Tl;dr Donkey Kong Jungle Beat is still one of my favorite Donkey Kong games of all time. I still hold it dearly to my heart and I'm really glad I was able to play it again properly with a pair of DK Bongos I bought again (which were the same ones I sold off to a local store ages ago). Only main critique I have of the game is the short length but that's really it.

Jungle Beat is one of those games my dad's side of the family owned when I was a kid and would play when I would go over to their house. When I was a kid I was completely out of the loop regarding the Rare buyout, I just saw this as another cool DK game, and it was definitely a pivotal game from my childhood that made me fall in love with Donkey Kong with DKC2 and DK64 being my main entry points.

And I'm very happy to say that Jungle Beat is still a really fucking fun ass game for me, probably even more fun for me now after mastering the DK Bongos as an adult. The game feels so satisfying to control, play, and my god its so rewarding to string long combos and finally land on the ground netting a ton of beats. DK's a mad powerhouse in this game and it really shows in the levels and boss fights too. Levels are so tightly designed around it's limitations that it feels exquisite to master movement and find the most optimal routes to keep your combo gauge going.

I love this game so much man; Jungle Beat, Jungle Climber, and Tropical Freeze are definitely my favorite 3 Post-Rare DK titles.

I highly recommend it to people especially since DK Bongos aren't in any demand right now, it's better time than now to get them before they fetch higher prices.

Chaos;Child is a basically perfect mix of murder mystery, psychological drama, fun Sci-fi magic, and likable characters. I was honestly floored that outside maybe the first several hours, the visual novel was consistently quite interesting or entertaining.

Country to popular belief from the hardcore Sci;Adv fanboys, you do NOT need to read other Science;Adventure visual novels first. In fact, I think Chaos;Child is one of the better ones to start off with since it has a good balance of mixing slice of Life character development as well as introducing mystery plot elements. It can help you find out if you like the ideas of Sci;Adv before going into others. But if you’re sure you wanna read all the Sci;Adv VNs, then find one of those online guides to read from Chaos;Head Noah up to Anonymous;Code.

Many of the Science;Adventure series usually have like 1-3 good characters and the rest are boring, annoying, or nowhere near fleshed out as they should be. In my opinion I think all the major characters of Chaos;Child all eventually get enough depth to stick out. Sure there are still some that probably could have used a little more love like Uki, Hana, and Mio but even I thought they had just enough for me to have something of an emotional connection to them, which I can't say for 90% of the cast of Steins;Gate or Chaos;Head.

As said earlier, the mystery stuff is basically paced almost perfectly. You have a murder mystery scenario within the first chapter and every single chapter has some really interesting reveal, so you're never left hanging. This also extends to the heroine routes when you get on them.

While this visual novel has a lot of sci-fi magic that could’ve lead to dumb deus ex machinas, Chaos;Child does a surprisingly good job having a good balance of hopeful/positive twists but also not reversing any big negative twist (like KEY). In fact, you can make the argument that sometimes the way some routes end are probably a little too edgy at times. But once again I think Chaos;Child has a good balance of having hopeful things happen and negative things happen where the characters just have to live with the consequences.

Chaos;Child also has a very consistent theme of “be careful what you wish for”. It’s a theme I find is only used in certain occasion in other media. I like how this theme applies to many characters and works great with how the sci-fi magic works in Chaos;Child.

The story structure is definitely very weird and a carryover from Chaos;head. The vast majority of the story is in the common route which you are forced onto on your first read through. I could see how this could bother some people since the common route on its own could be somewhere between 20 to 40 hours depending on your reading speed since it has 11 chapters of variable lengths. However, I'm glad this visual novel at least did something relatively different because the common route is very much its own complete story with a very definitive end. And honestly, if the story ended there, it could have been a great story on its own.

I generally have positive things to say about every heroine route + true route. They are all on the short side being somewhere between two to five hours depending on your reading speed. They basically feel more like giving context to certain characters and world building that the common route couldn't quite tackle. I thought this route aspect worked surprisingly well simultaneously giving the other main heroines a different role while not taking away from the main story and especially the true route twists. A minor nitpick is I wish more of the side heroine twists were integrated in the main story.

