Balatro is a game that caught my eye and immediately knew I had to play it. I’ve been a big fan of many rogue-likes in the past like The Binding of Isaac, and Enter The Gungeon, Though with Balatro, the idea of playing poker hands to score chips with a ton of different jokers that provide different effects, along with some deck building and alterations to essentially rig yourself for success seemed extremely appealing to me due to my history with poker. After around fifty hours with the game, I think it’s an interesting experience, let’s get into it.

Balatro was immediately very addicting and had a great sense of style with the CRT filter, the amazing music creating this laid back atmosphere, and generally nice visuals with pop and flair that never made it boring to look at. You play poker hands to score a certain amount of chips per blind, with eight innings in a given run, winning a run allows you to keep your build going in “Endless Mode” which I never personally delved too much into, but was fun to limit test my decks from time to time. It’s easy enough to understand quickly as well, play poker hands, augment your cards, buy stuff in the shop, find jokers to help make your deck or specific hands better as the chip demand increases per blind. It’s an incredibly simple premise with a lot of satisfaction seeing the numbers go up and watching everything work in tandem like a symphony. It’s no doubt this was fully why I was so enamored by Balatro and found myself playing for several hours at a time. Getting a good build going has that same knowledge requirement and experimentation as the aforementioned rogue-likes, so in this regard, Balatro hits it out of the park, while somehow being more approachable and simple comparatively as well.

It wouldn’t be Balatro without those trusty jokers though. There’s one-hundred and fifty of them in total, each providing a different benefit or effect that will change how you’re playing, and what you build towards. While not every Joker will be unlocked from the start, unlocking them is just as fun as using them I’d say, with a plethora of different unlock conditions for each of them. Others may require you to cater a run specifically to unlock them, but that’s hardly asking much considering their benefit for you in future runs once unlocked. While most jokers will offer you added multiplier and chips to help you clear ante’s, others are a bit more exotic in what they do. For example, “Even Stevens” is a joker that only adds multiplier to cards that are evenly numbered, to the much more niche jokers like “cloud nine” that will provide you a dollar per nine you have in your deck, which could influence you to add/create more nine’s to keep that economy engine going, which may have you running four or five-of-a-kind later on. This sort of snowball effect with jokers is very entertaining and practical for endgame scaling, it all works together very well, not every Joker can be a winner, and some Jokers you’d do well to help you early on, but abandon later due to their poor scaling. With that said, every Joker is a treat to not only look at, but figure out what it does and if you can include it in your build or not, that constant experimentation is what will keep this game alive far past its relevance. It doesn’t even end there as Jokers also have certain rarities that will augment the Joker to provide further benefits, such as additional chips, multiplier, or even an extra Joker slot, which can make taking certain niche Jokers far more viable and interesting.

If Balatro’s core gameplay is losing its luster, playing a new deck is always a good way to spice things up. Initially, Balatro will set you up with the Red Deck, which gives you one extra discard which is decent for a starting deck, but certainly not my first choice. Thankfully unlocking decks is relatively simple, and you’ll quickly have a decent selection you can pick from. The Blue Deck grants you an extra hand every round, arguably more valuable than the Red Deck’s extra discard. Yellow Deck starts you out with ten dollars, allowing you to potentially augment your deck and claim some powerful jokers early. While the first few decks grant you early advantages you can attain in any run, later decks will start changing the fundamental building blocks of the deck itself, as well as mechanics. From the tattered Abandoned Deck that has no face cards, to the appealing checkered deck that only has the spade and heart suits within its library. Every deck emphasizes a certain kind of play, adapting and recognizing them is half the fun, but are varied enough to keep the game fresh and interesting each and every time you make this decision before starting a new run. While the requirements to unlock later decks can be a bit demanding, they no doubt further change how you’ll perceive the game, as well as making specific setups, jokers, and cards far more valuable than they normally would be.

