An update. I recently read my initial review of this game and didn’t find myself fully agreeing with it anymore. Not to a drastic degree - I still really love this game and adore my experience with it, but quicker than any other game I’ve played, I’m finding the recency bias has dissipated to an alarming degree.

I still stand by a lot of my initial thoughts, but having time away from the game has made its issues red hot. I believe it is still a big improvement over BOTW in most ways, but I think I’m seeing through the cracks a lot faster now than with BOTW.

Last week I went back to do more post-game stuff - side quests, filling out the depths map, shrine completion etc, and I found myself hitting a wall with some of the redundancy. This game is carried by its first playthrough. The Depths blew my mind when I first discovered them. What once was exciting and mysterious is now shockingly redundant and predictable. The Depths don’t offer much once you know the pattern of their design. The excitement of having an entire 2nd map lasts most of the game, but going back to it after beating the campaign made me realize I wasn’t motivated or excited to fill it out any further. I was motivated in a check list kind of way. The sky islands are a gorgeous diversion with occasional surprises - but just like the depths, they cease to offer more excitement once you discover the pattern. They’re horribly similar half the time. Getting the gliding suit was a wonderful experience, but so many islands are obsolete and lose purpose once completed. At least with Hyrule you never feel like returning to certain locations is totally pointless. Sadly the sky islands dwindled down to the point where I only went to them when prompted by a quest.

I still stand by the base Hyrule map being amazing. I replayed BOTW before TOTK and never found Hyrule to feel redundant with its main areas. Seeing the world develop is organic and wonderful. Catching up with characters from BOTW was nostalgic and charming. This is clearly where most of the development time went. That and the general narrative which I love. There are some story moments that are so brilliantly and subtly done. Nothing about the story felt lacking to me and there are several highlights that resonate as being some of the series’ best.

Overall, I can’t stand by my previous statement that this could be up there for my favorite zelda game or one of my favorite games in general. I still love it and my first time with TOTK will go down as one of my favorite video game experiences, but I don’t think I could replay it and enjoy it nearly as much. The abilities are still a game design achievement though. I completely get why this would be someone’s favorite zelda game and I’m certainly taking a strange stance atm, but I’ve fallen out of love with it at an alarming rate. My time trying to return to it rattled me with how rigid and unmotivated I felt to do anything else outside of walking around and enjoying the visuals (when it’s not cloudy and grey). I really expected to dive head first into completing all the shrines, side quests, and light roots etc. Even content like the koroks and holding the signs up were blatantly tired to me halfway through my first playthrough - to the point where once I had enough inventory slots I started ignoring koroks. I did maybe 25 of the signs before I began to skip them.

The lead up to the dungeons are superb and possibly better than the dungeons themselves to a degree. There’s so much room to improve for future games. I don’t wish for Nintendo to drop this formula (I mean they confirmed they won’t), but I hope they tone it down for the next one. We don’t need each game to get bigger and have more busy work. The side quests were mostly great in TOTK, but I do think there’s more padding than good well designed content upon reflection. It’s not bad padding though, but padding shouldn’t also be compensating for something.

Also a random tangent: I love the fuse mechanic, but I can’t be the only one who HATED walking around with certain fused weapons and shields. I never fused a shield unless it was circumstantial because I didn’t want a giant rock on my back. I always wanted to walk around with the master sword when I had it because it bugged me how dumb link would look half the time with a bunch of garbage glued to his weapons.
It’s just a nitpick - I love the mechanic - but I just wanted to have normal looking gear sometimes. There’s some cool looking fused weapons for sure, but most are really goofy. I want to look cool when exploring, and despite how fun fusing is, you quickly end up only fusing the same few monster parts over and over. I likely had less than a dozen monster parts I’d rely on for arrows and weapons by the end.

TOTK blows my mind in a lot of ways, and my adoration for it hasn’t exactly gone away. I’ll always love how in love with it I was, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was released from some kind of spell upon beating it. I’d love for the next zelda game to have a smaller focused open world, and perhaps a more linear approach to progression. The do anything anywhere idea has been great for two entries, but I’m pretty confident the magic of that is totally drained after TOTK. We don’t need another shake up or brain melting revolution of game design, just a tighter version of what exists. Getting items in a certain order during the story and having an actual difficulty curve would be very welcome. I’m more excited than worried for the future of zelda. I still believe they put their all into this one. It’s not likely they’ll use this specific hyrule and its characters again, so a fresh slate with these ideas as a blueprint will undoubtedly lead to something even better.

