The reason I played this is because it was made available on Nintendo Switch Online. Now, I'm not stupid. Okay, having an NSO sub is kind of stupid, but ignore that for now. I know that there are endless different ways to play old games for free. I have multiple different programs and modded consoles for this exact purpose. Right now, if I wanted to, I could play literally any Game Boy game I wanted to on my PC or my Vita or my 3DS. But if there's one thing that a subscription service can be useful for, it's curation. Very little subscription services actually do this, and Nintendo definitely doesn't always do it well, but it can make all the difference to have a service actually care about what it's providing to the user. A lot of times I stare at a giant list of ROMs on my PC to play and end up playing nothing, sometimes I need someone to tell me "well why don't you play one of these games" and Nintendo did that. I probably would have never given the Game and Watch Gallery games a shot because from the outside they seem to just be what the title says, compilations of old Game & Watch games, probably not anything all that engaging. But now, I think I need to play all of these games.

You know how people talk about graphics peaking at the PS2 and everything afterwards being unnecessary? I think I'm becoming that person but specifically in regards to pixel art and the GBC. I adore the look of this game, the colors are so vibrant and the pixel art is all incredibly expressive and detailed while working within the limitations of the system. This not only makes for a great looking game, but one that can also showcase how expressive the original LCD games managed to be despite being made up of a very limited amount of still images. That also extends to how they play. Each minigame, while having a simple premise, has a lot little nuances, ways to get bonus points, ways each one encourages you to take more risks while always keeping the player engaged and changing things up. The best minigames in this collection are the ones that are essentially spinning plates: having to maintain multiple parts of the screen, having the player constantly switch their attention to different parts of it and punishing them for being negligent to any part of the minigame. Mario Bros and Greenhouse are the stand outs for this reason, and it makes sense since their classic versions are already great as well (Greenhouse Classic even has more score bonus opportunities than the modern version). The other minigames are mostly good, thought I'd argue Egg and Turtle Bridge have better classic versions, and Donkey Kong Jr feels like an even more ungraceful version of the arcade game, so it's better to just leave that one alone.

Where this game is more consistent is in its soundtrack. In a game that encourages playing each minigame up to the score limit, the music better be good enough to be listened to over and over again, and it most certainly is here. No track slacks, and it's nearly all original stuff as far as I can tell, so it doesn't really on playing the usual Mario fare either. This game also does a great job at providing context for these Game and Watch games, and helping the player appreciate them more than they would if just handed a boring port of the original, something a lot of game compilations fail to do. There's a museum with light trivia, but I mean more in the way that the modern versions of these games highlight what was already great in them, and so going back to the classic version doesn't feel like a downgrade so much as just another way to play. It helps the player see why these LCD games were popular, what made them stand out as games, it gives them value that could be lost if you engaged with them outside of this compilation.

This game was such a surprise, I never would have guessed how fun I found this. Hey, if you have an NSO sub, this is worth checking out, and hopefully they add more to the service. Or I mean, I could just go play them right now myself. Or play literally anything ever, actually. Or I could just sink more time trying to get all five stars in Greenhouse. Life is full of decisions, is the lesson here today.

Intelligent systems, is this a bit?

As soon as it was announced Engage is a game that was raising a bunch of red flags. Nostalgia baiting, the awful focus on a myunit, gimmicky new mechanics and fucking GACHA? The whole thing really looked like intelligent systems giving into the worst tendancies of post-awakening Fire Emblem.

And y'know, if that was it, i'd probably be at least fine with that. Fates, even revelations, one of the dumbest fucking things i've ever played, are all still at the very least, compelling. I have like 100 hours in Fates, embarassing as that is, because the Fire Emblem formula is still pretty great, conquest has like 5 good maps and the bad stuff is mostly ignorable. I have played fucking Gaiden to completion even after Echoes was out just to see what was up.

With engage ive got 15 hours in it and I can barely stomach a moment more. I want to keep going because I love FE. But I absolutely cannot stand this game.

Yes, like Fates, Engage is a game that falls prey to IS' stupid tendancies. But the real sin with Engage is that what has been cribbed about just does not gel together at all.

Main issue is bloat, on a gameplay level. Part of the genius of Fire Emblem is how really quite simple it all is, and how limited the resources and options really all are. The best section of the entire franchise, and it's not even close, is Thracia 776's Munster arc, a section which truly relies on you making the most of an incredibly limited toolset and pushing it as far as you can against overwhelming odds. Of course, over the years the complexity inevitably increased, to mixed but often positive results. Engage firmly goes too far though.

The big problem is the mixing of the social sim stuff from 3 houses whilst also incorporating its new stuff with the engage system and so on. Being able to boost stats and stuff in a hub was questionable but mosty worked in 3H, a game structured around it. In Engage all the stat boosting, friendship boosting, animal handling(why), minigames (WHY) are mindnumbing roadblocks to the fun strategy. These sorts of things have never really sat right in FE, where the ways damage formulas and speed formulas in particular work make tiny stat boosts often have huge implications, but this goes way too far in a game system very unsuited to it. It essentially stretches the preperations stage, already too long in most FEs, to being the majority of the game. It's unnaceptable.

And it's a real shame as a lot of the changes in the gameplay department are actually really good. Map design is probably the best it's been since radiant dawn, unit balance doesnt seem so overfocused on a small amount of strong units, bosses actually move about and honestly the engage system, regardless of it being insulting to the original characters and whatever, is a pretty neat gimmick honestly. It's a way more balanced version of pair up that gives effectively more burst damage and interesting techniques, which combined with enemies being generally stronger than previous games makes for an interesing loop. Obviously, its in this game so the execution is flubbed - the rings being limited in number kinda undoes the balance improvements on its own, and the skill inheritance, bonding, and gacha ring stuff is yet more pointless fluff to waste your damn time.

If the game just had the engage system over lets say, Radiance series levels of prep and other stuff going on, the gameplay could have been great, probably the best the series had seen in over a decade. But there's way too much going on to waste your time and it does not gel together.

The story and characters are so bafflingly bad I don't know who it's even for. As ludicrously bad as fates' are, at least it's very easy to pinpoint what's going for - the sheer power trip of being infalliable corrin, the stupid golden route both sides-ing and being able to have children with your big booba wyvern riding sister. Engage's is less bad in the "IS is down bad" regard, but it's worse in that it just completely forgets to have anything at all. It's completely hookless, the world and characters feel like they've got nothing going on at all, and it all feels very rote. The mystical/dragon elements feel tappen onto a pretty normal fire emblem plot and all they do is make the MC less personable and relatable. FE has only really had a good story in like 4 games, but it's structure as a series has always made it very easy to connect to characters and it has never dropped the ball this hard, and it's not like it's even trying something.