Difficulty in rogue-likes is a delicate balance of luck and skill, Balatro I think mostly sticks the landing here, with a few caveats. Balatro has multiple difficulties you can test your poker-playing skills against after you win a run with a specific deck. Each won run will unlock a new “Stake” which makes the game a bit more limited. From increasing the amount of chips to win per blind, to reducing your money-making, Balatro is rather creative and smart with how it limits the player without drastically altering the core gameplay. I think most of the difficulties here are very pleasant and force you to adapt to them without being frustrating or feeling unfair, which is very important to stress. It becomes even more important when you consider the fact every restriction each stake presents will continue to be applied to every stake afterward, making those last few stakes have a lot you need to keep in mind and strategize around. Let me be perfectly blunt here: Balatro stays incredibly consistent until you reach the Orange Stake. Originally, Orange Stake would begin to increase the price of booster packs incrementally each ante you cleared, by ante eight, the price of booster packs become ludicrous and not worth it. This made specific strategies entirely useless since there was not even a guarantee a useful card would be inside the myriad of different pack options the game presents to you. This further reduced valid strategies and would force players down the route of utilizing high card and pair builds since those hands were the most reliable to play. Without packs, rigging the deck in your favor basically became near-impossible and deeply frustrating. The ratio of luck and skill becomes heavily skewed in Orange Stake, which certainly did not leave me impressed, rather a lot of the flaws in Balatro became far more noticeable to me unfortunately. The reliance on luck to get a good run going was just far too inconsistent to me, and skill was rarely rewarded as much by this point, it certainly was… harrowing.

Gold stake was an even worse offender since it reduced your maximum hand size by one, making certain hands like flush and straight infinitely harder to pull off. All of this served to shatter any balance between luck and skill tremendously, and is by far the worst part of Balatro, or I should say was. Balatro has since been updated, making both Orange and Gold Stake have entirely new gimmicks that don’t fully fix the problem, but are ultimately much better for the game. Orange stake now adds “perishable” jokers which will lose their abilities after five rounds of use. There is a thirty percent chance of any Joker having this perishable sticker, so while it still involves some luck to not get every Joker with this sticker, allowing the pack avenue to stay open can allow for far more strategies and certain hand types to remain viable, which is a very significant improvement. Gold stake has had a similar change with “rentable” Jokers, these Jokers initially only cost one dollar in the store, but at the end of every round, they will charge you three. Not only does this once again not remove the luck factor, but it essentially prioritizes having a good economy or way to make money early, but still far better than what Gold Stake was before. Even with these changes, I think Balatro truly shines at its best on the easiest difficulty: White Stake, and when you’re simply able to have fun and enjoy the game without these restrictions. While the higher difficulties deserve their time in the sun, I don’t think they’re fully necessary to have a complete experience, but if you’re looking for a challenge, you’ll certainly get one!

Balatro does explore other avenues for challenge though, much like its contemporaries. Challenges that alter the rules of the game and force you to adapt to them are always a welcome addition to any rogue-like, and Balatro does a great job here. There are twenty challenges to sink your teeth into, and while they can’t all be winners, the few I had the pleasure of playing, I really enjoyed. Omelet was a particularly fun one, and the first challenge among the list where you will earn no money from any source except selling off cards, and you start with five “Egg Jokers” that increase in value every round. The idea is to sell them off only when you see something you absolutely want or need for your build, which I really liked, it made money far more valuable and really made you weigh your options rather than just burning money whenever you had it in the normal rules. This is just one example, but the challenges here felt very thought-out and valid to have in the game, while some of them can be a bit difficult to grasp or succeed in, it wouldn’t be a challenge if it wasn’t so.

I want to address a bit of controversy about Balatro in how it simulates gambling. The creator himself has denied this design philosophy, but admits the game does have risk/reward elements like any other Rogue-like would. I’ll be the first to admit Balatro became incredibly enticing and hard to put down for me personally, but The Binding of Isaac and Enter The Gungeon were even more so, with five-hundred and eighty hours, and over one-hundred hours respectively, Balatro barely cracked fifty. This is not to say these games are to be avoided or also replicate “gambling” but I do want to say these games are indeed very addicting, but for Balatro I also do not think it’s anywhere close to gambling, at least not any closer than a game like Vampire Survivors which was equally criticized for “replicating” something akin to a slot machine. While I don’t want to delve too deeply into this topic, just know upfront the game should not be affiliated with the negative contexts of gambling, but is certainly fun and hard to pull away from, but so are many other games, especially Rogue-likes.

