Yanno, I do a lot of digging through the depths of console libraries to find things that might look interesting whether that be just by looking through curated lists made by people online both on and off this website, or just looking through huge ROM fullsets that contain a painstakingly comprehensive list of every possible piece of software released for a particular platform. While I obviously don't have an absolutely comprehensive knowledge of every video game that has ever been released on this earth (retro computer games and itch.io indie titles in particular being two large blind spots of mine), in the realm of console stuff it does feel like there's more that I am aware of than not. It's certainly cool to know the depths of obscurity on a consoles library, but on the other hand the thought of running out of interesting games to play on a system does make me kinda sad, as at the end of the day there do be a limited number of releases on a given system. Sometimes though, there manages to be games that go completely under my radar completely despite the fact of them being exactly the kind of shit I tirelessly look for. Case in point: as I was looking through the Wii U Eshop archive and stumbling into several games labelled "Nintendo Game Seminar", I knew that it was investigating time. Considering the fact that I'm apparently the first one to review something here, I don't think I'm the only one that had these games slip through the seams.

The Nintendo Game Seminar was a program held in Japan where game design students could work officially with Nintendo in order to further their understanding on game development, with various finished projects in the program being released as free downloads for the public to enjoy. Doki Doki Tegami Relay is one of said titles, being made in the 2014 Seminar. The point of the game is to use the Wii U gamepad to pass notes around a classroom without being caught by your teacher on the main TV. Given that it's a student project, it's not the longest game, but it does actually have a reasonable amount of twists in the levels and gameplay to stay engaging throughout its whole runtime. There's a level where you prank the teacher by putting notes on them behind their back, a level where the teacher throws chalk at nonchalant students which disables them from being part of your note-passing path, levels where a music teacher makes certain students stand up to play which forces them to show any notes they might be holding, levels with ghosts that steal your notes, etc. Passing notes is done with the gyro of the gamepad as you move it in front, to the sides, or downwards and behind you to shift the note to its destination. The gyro can sometimes cause a little bit of inconsistent jank (especially when trying to pass behind you) but that honestly adds to the tension of not getting caught as there's no guarantee that quick note passing will go the way it needs to. You can also hold the B button to make the note into a paper airplane that can go over empty desks as a shortcut, but if it gets caught at any time it's an instant game over. It's a really ingenious use of the Wii U gamepad that would feel right at home as a minigame in something like Game & Wario or Nintendo Land.

It's crazy to me that I hadn't discovered this or the other Nintendo Game Seminar games sooner given how small the Wii U library is and how I'm always looking for games that could only have been done on that system. And this was published by Nintendo, too! For FREE!!! I am definitely now curious to try the other Nintendo Game Seminar projects, because it's always interesting to see what up-and-coming talent can bring to creative video games. It seems like there are 8 seminars worth of officially released projects across the DS and Wii U, so I definitely have a lot to check out! I don't know where the team that made this is now, but I hope they are continuing to make unique games wherever they may be.

Definitely not as cracked as Specter Knight's campaign, but still a fun time and decent end to the Shovel Knight Treasure Trove (unless you count shovel knight showdown as the real end but honestly im kinda shovel'd out after playing all these extra campaigns so i won't be playing that mode much atm). King Knight's unorthodox combat style of dashing into things for a bonus jump that puts him in a drill-like spinning bounce state definitely takes some time to get used to while also feeling pretty limited in shmovement especially after the craziness that was the Specter Knight campaign, but the levels are still really tightly designed around your capabilities and tests it in tons of interesting ways. Speaking about the levels, they are much greater in number and bite-sized to play through which is a solid change of pace from the other campaigns. This would likely be the most optimal shovel knight game to play on the go for owners of the switch/3DS/vita versions tbh. There's also a card minigame that I played a little bit of but didn't really invest fully into due to it being optional and kinda unrelated from the main core shovel knight gameplay, but I'm sure card game players can enjoy it still. The story is a prequel set before the main game a la Specter Knight, but much less serious in tone as King Knight is kind of a narcissistic asshole that only cares about himself being the king of everything, and knowing that he's gonna get his shit kicked in by Shovel Knight in the main campaign is very gratifying.

