both the main story and the DLC questline end with cliffhangers teasing popular characters which is pretty funny now that we know we're never getting a midnight suns 2 because no one bought this game outside of a sale (including me). so lmao.

Midnight Suns is a pretty cool game with a unique and satisfying combat system that actually had a lot of layers in it. Most of the other stuff isn't that interesting.

It's a card based SRPG. It doesn't sound good on paper but it's from Friaxis (xcom devs) and while I dont think they have any card games under their belt they clearly knew what they were doing with the system. Despite the fact that on paper you can "only" play 3 cards a turn, good smart play of a combination of your cards/deckbuilding, map interactables and movement skills can lead to very explosive turns. While a quick fear of it being card based is that sometimes you get complete bricks of turns, I had very little turns over the course of my 60~ hour playthrough that felt like i just couldn't do shit. Recycle often can ungum up hands and if your hands are still getting gummed up while skill issue man put less heroics in your deck.

To go with the good core is both varied enemy list with each their own rules and missions with their own unique rules. The dogs all aggro on the same target, giving you pause to either try not to have 3 dogs hit your squishy hero, or abuse a hero with taunt/counter to force all of them to hit them with one taunt skill. The nest mother summons towers that you dont want to keep alive, but also damage her if you break them, and shes always protected by a guardian that makes you unable to target her. Do you prioritize killing her rocks and whittling her down, or do you have a line that lets you just sheer brute force it? These kind of decisions are often, and it's really just enjoyable even when you're grinding.

Your deck is made up of what heroes you bring to a mission, each hero comes with their own unique card pool and gimmicks. Deadpool gets a stacking buff based on how many people he kills and his cards improve in various ways basd on his stack. Most of Iron Man's cards dont get recycled when you discard them, but instead improve in various ways from either extra keywords or more damage. Ghost riders cards do great damage but all come with downsides like forcing you to discard or taking damage. I think the card pools per character are oddly small which is disappointing but the characters are varied enough that it doesn't get that repetitive, and also there's an endgame grind mechanic to let you roll for extra effects on cards for even more deckbuilding options

Outside of the combat is a combination of xcom base building and like hero social links. Interact with the heroes between missions to build relationships giving individual heroes boosts while getting permanent boosts by upgrading the abbey, or also exploring the abbey grounds for its own questline. Unfortunately, the not combat parts of this game are definitely its weakest part.

The main story is pretty sauceless. It's a very clean cut heroes fight corrupting evil elder god for the most part. It tries to mix it up with some hero drama between, particularly like between the original midnight suns getting frustrated with the avengers abruptly showing up taking command, but it's not good and feels like highschool soap drama. Most of the social links stuff is also pretty unmemorable opening up about their doubts and anxiety dumps or just talking about how cool the protag is. There's a couple fun little side things but it's played almost too straight most of the time for how weird the cast of characters are. And also when its trying to funny it's often not.

Most of the xcom building stuff doesnt have a lot of depth either. While the things they unlock are good and add layers to combat, there isn't much to them other than Do Unlocks Requirement (probably do X missions with Y hero or upgrade Z amount of skills with Y hero) > research it > unlock it next day, maybe gotta spend money to actually unlock it.

DLC is pretty good. If the game is on sale the complete edition is probably also on sale and I think the DLC is worth the on sale price upgrade. The season pass gets you 4 heroes and around 15~ missions and its own story line about killing vampires. The story still isn't good and the social links have the same issues but the missions are the equally high quality and amongst the hardest in the game, and also you can get Venom. Everyone loves Venom.

It's good. Playing it is fun and it's a unique and well designed combat system with good missions to back it up. But the story, writing, and in-between events are uninteresting and lets down what should be a fun setting of standoffish super heroes working together. I learned I like Magik a lot though, she's cool.

did you know that one of the enemy journal entries says that swords just do not exist in mario's world? what am i suppose to make of that man.

Mario RPG is fine. I played the original like 2~ years ago and kinda came away with a feel of all charm no substance. Mario RPG remake comes with a bit more substance in gameplay upgrades and bit of a charm loss in that I think its a little ugly.

For the aforementioned substance, it takes the original RPG battle systems and adds a few bells and whistles; the big one being a separate meter that charges through proper attack timing/blocking, which can be used for various team super attacks that chane depending on who you have active. I also like the combo meter idea; when you get properly timed blocks/attacks you build a combo that not only generates more meter but gives you party buffs that increases the bigger your combo goes, but you lose it all if you drop one. Also there's a second extra strict aspect to timing now which lets you fully negate an attack on block and makes normal attacks hit all enemies. Finally, the game adds a bit of post game content in the form of 7 boss rematches.