Some closing thoughts on Balatro as a whole. I think the game is rather remarkable to say the least, while I think certain hand types like flush have far more supporting jokers than something like straight, the general balance and freedom to build whatever deck you want is very satisfying and is really refreshing to play if you’ve been stuck playing basic poker so long. Rigging the odds in your favor by improving your cards, copying them, or outright destroying them are all simple yet effective and provide enough decision weighing to make it very engaging each and every single time. I think the game hits the right difficulty mostly, orange and gold stake to me rely a bit too much on luck even after the changes to find them too compelling or fun, but I’d be doing a huge injustice to say it wasn’t damn satisfying to complete those stakes, much like going all-in when you’re sitting on four-of-a-kind in real poker. Jokers by themselves will define how you play and what you can build towards, but aren’t always so paramount to not experiment with what you can do in any given run, and most have general use to maintain that freedom of expression within deck building that is very much welcome, but also has room for oddly specific Jokers that can turn a simple run into a God run in just a few seconds. At first Balatro dug its hooks deep into me, though overtime it weakened its grip and has comfortably landed somewhere for me as a remarkable game, but not a masterpiece I once thought when doing my first handful of runs. Regardless, I enjoyed my time with Balatro and will be happy to boot it up for a few games every now and again, but certainly not grinding it like I once was. Thank you all for reading this shorter review on Balatro, I’ll see you all in the next one.

I’ve always wanted to get into the series since I was younger, but never really found a good way to start until World caught my attention. After one hundred and thirty hours of playing through the game by myself and with an incredibly important friend of mine, my thoughts on the game are as vast and in-depth as the game itself. For this particular review, I’m actually going to be splitting it in half by reviewing both the base game, and its DLC: Iceborne since I find the two different enough to warrant discussions on, as well as my thoughts being long enough to also justify doing two reviews. This will be the first part of the review, Iceborne’s will be soon after. With that out of the way, let’s jump into the world of Monster Hunter.

Monster Hunter World creates a strong impression right away with the beautiful graphics, the presentation, and the first few cutscenes. While graphical fidelity isn’t necessarily Monster Hunter’s selling point, I must admit this game looked rather gorgeous, though the colors are a bit muted which seems to be a departure from other Monster Hunter games, but Rise seems to have gone back to the original artstyle. You create your character, you create your loyal Palico comrade, and are treated to some cutscenes. This is where we run into our first problem with this game, is the unskippable cutscenes. While I don’t skip cutscenes for my first playthrough, if I were to play Monster Hunter World again, I’d also have to sit through these cutscenes again as well, and they’re not necessarily short ones either. This normally wouldn’t be a big issue for me if the story was good, which we’ll get to, but the fact you cannot skip cutscenes is a minor blemish all things considered, but still odd.

The story of Monster Hunter World has some promise at the beginning, but never really does much with it really. A lot of the “story” is just to give you a reason to be fighting a specific monster, which works, but since these cutscenes are unskippable and typically uninteresting and long, they certainly don’t do much to hook or captivate the player as far as the plot goes. With that said, the cutscenes do a phenomenal job at introducing us to a new monster, as well as tease some of their capabilities when you actually fight them, which I really liked. Had Monster Hunter World focused entirely on the monsters themselves, and not the reason why you’re fighting them, I think it'd have benefited greatly from it, because any cutscene not involving a Monster introduction I found little to no reason to fully pay attention to since all it’s really doing is stringing things together for another encounter. I suppose that’s the point, but characters and dialogue in general are just bland to me, I’d rather just skip them to play the game instead. Except for the Huntsman, the Huntsman was alright.

Monster Hunter World’s gameplay is incredibly complicated with tons of moving parts, I find it both great and bad in a lot of cases, let’s get into it. I’m going to address my positives with the gameplay first, and then the negatives.

