Do you want to play a game where you explore well designed areas densely packed with interesting creatures that interact with their surroundings and require thought as to how you approach and capture them, balanced with a thrilling investigation into the mysteries of the society you suddenly find yourself in? That sounds great, right? Well, I just described Bugsnax, the game that Pokemon Legends Arceus wishes it was, and I recommend that you play it. Arceus isn't a bad game, but I definitely have to count myself baffled by the volume of praise and hype it has received over the past 9 months because I don't think it's particularly good either.

I'm leaving my playthrough of Arceus feeling like I played an early access or rough beta, rather than a polished up and completed retail product. Look, I've played some ugly games and loved them - Fire Emblem Three Houses at times feels like it's missing important sequences (Blue Lions Dedue return for example, no cutscene or build, he's just... suddenly back with no explanation) and its texture work is extremely rough looking, but not only does it make up for that with the quality of the rest of the package I also don't think those failings are anywhere near as major or glaring as equivalent issues in Arceus. Almost every texture in Arceus is extremely ugly - if the world were well designed and interesting it could make up for it, but in practice it's a roughshod paint job on a ramshackle void bereft of anything to see or do in it. It constantly reuses cutscenes (ah yeah lemme watch the Potato Mochi meal cutscene 10 times with identical animations and barely different dialogue each time) or, rather than even pretending to have a cutscene we can just fade to black for 10 seconds while a sound effect plays to avoid even having to try to show something happening. There is nothing appealing in its presentation aside from the Pokemon themselves, and I do think that the new ones are all hits (with the exception of Sneasler, who I loathe). Even the music is iffy, I hate the Jubilife music and the music that plays when you talk to the Professor and they play so frequently that they grate on your ears if they don't land with you. The music for the various regions is actually pretty great... but unfortunately it either decides to simply not play or instead it'll just constantly be interrupted by the lackluster wild encounter theme, so it might as well not even be there.

The battle system doesn't make any sense. Every trainer battle seems to start with the enemy attacking you before you can even see a menu, often with an unexpected super-effective move not in their usual learnset, instantly sucker punching your pokemon as you send it out and often killing it. It's frustrating to not have a chance to react and to immediately lose your lead... but then I have 5 other pokemon and I retaliate by instantly nuking their ONE pokemon and win the battle. The combat forecast for moves often doesn't tell me correct information - the amount of times it showed me moving first or multiple times, or the enemy moving only once, and then suddenly something entirely different happened (in the final trainer battle against that bandit girl, her Gengar moved 5 times? I looked up the datamined stats and it barely had a higher speed stat than my pokemon, launching 5 moves at me absolutely did not track there) is just absurd. It's an unfair system, and yet the battles were so imbalanced and easy that it didn't even matter because I never lost a single trainer battle and nearly every pokemon on either side was dead in one or two hits. All it amounted to was somehow Gamefreak managed to make Pokemon Battles not fun for me, which is bizarre because I enjoyed them even in Pokemon Sword, my least favorite Pokemon game with my least favorite battling gimmick in Dynamax. You can walk around in them for some reason - I don't know what purpose this serves but it's a feature.

The story, and in particular the writing, is bad. I suppose this is to be expected because writing in Pokemon games is far more miss than hit, with really only Gens 5 and 7 being anything worthwhile. But even so, the writing just felt even more insipid and uninspired than it usually does... it's truly disappointing that Pokemon seems to lean into the defense it gets for its writing, "it's for kids" (as if writing for kids cannot be good, or as if kids somehow deserve bad writing). I feel especially shortchanged by the fact that the bulk of the game is helping the various Noble pokemon... and that's it, that's the last you see of them. Wouldn't it make sense for them to show up at the end and do a whole power of friendship thing to support you before you fight Origin Form Dialga/Palkia? That would make sense and show your impact on the world and that what you've been doing has mattered, and it's so obvious... and it does not happen, because the Nobles do not even remotely matter after their respective story quest ends. The only characters I really remember having any investment in are the woman who took care of Growlithe/Arcanine and the Battle Subway guy whose mere presence in this game is completely inexplicable - the rest are either forgettable or downright annoying (Melli, the Braviary girl, and the bandit trio come to mind, they were the goddamn worst). Otherwise, the game feels like it ran out of ideas when you quelled all the Nobles (Avalugg wasn't even rampaging yet, doesn't get hit by lightning, and then just IS rampaging when you fight it) and rushes to figure out how to include a banishment subplot, the lake trio, and Dialga/Palkia in to wrap it all up. It just didn't feel finished, and I know that it isn't in part because it has a post-game quest with Volo/Giratina and Arceus, but the main game story isn't satisfying. Ah yeah, we need the origin ore, thank god it's two feet away from the spot where we decided to invent the fact that it exists, glad we had that annoying detour.