The whole game is just a confused mess, and doesnt even seem to be sure of who it's appeal is for. It's nostalgia bait to an extreme whilst barely resembling the simple, down to earth nature of those games. It goes for a simpler structure, dropping choice and most of the social sim elements (which people quite liked even if they're not entirely my bag), but keeps just enough of them to be really annoying. Characters are less of a focus for some reason? Romance is less of a thing? I can't even tell who this game is for because it feels like it consciously does something to alienate a fan of every game in the series, and it certaintly isnt for new players. Even as a "we needed 20 more characters to eventually put in heroes" joint it's a complete failure.

I hesitate to say this is the worst FE - Revelations is truly awful - but even Fates had like, an idea of what it was going for, as bad as what that is and as bad as it's execution is. Engage is aimless and awful and for the first time ever, it's easy for me to put an FE down.

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.

As the only clown on this website who has played the whole game (in one sitting right at release to secure a free Pickle Rick back bling in Fortnite), I can say with confidence High on Life is dreadfully weak. And that's a bit of a shame since it theoretically has good bones.

The most glaring problem is, of course, the dialogue. The pre-release comparison to Borderlands 3 is apt as characters literally do not cease their oral spew, and you are forced to listen to them before you can progress at key points. Borderlands has ameliorated this in part with the ECHOnet transmissions, keeping you apprised of plot elements as you messed about on Pandora. Save for key story moments, the dialogue therein is accompanied by your mad dash for loot and slaughter. High on Life quivers in its boots at the mere thought that you might miss a single phoneme. There is no means to skip dialogue. There is no opportunity to play the game when characters are talking. If you are not physically glued in place, you are locked in a distraction-less room. And should you dare to break from the tedium of a suburban hardwood floor and off-white walls by heading upstairs, you are scolded by your guns to pay attention. In a properly written, compelling narrative this would be fine, but a substantial chunk of the game is NPCs yammering incessantly. Fake arguments become auditory static, the white noise penetrated only by mention of racism, misogyny, or a cavalcade of 'fuck's. Does a holstered gun have something to say? Worry not, they'll speak to you over radio. That there is so much dialogue is rather interesting in and of itself, particularly seeing how your different weaponry will engage in conversations with NPCs, but there is not a moment where speech is not occurring. The only moment of respite is if you stay in place.

And some of the writing is passable, some even bordering on good. But it never comes out of Justin Roiland's many mouths. The closest I came to cracking a smile was when Zach Hadel, Michael Cusack, Rich Evans, Jay Bauman, Mike Stoklasa, or Tom Kenny was the focus. In a vacuum, some of their witticisms might have earned a chuckle or at least a considered exhale, but these moments are paltry oases after being duped by an infinitude of mirages. You know in your bones that a joke will not be allowed to stand on its own, and that Roiland or his other hack voice 'actors' will need to get their own two cents in. It is a Reddit comment thread not only in content, but in presentation, someone always retelling the above poster's joke but worse. In Roiland's world, stuttering is a feature, not a bug. His stammering makes Porky Pig seem eloquent. A one-take wonder.

"Is the gameplay good?" This question was asked more times than I can count during my marathon. As I emphatically repeated there, "no." There's a weightlessness to every second of combat that betrays the animations and premise of your guns being living things. There is more weight, more oomph, more impact to Spore's creature stage combat than there is to this gunplay. Your bullets genuinely feel as if they are lobbed foam balls. The only times at which there is some punch is when detonating sigh Sweezy's crystals with her charge shot. I can't tell if it's all a consequence of your enemies being shrouded in goop or not. Your shots take away the goop to expose their regular flesh, but this somehow imparts little feedback. Is it because there is so much flash and bedlam occurring that I can't even tell where and when my shots are landing? I have no idea. At the very least the juggling of enemies is semi-novel (even if it comes after Kenny begs lustfully for me to use his 'Trickhole'), and Creature is semi-satisfying if only because you can launch his children and go find a quiet[er] corner to recuperate mentally in. You get some basic manoeuvrability upgrade which makes this a Metr- Search Action game in some sense when coupled with returning to planets to find extra cash. You can upgrade your weapons and unlock modifiers for them but the changes are so minute I couldn't really tell how much of an impact they were having. What the mods do do is change the colour of your weapons. Given that so much of your screen real estate is occupied by their "beautiful dick-sucking lip" visages, this is the most substantial alteration you can make.

The music is like Temporary Secretary by Paul McCartney but bad.

Visually there is something of value here (in theory). While many of the alien inhabitants blend together with their amorphous sausage anatomies, the unique NPCs typically bear striking designs. Sweezy notwithstanding, the guns are cute as well, even if I feel Kenny is perpetually doing the Dreamworks smirk. Kenny and Gus' iron sights are adorable, and the way Gus clamps onto your hand indoors melts my heart. Creature reminds me of that Skylander that had the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. Inoffensive! Until you see his actual full model and you realise he has three tits and a prolapsed anus for a barrel. And Gus looks like he has a turtle's cock.

Errant thoughts:

Boy howdy is there a lot of mpreg talk.

One of the scenes you can warp in is a movie theatre where you can watch all of Demon Wind with the RLM crew. That would be okay but I don't think the MST3K style commentary works for a film that belongs in a Best of the Worst episode. There's a reason why they show you fragments of them watching it, and why their film commentaries are for more compelling films.

There is so much overlapping of dialogue that I genuinely got a headache that intensified over the game. A horror during a Tylenol shortage in Canada.

I put more effort into gathering my thoughts than they did making this shit.

I wish that I had always been in a grave.

Fans weren’t lying, this really is the best Sonic game we’ve had in years.

If you’re looking for a balanced review of the game, you won’t be finding one here. If you’d like more positive perspectives on the latest Sonic hotness, I’d highly recommend reading Pangburn and MagneticBurn’s written pieces on the game, as well as watching ThorHighHeels and Cybershell’s recent videos on it. This review will not discuss any story spoilers, but will vaguely touch upon the final few bosses.