Monster Hunter World has a fantastic selection of weapons that each have their own playstyle, strengths, weaknesses, and builds with tons of customization and flexibility that allow you to tailor yourself for a specific monster, or to compensate for a weak aspect of your weapon or playstyle. I found myself very drawn to the Long Sword for its design alongside its good range, great damage, and decent mobility. It’s by all means a universally good weapon with very few drawbacks, however it’s a very difficult weapon to master. I also dabbled in Dual Blades, and the Greatsword, but ended up using Long Sword exclusively for my whole playthrough. While I can’t comment much on other weapons, they each have unique purposes and quirks that give them just as much reason to use than any other weapon, they all feel viable and useful. Dual Blades for example have a lot of hits and DPS, so it’s good for applying status ailments, Insect Glaive is great for mounting, Great Sword is great at shattering monster parts, and bow is a ranged weapon that can keep you out of harm’s way with plenty of options to deal good damage. Learning your weapon however can be quite the endeavor, as you’ll have to put in time to become efficient with them and understand their limitations. Since this was my first Monster Hunter, I ended up spending a lot of time in the training area for the first twenty hours or so just trying to understand my weapon and everything about it, which can definitely be a difficult hurdle to get across, but it’s worth it in the long run. Not every weapon is complicated, Dual Blades are incredibly simple, as well as the Sword and Shield, both are also very solid weapons that don’t fall behind the others, which is important to stress, simply pick the weapon you like the most.

Most weapons have sharpness you will have to manage while hunting monsters as well. Sharpness is incredibly important because the sharper your weapon is, the better damage it will do, and the less likely it’ll bounce off a monster's tough hide or skin. There’s many different “levels” of sharpness, purple being the best, and red being the worst. You’ll always need to check your sharpness meter often to make sure it’s not getting too dull, usually yellow sharpness is around the best time to find a moment to sharpen, though I personally always sharpened after a monster ran away to ensure maximum damage and wouldn’t need to worry about my weapon becoming dull in the middle of a scrap. I think the game does a great job overall giving you plenty of opportunities and big openings to sharpen your weapon, even during encounters, but sharpness is a very committal action that’ll get you punished since it can take awhile to do, but there are ways around this issue, such as special sharpening tools and a skill called “speed sharpening” which is pretty self-explanatory. I liked the sharpness mechanic quite a bit because by being diligent with it, you’re rewarded with more damage and less risk overall of being in a tight spot, of course if you really needed to sharpen in the middle of a fight, despite how long it is to do, you can always roll out of the animation, which is nice, there’s also some special sharpening tools that make it much faster as well.

Armor, charms, and decorations are essential building blocks to a hunter’s survivability, there’s a lot to it, but a lot of it is quite good. You’ll start off with some rather meek armor, but once you overcome your first monster, you’ll be ready to upgrade your gear if you so choose. This decision-making of which monster to hunt for their gear is the majority of your monster hunting experience, and there’s plenty of options. I think the idea of both grinding a monster for drops, while also being able to re-fight your personal favorites makes for a very strong gameplay loop that keeps you engaged for a very long time, I very much enjoyed grinding Rathalos and Odagaron for my high rank gear that lasted me until I got to the DLC. On the flipside however, fighting a monster for a specific piece of gear you don’t enjoy fighting, or simply never getting the drop you need can be very unengaging and bloat game time quite a bit, but generally I think it’s a positive since fighting the monster a lot will let you gain mastery over it, letting you shave seconds each and every time, which is its own reward to many. Of course, if you don’t care about this and just wish to progress, most monsters only need to be fought once to progress the actual game, there’s also other methods to get more drops from monsters if you need. Charms is another piece of equipment crafted from monster parts that allow you to gain a specific skill you might want, or your armor might not provide, from attack boost, to critical eye, you name it. I opted to go for the Health Charm since it increases survivability a lot, which you’ll need if you don’t have stellar armor, but you can make anything work really. Decorations allow you to slot in even more skills if your armor has decoration slots, your weapons can also have some. Decorations really allow you to be flexible with your builds outside your armor, which lets you slot in what you want to have, which I really like because there’s so many skills to choose from, plus it helps make experimenting a bit easier without crafting an entire new set of armor. Overall, building your character up, the armor, and the grind for the materials are all fantastic and kept me playing Monster Hunter far longer than I would’ve normally, but that’s by no means a negative, I very much enjoyed the progression, it felt rewarding, significant, and not too slow to where it dragged much.