What's unfortunate is that part of me likes the live capturing mechanics, and I don't really know why I do. Capturing literal dozens of the same pokemon is undeniably repetitive busywork and I really gotta question the fact that they focused on it as the main gameplay loop, but it did somehow get its hooks in me for the first few areas. It feels nice to throw the pokeball and catch the pokemon, even if there's realistically no reason I'd ever need or want 25 Bidoof. The problem is, the system for capturing is not deep at all. There's all this talk about stealth and throwing berries... you don't need to do any of that. Half of the pokemon you can just walk up to and crack a pokeball into the back of their skull to instantly catch, the other half all you need to do is either snipe them with a feather/wing ball or simply throw a spoiled nut or dirt ball in their face to temporarily de-aggro them and then hit them in the back of the skull with a pokeball. It was genuinely more effective for me than slowly creeping through the bushes or trying to figure out which berry would interest the pokemon, so I stopped bothering to experiment with that - after all, they only have three types of behavior. They're all either docile, aggressive, or docile until you do something that makes them aggressive like running or being seen capturing a nearby pokemon. They all wander around in circles, doing whichever of those three behaviors, and don't stray from their little zone. They don't do any particular animations or anything special, they don't interact with each other or the environment, they're just replaceable figures standing around in empty boring zones that have nothing to do or see in them. There's no puzzle to get them and getting them stopped feeling like an accomplishment when I realized I can just speedrun through an area and casually toss pokeballs and catch the vast majority of them. If the world could have at least had things worth exploring and discovering, that would've been great! But the world really is just nonsensically designed and has nothing other than hidden Spiritomb orbs and Unown. And the Noble fights are just clunky - they're easy affairs that tend to drag on, and I guess you can actually battle the pokemon but I didn't feel like seeing what bullshit they were going to pull vis-a-vis the unpredictable nonsense of the battle system so I just kept tossing balms, which completely works as a way to win and probably took just as long as the battle would have.

My biggest problem with this game is that I could see it being the groundwork for something good in the future... but I don't really have any faith in Gamefreak to deliver on that. With a more capable studio I could see this evolving into something interesting, but as it stands Gamefreak is just kinda marginal. I wouldn't call it a bad game, but I don't think it's a good game - it's about as middle of the road as can be. I don't think it really excels at anything but I've played much MUCH worse, and I feel that this was still more compelling than Gen 8 despite the many flaws I think it has. Props to anyone who loved this - I sure didn't see it, and I don't understand it, but if this is what you wanted then I'm glad you got to have it. I just wanna have a Pokemon game that catches me again, and as the entries keep coming out and missing with me I feel I'm getting less and less likely to get that... At least I got Basculegion and Overqwil.

Loved it. It's really finely crafted all around, with a great balance between different gameplay styles. Exploring the town hubs and soaking in the atmosphere with the gorgeous aesthetics and great soundtrack was wonderful. The actiony moments were a bit weaker but they still contributed a lot to the experience, especially in making you further appreciate those moments of sanctuary when they arrive. Just really impressed overall with how this turned out, it's a definite highlight of this year's releases.

Played this as a joke because it was added onto PS+ the same day as Stray, the game I actually intended to play... I've played worse! This is honestly a solid if unspectacular platformer. Really the worst things about it are that the camera likes to glitch out and you have to listen to Scrat noises for 4 hours... on that note, you don't get ANYTHING good to listen to for the whole game so you might as well just play your own soundtrack. It feels like one of those licensed PS2 era platformers, the kind of game you'd love as a kid with few options for games to play that you revisit 10 years later only to be pleasantly surprised it wasn't horrible. Good job Scrat, I figured I'd have a laugh for a half hour and instead played you to completion, guess I have to truly commit to the bit and get the platinum trophy.