It sounds good and honestly it is but unforantely the game is a pretty 1:1 remake until the post game, so these additional mechanics often amount to just making an already easy game even easier. You're already clobbering most enemies; with the power of the triple attack meter you can now kill a boss a round or two earlier. The post game rematches are actually quite fun and because they're designed for max level parties in mind you have to engage with the bosses actual mechanics but, but it's a little too late.

Most of the game's charm is still there; it's funny, it's a cute bite sized RPG adventure in the somehow under utilized mario world, with weird characters and enemies and funny attacks. All that is still there; I just think it's a little more ugly.

I just don't like the new models. I dont like how Mario and the toads look, I think bowser just being the modern bowser design shrunk by 50%, where it was a cool and unique look on the SNES it falls flat for me in 3D. The game at times feels oddly budgeted? Cutscenes not having any sound effects aside from the occasional stock Bowser noises is crazy to me.

Also you can't tell me you like new fat yoshi more than old fat yoshi.

Some stuff does look great; most the environments are fantastic, some enemy models are really killer now, love everything they did with Culex, but overall I think I like how the SNES game looks more.

Also a big thing is that the game does NOT run good. A lot of the towns have framedrops, most screens with water drops the frames, some of the triple attacks make that shit CHUG. It's not a game ruiner but it sucks.

It's fine. I can't confidentially tell you if you should play the remake or the original or not; I think SMRPG was always more style than substance but I think the remake loses a lot of its style, but it does objectively just have more content than the original. It's up to you.

The weapon boss battle theme is still stuck in my head tho.

In this game you and your coworkers are sent to a distant planet full of dangerous native creatures by the shitty company you work for so you gather mundane objects for the sake of selling them back way over their actual value. So what I'm saying is that Pikmin 2 and Lethal Company are the same game.

I really liked this game. I knew going into this that I was probably gonna like it because I played this a lot as a kid but I didn't think I'd like it this much. Coming off Pikmin 4 felt like a really different beast; if that game was using the Pikmin system as an engine to make puzzles, this game uses the pikmin system to make a dungeon crawler. And it's tight.

Unlike Pikmin 1 (and the later 3), Pikmin 2 ditches the the timelimit and trims down the amount of time you spend in the overworld looking for items (though you still do that) for Caves, large multi floor dungeons with some random elements (Floor patterns, what treasures are on each floor, and type of enemies are consistent, but enemy spawn locations, treasure locations, starting position and exit locations have various different patterns).

I love the dungeons; the game knows that because there's no global timelimit like 1, it is allowed to be a little mean and punish you harsh if you fuck around because you'll always be able to resupply and go back in. Fucked up traps like bombs just falling from the sky (shoutouts to opening an egg that was full of mites that freak out all my pikmin and then dropping a bomb ontop of me), dense enemy spawn locations, enemies that very easily mulch pikmin if you move wrong (i lost a lot of pikmin to shit like calling pikmin back at the wrong time to wollywogs/moving the squad wrongly agaisnt cannon larvas), and because enemy spawns can be really dense you can't just completely own every enemy by walking behind them and throw Purple Pikmin until they die. And obviously you can't recover your pikmin outside of specific floors, so having a Pikmin Disaster fucking SUCKSSSSSSSS. It's great

Of course this is a gamecube game so it was made in the era of nintendo taking Genre, But Make It Rated E, so it's not THAT punishing. As mentioned before you have no global timelimit so if things go tits up you can always just bail, recoop your pikmin, and go back in. The game also lets you save between floors, so if you want to runback your Pikmin Disaster you can just hit reset and try again. And even if you do have to go back into the dungeon most floors are pretty easy to beeline straight to the exit to so it's quick to get back to whatever floor you missed an item on. It's fucking pikmin this isn't your masochist mod.

Things I have issues with are mostly control related. Limited camera controls can make trying to precisely aiming pikmin difficult which is frustrating for enemies with mid air attack points like the snargets and ect (this might be better on the versions of Pikmin 2 with motion controls, but then you lose all the branding, and I'm not giving up on being able to collect duracell batteries and skippy peanut butter), non flower pikmin (especially purples) being so slow that you can just lose them forces you to move slower than you need to be and is annoying, some floors just fuckin suck (S/O to Hole of heroes 6/dream den 10 layout. And by shoutout I mean go to hell. also specifically the Heroes 6 one because there are some treasure layouts that are actually impossible to get), and I think like 2-3 bosses are kinda dogshit. But it's really minor gripes in the long term.

This game was awesome. Such a fun skew for a weird console RTS/Dungeon Crawler hybrid. Not even the other pikmin game hit the same feeling, as the other dungeon focused pikmin game (4) is far more focused on puzzles than combat and "resource management" (not letting your pikmin get massacred).