However, one thing I don't have positive things to say about is the delusion choice system, another carryover from the spiritual prequel Chaos;Head. In Chaos;Head, the delusion trigger system made more sense for the main character as he was exceptionally paranoid. In Chaos;Child, the delusion trigger works exactly the same where you can choose positive or negative delusions based on certain slice of life scenarios. Unfortunately, all these just feel like dumb tacked-on anime fan service scenes. Since these all happen in the main character Takuru’s head, they can range from goofy references to other media, typical horny male fantasizing over females, or just super random mundane things. What doesn't help is that you have to watch a certain amount of positive or negative delusions to get onto the heroine routes. Thankfully, if you really don't like these scenes, you could probably just hold the Skip button during the scenes you don't like because none of them are plot relevant.

Thankfully the delusion trigger aspect is the only real flaw I have with Chaos;Child besides the occasional slow pacing issue which is just a common thing with visual novels in general.

The “best for last” aspect I want to talk about is the characters and as I basically implied earlier, they are what help carry this visual novel to now one of my new favorites.

Admittedly, almost none of them are in the running for my favorite character or anything. In fact, you could make the argument that a few of them are purposely unlikable at times, including our main character Takuru. Some people may be put off by him because of how low-key arrogant he is despite clearly being socially awkward. But he gets a surprising amount of depth, and while his development wasn't always great, the way he turned out by the end was satisfying.

All the major heroines are decently likable: Nono being an overprotective mom but for good reason, Hinae being a troll who has clear trust issues, Hana having a mystery of why she never talks, Uki’s desire to always want to be helpful to people, and even Mio who starts off as a bitch but gets more tolerable over time.

However, the true star of the show is easily Serika and is now in the running for one of my favorite visual novel heroines. I really like her base personality of just being a goofy ditzy weirdo. In every single scene she's in, she provides some fun commentary, jokes, or super interesting dialogue.. As you get farther in the game, she shows a lot more depth than you realize and the fact that they don't sugarcoat things about certain aspects about her was part of why I really like her even if she does some things that aren't really “waifu-like". But that's fine, not every visual novel girl has to specifically be a waifu target, we got plenty of childhood friend characters in weeb media.

The more I think about it, the more that chaos child was basically the perfect storm of what I want in a plot-heavy mystery focused visual novel. It’s just consistently entertaining and interesting, and despite all the sci-fi magic stuff and things getting a bit edgy at times, everything either has a proper explanation or has really good character growth and depth that generally made the storytelling understandable.

I'm still debating whether to give this a 9 or 10, but when I have almost nothing but positive things to say, I think that's a good sign that this is now one of my favorite visual novels.

I heavily recommend Chaos;Child if you want a mystery and/or psychological story and don't mind some sci-fi magic explanations.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is an amazing game and one of the best 2D Mario games we've ever gotten that finally mechanically & artistically advanced the series far beyond what the New Super series offered in the last decade post NSMBDS. It made me remember why I still hold the franchise very dear to my heart aside from replaying the old titles I grew up on.

The levels were fun to play through, constantly making you guess what would be next especially with the Wonder Flower being thrown in to shake things up. I also love the less is more approach with the Wonder Seeds, how you can either go for the secondary seed in each level via the Wonder Flower challenge, or go to a challenge room or two outside of levels and get rewarded with a seed that way. You actually feel rewarded and encouraged to give it your all and get everything, something that alot of 2D Marios (Classics & NSMB) never made me feel.The badge system is versatile as hell and I really like how it cracks open how you approach the game too. Controls are tight and responsive as hell too, especially with running, you no longer have that startup delay like you do in NSMB. Pure satisfaction and bliss.

The new powerups (Elephant, Bubble, Drill) are great too, even though Drill was my least used, all of the powerups felt very useful for level traversal and enemy encounters. They didn't feel situational and they all shined (alongside the Fire Flower) as great tools that all sparkle in their own ways (likely due to the game maintaining a small pool of items which I greatly appreciate). Such an enjoyable set of powerups that I personally think blow the ones from the NSMB series out of the water (Penguin Suit was cool though).