Initially I had (unfairly) written the game off based on its truly awful press coverage, but it’s not like I had much faith in this franchise’s future anyway after getting a game as vapid as Sonic Forces. Though let it be known that I’m always willing to give something a chance, no matter how little I think I’ll like it. I hadn’t planned on getting to this for a while, but after my brother bought it on Steam out of the same curiosity for the game that I had, I knew I should probably just go ahead and play it. Now that I’m on the other end of the experience I think I’m even more concerned for this franchise's future.

After his last 3D outing this series was bound to take a sharp turn somewhere, but I think this genuinely might be Sonic’s most baffling course correction yet. True to its name, Sonic Frontiers stands as the dividing line between the older boost era of games and whatever empty path the series may decide to take next. This should be cause for celebration as I think everyone was essentially done with standard boost games after Forces, but I’m not convinced this open world zone approach is the right way to go if this series wants to stay on the cutting edge.


Over his career, Sonic has always been nothing if not a trend chaser, and that’s abundantly clear here. Shifting away from a straightforward progression though linear stages, Frontiers dumps you into a huge, empty map and sends you off on your way to do whatever it asks of you, knocking out dozens of menial checkmark tasks on your way to the next Thing. Generally you’ll be bouncing between haphazardly placed waves of enemies, puzzles that feel like they were made by a computer, and traditional boost stages in some of the most shameless methods of content rehashing I’ve seen in a long time. In-between these game-percentage ticks are the vast open fields themselves, letting Sonic stretch his legs a bit and run freely and mindlessly like the little rascal he is. After getting all the chaos emeralds on any given island (a process normally executed by fighting a boss to get a gear, using that gear to open a boost stage, playing the boost stage to collect keys, and using the keys to unlock emeralds), you’ll be thrust into a massive set piece pitting Super Sonic against a massive titan, and after beating the boss you’ll be ejected to the next island where the process begins anew.

It may sound harsh to explain this loop so bluntly and unceremoniously, but it’s not like I’m being totally uncharitable. This is the large bulk of what you’ll be doing during an average playthrough. Even among those who love the game, most would agree that a lot of the content in the open world itself can feel tedious at best or downright poor at worst, and I’d be inclined to agree.

Stopping dead in your tracks while zooming from place to place to complete another copy and pasted “puzzle” to fill out a map you’ve already explored is a recipe for disaster in any Sonic game as far as I’m concerned, and that's before you even consider the quality of the puzzles themselves. I think I’d be more charitable towards these if they were taxing in any way whatsoever, but they genuinely amount to turning your brain off for a variable period of time and getting rewarded with the mild satisfaction that you’re working towards a greater task in some small way. Sometimes you’re holding a button down for 30 seconds, sometimes you’re following a path around an obstacle course, sometimes you’re drawing a circle on the ground, sometimes it may even give you a slightly more valuable trinket as a reward for your hard work, but none of it will meaningfully latch onto you regardless. The game may as well just give you the stat boost / item for finding them (see also: looking at the marker on your map and running from one side of the map to the other to get to it) because the puzzles ultimately add nothing to the experience but provide a shallow time waster between story moments.


Let me slow down for a second, I know that these puzzles aren’t the primary draw of the game and it’d be foolish of me to pretend they are. This is a Sonic game after all, it’s always been more about the journey than the destination. Even the best 3D Sonic games are usually pretty fun to move around in regardless of any extraneous elements that may bog it down, so how is the movement in Frontiers? Well…

I’ll be upfront and admit that boost Sonic has never exactly been my thing, but there was a real opportunity here to transform this style of control into something that not only felt fresh, but managed to hold up the rest of the experience on its shoulders, flawed as the surrounding game may be. Against all odds, the system presented here managed to be possibly the most underwhelming iteration on this formula yet, but it’s not entirely the fault of the physics engine.

There was clearly an effort made here to give Sonic more tools to work with and add extraneous world elements to make field traversal flashier. but ultimately most of your experience will just be spent boosting everywhere if you’d like to get to your destination with any semblace of expediency or natural flow. It feels like most movement options (barring a few niche maneuvers like boost jumping off of a rail or other admittedly interesting speedrunning tricks for the Cyberspace stages) just punish you for trying anything other than the prescribed fun it wants to give you. Gone are the days of empty homing attacking to convert air acceleration into ground speed or spin dash jumping off a slope and shooting into the stratosphere, and in their place lie disconnected setpieces of rails and platforming challenges to stumble into and sit back in awe of. Admittedly, it can be rewarding in its own way to string these setpieces together in a way that can very occasionally bring me back to the beautiful labyrinthian nightmares of Sonic CD, but this type of traversal just is not my thing at all - boosting off a bump in the ground and entering a stiff arc in the air will never scratch the same itch to me as some of the crazy shit you can do in Sonic Adventure.

The elephant in the room regarding the openworld design is Breath of the Wild, a game that not only breathed new life into its own series back in 2017, but inadvertently spawned a wave of imitators that wouldn't pop up for at least a few years after the fact (you can’t make a game like Elden Ring in just a weekend). Sonic Frontiers is clearly drawing inspiration from this title, and while this isn’t a terrible thing on the face of it, I’m intensely bothered by the approach taken by Sonic Team. On the surface, both games are strikingly similar: A desolate, wide open map to explore, exceedingly simple puzzles sprinkled across the land, an emphasis on player growth in its collectables, and short cutscenes that add almost nothing but small moments of character growth to bolster the main plot. A common critique I’ve seen levied at Breath of the Wild over the years is that the land of Hyrule is boring to traverse, that nothing you do ever feels significant and that there’s nothing truly special to be discovered. I obviously resent this notion, but the reason why its crept back up in my mind is how Sonic Frontiers just feels like that imaginary game people have occasionally punched down on for 5 years. While many will bring up these two games in the same conversation primarily as a point of praise for Sonic, I feel like the core of each game couldn’t be any different.

Sure, it may be true that not every single task you perform is Breath of the Wild is exemplary, the secret to their success is one word: freedom. The freedom to go anywhere, do anything, see new sights, play at your own pace, and tie it in a nice bow at the end of it all. There are more granular elements to the game I adore, like how truly alive the world actually feels, but the thing that stands out the most to me in this concoction of fun is how decision making affects the game on such a massive scale. It’s not just that the game gives you a stat boosting item for a large portion of puzzles, it’s that you have to make the choice between boosting health or stamina. The world can be vicious early on with enemy camps dangling good early-game rewards on a string just in your grasp, so upgrading health might be desirable. At the same time, having a higher stamina bar is all but essential to make some of the more treacherous climbs in the game, and may also inadvertently make some combat encounters easier on the defensive if you need a hasty escape plan. While both of these can be mitigated somewhat through clever uses of the cooking system, it’s this consideration for player choice and their long term consequences that really make Breath of the Wild special to me, and go some way towards recapturing what made the original The Legend of Zelda feel like such a magical bolt of lighting on the industry.

