Kinda disappointing coming to this after experiencing the oracle titles. I initially was going to start with this game after coming off Banjo-Kazooie because of how charming MC's art style is and how much of a fan I am of Wind Waker's art direction and expressive animation. That said, I stopped in the middle of the first dungeon since I was vaguely interested in the Oracle titles and didn't want to experience too much whiplash going from this to the game boy titles, even if they weren't as primitive as I expected. Capcom's philosophy towards this series is interesting to engage with going from the initial duopoly as Minish Cap in all intensive purposes is a culmination of their own spin on the 2D Zelda formula while also wrapping in series elements to keep that Nintendo feel attached to it.

Much discussion around this game, and similar to the Oracle titles, is how underappreciated they are in the Zelda series and even Nintendo's lineup. Funny enough these games all released on the cusp of new successive tech being pushed that I feel overshadowed their releases. Oracle of Ages and Seasons released almost a month before the GBA made its debut in the states in June 2001 and Minish Cap dropped two months after the DS released in November 2004, so it’s not too surprising that these tiles went under the radar for a long time and still kinda are despite being re-released on Nintendo’s online service recently, though Four Swords is still missing. After playing across these titles these past two weeks, I find that there is a lot to appreciate regarding Capcom’s efforts in adding more eccentricties to the pot of 2D Zelda and where they wanted to go and experiment that I feel has at least some tangible influence on the contemporary 3D Zelda titles. The Gust Jar in this game predates the similar Gust Bellows in Skyward sword almost 7 years later so I’d be hard pressed to believe that Nintendo isn’t pulling from these titles for inspiration on where to go with Zelda going forward even if the 2D titles aren’t the ones on the menu now.

Still, Minish Cap continues the tradition of unique design in a few ways with the center piece of this being the shrinking gimmick via the Minish Portals. Link has the ability to shrink to the size of a spect of dust and explore existing areas but with new secrets, puzzles and a whole different scale of things that add depth to a beautifully dressed yet vanilla overworld. I love the detail and scale that this new mechanic brings and emphasizes in the dusty crevices, waterways, and other interconnected and out of the way paths as Minish Link as the world becomes even more alive and comical such as climbing up to the dusty support beams of houses littered with the Minish people taking residence in the cramped spaces and even going outside and walking through grass blades and puddles of water that are now treacherous oceans at this smaller size. Hyrule Town's level design in particular is even more intricate than on the surface once you can shrink down in size and explore the sewers, houses and other spaces not possible at regular size and the mechanic is incorporated to decent effect in the dungeons as well, though a part of me wanted a bit more in terms of how much you can explore as Minish Link since it is still limited and gated by obstacles like blocks of grass and even the pavement of Hyrule Town, along with the number of portals to transform; there isn't no harp of ages in the second half of Oracle of Ages.

The music and sound effects in the dungeons and across the board of MC are a huge step up from the Oracle titles. While most of the selection still contained great and memorable tracks like themes of Holocrum and Labyrnna, the selection is host to many grating sounds and repetitive themes that I turned off the sound of my 3ds at points and just kept playing; shout out to Crown Dungeon in Oracle of Ages for an especially egregious track. Minish Cap thankfully doesn’t have instances like this and the soundtrack smoothly fits the scenery of each setting pretty well and makes them vastly memorable in a good way. They revisit old sounds with tracks such as the Fairy Fountain, Hyrule Field and Dark Hyrule Castle remixing A Link to the Past’s Hyrule Castle theme that serves as a perfect final climax to the game. The soundtrack is also home to new, original tunes that elevate the regions such as the dreamy electro soundscape of the Minish Village, the Temple of Droplets’ air-y and eerie wintery mix of chains and bells, Palace of Winds’ atmospheric orchestral feel representing the tense sky traversal, and finally Hyrule Town’s jovial vibes that sounds classic to all Hyrule hubs but is very distinctive to what MC brings to the table. The mix of both classic tunes and new original material shine to make this my favorite out of the top 2D titles next to Link’s Awakening, maybe even higher.

I've teased this earlier but the overworld in MC is florissantly captivating and booming with life through the extensive animation and artwork in the settings, characters, and music that makes the Oracle titles feel dated. The area theming is very similar to what was done before but still feels new: the vast forestry and fields with familiar monsters and creatures encapsulating Hyrule Field, Hyrule Town’s festive and cozy energy with so much in motion, the rocky and enemy filled terrain of the Gorons' Mt. Crenel with falling boulders and debris, the sleepy atmosphere and haziness of the Minish Forest/Village and Lake Hylia, and the aerial bloom of the high up Cloud tops, a very unique setting for a 2D title that flexes this game’s strength and is impressive in scale for the time. Even the dungeons are sufficiently distinct in their aesthetic and don't feel too similarly visually that plagued many of the Oracle ones.

