Whew what a saga this was. I'm glad I played this series if only for the really satisfying narrative. This truly feels like a fully fleshed out fantasy novel story and world set to a game, and I really loved that aspect. The world and its history, magic, and peoples were so well developed, and I loved the characters I got to know. The ending too was very satisfying, revealing the final puzzle pieces as to what happen to set things in motion while also tying everything up nicely (depending on your choices).

That being said, it's unfortunate that now the series' novelty has worn off, I'm not so impressed with the gameplay anymore. So many of the issues that have existed since the first game are still lingering here! You're telling me in the 4 years since the release of the first game, the developers didn't have time to iron out some of the UI and gameplay issues and bugs? It's pretty baffling, not to mention what was added to the combat in particular wasn't all the noteworthy either. There are more new classes which is always welcome, but the only other major addition are waves. Yea, now some battles have additional waves you can choose to partake in for additional goodies. Interesting idea, but it didn't really mesh with the game as a whole. It felt too gamey for an otherwise very story-driven title where combat was more about giving you challenges to drive the atmosphere of strife and difficulty for the player. If this is what they spent their time on instead of fixing longstanding issues, it was a major misfire.

Another weird quirk is how they implemented the traveling mechanics this time. One of the two parties is traveling as normal, so nothing off there. The other though, stays in one city the whole time, so how do you get the Oregon Trail-style traveling and decision making from previous games into their storyline? You have them slowly travel through the city to get to objectives. This just kind of seemed odd, though I can't complain too much as there were still interesting moments that came out of this. It's just super weird to go slowly through a single area, not to mention later on when you're revisiting some of these same places, you don't have to travel slowly to get there anymore. So why did I have to in the first place?

That's basically the end of most of my complaints however. When you really get into the meat of the story, Banner Saga 3 does plenty to make this a worthwhile finale. It's really just these nitpicks that keep it from being great. The penultimate chapter in particular is so cleverly structured, I loved that part a lot. Even if some decisions for Iver's party were a bit nonsensical and overly unpredictable to the point where I felt I was being penalized randomly and not because of a mistake I made.

To start to wrap things up on a more positive not though, the presentation thankfully remains a highlight. Not as many animated cutscenes this time, but the artstyle remains excellent, we get some more haunting voice acting in bits, the music from Austin Wintory is exceptional, and once again this world just absolutely comes alive. It's impressive what this team was able to do with this saga, even if they unfortunately left a few too many gaps along the way.

Overall, if you're a narrative-focused gamer, or one where a narrative focus falls into your taste, this series is well worth your time. Otherwise, the gameplay flaws may have a large impact on your enjoyment.

A messy end to the saga, but a decent conclusion.

A return to the slower pacing and minesweeper-like choices of the first game, it really improves as the game goes along, but still… kind of disappointing. And yes, most of the problems of the previous games are still here. Combat is the same, and the new additions are basically worthless to none.

Writing at times felt off, like for example Hakon and Fasolt getting mad for taking orders from Oddleif, because she's human. Kinda weird since the past games they only took orders from you, a human. I also noticed an inconsistency with the Horsebornes talking like humans during the fights, even though they don't speak the tongue. It was pretty funny, though.

Pretty good end to the story, nonetheless. Glad it didn't leave anything left to uncover, pretty much every question gets answered satisfyingly. I do wonder how this would've been if I didn't make the choices I made on the previous games, though. I can't imagine it been as good if I didn't keep some of the more interesting characters, but maybe it would be. Guess I won't know until I replay it ¯\.(ツ)./¯

★★★ – Good ✅

I have such a soft spot for sports rpgs, this would have inevitably been a win for me. Its such a precise, niche genre that's basically never been done flawlessly, but you kind of have to adore with all the flaws in mind. More of them have popped up in the indie scene, but many have gone for a goofy, slapstick, throw every gag we got at the wall kind of vibe, with less the of shameless sincerity that I think a genre like this really needs to thrive.

The game mechanics themselves are fairly compelling. Throwing balls as your attack. Precise timing to catch thrown dodgeballs (which can move straight, zig, zag, or teleport around the field depending on the enemy type). Dodge roll or a jump depending on the character. A super meter that slowly builds based on time + caught balls + a focus button. All the party members operate slightly differently from each other. Otto is your jack of all traits, Mina counters dodgeballs back at enemies rather than catch them, a later party member has a counter that hit enemies multiple times, but requires a longer prep time for countering. Super moves like electric strikes, Paper Mario-style power bounces, things that get stronger and more elaborate as your characters level up. I can understand how it might get repetitive for some, but for me the gameplay was always just challenging enough to keep me coming back and engaging with it more and more.