No such consideration exists in Sonic Frontiers. Every task feels like it's being done for the sake of itself, rather than acting as a vehicle for interesting engagements with the world. Stat boosting has no bearing on how you play the game and does nothing but make combat slightly less tedious, so those rewards you get for completing puzzles may as well not exist. Enemy encounters similarly feel slapdash, there was not a single fight in my 15 hours of playtime that instilled any excitement in me whatsoever and I was tired of fighting the same mobs and minibosses by the time I saw them more than once. I guess it must appeal to someone that there are hundreds of little things on the map that go in one ear and out the other, but it certainly doesn’t to me. Frankly I don’t feel like this new approach fits the playground philosophy of Sonic in the slightest, and unless they come into the next game with a fresh mind on how puzzles and combat are designed, I think this approach should just be scrapped altogether. If Breath of the Wild was Zelda’s come to Jesus moment, Frontiers is Sonic’s JESUS IS KING moment.

As I’ve tried to lay out so far, I have massive fundamental problems with this game, but what truly breaks my heart is every small crevice of the game that just blows its potential for no good reason. It feels like with every nearly decent idea Sonic Frontiers has, it somehow undermines it and makes you realize the whole thing was built on an extraordinary shaky foundation to begin with. Why go to the effort of divorcing the homing attack from the double jump, only to layer it over another opposing action anyway with the combo button? Why even force a stamina bar on you when it takes two seconds to enable infinite stamina? Why offer me the choice of pumping my stats into ring capacity when you simultaneously benefit massively if you can reach the maximum rings, making an increase in rings tantamount to wasting my time long term? Why dangle a defense stat in my face when I can spawn infinite rings at any point negating every single challenge in the game? Why would you design these massive bosses in a game with combat at the forefront only for me to fight every single one in exactly the same way. Why would you add a mediocre fishing minigame to your laundry list of side activities and skip out on the presentation side of it (the only good reason to have a fishing minigame), completely? Why include Big the Cat in your roster of side characters if Jon St. Jon’s goofy ass voice isn’t the one backing him up? Why include a parry if you can just hold it down indefinitely, defeating the entire point of adding a parry to your game? What’s the point of living if we are all just going to die?

Even beyond the gameplay itself, I never found the actual primary tasks you’re bouncing between to be very satisfying either. Between chaos emerald runs, you’ll be collecting island specific collectables to satisfy the needs of a few of Sonic’s friends, and will be treated to short cutscenes of banter between Sonic and the character in question. Occasionally these conversations will directly tie into or work to resolve the current events unfolding in the game, but oftentimes are just quick conversations about old adventures or ad libs about the current psyche of the characters. The writing of these scenes (and by extension the story as a whole) have honestly eclipsed all other discussion surrounding this game, and part of me understands why. It's clear Ian Flynn cares for these characters and wanted to push this series forward in a big way, nearly every scene feels far more grounded than what you’d find in an older game with even this same cast, and with every character interaction you can practically feel the love flowing from the heart of Flynn as he tries to humanize everyone to the best of his ability. I see why people are into his approach of character writing, but man it’s just really not my thing.

To me, the highest highs of this series were always founded on sincerity through the shmaltz and camp. It's not that you had to take it seriously, it's that it was all coming from a genuine place of earnesty to make something fun first, and to write a compelling character drama second. Even when Sonic is absolutely fumbling over himself trying to weave together an interconnected mess of a story, he still somehow manages to bring it all home with an absolutely legendary finale. I’ll admit that much of this may be down to personal taste, but none of the melodrama here in Frontiers really managed to resonate with me, and I think part of that may be due to the presentation and escalation of scale here.

One of my favorite elements to the older Sonic games, (and you’ll have to bear with me here) was the buildup and anticipation to Super Sonic. This was less the case in the 2D games as it served more as a completion reward more than anything, but with the transition to 3D came a far grander scope, and an attempt at narrative pacing. The key word there is attempt - I think most would admit the writing in Sonic games has never been Shakespearean - but the effort was certainly appreciated, and likely played a large part in how these games were remembered over time. Even the blindest of Sonic haters would have to admit that he rarely disappoints for the finale, and this shift where Super Sonic went from a cute in-game bonus to a crazy big payoff right before the curtain call was a brilliant move on SEGA’s part. I tend to be one who prefers intrinsic gameplay benefits over extrinsic ones, but the buildup to the inevitable Super Sonic encounter in every subsequent 3D Sonic game has excited me ever since I first finished Sonic Unleashed back in 2008. Not only was it a smart move to ensure players couldn’t steamroll the challenge of the game (assuming they didn’t also intensify the requirements to unlock Super Sonic), but also to make the game’s final moments land way harder than they could have if say, you had repeated access to Super Sonic at multiple points throughout the game up until that point.

This is why the approach found in Sonic Frontiers feels extremely flaccid to me. It's hard to get excited over an encounter that may have been the equivalent to smashing my childhood toys together had it happened in an older Sonic game, but when it gets repeated 5 times without any build up or escalation on subsequent encounters, it quickly loses its luster. At first I thought this may have been done to amplify the impending finale where we’d really do some mad shit with Super Sonic, but that's not the case. Instead you have two choices based on the difficulty you’ve selected: on Normal you can have a final boss that plays just like the final encounters on the previous 4 islands followed by a Super Sonic cutscene, or on Hard you can have that followed by an… Ikaruga inspired final boss? I know I’m normally the biggest blind defender of shoving shmup sections in games where they admittedly rarely belong, but there was such a missed opportunity here to blow the roof off the finale of the game and at least end with a bang, but I suppose that would require some amount of buildup to be paid off by a hypothetical section like this.

I don’t wanna rip this game away from anyone who’s having a good time with it, after suffering for years with no reinvention I can totally buy that this game would be the one that ties everyone together and brings back a feeling of hope for this series that hasn’t been felt on this scale since Sonic Generations. That said, I’d be lying if I said I enjoyed this on any level. This genuinely might just be a case of me growing up and this type of thing not really being for me anymore, which would be a genuine shame if that's the case. This series that once felt like a cause for joy and celebration in my life now feels trite to me, like the ship is finally sinking and the Captain is trying everything in their power to keep the cruise afloat. I’m sure they’ll still find some way to wrangle me back in to see how the blue bastard is doing in the future, but there’s no doubt that the spark is starting to fade for me.

