This game is pretty good. Not fantastic, but pretty good.

First, the good:

First, the core racing mechanics are a lot of fun. It's apparent that the developers really understood what made podracing so exciting in the film, and they've translated that excitement well. The racers are fast, the boost and repair mechanics are great ideas implemented well, and while it clearly borrows a lot from the F-Zero series, it never actually feels like it's copying F-Zero.

I've also gotta give bonus points for it performing surprisingly well on N64 despite having super detailed graphics. This is one of the best-looking games I've seen on the platform, and while it doesn't get great framerates, it does manage serviceable framerates (at least by N64 standards) for the most part.

Now, the not-so-good:

The controls in this game are frankly weird. It's not entirely the game's fault, since the N64 controller simply isn't well-suited for what this game is trying to do, but it presents problems nonetheless. Chief among them, you can rotate your podracer 90 degrees with the C-left and -right buttons. This is basically required to get past some obstacles. Unfortunately, unless you're using some sort of really weird claw grip, it's basically impossible to tilt and accelerate (A) at the same time.

Worse, the game doesn't actually tell you this. Even the instruction booklet doesn't mention this in the controls section; it's tucked away in a "Tips for Success" section near the back. In fact, the game doesn't tell you much of anything at all about how to play it. Some of it can be intuited, but a lot of the controls aren't actually useful until certain points in the game (such as Z to drift), so they're very easy to miss even if you diligently test the controls when you start playing. It's a built-in handicap if you don't both have and read the instruction booklet.

The boost mechanic is really cool, but super awkward to use. You have to hold Up on the control stick while driving at top speed to charge boost, let go of A, and then immediately press and hold it again to activate boost mode. This makes it physically impossible to prepare in areas where there are a lot of curves, as steering too hard (which you will need to do) cancels your boost charge. In many cases, by the time you have a chance to fully charge it, it's not safe to activate anymore. Not the worst, but it does make it feel like maybe the track designers and the game mechanic designers weren't entirely communicating.

Some sections of tracks have a more cinematic camera, and the game plays a little more on-rails. This would be fine, but when the camera is doing a barrel roll and you still have to dodge moving obstacles, it can feel borderline unfair. The camera in a game generally shouldn't itself be an obstacle.

That's it for the not-so-good, now here's the downright baffling:

There are four shops in the game that you can visit between races, and three of them serve very similar purposes. One lets you buy parts, one lets you upgrade parts, one lets you buy used parts that are worse for cheaper, and all three are run by Watto. The last shop (possibly also Watto? I couldn't tell) is the only one that felt meaningfully distinct; it lets you buy pit droids, which help you repair your podracer faster. None of this is necessarily bad, but really, all four could've been combined into one and it would've been fine.

The shops also won't show prices (or your own current funds) until you try to buy something. It's not the worst thing in the world, but it gets really tedious if you want to be optimal about your purchases. Just picture it: You visit a shop, select each item one-by-one to see the price, leave, repeat for two more shops. It's time consuming, and really requires a notepad by your side if you wanna do it right. My recommendation is just buy the first thing you can afford and don't even bother trying to be optimal.

The menus are just all out of order. You have to select a game mode (choices are Tournament, Free Play, Time Attack, 2 Player), a racer, and a track before you can get to the options screen to control things like music and sound volume. It works just fine, but it's super weird.

So that's it. Reading this might give the impression I didn't like this game. I certainly had a lot to complain about.

But here's the thing: As I said at the start, the core racing mechanics are a lot of fun. And boy howdy do I mean that. For all of the issues I had with this game, I still recommend it. The frustrating elements get less and less frustrating the longer you play the game. I had a blast the entire time I was playing, and while I can't in good conscience give this higher than 3.5 stars, those are a very solid 3.5 stars. Despite everything, the actual racing remains fun, and for that I'm willing to cut a lot of slack for some questionable design choices peppered throughout.

I wanted to love this game. Oh how I wanted to love this game. The art is gorgeous, the music is excellent, the characters and world are charming... But that's about where it ends.

The problems begin with the menus. The game's "Ring menu" system mostly just gets in the way. Almost everything you do outside of basic attacks and talking to NPCs is done with the ring menus. The menus display as circles that surround your characters, which can be navigated clockwise and counterclockwise by pressing left and right on the D-Pad. You also have multiple menus for different tasks (options, items, weapons, magic), which can be swapped by pressing up and down.