Dodgeball Academia is mostly silly, but I think there's some really charming character work used to win you over on the characters. The story focuses on a young boy named Otto, who's run away from Referee school to join the Dodgeball Academy and find joy in the sport he adores so much. To that end, his primary interest is in having a good time. As he gathers people to his team/party, he does so primarily by being such a good sport about things. One of the first party members is "Balooney", the big blue fella on the box art. Balooney is shy and reluctant to fight, so Otto has to force Balooney onto the team just so Otto can enter the tournament. But after he does this, Otto does something really striking. 1. He apologizes for forcing Balooney into something he's uncomfortable with. 2. He promises that Balooney will NEVER have to fight. They'll find a fourth person to join the party and Balooney doesn't have to enter the court at all. And he sticks to this for the next several hours of gametime. Balooney acts as a passive healing support, but he's not an official party member. Balooney himself is the one who decides he wants to join the team for real after seeing Otto stick to that promise for a large game segment.

The game's character designs are so diverse and striking that I had no way of predicting who would join my party or not. I wouldn't be surprised if their choices were picked from a hat. Nearly all the characters ended up winning me over by the end and it gave me plenty of motivation to test out different party set-ups until I settled on my preferred squad.

But the core of the game's narrative has this fascinating kernel that I really wished it expanded upon. Otto's laid-back approach to the sport gets interrupted by an ultimatum. His father plans on forcing him to return to Referee School unless Otto wins the Dodgeball tournament trophy. He's openly mocking, nigh-on verbally abusive towards Otto, and its a great hook to give someone as nice as Otto real stakes to keep climbing the ranks.

Otto's opposed by two main antagonists. Boris is the school's strongest player, who casually destroys you in a casual match where he plays at 10% of his usual power. His parents are not in the picture and, its eventually revealed, they abandoned him and his sister. The initial set-up as a bully reveals something quite vulnerable: he thinks he needs to stay strong to support his sister. He gradually evolves into a supportive, but gruff mentor rediscovering his love for the sport.

But the main rival is Nino. Compared to Otto, Nino actually has a happy home life. His father heaps on endless praise, calling his son the best of the best. And so Nino takes his losses as a personal attack, a fear that he's failing his father that he loves so much. He doesn't have the stakes Otto does, he doesn't have to fear losing his friends or support system for failing. But he's so internalized this need to meet his dad's praise that he resorts to increasingly desperate means to destroy Otto's progress. Its a genuinely compelling rival set-up that I feel like has a lot to say about children and parental expectation.

But when I say "feels" like it has a lot to say, I do mean it "FEELS" like rather that "it DOES have a lot to say." There's something THERE about these children and their parents, but I'm not entirely sure the devs were fully aware of it. Perhaps they were mainly focused on keeping the game's cheery tone. The abuse Otto's Dad heaps on his son is ultimately brushed aside as goofy strict parents and we don't learn enough about the parents of other characters to feel a cohesive theme.

But I think that's also... fine? This game is writing a fun 00s shonen anime for kids. That's all it needs to be. The engaging gameplay and the interesting character work is just a surprise bonus.

Dodgeball Academia is what you get if you mix any sports anime with Pokémon like battle encounters.

Though it's a little flawed in places it's overall a charming unique little game. with a lot to like. You play the role of Otto, a new student at Dodgeball Academia, a rather prestigious school but one that underneath is struggling. They have placed all their bets on this years inner school tournament to save the school allowing them to keep the legendary dodgeball and Otto and his band of odd team mates will be a big part of that. Along the way he will play against all sorts of weird characters and situations in which Dodgeball will inevitably save the day! It's a fairly straightforward game in it's 10 hour run but must of the cast are extremely likeable, unique and the dialog is often surprisingly funny.

Each of the games played is set up like an RPG battle encounter as mentioned above. Walking through the campus in the line of sight of a student they will challenge you to a game like Pokémon trainers do. Each character in the match has HP, a super, a charge throw and certain character locked skills. Some catch the ball, others counter etc. It's all pretty basic but the game does throw some things in to mix it up with elemental balls and knocked out characters being able to throw balls in from the sideline to keep an eye out for. Even with mixing things up as much as they can the matches themselves get old kind of fast. Your team mates merely copy your movement ad actions in random to you rather than act on their own. This leaves it all feels a little too basic in some ways yet that shouldn't be mistaken for easy. Far from it, certain battles will have abrupt difficulty spikes where I found myself pounded by balls.

The visual design is a treat, it really reminded me of Saturday morning cartoons in some ways. The characters are all pretty unique but cohesively fit with each other but the game jokes about it in several instances like how npcs look the same or the marvelous chin of George the giant pickle headed receptionist and it all works absolutely to the game's credit and the small Brazilian team behind it. The soundtrack is also a surprising stand out with this peppy upbeat music that match the content and art style perfectly.