We're at the point where any features cannot be taken for granted in this serie. They removed set mode, the national dex, the battle tower, any postgame content. You can't even explore most houses and the stores are just menus. All of these sacrifices for a mediocre open world game that is barely able to run at 30 fps, a shitty gimmick that makes your pokémon change its typing and is very competitively balanced :) . And a pokédex smaller than DS titles that look like they could have been on the SNES. A disgrace to the franchise and to gaming in general.

I'm done.

I'm done playing you Pokémon. I'm bored. You're boring me.

You know, I can forgive a technical mess. I think it's quite frankly absurd that this is the most broken major release of a video game since Cyberpunk 2077 and if this was any other franchise we'd be talking about it in the same breath as that game's disastrous launch. But at the same time, I'm the guy who likes Sonic 2006. I think it's perfectly fine to enjoy a game even despite its overwhelming issues. I think it's important you acknowledge those issues, which a large portion of the Pokémon fanbase refuses to, but it's entirely possible to see the good through the bad and find enjoyment in something so deeply flawed.

I'm much, MUCH less forgiving of a game that bores me, especially one that finally moved in the direction I had always hoped it would, only to massively drop the ball in the process. This game should have been a slam dunk in spite of Game Freak's incompetence, and that it isn't means I'm going to be immensely harsh in my review of it. I had to force myself to see this through to the end, something I once thought impossible for a franchise I truly loved. New Pokémon games were an event for me. Something I looked forward to years in advance. But now I'm struggling to finish them. This was that uninteresting to me. It speaks volumes.

So how did we get here, especially after the disaster that was Sword and Shield? Those games that had previously put me off the franchise forever? Well, there are three answers to this. The first is that I got this game for free. Let's just say my uncle who works at Nintendo hooked me up with a copy. I vowed they wouldn't get my money after Gen 8 unless they delivered something different and of quality and I'm glad to see I was right in that stance. I realize this ultimately amounts to nothing as Scarlet and Violet will undoubtedly be the best-selling games of the year. The Pokémon Company clearly realized long ago they didn't have to put real effort into these games when people just buy them anyway. Still, for my own peace of mind, I refused to purchase it.

Second of all, I have said I would at least be willing to give the franchise another chance if they drastically changed their approach to making these games, at least in terms of their design. Sword and Shield had many flaws but a major one was its inability to free itself from Pokémon's outdated handheld framework. Scarlet and Violet's switch to an open-world style certainly fits the criteria of a major change, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't at least a bit curious about how their take on that type of game ended up, especially as I do enjoy the junk food style of game that is the open world genre.

And third, perhaps the most simple of all to understand: "The Rubberneck Factor." This game is a trainwreck from a technical perspective, and social media has been flooded with all manner of hilarious bugs and glitches consistent with a Cyberpunk-level disaster as previously mentioned. It's like noticing a car burning on the side of the road: you can't help but want to stop and see for yourself, and I certainly found myself drawn to Generation 9 in that regard. I wanted to bear witness to just what the hell went wrong here.

However, let's put the technical bellyflop of this game aside. That part doesn't even interest me, and I'm actually a little sad I didn't encounter some of the more egregious bugs in my game. It was largely just the standard jank and lack of polish you'd already expect from the latest entry in Nintendo's Madden series. The yearly releases of this franchise certainly don't do it any favors, and I imagine a lot of this could and would have been cleaned up if Game Freak were given more time to develop their titles. However, the fact that people pounce on this as the perceived singular reason for the game's lack of quality misses the larger picture. The problems go much deeper, and I simply do not believe this studio is capable of making this type of game regardless of how long you give them.

So let's work from the beginning. Like every Pokémon game, you start in your own home, pick a starter Pokémon, and head off on a grand journey. However, Scarlet and Violet have a bit of a twist, where you're enrolled in a school at the start of the game, which works as the framing device for your adventure. It soon becomes apparent, though, that this is nothing more than window dressing, as the school itself serves little importance and clashes majorly with the open-world nature of the game. You're thrust out of your school almost immediately after arriving, and you're given few reasons to ever return. Why they felt the need to go this route, I have no idea, aside from perhaps a minor change of pace. But hey, at least it locks you into a school uniform for the entire game, restricting the ability to fully customize yourself that was present in the past several generations of Pokémon titles. Game Freak sure loves to take things away from players for absolutely no reason, don't they?

Also early in the game, you meet Nemona, your overly-excitable rival, who also has a slightly different twist: she's already a Champion level trainer. In theory, this gives you a concrete goal to strive towards, but in reality, I never once bought her as a Champion, and if they wanted to go the route of having someone stronger that you felt incentivized to chase, a more antagonistic rival would have been preferred. But, at this point, Game Freak seems to be adverse to ever going back to that archetype, so it's almost pointless to complain. I wish they would ditch the rival aspect of these narratives altogether if they're going to keep doing this, much as they did in Pokémon X & Y where your rivals were more of a friend group who all went through the same journey together as you did. I enjoyed that framing a lot better.

Before going to the Academy to officially start your adventure, you're thrust into an early taste of Generation 9's big shift in gameplay paradigm: the open world. There's a pretty large field to free roam about, crawling with dozens of Pokémon that you'll probably barely see until you step on them because seemingly half of all Pokémon in this game are so small they can be hard to distinguish from the environment. I have no idea why this was such an issue this time around, whereas it never cropped up in Scarlet and Violet's protoform design of the Wild Area in Sword and Shield, but it bothered me the whole way through the game. I also didn't care for how many Pokémon this game throws at you in this first area, as you're never really given enough time to bond with your initial catches before moving on to the next shiny thing that pops up in front of you.

After your very brief trip to school, you're presented with the three narrative quests that form the backbone of Scarlet and Violet's adventure: Victory Road, Starfall Street, and Path of Legends. Victory Road is your standard Pokémon fare, where you seek out eight Gym Leaders, earn their badges, and face the Elite Four on the road to becoming Champion. Along the way to earning those badges, you'll have to do Gym Tests before taking on the actual Leaders, and boy let you tell you, these are some of the worst excuses for "gameplay" you'll ever find. Do you love baby games like Hide and Seek? Simon Says? Where's Waldo? Game Freak has you covered! It's quite honestly embarrassing that the devs thought this was legitimate content, with the Olive Roll minigame taking the cake in terms of pure awfulness. It's like someone's first high school computer programming assignment. I can't believe they got rid of previous games' fun little gym puzzles for this garbage.