Speaking of the dungeons while I did praise the visual detail in differentiating the dungeons from one another, this collection is possibly the weakest of the 2D games in terms of puzzles and overall complexity. They emphasize more of seasons' approach with a gentle mix of combat sequences with very surface level puzzles compared to some natural ones that are found in the overworld. They never really ramp up across the small selection outside of the Palace of Winds and the Dark Hyrule Castle which feel appropriately expansive and complex in utilizing all the tools the game gives Link and hit some manner of Labyrinthine design but still more guided compared to what the best Ages had to offer. These last two exhibit an excellent sense of escalation of the game's closing hours but they feel a little too late in how middle of the road most of the journey felt. The shrinking mechanic is used to fun effect at least outside of some of the dungeon items, which I also felt were pretty forgettable, but it feels like it was the only fully fleshed of mechanic used in interesting ways as the dungeons and their puzzles really started to blend together and get a little repetitive. The simplicity itself isn’t a problem as seasons felt like this and I wouldn’t call any of these dungeons outright “bad”, but I was on autopilot for most of them and the dynamism shown visually stood in such sharp contrast to how one note the puzzle solving and exploration was. I didn’t expect this game to be pretty handhold-y as well with Ezlo spoiling some (easy) secrets and solutions to puzzles before I started engaging with them.

Exploration similarly takes a backseat in a way with Minish Cap though not completely as there is still much to find in the world with each new item unlocking new secrets and pathways if they aren’t locked behind the new coin fusion mechanic called the Kinestone to unlock the chests or other secrets in the world. Initially I was a lot more negative on this but I’ve cooled on it since it does provide a cute way of interacting with the NPCs and pets in the world and they generally are okay outside of the RNG needed to get specific pieces if going for 100% which I didn’t do. While I would have preferred that the secrets already existed on the overworld map instead of having to make them spawn by fusing together the coins, I’m fine with this compromise. What is a big disappointment is that the rewards themselves don’t amount to much outside of rupees, shells for figurines or more kinestone pieces and sometimes a piece of heart if lucky, which I ended up with a lot less of comparatively to the other games by the end game. The act of exploring is pretty milquetoast and annoying outside of how some of the dungeon items impact it like the classic flippers and new Cane of Pacci, but even Roc’s Cape is vastly underutilized outside of its dungeon use which is a far cry from the Oracle games using it for some time in the overworld for secret goodies.

For what a charming game this is, I truly feel at odds with the higher acclaim that gets attached to this game and struggle to see Minish Cap as a fundamental improvement over what the Oracle games were doing outside of the visual and music flourishes added with the jump to a whole new and powerful platform. I didn’t speak much on the narrative because while it is more involved than either of the Oracle games, it still is severely underwritten which sucks with how interesting Ezlo and Vaati both are along with the Minish and their whole civilization in Hyrule’s history. MC is representative of Capcom’s efforts on the game boy with a lot of good attached at the hip that I would kill to see the team do again on a new original 2D Zelda title, but it overall feels less inspired and interesting than what they executed before. Even then, Minish Cap can be a decent comfort game to blast through with the some of the most colorful worlds and enticing music of a 2D Zelda game that is criminally short but still sweet in dividends.

(9-year-old's review, typed by his dad)

It's fun but hard. I like "bwomping", and most people call the square a cube even though it's not 3D! I like the game because it has a lot of customability, and you can do funny things. And my favorite part is playing the level Blast Processing (the bwomp level) because it has the best song in the game. My favorite custom song is called Endgame by Waterflame, and Waterflame makes good songs. And when will 2.2 come out? Robtop please. Please give us 2.2. Bye!

History time with wreith! One of the contestants was a 17 year old girl who was legally incapable of giving consent, meaning The Guy Game legitimately distributed child pornography! When she was rightfully granted an injunction to discontinue the games distribution after suing Topheavy Studios; their actual response on their website was "the Man has decided that our fun and hilarious presentation of spring break revelry just wasn't appropriate for the world of gaming. Maybe we should have blown some sh!@ up?". How pathetic!

During a month-long marathon of streaming bad games to my friends, Battlefield Hardline wormed its way out from a dark, dark, neglected corner of my memory. We'd all collectively forgotten about it, and when I mentioned that it was next up on the docket, everyone was giddy. We knew we were going to be in for a middling, designed-by-committee piece of copaganda garbage; a game about rough cops doing whatever it takes to get their man, tastefully developed and advertised at the same time as the murder of Eric Garner and the subsequent go-nowhere trial of the man who murdered him under the guise of justice. It was a terrible idea from the outset, and it was going to be hilarious. And it was.

Two-thirds of the way through the game, something changes.