This was one of the games on my Sport RPGS list and I'm really glad I gave it a go. The battle system could do with refining and I would have liked more locations than just the Dodgeball Academia Campus (like a nearby town) would have really improved it but even so it's fun, has great visual and music design and is full of wistful charm in a lot of ways.

Recommended.

+ Charming atmosphere.
+ Can be funny at times.
+ Great visual and music design.

- Battles get stale after a while.
- Some odd difficulty spikes.

Knowledge of game design is a curse, akin to having the flavor of steak forever ruined by the awareness of The Matrix programming you to like it, and you can probably count in one hand the games that predate that red pill moment when gaming language forever became familiar and predictable to you. Pokemon Yellow was fortunately one of those games for me, a joyous moment of my childhood where my whole life existed inside a small square screen that could fit inside my pocket and whose 2D 8-bit walls felt as far away from my grasp as my imagination and curiosity were willing to go.

Picking it up nowadays, more than 20 years since that precious moment of my life where I gladly devoted myself to it, the feeling is a bittersweet one. With its secrets, surprises and discoveries now obsolete, the rudimentary gameplay fails to engage, and its combat is one of mindless grind and broken mechanics that are only challenged by the occasional difficulty spike, once a compelling puzzle to be solved as kid, now serving only to expose the game’s more blatant weaknesses.

Its magic wasn’t totally lost on me just yet, however. The sudden color pallet changes when arriving at a new area, the simplest of chiptunes that were instantly recognizable on note one, the kinesthetic pleasure of speeding through its routes with a newly acquired bike and its cheerful theme, and the occasional excitement at the sight of a personal favorite, managed to sustain my interest throughout its primitive JRPG nature, as it quickly took a backseat to the core allure and fun that made this the biggest franchise of all time, one that never fails to leave you in a state of impending suspense as you watch your pokeball twitch its way into a new catch or fill you with excitement as you witness your personalized team finally evolve after your hard effort, regardless if you already know what it will turn into or not.

Reviewing Pokemon Yellow in a vacuum is nonetheless a fruitless endeavor, considering so much of its purpose and qualities are tied to the social aspect that was so crucial to the Pokemon mania of the 90s, leaving the game itself in an incomplete state whose true experience is forever inaccessible to the ones who are unfortunate to not have lived through those magical years. Think of it as trying to relive the early days of your favorite MMO, it’s just not possible, is it? Nostalgia is a double-edged sword, and it’s no truer than in Pokemon Yellow’s case. Still, climbing the ranks through every Gym and surviving the Elite Four gauntlet so you can slap the grin off the face of Blue with your ever trustworthy Pikachu remains a satisfying throwback to a time when I would gladly listen to fake rumors on how to catch Mew from dumb kids at school.

For such a great concept, presentation and use of the Tony Hawk's formula I found it rather disappointing

Firstly, level design wise the game only has really 3 maps with very minor changes between them. They suffer from various problems, way too much open flat space, lack of ramps, halfpipes and rails to give the platforming more variety. Some levels have very open gaps in the middle and edges where you will end up falling because of the bad design and the confusion while dodging enemies, they end up just interrupting the gameplay.

For the weapons the biggest issue is the ammo carries over for every weapon, so there's no rotating weapon incentive, you may pick the one you think is best for each enemy, but that's it. You also have to reload after killing only 1 of most enemy types and for such crazy amount of enemies I found the weapons to have too little ammo to do this, like 2 shots? For a rotating grenade launcher? Really? This maybe would've been less of a problem if the levels weren't so open and flat as mentioned above.

And then there's the enemies, the melee type are a joke and stand completely still instead of chasing you, the ranged ones are fine until too much of them spawn and you have to dodge sniper fire, lasers and missiles, some being more obnoxious to play around than others, aimed at you at the same type making you spam the dodge button, there's also a boss which is repeated and offers no real challenge.

Lastly for a music genre I usually like a lot, the soundtrack was very lackluster and so was the sound design of the weapons and explosions, they feel like have no impact. Overall I think most of these issues are easily fixable and hope for a sequel to do it eventually.