Overall I'm really surprised at how the three expansions turn Shovel Knight from a charming NES tribute to a whole series that I've found myself becoming surprisingly invested in. It really do be like if a Mega Man game fleshed out each robot master with their own unique playable backstory campaign, and while I do wish each of the other members of the Order of No Quarter had their own stories to go through there'd definitely be no end to the developer work given that it took them 6 years just to make the 3 campaigns they did. I'm def excited to see what else Yacht Club makes in the future, because they have a very fine eye for the attention to detail with their games.

Sonic Frontiers: The Lost Levels

Definitely a very scattered addition to Sonic Frontiers. Having new playable characters in Tails, Knuckles, and Amy is really cool and I really liked being able to control someone other than sonic in a mainline game for the first time in a LONG while. There's a whole extra island full of the typical stuff you'd need to find and do in the base game, just now split across 4 different similarly-controlling characters. The big primary gripe that I (and a lot of other people) have with this expansion is just the fact that it's uncharacteristically difficult compared to the base game or just other sonic games as a whole, and it really emphasizes the flaws from the base game rather than playing towards its strengths. Since Sonic is for some reason the only character that can enter the (now much more demanding) cyberspace levels, in order to make interesting platforming challenges for the new characters there's a lot more focus put on the random floating sky blocks and rails that plague the islands of Sonic Frontiers, and the pop-in still does not help much. There were several instances where the game prompted me with a waypoint that to the understanding of my current view was just a random inaccessible point high up in the sky because the render distance was too short to actually show what kind of platforms I needed to be getting to or where the path to go there even starts, and conversely there were also times where I felt like I used each of the new characters air movement in a way to bypass entire large platforming challenges that I was intended to do a specific way. There's also these really tall towers that need to be scaled with their own unique lengthy platforming challenges to reach the top, and they are incredibly stressful to climb as any small mistake has the possibility of sending you all the way back down. The overworlds balance is just as sporadic as the random blocks that float around within it.

Combine that with a boss rush that is aggravatingly difficult as it demands you clear the first 3 bosses on the same pool of rings which as a speedrun challenge works fine enough for the first and third bosses but the second one being a cycle-based fight means you pretty much have to get a perfect cycle or two otherwise the entire run is dead which is always fun. They introduce the "perfect parry" mechanic here where instead of just holding the bumpers to be in a automatic parry state you need to time your parry properly which sounds deeper on paper but considering the very weirdly timed hit windows on the bosses attacks I think I understand why the parry system was how it was in the first place! And this is even after several patches that nerfed things to make them easier, this shit was even harder when it first dropped!

It's just kind of hard for me to tell who this expansion was really made for. The new characters and world make me believe it's for anyone who has played through Frontiers, but the higher difficulty makes it a pretty tough pill to swallow. The extra story content might mean it's for sonic lore masters, but really the alternate ending doesn't really amount much differently than the base games ending, if at all. The extra focus on challenge implies that it's for challenge-seeking veteran gamers, but the challenge comes more from managing the games jank and figuring out what the game may or may not want from you as the game itself doesn't really inform you on shit! I think the base game being much more mellow and casual in design helped hide the mechanical cracks in the seams, but with this game being much spicier those cracks are all the more apparent. To me, a games final impression matters as it's both the note to end the whole thing off on as well as one of the first things that I think about when I reminisce on it given that it's usually a more recent memory of playing it. Playing through this made me genuinely consider if Frontiers was actually this mid the whole time, and that's never the kind of note you want to end your bonus content on... I will give them props for making something of this caliber a free update instead of a paid expansion, but like it might be for the best to stick to the base game so as not to potentially sour your last impressions on the game like me by playing this.

fucking peak, I simultaneously can and can't believe this game was ravished so critically in its time. Like, did we even play the same game???? I honestly booted this game up as a joke since my Wii U was plugged in for shovel knight, and ended up getting really invested to the point of playing through the whole thing.