Mantles are another idea in Monster Hunter I really enjoyed because it gave even more customization, but also allowed you to handle certain fights and situations much easier. Mantles come in many forms, from the vitality mantle that gives you more health, temporal mantle that gives you invincibility for several attacks until it wears off, elemental mantles that lower specific elemental damage, like fire, and the rocksteady mantle which prevents your attacks from being interrupted by attacks while still taking reduced damage. While they’re not essential for hunts, they allow a lot more room for error, or simply make it easier, especially if you’re struggling with a monster, crafting a mantle can mean the difference between a win and a loss. I personally opted to use the Vitality and Temporal Mantle, and I couldn’t tell you the amount of times it saved me in a pinch, it does take a second to actually put on the mantle, so keep that in mind. The drawback of mantles is they’re on a timer, once you put it on, the mantle will slowly lose its energy until it blacks out entirely visually, this is when you need to take off the mantle to let it recharge. I like this idea of having to be diligent with the mantle, but in a tough battle, it’ll be hard to find a moment to take it off sometimes, even though it only takes a second to do so, but make sure to get everything you can out of them, because once they run out, they’ll be out of commission for a decent length of time. If you’re not particularly interested in using a mantle, there’s also “boosters” which create an area of effect that can increase your weapon affinity, heal you and your allies, and remove status ailments, I never personally used these since I found mantles infinitely more useful and versatile, but also because boosters have to be placed and have a small area of effect which can be difficult to utilize in fights where the monster is constantly repositioning, or you the hunter have to reposition due to the monster’s attacks.

The slinger and environmental hazards are two components of Monster Hunter World I very much enjoyed overall. The slinger is this arm mounted crossbow every hunter worth their salt uses and will utilize on hunts. In order to use the slinger, you need ammo, which can be stones, to moss, to any number of things really which can then be used to trip environmental hazards, as well as against monsters. Against monsters, there’s a few specific things you can do with it, like getting their attention, but most importantly it can allow you to stun or stagger a monster. Specific ammo types will allow you to interrupt a monster’s attack, granting you a big opening at your discretion which is pretty much an essential mechanic in later fights, but can be neglected early on. Not all ammo can stagger unfortunately, which is a small negative I think makes sense in theory, but would allow all ammo to be invaluable instead of only a select few. The slinger also allows you to shoot special crafted ammo you make yourself, such as flash pods to stun the enemy for a long period of time, as well as forcing flying monsters to crash back down to the Earth, providing a gigantic opening and is almost essential for monsters like Rathalos, to the more obscure screamer pods that create a high-pitched noise that’s particularly useful against the likes of Diablos. Flash pods are more universally useful though, and in base Monster Hunter World, they’re a tad overtuned, making certain fights an absolute joke, so I opted to not abuse them much but is something to be aware of. I think the slinger’s most important use however is triggering environmental hazards. There’s a few cutscenes in-game that showcase this idea which I really like, though they still give you a tutorial on it which is understandable, though I’d much prefer to have put two and two together. Environmental hazards are usually unstable formations above monsters you can hit to make them come crashing down, like rocks in the ancient forest, to giant crystals in later areas. Though not every environmental trap needs the slinger to activate, some of them work if you can attract the monster to where they are like vine traps, which entangle the monster for several seconds, allowing you to get a lot of damage in! It’s up to you to take advantage of these environmental traps however, and they’re not guaranteed as you need to get the monster in position and either stun them or knock them down to do it, or get very lucky where they just don’t happen to move. If you do successfully hit a monster with one of these hazards, they will take a large amount of damage and automatically topple, giving you an opening on top of the high damage, which is incredibly beneficial and can make hunts go way faster if utilized well. Traps can also help you break monster parts which we’ll get into in a bit, but overall environmental traps can turn the tide or snowball your advantage momentously, and I quite loved the interactive environmental aspects a lot, there’s other things you can trigger as well like swarms of flashbugs to flash a monster, water geysers and lava geyser that deal passive damage as the monster stands in them, and environmental destruction from rampaging monsters among other things, such as Rathalos attacking the rocks in his nest to cause the water behind it to rush out, potentially flinging him off the cliff along with you if you’re not careful. It’s truly an interactive world, which I really appreciate as it helps the immersion aspect a lot, and again just very helpful to gain an advantage if you’re paying attention.