Additionally, each character has their own menu. One button accesses your active party member's menu, another activates both of your other party members' menus. Some of the menu entries will be the same for all—for example, all party members share a single inventory—but others will be different, such as each party member's individual magic.

This system is, quite frankly, too innovative for its own good. It's slow to open or change menus, overly focused on looking nice over providing important information, requires a lot of button presses to get to basic things you'll be needing to do over and over again during battles, and the mishmash of shared and non-shared menu entries is mind-boggling.

And when you're trying to do anything for someone who isn't currently the party lead, you'd better hope you've got the right menu open. Since it shows as a ring around them rather than showing whose menu it is, if two party members are standing in the same place (which they frequently will be during battles) it can be literally impossible to tell which menu you have open until you realize the thing you're looking for isn't there.

The combat in this game is baffling, to say the least. You have a party of three characters, of which you can control one at a time. The other two will be AI-controlled, but the AI is borderline useless. Your attacks have a fairly substantial cooldown to them, during which you can technically perform another attack but it'll be significantly weaker. And when you do attack, it might land immediately, or it might take a few seconds if the enemy is recovering from an attack from another party member.

There's also magic, which you unlock fairly early in the game. Only two of your three party members can use it, and to do so you have to navigate through multiple layers of menus. First to the magic menu for the character who has the spell you want to use, then to the category that spell is in, then to the spell itself. This might not seem like much, but with as much as you'll be doing it and as slow as the menu is to actually use, this gets tedious fast.

But my "favorite" part of the combat is the stun locks. Hoo boy, the stun locks. When fighting multiple enemies at once, it is very easy for them to corner you. You get stunned after each hit you take, and you'll find yourself unable to move or attack, leaving you no choice but to watch helplessly as your full health gets completely drained.

No problem, just have one of your other party members use a phoenix down cup of wishes to revive your downed comrade, right? Not so fast, bucko. You can only carry up to four of any given item at a time. Between healing and reviving the brain-dead AI characters and bringing back people killed by a nasty case of stunlockitis, you'll be burning through your inventory in the blink of an eye.

But at least you can change your weapons around whenever you want, even mid-battle. I guess that's pretty cool. It's too bad each character has a skill level for each weapon, so if you want this to be at all useful you'll have to spend hours upon hours grinding them.

Okay, so the menus are a mess and the combat is a disaster. But maybe that's not why you play a game like this. You're interested in the story. Well in that case, I'm sorry to say this isn't the game for you.

The story isn't bad per se. But it's super barebones. Sure, there are some cute character moments scattered throughout the game, some fun dialogue here and there, but they're fairly spread out, and on the whole the story mostly just ends up feeling like Cliff's Notes summary of itself. You pull a sword because you need to cut some grass, that dooms the world (even though it was apparently already actively being doomed), and now you have to go from place to place collecting the MacGuffins that will power up the sword so you can defeat evil and un-doom the world.

It'd be good enough, if the game was actually fun to play. A story like that is fine in a Zelda game. But when the gameplay itself is so tedious in its best moments and downright frustrating in its worst, such a barebones story doesn't cut it.

This game had a lot of ideas. Some of them were even good. But too many of them feel unnecessary, or half-baked, or in the menu's case overbaked to a crisp, and as a result the game just isn't enjoyable to play. It's a genuine delight to look at and listen to, but when playing it feels less like a battle against enemies or a great threatening evil and more like a battle against the game itself and its weird dogged insistence on not learning from other games in its genre, I just can't recommend it.

I first played this game in high school. I really enjoyed it, but I wasn't very good at games at the time, and though I made it to the final boss, I ultimately gave up. But now, as an adult, I played it again, and this time I wasn't gonna let it beat me.

Turns out, that wasn't a big ask. I beat the last boss on my first try.

This game is excellent. Kazumi Totaka's music is completely unlike anything I've heard in any other game. The art and animation perfectly captures the "spooky" tone, but in a playful way that isn't actually frightening. But most importantly, it's just plain fun. The unique control scheme for sucking up ghosts takes a bit of getting used to, but once you do, it feels totally natural.

For better or worse, the game is pretty short. I finished it in about five and a half hours. But personally, I think that's just right. I'd almost always rather be left wanting more than feel like I'm slogging through a game filled with bloat and padding.

All in all, I think it's an excellent game. Not the longest, but densely packed with some fun rooms, creative bosses, and mechanics unlike any game before it.