The game goes off the rails. Retelling the plot doesn't do the sudden, massive swerve any justice; after going through milquetoast cop procedural cases where people are being extra-judicially executed by our brave heroes on the force, your character is framed, arrested, and shipped to prison for several years. One timeskip later, while being transported to another prison, a drug dealer you busted earlier pulls up to the side of the bus you're in and blows it up with a backpack full of C4. You immediately go rogue, gun your way through a Korean mafia car shop, get kidnapped by trailer park preppers and kill them in a tank showdown, and then storm a Scarface-tier mansion seated in the Miami swamps to kill your corrupt ex-captain. There's a part where you swing on a rope through a penthouse window, faced with several armed goons on police payroll, and order them to freeze before being dragged back out by the ankles to the streets below. You fight an alligator in a quick time event. After you put a bullet in the police captain's head, the player character opens his personal vault and is rewarded with a mountain of gold bars. I want a development documentary on this game more than any other, because I have no idea how or why it was decided to try to make all of these pieces fit together like this. It...works? Kind of? The first two-thirds is complete garbage, but the prison bus exploding is a marked shift towards the game actually being fun, and interesting, and reminding you that this game was made by Visceral, not DICE.

I have a pet theory that everyone at Visceral who worked on this hated it. I don't have any concrete proof to back it up, but there are more than a few circumstances that line up a bit too neatly to discredit it entirely. This was the last thing that Visceral was given to work on before they were shuttered by EA for "under-performing" in sales, infamously being instructed under threat of studio dissolution to sell more copies of Dead Space 3 on launch than the previous two games combined. Studio morale had to have been low in 2015 with EA dangling a sword over their heads. When a character in Battlefield Hardline throws a house party, some henchmen with Xbox controllers in the living room are playing Dead Space 2. The second Dead Space game was four years old at this point, and the third entry had just released. If this was meant to be promotional, why not the newest game? If it was mandated that an ad for a real game needed to be included by the publisher, why not something like FIFA 2016? Dead Space 2, as my theory goes, is the last game that Visceral as a whole was actually proud to have worked on. Stick with me, I've got more.

Pressing continue from the title screen leads into a recap of earlier story events, introduced with the line "Previously, on Hardline". Note the lack of "Battlefield". The game never once calls itself "Battlefield". It seems ashamed of the franchise. The dirty cop strongman garbage with the casually racist supporting cast (three racial jokes at the Cuban-American protagonist's expense in the first minute of gameplay!) gets completely dropped by the third act in favor of the ridiculous 80's B-movie action schlock that happens in the final third of story. The longer the game goes on, the further into development it goes, the closer to Visceral's dissolution it gets — it feels less and less like EA was breathing down their necks. It feels like the publisher gave up, knowing that the studio wouldn't exist a few months after release, and then decided they didn't care enough to monitor everyone who was about to be out of work. And Visceral went all-out with it! It's complete chaos! Why is any of this happening? Who gives a shit? It's so far beyond the garbage that came hours before that it feels like your head is breaching up from beneath dark, cold water and into open air. It's your final reminder of what Visceral was capable of pulling off, right before they got cannibalized by their publisher. It's the last thing they were allowed to make, and it sucks that their legacy gets tarnished by blatant studio meddling on their final two games before they were killed.

Battlefield Hardline is not a good game, but it becomes enough of an oddity to earn a recommendation. It's hardly deserving of scorn. It feels more pitiable than anything else. It's an impotent, flailing narrative with stock FPS gameplay that finds its footing just in time for it to end two hours later. I would have loved to play an independent Visceral's Hardline, before it could be shoved through the filter of DICE's Battlefield and EA's interference; ultimately, the game's narrative that we're left with can only mirror the studio's history and abrupt end. Visceral deserved a swan song. We all got Battlefield Hardline.

I had a best friend like Chloe growing up, a narcissistic rebel who's self-confidence and ability to truly not give a fuck I looked up to. But whenever i tried calling them out for their selfish asshole behaviour, they would gaslight me into thinking, me criticising them is actually worse and what they did is just what best friends do or not that big of a deal.

The game's casual normalisation of this kind of behaviour made me reflect on that constantly, but it never really questioned it. You can't not engage with chloe or really disagree with her actions if you want the story to progress. Trust me, I've tried getting caught, going back to max's room or what ever seemed like an alternative, but nothing is possible. If this inescapable dread of a guilt tripped toxic 'friendship' would be on purpose i think i could appreciate it, but it's not. The game views those scenes as Max having a fun night out with her besty.

I wanted to play this, because i was for a long time under the assumption that Life is strange is a pro LGBTQ+ game, but it utilises a mechanic known in the industry as 'gay button'. A bigoted homophone can play the entire game without ever being confronted with anything explicitly queer. It's all hidden behind optional button prompts and up to interpretation, like the boys or girls locker room decision or kissing chloe. The game just wears some of the aesthetics of being progressive nothing more.