The narrative is pretty much a bonafide example of a japanese developer making a western-leaning action plot, and I mean that in only the best ways. There's tons of political jargon and inter-continental relation talk that borders that fine line between advancing the plot in a sensible way while still sounding complicated and serious. The cast of characters all have their own exaggerated morals and views of the world alongside their borderline tangential relationship to our protagonist where things feel personal between them but never really established nor developed any further. There's all the action setpieces you'd expect like puching through a jail full of cartoonishly insane tenants, blasting helicopters singlehandedly in your generic western battlefield, going through a house-of-the-dead-ass hospital filled with zombies, going through the cool japan castle level filled with cyborg ninjas, snowy mountains complete with a crazy vehicle segment, this game has it ALL. Instead of having anything tongue-in-cheek about how absurd that some shirtless dude with a gun and a sword and his crew of generic mechanically-enhanced supersoldiers can make it through all this insanity, the game plays everything dead fucking straight. There's not a hint of irony going on about this overly complex and flashy plot that mostly amounts to the same generic action movie tropes, and I ate up every goddamn second of it and lost my shit at every crazy moment the game threw at me. If you are a fan of like the Metal Gear series, the Ace Combat series, Resident Evils 4-6 in particular, or pretty much any Clover/Platinum game or Suda51 action title, you probably already know exactly what kind of vibe this games going for and will likely hella fuck with it just as much as I did.

If this game was just a goofy stupid setpiecy title that'd be one thing, but the actual gameplay is really fucking solid too! Yeah, the game definitely looks and runs more like an xbox 360 game from 2008 than a AAA Wii U title from 2015 (not really like there's much of a difference between the two in the first place), but honestly I do not give a singular shit about graphics and even found plenty of parts to look really nice regardless. The game is directed by our boy Tomonobu Itagaki, and while that sounds like a pretty red flag for me personally given how much Ninja Gaiden Sigma PTSD I still suffer from, in this game he was able to adapt his Itagaki-isms to a way where it's not total cock and ball torture to push through. In this game you have a gun to shoot things and play like a cover shooter, a sword to combo people in melee combat, and extra moves like grenade throwing and dash sliding for extra options for mobility and offense. I noticed while playing that I was doing everything I could to get from one battle sequence to the other because I found the combat that engaging, which isn't even something I do for some fully-blown character action games. The game and its levels are definitely designed in a way where while you CAN just focus on one over the other and either play the game entirely like Gears of War or like Ninja Gaiden, it's at its peak when you stay on your toes and utilize each weapon equally. I found the most fun in focusing on melee for primarily killing people and using the guns only for particularly long-distance targets that I'd die trying to run to, or to occasionally use in order to thin out crowded rooms a bit before running in like a lunatic with a knife. Hitting and killing people with melee in particular earns you meter which can be spent on activating a super mode that makes you mostly invulnerable while active and gives a heavy melee buff, and you can even activate it during scripted enemy attack sequences which means at any time you can have a panic button if things start going south. The bosses are also really fun and each one serves as a pretty different test of each of your different skills (even if some of the later game bosses get pretty cheap with instant kill attacks). It's basically 3D Ninja Gaiden but with high-speed third person shooting thrown in and not ludicrously difficult. What the fuck isn't there to like about that???

It's a banger fucking video game, shoutouts to Nintendo of all fucking people for actually being the guys to see the worth in something like this enough to publish it. It makes sense why this game reviewed so low because like in 2015 people were more wanting to see what the PS4/Xbone generation had to offer and didn't really have the time or energy to give a late wii U Unreal Engine 3 game much the light of day at all, and I lowkey get that. Nowadays though, where I feel like people are more willing to look past that kind of thing, I think it makes sense why this game has such a devoted cult fanbase. I wish I was able to try out the online mode when it was alive because of what I've heard from secondhand accounts it was apparently fun as FUCK and after playing through the singleplayer I can very much believe it. You goddamn KNOW if some fan servers pop up for this game, I'm there day one. The game is insanely difficult to get nowadays because Nintendo of America apparently lost faith in the title near the end of its development similarly to Disaster Day of Crisis (which honestly this game shares a lot in common with in terms of camp, guess Nintendo of America has horrible taste but at least they released this game here in SOME capacity vs just outright not for that game), and as such combined with the fact that the Wii U eshop is rip in kill, this game is a fuckpile of money to buy physically. I had my chance to get this game physically for 40 bucks back in its time but decided against it because I was a broke-ass high schooler and now its like 10 times that price and I have every US first party Wii U game physically except this and fuckin Mario Tennis Ultra Smash. Considering that it's extremely unlikely this game will ever get a rerelease, I'd def suggest giving this game a go under any means necessary without having to sell your liver. This game deserves to be played by more people that can appreciate what it does instead of being known as "that shitty expensive wii U game".