Artistically this game is beautiful, the animations are fluid and expressive, and I love the designs for the new enemies, tweaks to old ones to have them resemble their 2D art, and the characters all being so bouncy and lively in all that they do. I also love how the game took Mario's typical world tropes and ran with it on a visual level, something I wish NSMBU did. The music, while not a whole lot of it stuck with me like an earworm, was really damn good, and it feels so refreshing to hear new stuff instead of the same arrangements from NSMB the 800th time.

Bosses were a bit of a missed opportunity which is a bit of a shame cause the final boss was REALLY cool. Granted, the Mario series was never really one to have jaw dropping amazing boss fights, I feel like the best the series has provided on the platformer end are Yoshi's Island, New Super Mario Bros. DS, (and if we're counting 3D stuff), Galaxy 1 & 2. I really wish they went a Yoshi's Island approach with bosses cause I mean look at this game!! There's so much cool stuff here, how could they not have went for that?? But I digress. The boss fights we do have here are a step up from fighting the Koopalings the 5th time in a row, so I appreciate them at least doing something more to spice stuff up.

Overall, I loved this game and I'd absolutely rank it in my Top 5 Mario games most likely. I really enjoyed what Nintendo did here to breathe new life into 2D Mario and I cannot wait to see where they take it next!

Wonder comes so close to being a perfect Mario game - the Wonder Seeds were amazing ideas, the 10 coins feel nice enough to obtain, the artstyle and animation are great, and the levels themselves all feel pretty nice.

Unfortunately Wonder also has standees (i hope you like mashing A on either a gacha or money sink), bad online multiplayer (the general one is fine but why are my friends all ghosts and also not even required to be in the same level or anything?), and some disappointing boss fights (Bowser Jr.).

Only other complaint I have is that badges felt mostly useless so I just had the floating cap one on most of the time, but I'm gonna at least hope that other people enjoyed the variety and got some mileage out of stuff like jet run and the grappling hook.

Wow this is like shockingly really bad. Like damn, for a console with so many bangers and hidden gems I was surprised how awful this game is. First off what is with the art direction in this game it’s so ugly. Everything looks like it was hit with a goddamn cartoon frying pan. Second off, these levels man. I think the general concept is stellar, 2.5D worlds you can go in and out of the foreground. Sounds great to me right? It’s terrible. The movement from Bug is so stilted and stiff and going anywhere always feels like a challenge. Doesn’t help these levels are so fucking long and the boss designs really don’t help matters. Idk man, only look into this if you are like me and are really curious about the Saturn’s history. Otherwise, just play any other game from the console it’s not worth it.

A highly influential legacy title, it’s very clear to see how this influenced many other visual novels and SRPGs going forward. I think this game has aged exponentially well in spite of how long it’s been since it has released. All of the characters are fantastic, I loved all six of the main girls and they all grew so much on me and felt like a family by the end. Sakura in particular really resonated with me and I ended up romancing her. While the SRPG content is very barebones and just has the basics of it from the genre, I still found it very fun and engaging with the mechanics and found the maps extremely well-designed. The story was also great and I loved its social commentary and religious elements. Combine that with fun minigames and a great social simulation aspect and I found this to be a fantastic experience overall. Overall, Sakura Wars is a timeless classic, and I urge you to play it. I think this is a game everyone should play at least once in their life.

This shit is just dumb fun and I hate to say I had more fun with the Story Mode than I did Smash Ultimate's World of Light.

Played the Story Mode in 2 Player with a buddy and we had a blast at how funny and jank it all was. It's a short and goofy playthrough with a friend. I also liked how the Story worked in enemies and worlds across all these shows.

As an actual platform fighter it misses so much on what makes one good, the potential was there though. I hope some studio out there tries this again someday with all these Cartoon Network IP at the helm.

First things first, and this is a visual novel with a HEAVY emphasis on the novel part. There are traditional bits of gameplay throughout in the 'tactics investigation' sections but they are short and infrequent. Be prepared to read your ass off. Really, the lack of a thorough editing pass to shave off fully 25% or more of the word count in most sections is the greatest fault of the game – I suggest adapting to it instead of frustration but that's a personal matter. The wordiness isn't always negative though; where many other VNs i've played perhaps cut too much from pivotal scenes where the pacing NEEDS to slow down and gain gravitas and detail, PoE at least gets to put a lot of weight behind those scenes, and that helped build its relationship with me a lot.