Starfall Street and Path of Legends both constitute part of the game's overall story and are required for the ending, but truthfully they feel more like long side quests. This isn't a bad thing, however, and I actually do wish these games leaned harder into their JRPG roots with more side content and character stories. Granted, the stories you follow in both of these (taking on the "villainous" Team Star and helping a fellow student track down Titan Pokémon) aren't particularly compelling, but at least they tried. Unfortunately, between these three quests, that's really all you're going to find in terms of content here, and leads to my biggest issue with these games and why I was so fundamentally bored with them: there's an open world, but there's nothing to do in it.

If you're going to make an open-world game, you REALLY need to nail the actual world aspect of that. It needs to feel like a living, breathing, flourishing environment that you want to become immersed within. Scarlet and Violet do not do this. I quickly found myself simply going from Point A to Point B in my quests because there was simply nothing else to do. There are a lot of Pokémon to be found, for sure, but at this point in the series' lifespan just catching these things isn't enough anymore, and that's literally all there is to do! The game doesn't even force you into trainer battles anymore. There's just a small handful of them in every area, so spread out that you rarely encounter them. There's nothing to see, there are no interesting landmarks to explore, and there are no dynamic events happening. You just go and catch the same Pokémon you've been catching for years, with a smattering of new ones, and that's only if you feel like it, as the game gives no real incentive for catching things anyway. Why would it, after all? This is no longer the "Gotta Catch Em All" franchise.

It's like they started from the baseline of "let's make an open world game" but didn't consider what goes into making an INTERESTING open world game. Instead, it just retrofits the old way of playing Pokémon on top of this new system, with the only major change being the ability to do things in any order, even though you'll still mostly stick to what you're capable of anyway, lest you be severely under-leveled or locked out of certain areas until you acquire new movement abilities. Open-world games kind of work on a hamster wheel, always giving you something to do, something to work towards, something shiny to collect as you make your way through the world, but there's no hamster wheel here. You fight the gyms, you defeat the evil team, you take down big Pokémon with health bars - all stuff that's been in previous games. In between, you're helplessly bored.

Perhaps some of this could have been mitigated with an interesting and diverse region to inhabit, but instead, you're stuck looking at the same five GameCube textured environments the whole way through. There's no sense in wondering what's around the corner because you know nothing will be there anyway. Towns and cities also suffer in this department, as they're purely cosmetic and feel more like fake towns used for nuclear testing purposes than actual lived-in human dwellings. You can't even go in buildings for fuck's sake, one of the most basic staples of an RPG. There are no exciting events, no weird back alleys to get lost in, and absolutely no one interesting to talk to. This is by far the most generic ass world of any game I've ever played. If you're expecting anything as whimsical as Fortree or Laverre City in this generation, you certainly won't find it.

A lot of people have claimed this is a Switch issue; that it's just not powerful enough to create big, detailed open worlds that perform at least reasonably well, but that's such horseshit. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 came out three months ago, guys. It's a perfect comparison to see just what Pokémon could be, but never will. Funnier still are those who claim screenshots of Pokémon that make it look bad are just cherry-picked out of context when you can literally stand in any place in Xenoblade, take a screenshot, and have it filled with some of the most breathtaking visuals you'll see in any game, let alone on the Switch. As a Nintendo fan, I get it, graphics aren't everything, but it's really hard to get immersed in a world with this little effort put into it.

I'm not saying Game Freak needs to make something like Xenoblade or that they need to measure up to the impossible standard that is Monolithsoft, but is it too much to ask for at least some degree of creativity? It's not there, and with this being their fourth major release on the platform now, I think it's safe to say we have a body of evidence that supports that. I used to think Game Freak made their games in a vacuum and that's why they feel so behind the times, but it's actually more like they exist on a planet 10 light years away from Earth, where information about video games a decade ago are only now just getting to them. How else do you explain that they put goddamn enemy base raids into a Pokémon title, the most boiler-plate open-world content you could possibly come up with? Enjoy letting the game play itself for you before fighting the same car five times in a row.

Don't even get me started on the Pokémon or character designs here, which are the absolute worst in a series that has traditionally had some outstanding ones over the years. This new batch of Pokémon feels particularly uninspired, and I wonder if they're genuinely running out of ideas. Hell, they finally added a dolphin Pokémon after all this time and then proceeded to make its evolution the worst atrocity ever committed in these games. Oh, but at least there's a le chonkin' pig Pokémon, another kooky crab Pokémon, and oh yeah, a flamingo Pokémon. They didn't even bother to stylize that one; it's just a flamingo. In what I can only describe as an act of malicious compliance, I proceeded to use this stupid thing throughout the entire game. At least it was useful.

Presentation-wise, it's just as bad, and it feels like there was actually negative effort put into this aspect of the game. Can we get some fucking voice acting already? It's 2022 for fuck's sake. I don't even care if it's bad voice acting, it's still better than what we have now. You can't keep putting musical acts performed by mimes in these games and expect me to get invested in this shit. It further underscores that no matter how far these games have come, no matter how much they try to sell you the illusion of doing something different, it's still just the same dated design philosophy it's always been. They couldn't even be bothered to design cool and unique rooms for each of the Elite Four; you just fight them in a big empty room on a basic battlefield. Way to hype up what should be the culmination of your journey, guys.

That said, I will give credit to one thing, which is the endgame story. Area Zero represents the one genuinely good idea Scarlet and Violet bring to the table, and how your story ultimately coalesces around it is legitimately interesting. It's the most I've ever felt like I was playing a true JRPG in a Pokémon setting since Colosseum, something Game Freak didn't even make. Unfortunately, it's too little too late by that point, and I also can't help but feel that despite how interesting it is, it would have been done even better in the hands of a more competent team. The entire game really should have revolved around this concept instead of surfacing it to you at the 11th hour.