I don't know why this exists, it's an extremely unfocused and muddled project that doesn't even remotely come together. It's an open world except it's covered in deadly fog that prevents you from exploring and it's entirely empty and devoid of things to do, so what's the point? Ah, do the repetitive busy work and you get to dispell the fog and explore more and get even more repetitive busy work to do! Screw that, everything is the same and you see the whole core loop in the first hour. The sheer overuse of detective vision in order to proceed is just comical. It's so ridiculously in your face about how much busywork it has, every time I open the map it takes a full minute to take control from me and slowly hover over every new icon on the map hoping to tempt me to check the sidequests out. It has some of the clunkiest and worst feeling FPS combat I've ever played. The story is incredibly short and has almost nothing going for it - you play as the most generic guy ever, with a stereotypical hardboiled cop who doesn't play by the rules in your head, and the rest of the cast basically doesn't exist. Was I seriously supposed to care for motorcycle woman (Rinko? I don't remember), who died about two hours after I met her, who only talked to me briefly maybe two times? Ah yes, let's say and explain nothing about KK until the final hour and a half, that'll make you connect with him! Hard to care about anything when nothing is ever explained or spelled out and everything ultimately boils down to things happening for the sake of filling time. The entire walking simulator segment of going through dull retread environments while you hear Akito and Mari not having a good relationship was such a slog. The first session I played it, I was enjoying hunting for lore and such until the 20th text message or scrawled post it note of a dead unnamed character who clearly had no relevance or anything interesting to say - maybe put even just ONE interesting story into any of these scattered lore bits? Huge disappointment in every regard. The best part of the game was the entire stupid bit where the villain used force lightning on the corpse of your sister and then inexplicably fell down a hole, just an absolutely impossible cutscene to take seriously even though it was meant to be setting up the final battle.

I'm not gonna say no to another chance to wreck things with Annette and Dedue. Loved getting to see a different perspective on Fodlan and to meet some of the unseen figures constantly mentioned in Three Houses, the story has its issues (particularly feeling rushed and unfinished) but man it sure does some cool stuff at times. A shame that a certain bit of hypnotism happens and harms both the impact and pacing of Azure Gleam because that was shaping up to be a genuinely top tier Fire Emblem story... ah well, at least it still hit some very high notes. It's a musou, you know what to expect, but I love the micromanagement stuff, from the training and support building to those map mechanics to better direct your AI companions. Just had a great time, it makes for a very fun co-op experience and we were so happy to revisit this world and cast of characters.

World 10-1 was a genuinely good level, it was actually fun. There's like 4 or 5 other levels that are pretty good, and I love the Fire Hydra(nt) boss. That aside, this game is a baffling fever dream of horrible design decisions and awful levels awash in an obnoxious and annoying soundtrack with some of the stupidest cutscenes I've ever seen. Every button doing the same thing, often overwriting the ability to jump, is absolutely the most insane design decision I've ever seen in a video game (especially in a platformer!). I love how the various NPC storylines range from "this farmer's home and livelihood are destroyed in a tornado" and "this girl is nearly murdered by a dolphin that goes crazy" to "man loses a single game of chess" and "boy doesn't understand gravity". Genuinely hilarious that the game seems to be trying to tell a story of overcoming your fears and reaching out to make friends, but the main villain just gets killed off instead of them doing some power of friendship deal to redeem him. Maybe Act 3 changes that? Who knows, I sure don't care to find out! It's not the worst game ever made, but it genuinely is an awful experience with very few redeeming qualities and I was really only able to derive any entertainment out of it from the co-op breaking the game to a hilarious and unintended degree. Don't put yourself through this.

Bunger is one of mankind's greatest achievements. That Metal Gear Solid gag at the end was incredible, absolutely perfectly done. Had a great time, it's addictive and fun with an enjoyable cast of characters. Shout-out to Scoopy Banoopy's voice clips, they might just be the funniest ones in the game to me. Pretty much figured out exactly how it would play out and what the story would ultimately be very early on but it still built up to that point really well and had us invested the whole way through, so I'd say it did a very good job of that.