My absolute favorite aspect of Monster Hunter World are the monsters themselves. If you actually decide to not attack them and watch them from a safe distance, you can observe them, how they interact with the environment, other monsters, and themselves. For example, you can watch a Rathian hunt for food, you can watch Barroth try to cool itself off in the mud, and you can see even more intimidating monsters like Nergigante ( my personal favorite monster) groom himself and just walk around peacefully. These dynamics make these monsters feel real in an actual environment, not just boss fights that net you rewards. I think they absolutely nailed this aspect, since while even fighting monsters, they’ll often retreat to their nests to rest and restore their health, and if you take too long you’ll be at a further disadvantage. Turf Wars help emphasize these monsters are territorial not only to you, but other invading monsters, and will fend them off best they can. Mechanically speaking, Turf Wars always end in a tie as both monsters deal a massive amount of damage to each other alongside a unique animation. After this is over, the monsters can still fight each other with their normal attacks, which can drag on sometimes depending on the monsters, but you can sling a dung pod to drive off any monsters you don’t want to deal with. Usually the monster who invaded the territory of another monster will leave, feeling threatened, which thematically makes a lot of sense in some cases. In other cases, it makes less sense depending on the match-up, but I think the idea that every monster has a chance to beat another monster that is stronger than it is definitely possible. All of these monsters have specific routes, nests, and interactions that give them consistency to feel very real, and I absolutely love it. It was always a highlight to watch, and undoubtedly my favorite part of the game besides actually fighting the monsters.

Fighting monsters is one of the biggest selling points of Monster Hunter, so is it any good? Yes, very much so. When you’re fighting a monster, they have specific weak points you can take advantage of to deal higher damage than normal, and not every monster has the same weak points, which not only makes a lot of sense, but ensures not every fight feels the same. Some monsters might have weak arms, some might have soft tails etc. It’s up to you to figure out where the weak points are, though there are resources in-game to figure this out as well without guess-work, which I appreciate not having to look up a wiki to do so. There are some universal weaknesses though, monsters with large legs can be attacked to stagger them, if you damage their leg enough though, they might just topple over, completely at your mercy. This allows for a consistent strategy against monsters, especially new monsters you haven’t fought yet, but it’s not always guaranteed or ideal, since some monsters have very strong legs. One of my favorite parts of the combat though is part breaking. If you attack a specific part of the monster long enough, it’ll eventually break, which not only severely lowers their defense in that specific area, but it can also drastically weaken the monster. Let’s take Rathian as an example, Rathian has a tail flip attack that deals severe damage and can poison you, so this incentivizes you going for her tail, since if you cut her tail off, it’ll make her arguably strongest move much weaker. Not only does this give you a huge advantage to sever her tail, but it’s so satisfying watching the tail get cut off and go flying, you even get an extra carve from it, which basically means you get another drop from the monster, which can net you really valuable materials. Tail cutting isn’t the only part you can go for though, as monsters all have specific body parts they rely on for attacking that breaking will cause their moves to become far less dangerous, and in some cases, slow them down, or cause them to have much larger windows of opportunity to attack them. On top of all of these advantages, part breaking can topple the monster as well, which gives you even more opportunities to break parts which will eventually snowball you to breaking multiple parts in a row, which is so much fun to do and really rewards you as well. Each broken part will also give you an extra material after the hunt is over, further emphasizing part breaks, you can also destroy highly resistant parts of a monster to make them take solid damage in that area for the remainder of the battle. Part breaking is an essential component of hunts, and a very fun mechanic as well, once you figure out what part of their body the monster uses the most to attack with, or what its most dangerous attacks utilize, it becomes a glaring target for you to go for, which I love a lot, and was just another aspect of this game that made me put in so much time playing it.

