ah. i was truly suckered into blowing $30 on a rushed licensed product. i really am an adult now.

cosmic shake feels so weird. it constantly feels like it should be a great game. the controls are solid enough, the graphics are appealing, and it's running on the basis of the bfbb remake that i thought was great. yet, the new direction they take with the gameplay feels rushed at best. the game tells you where to go and what to do, and besides some side collectables, it's a straight shot to the finish with little non-visual variety. abilities that spongebob once had in the heavy iron games are no longer around, and you have to progress in the game to learn new ones (artificially making it so that you have to backtrack to previous levels if you want to 100% them). combat is drolling and repetitive, especially when they force you to take down the three-hit tanks. everything just feels worse.

this sentiment extends to the game's identity as well. half of the writing is references, and all of it isn't funny - precisely because it plays it way too safe and hogties itself to what older people might vaguely recall spongebob to be. i don't think anything made me respect the current spongebob crew's aim to give modern episodes a distinct difference from classic episodes than seeing a random european writing group's fanfiction given a budget. to that end, the audio - music is unmemorable, the voice lines play way too frequently, and sound mixing leaves much to be desired.

i could be much meaner. i thought i was going to be meaner. i also thought this might have turned out better than it ended up. i had high hopes for at least another solid spongebob adventure. i pre-ordered this for $10 less than msrp. unfortunately, when i finally got around to this, all i ended up with was a disappointment.

Every time I start a Warriors game, I’m always puzzled as to why I’ve never finished one despite always loving the gameplay for the first few hours. Warriors Three Hopes was no different than Hyrule Warriors or the first Fire Emblem Warriors in that the gameplay loop becomes completely boring and repetitive after the first few battles. Three Hopes looks to break up the downtime between the battles with resource management mechanics similar to the original Three Houses. However, Three Hopes feels like it’s simply trying to imitate the original game, and getting all of it wrong in the process. I have 0 motivation to go through the motions of developing relationships with any of these characters again because I’ve already done that in Three Houses. The choice to have an alternate world story, in which Byleth never joined Garreg Moch, was probably the worst decision for this game. It ultimately feels as if nothing matters, and that, these characters aren’t the same ones I spent 50+ hours with in Three Houses, because they aren’t. The story feels jumbled together and like borderline fan fiction. I have no motivation to do practically anything in this game so I will simply just stop playing.

Man, what a letdown. I beat Bayonetta 2 on Christmas Eve so naturally didn't have the time to write a review. But I thought it was an improvement on the original in basically every way. I loved it. So naturally I was really excited for this one even with all the dumb drama surrounding its release. Now that I've finally got to it... all I really feel is disappointment.

Before I start being too negative I'll say a few things I like about it. First of all I love how colorful this game is. My biggest complaint with the first game was how damn dreary it looked, and to see 2 and 3 be a lot more vibrant is pleasing. Plus the location variety is fun and helps keep things interesting (desperately needed). I also think there's a really fun selection of weapons to use, Tartarus and the yo-yo being my favorite. And! This game has a lot of dancing. I love dancing. I love Bayonetta dancing. But if this game thinks I'll forgive it for throwing a lot of dancing at the end after mostly boring me for 12 hours then its kinda wrong!

God this game was such a slog to get through for so much of it. The combat may be flashy and the weapons may be cool but it didn't feel fun. The new enemies are almost all just boring. And it feels entirely too reliant on the summoning which besides giving more dancing just makes the combat feel slow and sluggish. Then there is playing as Viola which is a whole other can of worms. You only play as her in three chapters and an epilogue but everything about her moveset is so basic that those three chapters end up feeling like some of the longest in the game. Besides the normal combat the game does switch things up a bit often. I do really like when games get funky with their genres so its appreciated here but even some things like the kaiju fights are just so helplessly boring. There is also Jeanne's side chapters (you don't get to call them Side Chapters and make them mandatory, fuck you) that shake things a bit too but its just.. I really don't know how else to put it. Its not fun.

All of this translates into the cutscenes too. I love the over the top cutscenes in the first two games and DMC but its just way too much here. Its almost all action with very little substance and they drag on and on. Multiple times I just found myself completely zoning out. It all felt mindless. So much creativity with so little love put into it. The story of course suffers from this. Theres very little plot but this game still has the most cutscenes in the series. The first games story was barely decipherable but still fun. 2's was quite enjoyable but still nothing amazing. But here in Bayo 3 its both hard to follow and not enjoyable. The whole multiverse thing is great potential that's handled spectacularly uninterestingly. Only does it really do cool things with it at the very end where its already too late. I actually didn't really mind the whole Viola-Bayo-Luka thing going on but the ending is just kinda bad. Viola is basically female Enzo and I don't hate him but we really did not need more of that. There are dozens of attempts at humor with her and they did not land for me a single time. And now with the game really heavily pushing that they want to continue the story with her as the new main character in Bayo 4? Yeah. My interest in this turning into a saga has almost entirely diminished.