It has no rights to be called peak but I'll do it anyways, and I'll do one more and say Ultimate not having trophies, subspace and target smash... well, I'd hardly call a game like this Ultimate. Also only game in the series with no straight up clones, next Smash should try to differentiate its characters more.

Game's such a vibe. Story mode is iconic to this day and has more heart-wrenching moments than most of Sony's 3rd person cinematic AAA releases. I think picking Peach at the start makes the most sense but you can see when they quickly realized they would go over budget fast if they let you pick who to keep and discard too often. Still fascinated by the final boss... such a Sakurai concept. Yknow it's art when I still ponder on what he represents.

This game's combat is the closest Smash got to a bar fight in remote Scotland. I've explored every mode this game has to offer... lots of time spent on the sound test and trophies... and making horrible stages to have 99 lives battles using Ike or just watching NPCs fight like I've got no life... I kinda did not I was a small lad with no prospect of his future

Banger game. You'd think that with its rushed development and constant re-use of assets from OoT to the point where it might as well be an official romhack, that this game wouldn't be as fun or memorable as its predecessor, but they managed to miraculously make something that I enjoyed just as much as OoT. While this game doesn't have as sprawling of a world and the dungeons are kinda more misses than hits, the real appeal stems from the overall vibe of the game. Exploring a town during the three days before its imminent demise creates this really tense and dark atmosphere, and the lengths taken to essentially give every NPC their own schedule that they follow for the three days makes the world feel rather alive for an N64 game. The dark themes are kinda contrasted by the amount of actual color in the game itself, as I felt like the worlds and areas that ya explore here are way more colorful and vibrant than the muted color palette of OoT, and that was super cool. That being said though, the whole cycle system does mean that ya have to backtrack every time a quest-specific event goes wrong or if some specific item that resets isn't all collected in one time, and that could probably be annoying for some. There is also a bit of an inventory problem with masks taking up a slot on the 3-item wide inventory wheel so it makes frequent menu switching be prevalent throughout the whole game. It ain't perfect, but it doesn't really need to be. It's also a bit stingy when it comes to saving as you can only either save by resetting a whole cycle or by basically making a "suspend point" through owl statues. It never happened to me, but I'd feel like there's gotta be someone who had their play session ruined by something happening to their game before they could reset the cycle after being 2-3 hours in. Regardless, the fact that this game goes so far off the beaten path both in how the game is played and how the story is told makes it feel fresh and stand out in this series, and it's no surprise to me that this game has such a huge cult following.

GoldenEye with standard controls isn't for everyone. Turning with the analog stick while strafing with c-buttons is forever etched into my muscle memory, but I'm fully aware that the 1.1 Honey control scheme can be difficult to get into in 2022.

So if you're trying out GoldenEye for the first time, I cannot stress this enough: CHANGE THE CONTROL SCHEME. Some people are into the "2.2 Galore" setting which allows you to hold two controllers (one in each hand) for a twin stick shooter experience, but I've found it more cumbersome than helpful. "Solitaire" is where it's at, and I'll tell you why.

You hold the left and middle prongs of the controller for this layout. The D-Pad becomes your movement. It's digital, not analog, so think of it as WASD controls. The analog stick is used for looking/aiming. Z is still fire, but it's used by your right hand now, much more similar to modern shooters. L is used for aiming, and A and B still handle weapons and action commands, respectively. At first, it might feel odd to reach for the A and B buttons from the middle prong, but it's honestly not a difficult adjustment to make.

The other secret detail of this scheme (which I don't fully understand, but won't argue with) is that it REMOVES AUTO-CENTERING. You know, that feature that made it really difficult to aim at small targets like locks or alarms because as soon as you let off the stick it would snap back to center? This control scheme ditches it. What this means is that you can actually play this game like a modern shooter, with free aiming and a hybrid of WASD movement and the modern two-stick controller.

If you've been put off of GoldenEye because the default controls are janky, I implore you to give it another shot with different button mapping.