Similarly, the art style and presentation of characters with the (nearly) fully-voiced Japanese lines is sublime. Even with over-exaggerated localized dialogue quirks you may expect from this kind of thing, just about every character won me over eventually, despite my initial hesitancy on many of them. The joyous character art and VA delivery definitely helps tide you over while the prose slowly works its way in. The main exception to the cast quality is the murder robots, which are very weakly executed overall, but even as someone who should be allergic to that kind of ... machina ex machina, they were managed OK enough that I didn't feel that they were a huge stain on the work. Even after I finished reading this mammoth thing, I was compelled enough by my favorite characters to replay the investigations for bonus scenes and the extra scraps of dialogue that come from the fact that basically any of your detectives can do any investigative action and they all have their own lines for each one.

The game will win zero originality awards, and yet where it could have been banal, hacky, and derivative, I feel it ultimately was written with love, wit, and deftness. There ARE original ideas, and what's more, the shortcomings of its forebears are recognized and often resoundingly corrected. The execution with this tempering ends up being as solid as a brick shithouse. This is something that really warms my heart about PoE: that it is clearly responding to its influences in this niche field, (relatively) big and weighty author names like Kodaka and Uchikoshi, and loves their work like I love their work, but affirms my conclusions on the attached games' structural shortcomings. Even with a clearly strained budget in places – you're going to see sooooooo goddamn much of a certain L-shaped hallway background with some different lighting fixtures, there are some puzzles that keenly feel like they were made for a breakout minigame section that isn't there, et cetera – there's good priority on which parts of the work have the biggest impact from dev resource allocation.

The tactics investigations are low key brilliant. They're never too long, so if you got way ahead of the mystery-solving, you're not too far from getting to prove it and progress; but they also present evidence and info in a novel-enough way for folks behind on the mystery-solving to follow along with the ride while they catch up. Additionally, controlling a whole group of detectives actually sells the feeling of you putting the case together as a team, and dovetailed well with the protagonist's confidence arc. Plus the sections have novel enough mechanics for it to not feel like completely unrelated, derivative minigame filler.

Finally, I think objectively this is more like a 4 or 3.5 but I fell in love with it so fuck the scale. The main reason I have to rate this so highly is that it has the best macro plot & villain resolution of any of these type of games I've played – there are so many of these psychologically-minded VNs where the ultimate conclusion is just "some people are Evil Ahhhh Oooohhhh!!! Mean!!" and that's THE inciting incident. Even some of the best ever are marred by this anticlimactic cop-out reasoning. PoE doesn't not have some of this in a character or two, but ultimately the villains' motivations are really not that and are instead rooted in some complex and fucking real places with the bonus scenes actually giving you further shading on them. And after having just played Kodaka's RAIN CODE a month or two back which is another incredibly back-and-forth-quality-level script of his style, I feel pretty confident in saying that yeah, the folks on Process of Elimination truly surpassed their influences in some really vital ways. It may be long-winded as fuck, but that wind is astute and confident. Also I wanna slap Doleful Detective's gay little ass fr

I got no damn clue why some people are blasting this game on here but whatever I don't care.

This game is probably one of my favorite releases from this year. I got hooked on it with the SAGE2021 demo.

I loved how versatile the Frogun itself was, the game really radiates the energy of "If you think it's possible to do some skips here, go for it" and 99% of the time I was able to. Frogun revels in its speedrun potential and I had a lot of fun finding skips and glitches. It brought me back to the Gamecube days where I really enjoyed finding glitches and bugs and using them. The game does have polish for the most part, but you can pull a ton of crazy stuff that was either intended or not.

The game does have a few issues with it (most of which have already been patched or will be patched, even moreso with the Switch version's framerate issues in some places). I wasn't too keen on the grind I had to do for coins to buy every item from the shop for 100%, even with a grind-friendly stage. The bosses were also really okay. The final boss and a post-game one were my faves, but the others were just "wait til they stop moving to hit em" type of dealio which I guess is in the spirit of bosses from the N64 & PS1 days.

Visuals look really good and I love how cute things look in the game as well. The music is solid too.

Overall, a very fun game that I was happy with playing from start to completion. The replay value is insane as well because man I really want to find more glitches and skips.