Despite huge missteps with story and pacing, I didn't hate Bayonetta 3. It has cool colors and lots of dancing and Bayonetta is still one of my favorite video game characters. But, I just can't help but feel really disappointed having completed it. I was sure this could be an easy 4.5 for me but Im struggling to find enough reasons for why it deserves a 3/5. Its mostly just the dancing.

man :/

A few more things I wanted to add but didn't know where to fit in to the review. Jennifer Hale my queen does great as the new actress for Bayo. Having one voice line for being idle is annoying. New soundtrack is cool but Tomorrow is Mine still clears. The Switch needs a sequel desperately.

Thanks for reading <3

Nancymeter - 64/100
Game Completion #18 of April
Game Completion #88 of 2023

A bit of a letdown, but still good! It's more of a lateral move from the first Mario + Rabbids rather than an improvement.

PROS:

- The game allows you to have any configuration for your team, whereas the first game forced you to have Mario and at least one Rabbid at all times. This is a MASSIVE improvement and was easily the worst aspect of the first game.
- Sparks are great! There are a bunch of cool uses for them, and the ability to customize which character has which abilities before any match was a very good choice, especially once you make a bit of progress and can put two on each teammate. The sparks that summon enemy-type characters to your side are the biggest addition here, providing the most substantial change to the combat this time around.
- Music is consistently great throughout, though I don't think the idea to use 3 different composers was a great one. The game doesn't have a strong musical identity because you have three drastically different musical voices scoring the whole thing. It ultimately feels more like a playlist of songs from other games rather than a consistent soundtrack.

Hey, that was more of a negative than a positive! Guess it's time for

CONS:

- Status affects are worse. The first game featured bounce, burn, honey, ink, push, freeze, stone and vamp powers, and they all fulfilled very specific purposes and I loved how they were tied to individual weapons. Sparks of Hope retires the idea of alternative weapons entirely and allows you to apply new abilities to your attacks and/or dashes, but now they mainly work like Pokemon types, where most enemies have one effect they're weak to and one they resist. It felt consistently worse than the old system.
- Battles happen a LOT more, and they're in little pocket dimension levels instead of taking place on the overworld's terrain. I enjoyed certain mechanics of the newer combat, but the battles themselves all felt far more bland and forgettable than in Kingdom Battle. The previous game's focus on completing hand-crafted battles in as few turns as possible was so much more engaging than these uninspired shootouts. I honestly wondered for a while if these battlegrounds were procedurally generated, they felt so lifeless.
- Puzzles are slower and more obtuse. There's far too much "walk over here, pick up this thing, take it over there, put it in another thing" in each area of the overworld, and it gets tedious fast. Some of the puzzles which try to be more complicated end up requiring Sierra Adventure Game-level guesswork, and I got stuck quite a few times (though I only had to look up two solutions online).
- Rabbid Luigi, my poor baby. He used to be vampire dashing like 6 times in one turn, dominating the floor. He was the Rodney Mullen of Kingdom Battle. Now all he's good for is lowering opponents' attack. Huge downgrade for my MVP from the first game.
- Spoken dialogue is super weird! I turned off the dialogue pretty quickly, but the game did sound weird without the grunts and growls, so I eventually left it on but very low. I'm not sure if I'm in the minority with this, but I loved how the Rabbids in the first game still spoke in nonsensical "BWAAHHH" sounds! Hearing Rabbid Peach talk like a stereotype of a bratty Millennial influencer was just the woooorrrrst. I was not a fan of any of the spoken dialogue in the game, big misstep as far as I'm concerned.
- The ending just kind of... happens. Just like in this review!

You've heard it here first folks: Disney Speedstorm sure is a free to play kart racer. It is a perfectly fine game. Outside of the mobile game like UI it has good presentation. Looks clean and the soundtrack is pretty solid. The core racing gameplay plays well, because why wouldn't it? It's a tried and true formula. Its got boosting and drifting and powerups, the whole shebang. I can't attest to how heavily monetized it is since its in early access but its looking pretty rough on that front. Lots of currencies and characters and cosmetics to buy. Most excitedly ways to upgrade your racers and give them better stats. I am sure nothing can go wrong there. Will have to see how it plays out at launch. Overall. its fun but, yknow. I'm sure your kids will love to spend your money on this.

Also to be clear I played this through PS Plus, I am not insane enough to buy the founders pack for early access of a free to play game.

just wanted to review a game cuz why not, I'm bored. Don't really have any stake in this but hey, hope the people who actually care are happy with it.

Nancymeter - 55/100

It's pretty well made for being a joke game, has a lot of passion clearly. The music and art style is really nice and the mini game was pretty enjoyable for what it was. The interactions were mostly good and gave me a chuckle. However I felt the mystery itself was poorly written in some ways like how is there a secret passage between carriages when its a... train? Do the train carriages somehow wrap around eachother? And they somehow arent separated by the outside somehow? I know its kinda silly to take the mystery seriously but it's at least attempting to tell a cohesive mystery so it's not immune from criticism in that sense. Overall it was alright, a fun afternoon game I'll forget about in a day. Was fun tho.