(Also, there are mods that you can play through an emulator or on an Everdrive that add multiplayer levels like Kakariko Village and Peach's Castle, and you should ABSOLUTELY try those out)

Essentially a battle between the two sides of nostalgia’s collectable coin: on one there’s the ugly and hollow self-perpetuation of “oddjob slappers-only natalya AI bad” that the Nintendo-Microsoft marketing machine is currently indulging in - cravenly memeing about the pause menu music while the game’s original developers call foul of an emulator’s exhumation in the replies column; but on the other side, despite it all, there remains a more sincere evocation of random-access memory here, one that arrives in unexpected moments - on this playthrough I was struck by the sound of Natalya shooting a guard off-screen in the eerie silence of Jungle, the way the cartoon violence suddenly veers towards reality in a rainforest soundscape that thrives upon an absentia of Kirkhope’s otherwise-welcome elevator-electrofunk. It felt good to be reminded of a time when this game felt so real to us and there was genuine fear in Xenia barrelling across a rope bridge with a grenade launcher… I don’t want to go back, but I do like to visit.

Like Pokémon Red & Blue, this is a game that’s ultimately doomed to be misunderstood and maligned by those that came after us. Despite playing this game for days and years on end, I’ve never been able to perceive the all-consuming glitches, bugs and jank these games apparently stink of. A recent Twitter thread recommended switching the control scheme to 2.3 Mode and then using the Switch’s built-in accessibility settings to swap stick and button inputs around in order to get the conventional twin-stick shooter experience; many replies praised the OP for “fixing” the game on behalf of Nintendo - but in what way was the game broken? Why afford yourself precision aiming in a game that is best left in the hands of a frankly glorious Auto-Aim? Why deny yourself the James Bond Musou experience of running down Control’s corridors with dual RPKs on full auto? Why not indulge in a couple of thoughts about how game designers in the 1990s overcame technical limitations that they didn’t even know existed yet? Other gamers in proximity to the thread lamented the fact that the re-release does not include upscaled or redone textures and character models, but I’m not going to get into the Midjourneyification of preexisting art because I don’t like to write mean things about consumers who just want to hitch a ride on a Ship of Theseus that bears the false flag of Goldeneye: 007. It aged poorly? So will you, soon enough.

Genuinely one of my favorite games of all time. It has one of the greatest soundtracks of all time, 99% of the time there will be music playing but not a single song is bad. The characters are all very memorable and have great chemistry with each other which is one of my favorite parts because it makes the characters feel so much more real and the way they interact with each other resembles a real life group of teenagers which a lot of games fail to do. All the characters have some sort of tragedy or traumatic event that happens to them, like the struggles of having one parent or being an outsider, or even being blamed for your mothers suicide. The main characters all have insecurities and contrasting personalities which just helps them feel more like real relatable people. You can read books, go shopping, talk to people, take a bath, make coffee, play pool or darts with your teammates, go to school and dodge erasers thrown by your teachers. it sounds boring but it isn’t because all these activities take less than a minute each and all have some sort of benefit like increasing your guts or intelligence which gives you even more options. theres just a lot to do, but the most important thing is obviously the Phantom Thieves who is this group of high school teens that “steal people’s hearts” which means they go into the bad guys cognitive world and literally steal their bad desires away which in turn makes them good. They all have personas which are basically just stands from jojo. the art style, the characters, the gameplay, music, level designs, and story telling all make this easily one of the greatest games of all time imo.

This game was absolutely outstanding. To the point where it makes the previous game feel like a proof of concept. This is a iterative jump that improves on everything, a KH to KH2 situation. So many more kinds of enemies than the last game. And so many ways to kill them. The combat and spectacle is next level. The combat is faster, more tools to use and the verticality of the levels offers loads of opportunities to murder monsters (despite still no jump button lol) The environments are spectacular and you get to go to a wide variety of places across the realms. Really liked the story, well performed, well told. Made me cry A LOT for lots of different reasons. Much bigger scale than the previous (you may like that more or not) This version of Kratos is still one of the most engaging video game characters ever. So many other characters too, this feels like a rich full world with a massive family of characters who all get big moments (some super surprising) the world feels so fleshed out.