemies meanwhile take no knockback, often move quickly and have weird patterns or have ranged attacks that take off a huge chunk of health or throw you directly into a bottomless pit. The odds are stacked against you, and while the limited options can be frustrating, it also allows for greater control and precision. You always know exactly how far your whip will go, how far you'll jump, if you can move out of the way in time. This puts far more of the responsibility for deaths on the player.

That's not to say there isn't some classic NES unfairness to be seen. The hit detection on platforms is really weird, and you'll often fall off of one when it really looks like you should have made it. Enemies can have weird spawn patterns that they deviate from and make it hard to predict when they'll show up. Worst of all, some enemies have different attack patterns that they seem to switch between randomly, making some of them a roll of the dice if you can get past them easily or lose half your health trying to beat them. However, unlike a lot of games, these difficulty imbalances are pretty infrequent. Levels 2 and 4 are the worst offenders, but even they aren't that bad once you get the hang of things.

Overall, I really really liked this game. Definitely one of the best games on the NES.

One of the most boring and mind-numbingly easy platformers I have ever played. The level design is flat and uninspired, the bosses all feel more or less the same, and the game isn't long enough to impress you with more ideas. The last level is literally just fighting the four bosses again with no changes, or at least not any I noticed. Kirby's suck mechanic is an interesting idea, but it wouldn't reach it's full potential until Kirby's Adventure, and here it just feels slow. Everything in this game feels slow. Kirby moves slow, he flies slow, and defeating an enemy means sucking them up and spitting them out or swallowing them, a process that becomes incredibly tedious, even over the course of a game that takes an hour to beat. This game would be a 4/10 if not for the pretty good soundtrack and some charm, especially on the character designs for Kirby and Dedede that just barely pushes it up to the 5/10 range. This is the first Kirby game I've played and if this is what they are all like, I am not looking forward to playing the rest of the series.

This is by far the best NES Mario. It's also like 20x easier than the others. The levels in this game are (mostly) pretty great and Mario feels great to control. I think there's just a couple flaws that just barely make it a 7/10 instead of an 8. Not every level is fantastic and a lot of them start to feel very samey, especially towards the end. I also think the difficulty curve is super weird, world 6 is by far the hardest and world 3 is pretty tricky too. By comparison world 4 is incredibly easy and world 8, despite being the last one, is filled with like 2 tricky levels and a bunch of fairly easy ones. The final castle is especially disappointing, I remember it being hard from my last playthrough but it's super short without much challenge. Still, I really like this game a lot and is, in my opinion, the first truly good Mario game.

This game is so weird to me. In a lot of ways I think it's one of the most creative and interesting Mario games. And yeah, I know that comes from it being a localization of YKDDP (literally everyone knows this) but that game was originally designed to feel like a Mario game with vertical scrolling anyway. Future games would take a lot of inspiration from this one, with more active boss battles that usually take 3 hits to defeat, a lot of enemies would become series staples, more open levels that encourage exploration, themed worlds, etc. A lot of people don't realize how much of modern Mario came from this game. The game itself is very creative already and it has a great soundtrack. That all being said, it kind of still sucks in a lot of ways. The movement is pretty much the exact opposite of SMB1 and SMB2J. Instead of being super stiff, Mario is extremely mobile and slippery. This is fine early on but eventually the game wants you to make fairly precise jumps and you end up feeling extremely frustrated. The continue system is slightly better since you get a few game overs before it sends you back but needing to earn lives from the slot machine is extremely annoying. Even after learning the timing it's still very inconsistent.

There's a lot of good and bad in this game, but I have to give it a 6/10 simply for the sheer amount of ideas and creativity on display, and how impressive the game was for the time. Even as a reskin it's impressive, there's a whole lot of changes they made to make the game feel like a Mario game, and the ending is incredibly beautiful and impressive given this was a 1988 NES game.

This is an excellent video game that I don't really have much to say about since it's essentially just more Breath of the Wild, which was already a fantastic game. I don't think it makes great strides to be a vastly superior game (which makes it a bit less impressive than BotW) but it has a lot of little improvements that make it an overall better game for me, even if it doesn't have the same magic that BotW had, and so it will probably never feel as special to me. But I mean come on, you can build the green goblin glider in this game so it's pretty amazing.