It also kind of seemed from the very beginning to me like kate was a problem to solve for the player, before she was real character, which left a sour taste in my mouth up untill the point where i choose the wrong dialog a second time. I feel the game using her suicide as this shock factor knowlege-check climax to the episode, outways whatever they attempted to say about bullying or mental health and kind of game-ifys trauma.

When episode three strarted i had to think about the scene with kate, but before i could properly start reflecting max's voice actress said: "I really have to think about kate"
There is a constant discussion in film director circles about how much you should really think for the viewer. Beyond obvious stuff like 'show don't tell' there exists this inability in mainstream art to just let the receptor think and let them engage in their own thoughts about the art. I don't even mean having a different interpretation, i mean letting the receptor interpretate period.
Life is strange, constantly does this, it does the thinking for you. Max just tells you how or what to think. How to solve the puzzle. What to do. How to feel.
I really don't get why this is so normalized and even often appreciated in gaming.

For something more positive, i liked the artstyle and the general vibe of the town.

this is simultaneously a half-star and a five-star experience.

i don't trust people that can walk away from this and just say, "oh, it's just another bad telltale fad game" and move on with their life.

this features the most insane, psychopathic writing (both literal and structurally) i have ever witnessed. this game will change your fucking life. it is goddamn amazing. there are lines like "go fuck your selfie", "I WAS EATING THOSE BEANS", and "this is the only place where i can feel 'myselfie' ", what the fuck are you waiting for? please play this game. it's honestly inspiring. it taught me that as long as you nail your aesthetic to a demographic, you can make money.

A very nice open world with an incredible amount of stuff to do, but this game's raison d'etre is milking you for money via a waifu slot machine, so they're deathly allergic to doing anything interesting with the game they've built on this chassis. People have already taken this game to task for the predatory nature of gacha mechanics, for openly aping Breath of the Wild's style (and doing it worse), etc., so I want to take this in a different direction and focus on what keeps the best parts of this game from being better:

Dungeons required for progression are locked behind a time-gated resource, with rewards that rotate based on the day of the week. The combat is serviceable and I could easily see myself grinding these dungeons if it let me (a la Diablo 3, spamming Nephalem/Greater Rifts). Many rewards are locked behind a story with countless unskippable, intrigue-less conversations - no human character that you actually see on-screen will do anything meaningfully villainous outside of the opening cutscene. It's a shame, too, because their writers have shown that they can actually create worthwhile stories in this universe - there's a fairly compelling storyline in Liyue about a lesser god whose kingdom collapsed around her, and it demonstrates the kind of stories that can fit in this world if you're not afraid of a character getting dirt on their clothes.

Every playable character is palatable, inoffensive, marketable anime slop. Male characters exist in three flavors: Twink, Tall Serious Guy, and Itto. Female characters represent a few more archetypes, but you're still not going to be blown away by the creativity on display here. Give me more varied characters, Mihoyo! You underestimate how horny people are - you can get way more adventurous than this and still have people dropping stupid amounts of money out of sheer thirst. Give me a silver fox character, give me a character with even 5% more body mass, give me an actual-ass evil character (not just assertive! I want evil!).

Why am I actually rolling for these characters, anyway? Optimal gameplay demands that I use one character 80% of the time, with the other 20% split between the remaining characters in my party - you swap them onto the field, trigger their abilities, and swap them out. Unless you're releasing a new character for the Main DPS role, there's no reason to give them interesting mechanics - not that this really happens anyway. Implementing new game mechanics is hard, and I acknowledge that, but Mihoyo has the money and the time to justify it. Currently, the most adventurous set of mechanics in the game belongs to Childe, whose abilities act as a stance system, swapping between ranged and melee - second place goes to Beidou who - wait for it - has a counter-attack on her basic ability. I'm hoping that with the eventual release of Lyney and Lynette we'll see a tandem character, but this would be radical compared to what's in the game now.

Genshin Impact has given me the worst gift possible by being a game that gives you valuable rewards for your time investment, but not interesting rewards. There's so much potential being left on the table here due to a complete dearth of ambition, but rough edges don't sell.

A brilliant game that's buried in a pile of predatory business practices, unreliable online services that even punish you for nothing, "do or don't" mentality when it comes to joining late, and an empty promise to deliver a game that's been in Beta for 5 years now.

I've played hundreds of hours of this, and there is something good stuck in this game. But in it's current state, this game just doesn't respect your time at all. And as far as I can tell it's only going to get worse and worse.

As for me, it's time to move on to games that value your time and don't rely on cheap "pay more to get an invaluable advantage" strategies to generate infinite revenue.