There are also plenty of little things that I haven't covered but honestly don't even care enough to delve deep into, like the new Terastallization gimmick, which hey, if you want to talk about running out of ideas, here you go. I thought Dynamax Pokemon in Sword and Shield were a pretty lazy gimmick, but now make way for crystal hats that change your type. Real thrilling stuff here. There are some nice quality-of-life improvements, like the ability to press one button and instantly use potions to heal your Pokémon, but for some reason, you can't do the same for reviving them or cleansing status conditions, so it comes off as a completely half-baked implementation of what should be a better feature. I can't stand how your map rotates with you, so whenever you open it, you're completely disoriented from where you want to go. The music is awful and sounds like AI-generated approximations of what a Pokémon soundtrack usually sounds like. The new ancient and future variations of certain Pokémon are interesting ideas on paper, but in practice, they just look stupid, and why do these Pokémon have generic descriptions instead of real names? I hate it. I hate so much of this game.

The only saving grace of Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet is that this franchise can no longer hurt me anymore. I stopped caring after Sword and Shield ruined the veneer of what was my favorite series of all time, but in doing so exposed just how shallow and dated these games actually are now. Don't let anyone tell you great ideas are lurking under the game's serious technical problems; this is largely the exact same shit it's always been, and I'm bored with it. The open-world design, the one thing I always thought I wanted for this franchise, turned out to be the game's biggest anchor in terms of enjoyment. They couldn't have missed harder if they tried, and now that they've pulled the trigger on this new style of game and failed, there's really nothing left to be hopeful for. This was their one chance to finally bring this franchise into the present day and make something of it again.

But they didn't. They failed. Please let someone else have Pokémon, because Game Freak will never change, never grow, and never be capable of delivering anything but the most barebones experience possible. It's truly embarrassing at this point. You'd never know it was a game in the highest-grossing media franchise of all-time looking at it. But people keep eating this up, so I guess they're just giving the audience what they want. I guess I'm the crazy one to keep demanding something better for a franchise that deserves it.

Fuck you Ed Sheeran.

Works about voyeurism that directly confront the viewer for participating are nothing new (Rear Window, Blow-Up, The Truman Show, Finding Frances, etc.), but I do think there's sincere eternal beauty-genius in the idea that everything we see through a lens - whether fact or fiction, consensual or non-consensual - constitutes a perverse one-way violation of the natural world in pursuit of wicked desires that we can never fully suppress, layers of cultural coercion that build like a coastal shelf of pressure upon everyone who participates with a camera from any direction.

Immortality is at its best when it's gleefully reveling in this idea, a sort of hypersexxxual Day For Night that permits and often encourages luxuriation in watching beautiful people be flirty and sexy and funny on, off, and mid-camera, poring over a grand archive of film footage that successfully evokes a variety of eras without putting tie-dye lampshades on them. The game could be accused of titillation, but the aforementioned genius of works like this is that the word "voyeur" acts as a creative shield behind which the footage can justifiably hide, cheekily asking its critics if they'd like to see one more clip of someone with their boobs or dick out. It's unlikely you'll say no - you're part of the problem, after all.

The ideas here aren't particularly original to anyone who's watched a "movie about movies"-type movie (it made me think of Boogie Nights a lot), but that doesn't mean they aren't worth exploring in a new mode of interaction - disjointed narratives in film can be a real pain when executed poorly because of their reliance on the audience "jigsawing" data-points together in real-time, but Immortality gives viewers the patient pleasure of being able to tap and spin the film reels (via a very satisfying interaction metaphor) at their own pace, bolstered by a helpful "find {noun}" match-cut feature that makes digging through each character/actor/person's tapes much more enjoyable than trying to piece a picture from Momentos in perpetual movie motion. At a dozen-or-so hours long, it's easy to spend a whole evening just silently researching a single participant in the puzzle, naively feeling yourself like Jack Terry in Brian DePalma's Blow Out.

It's unfortunate, then, that Immortality simply can't resist telling a video game story. Without spoiling too much: about two-thirds of the way in, all the psychosexual intrigue dissolves away to make space on the cutting room floor for a plot that is so corny and clunky that I think even the writers of Star Trek: Voyager would have passed it up in favour of another episode about that planet of Scottish ghosts. There's an unintentional sadness in seeing Charlotta Mohlin, a professional actress and beautiful interpretive dancer, gradually be reduced from an ephemeral alien to a static exposition device who speaks in the pronouns of Cromp and Wenbembo. When you're dealing with desire and bodies and valise of inner selves, why do you need to bring the fucking Chongo into it? What a shame.

Regardless, this is still absolutely worth your time if you, like me, like to write big pretentious essays on Letterboxd about all the ways dialectical Freudian analysis can be applied to Solo: A Star Wars Story or whatever. Haters and intermediary filmbros will claim the plot of Marissa's last picture, Two of Everything, is an almost point-for-point remake of Mulholland Drive, but true kinophiles know it's an homage to The Lizzie McGuire Movie.

not morally egregious per se but rather a depressing culmination of a decade's worth of design trickery and (d)evolving cultural/social tastes and otherwise exists as insipid twitchcore autoplaying bullshit that should come with a contractual agreement binding its devotees to never speak prejudicially about mobile games or musou ever again lest they face legally enforced financial restitution. just play nex machina man. or watch NFL. been a fun season for that. fuck the review man let's talk sports in the comments

What was initially a fascinating rabbit hole of interpreting a fictional game developer's oeuvre by examining key symbols & psyche, eventually turned into woefully brushing over decades of inner workings of artists turned into art & how a viewer can digest it. The game's message isn't inherently wrong for it is ultimately a work of how one can connect to art, but I cannot find myself to agree with what is suggested throughout.

Keep in mind, one does not necessarily have to unravel hidden meanings & deeper symbolic gestures in every piece they come across. Sometimes, it's even better to simply feel the emotive gall of a piece of art. Furthermore, the game indirectly suggests that a form of projection is taking place when overanalyzing art at times. To that, I have to say: correct. But this is what art is all about. Art, whatever your interpretation of it may be, is almost always a discussion between the artist & the viewer. It is a two-sided (sometimes more) dialogue that pricks at thee heart & mind in such a way that is ultimately life affirming.

Dave means well with this game. After all, it's one in which you could ultimately interpret, perhaps against his own wishes, that he himself is attempting to purge this state of thinking while experiencing art itself. But the "games" in this suggests that there is something going on underneath the surface of the creator in the metafiction here (aside of course, from literal symbolism that Dave is projecting into Coda's own games). By simply creating something, one is shedding skin for the audience to witness. One central message that Dave conveys is that an artist does not owe their audience anything, & to assume what the artist is experiencing when creating something without having a single idea what that might be can be dangerous. A cyclone of sorts forms, one that can potentially create a parasocial relationship with an artist that may be more dangerous than helpful.