I actually beat Rollerdrome back in March and was quite enamored at first, but I've since cooled down on it somewhat. A quick replay today has only confirmed my suspicions that there's unfortunately a lot left to be desired. Feel free to take my word here with a grain of salt: I'm not a particularly huge Tony Hawk fan and was more or less playing this as part of a warm-up via Jet Set Radio-likes (since Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is coming out in less than a week, and I replayed the original Jet Set Radio right before this). Still, if I had to put my finger on why this didn't hit the mark the second time around, my best guess would be that Rollerdrome doesn't understand how to create an engaging difficulty curve, and here are some of my theories as to why:

- Progression: Rollerdrome locks its stages behind completing challenges (collect all the tokens, do a certain trick while killing a certain enemy, rack up enough points, etc), with ten challenges per stage and sixty completed challenges required to unlock the finals. This is supposed to incentivize players to tackle as many challenges as possible while going through stages, but in reality what I found myself doing was farming the earlier stages for the easiest challenges to get the base completion requirement out of the way, and throwing away dry runs to farm the more manageable challenges at the beginning before resetting and running through the stages proper. This unfortunately feels like an artificial implementation of coercing me to explore its mechanics when I was usually more concerned with straight efficiency regarding combat.

- Tricks: You need to perform tricks constantly in Rollerdrome to restore your ammo, and tricks are also a way to quickly rack up points in-between shooting to exploit your current combo multiplier. Again though, I found tricks to be unnecessarily complicated and superfluous outside of doing the required tricks to complete necessary challenges: if you don't care about your score, then all you have to do for quick ammo restoration is to just hold the stick forward and perform the same grab/flip/spin while not in combat, or just spend your time grinding on rails/edges and firing since you'll automatically regain ammo for grinding up to a certain point. It also doesn't help that I found the inputs for more complex tricks a bit fiddly and perfect dodges refresh some of your ammo anyway, reducing the reliance upon tricks. Speaking of which...

- Dodge/Super Reflex: The dodge is a little too good in Rollerdrome. You can basically invincible frame roll at any time in the game (including in mid-air and while grinding), outside of a few frames right after the roll animation ends as far as I can tell. This not only provides a reliable method for quickly getting out of danger, but also you can roll in any direction to quickly alter your momentum and enter Super Reflex if you activate bullet-time right as you perfect dodge (that is, dodging in the first few frames of an active enemy attack). To summarize, this strategy easily gets you ammo refills, allows for relative invincibility when confronted by a barrage of attacks, and powers up your shots while in Super Reflex, which as a result makes Rollerdrome almost feel too reactive as opposed to proactive since it's far too advantageous to not abuse this to safely and quickly wipe out waves.

- Stages: Rollerdrome only has 11 stages, and quite a few of these stages are just repeated locales with few hazards outside of the enemies and a lot of empty, open space outside of a few trick ramps and grind rails/edges. A bit more variety in the set design (and more walls to wall-ride, which I thought was a little underutilized) would have been appreciated since by halfway through, some of the arenas started to bleed into one another for me.

- Laser: I'm fine with most of the weapon balance in Rollerdrome, but the Z-11 (the in-game laser gun) is an exception. The main caveat to using the Z-11, aside from the three shot capacity (still more than the grenade launcher though), is that you can't use aim assist to automatically lock on to foes with it and thus must manually point your reticle at them. Not a very difficult task though, since Reflex gives you more than enough reaction time and the reticle turns red as soon as you hover over a target. Because the shotgun and pistol are limited somewhat by range for aim assist (especially the shotgun due to perfect slug shots), the laser is a godsend: it bypasses this system entirely and lets you snipe foes from across the arena, taking out most enemies after a double charge and can also pierce through multiple enemies at a time. It further disrupts this balance because the Z-11 is unlocked halfway through, meaning the game's earlier combat/combo challenges are a lot more difficult without it at first but often rather trivial once you've unlocked it.

- Boss fights: I've already mentioned that Rollerdrome's dodge roll is a bit overcentralizing, but nowhere does this become more evident than during the two boss fights, shifting the prevailing strategy from any semblance of ammo management/route planning to just basic bait and punish. Simply wait for enemy attacks, dodge to regain ammo/enter Super Reflex to finish off goons, and then approach the big robot to deal damage and enter the next phase. There's no scoring optimization or crazy tricks/maneuvering involved, and as a result, these tend to be pretty dry affairs that could have been removed from the game entirely with little value lost.

I certainly get the appeal of Rollerdrome, given its potential for optimization to maximize the combo meter and quickly speedrun stages, but unfortunately I find that the game doesn't get harder, but rather gets longer with more enemies that take more hits and throw out more attacks. Even so, I had enough fun constantly filling foes with lead in slow-mo, but even this thrill began to wear itself thin an hour in. I can't help but feel that the separate movement and combat mechanics are undercooked despite how promising "Tony Hawk with bullet-time gunplay" sounds on paper. More power to those who find the core gameplay engaging enough to try and complete all the challenges + the "Out for Blood" post-game replay with stricter margins: as for me, I'm content with putting this down after a few hours and completing Finals with a C rank. Rollerdrome is by no means a bad game, but I know Roll7 is capable of so much more.