Suffice it to say, a fair amount of points that Dave suggests in this game are not necessarily damaging to art or how we experience it (I generally disagree with them, but at times they hold some weight), but it all quickly becomes relatively disingenuous by the mere act of Dave purposefully going out of their way to create fictional games that seemingly have no meaning whatsoever. By the end, the mere existence of this game contradicts the point its trying to make, to some extent.

But maybe I'm only proving Dave's point. So be it.

Of all the different realities in the multiverse, there's not one in which Bayonetta 3 turning out the way it has isn’t the best possible outcome, both for its identity as an individual game and for its series at large. Any number of its decisions are already controversial, but it’d have been disappointing if it wasn’t so substantially different from its predecessors after being on ice for so long. Not everybody’ll be onboard with the direction it goes in, but if you are, it’ll scratch an itch in a way that few other action games can.

Demon Slave especially is in the eye of the beholder, but I personally think it’s probably Platinum’s best crack at simultaneously controlling multiple characters thus far. The new wink attack finishers take after Astral Chain’s sync attacks quite heavily, down to being signalled by a lens flare, but they have some tweaks which make them a noticeable improvement upon that base. One key difference is that wink attacks universally have slight invincibility frames, lending them an element of defensive use if done with proper timing and avoiding previous frustrations of your Legion being just dandy while Howard gets smacked across the room – I might’ve died to the bombs at the end of this sequence if it weren’t for this addition. There’s also less ambiguity as to when Bayonetta’s able to do a wink attack, since she always transforms into her demon masquerade form beforehand, hearkening back to the clearer audiovisual language of Bayo 1 where specific grunts of hers always preceded certain attacks. The demons themselves are a great help in encounters with multiple enemies too; when you’re being ganged up on and need some room to breathe, their special directional attacks come in very handy for creating some space. It’s attack, defence, spacing, comboing, traversal and more all in one, and I think the layers it adds to these aspects of Bayo’s combat system is enough to mark it as a firm net positive despite the scoring system arguably overrelying on it to an extent come Infinite Climax.

On a more unambiguous note, the weapons in Bayo 3 are unreal. Not being able mix and match hand/feet equipment sounded suspect pre-release, but it’s a worthwhile exchange for everything else offered in return here. Each of them having a fully fleshed out moveset of both punches and kicks makes me constantly rotate between them all, whereas in the previous games I actively avoided options like 2’s Kafka which couldn’t help but feel relatively limited. Part of what helps them largely circumvent the homogeneity this could’ve introduced is their new Demon Masquerade forms and the movement options that coincide with them. Simoon’s flying ability controls like a dream to the point where I occasionally drop combos because I forget to switch out of it, and the spider form’s swinging/wall climbing or the train’s multidirectional choo choo charge are similarly versatile highlights, but the beauty of Bayo 3’s arsenal is that the rest are also so varied you could ask someone what their favourite is and get a different answer each time. Between the aforementioned, their starkly different charge functions and how equipping different demons can alter the effects of the same combo(s), it’s hard to decide between just two. By the way, press PPP with the yo-yos and don’t cancel the animation that plays afterwards. Thank me later.

I mentioned the spider form’s wall climbing specifically because, for all the talk of Bayo 3’s gimmick sections, it doesn’t seem like it’s getting enough credit for taking gimmicks from its predecessors and incorporating them into standard gameplay. Wall climbing is essentially Witch Walking whenever you want, wherever you want, and the extra manoeuvrability afforded by this (plus the other Demon Masquerade forms) allows the level design to be more creative in terms of hidden verses, collectibles, Umbran Tears, etc. with no real instances of arbitrary backtracking. Remember that bit in Bayo 2 where you’re in a mech suit? Past a certain point of 3, you can summon it on demand too. I’m tempted to argue that 3’s actual gimmick segments are by far the least obnoxious ones Platinum have ever done, but there’s not much point, since its revamped checkpoint system means it can theoretically be enjoyed purely for its normal combat encounters anyhow. It’d have been nicer if it went as far as something like Uncharted 4’s system and let you replay any individual verse in the game, but even being not so fine-tuned and debatably too generous, it’s nonetheless immensely preferable to the days of jumping in and out of the main menu.

Speaking of things Bayo 3 doesn’t get enough credit for: visuals. Compare any of the returning enemies to their original incarnations from 1 or 2 in the model viewer and the upgrade in quality’s immediately apparent. The sole area in which the homunculi fall short of their divine and devilish counterparts is that becoming progressively cracked as they take damage probably isn’t as clear an indicator of their current health as previous games’ custom of armour falling apart to reveal grotesque musculature underneath. Had Singularity’s fractured, digital aesthetic (complemented wonderfully by the distorted choir in his battle theme) been extended to his underlings, I think people would be more charitable to them, because creatively speaking they’re absolutely up to par even if you don't dig into their light Buddhist theming. I wish we could somehow peer into the minds of whichever artist came up with the idea of the giant flowers made of molten humans that litter Virga’s back, or whoever pitched the scenario of fighting a self-cloning, peacock-shaped Sun Wukong in the sky using clouds as a bubble bath. If Bayo 3 might be compared to DMC5 in any regard, it’s that its art direction seems doomed to be drastically undersold.

Viola seems like an obvious point of comparison in this respect, but that’s at least a little bit reductive. I’d bet several halos that most players won’t learn she has her own equivalent of dodge offset until after beating the game for the first time, which begs the question of how many other less obvious, unique tricks she has in her toolbox – certainly more than I feel qualified to talk about at length. To those concerned about where she and the gang end up by the finale, I say this: worry less, and read character bios more. You might say that storytelling via optional collectibles isn’t the ideal way to handle the narrative in a game like Bayonetta, but I’d equally argue that you aren’t a real fan if you can’t explain why Rodin’s pizza chain is penguin themed (and I’m only half joking).

I didn’t mean for this to be so long, but I really like Bayonetta 3. So much so that at one point I tried to make a smiley face in the level select menu. It doesn’t try to beat either of its predecessors at their own game and goes off in a totally different route, leaving in its wake a trilogy that really only ever slightly wobbles in quality and where there are legitimate reasons to revisit each. It’s been a while since I felt such a drive to want to get better at a game, accentuated in no small part by the fact that it’s draped in such a characteristically amazing soundtrack and charm. It’s crazy, it’s rare, it’s you know what.