As far as the monster’s attacks themselves, well it’s a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, there’s a lot of attacks in this game that feel well telegraphed and fair, allowing you to anticipate what the monster will do, and react accordingly by dodging or moving out of the way. On other occasions, some moves have some wild hitboxes that felt very deceptive in their size and range. One thing I need to stress about Monster Hunter World is how a monster’s attack pattern is entirely random. A monster may just use their worst attack three or four times in a row, and there’s not much you can do about that besides using slinger to stun them, avoiding it, or just getting hit. I think this randomness factor works since these are monsters, and just like animals, their behavior will be unpredictable, so thematically it all checks out, but mechanically it can feel utterly unfair at times. If a monster decides to just not give you many openings, or keeps moving around and you have to chase them down a lot, it can become rather annoying and hurt the pacing of the battle. Let’s not forget every hunt outside expeditions have a time limit, so the less time you’re attacking, the more that clock is ticking down. I will say in base game, the clock usually never played a factor in victory or success for me, but it’s definitely something that became an issue later on. I didn’t really notice these issues until the endgame, since most of Monster Hunter world is actually rather easy once you get the hang of it, but in the endgame it starts getting a little ridiculous. Some moves have barely any start-up at all, so reacting to them is a nightmare, insta-kill moves, ridiculously sized attacks etc. This definitely bogged my experience down somewhat, though it wasn’t super consistent enough for me to feel like it was a pressing issue a lot of the time, but it’s definitely there. Some monsters are better than others in this regard, though like any game, some monsters are incredibly well designed, some are incredibly poorly designed. Some of my least favorite monsters were definitely Black Diablos, Uragaan, and Kirin for reference. My favorite fights include Nergigante, Teostra, and Odagaron. My biggest issue with the combat really just boils down to some moves either being too strong, too fast, or just having weird hitboxes, everything else is either fine or manageable, especially in a multiplayer environment, I’d even argue some of these criticisms disappear if you’re playing with one other person like I was, but when playing by myself, these flaws became much more apparent.

Monster hunter world was one of the best multiplayer experiences I’ve ever had. Even though I only played with one other person, being able to share this experience with them and fighting giant monsters together was always fun. Even in the more difficult fights, having someone to rely on is comforting, but always keeps the fight engaging since teamwork becomes essential in multiplayer. Monster’s gain much more HP the more people are in a hunt, so everyone needs to usually pull their weight for a hunt to be a success. Having an ally to split aggro can help ease pressure and give you a moment to heal or buff up if you need, but makes the monster a bit more chaotic to predict, which I honestly preferred, made things more interesting, plus the trade-off of being able to take a breather was very welcome. Allies can hit you out of stun and other nasty aliments as well, heavily rewarding teamwork as you’ll both be keeping an eye on each other if you’re ever in a bind, which is pretty much essential in the endgame. There’s plenty of multiplayer support skills like wide range that allow you to support your team further by allowing you to heal some of your allies’ hp by drinking a potion which also heals you, as well as buffing items like might and adamant seeds. Of course, multiplayer has drawbacks as well, hitting your allies with your weapon will flinch them, interrupting their action for a second, in which case they’ll need to do it again, though the flinch animation actually has some i-frames on it, so it can have incredibly niche use in that regard. You can run flinch free to prevent this, and if you’re with a LongSword player like myself, I’d recommend it, ‘cause LongSword is very well-known for flinching allies, which can be frustrating for sure. I have to admit though, I vastly preferred my Multiplayer experience compared to my Single Player experience, which we’ll get into, but I was thoroughly impressed with how thoughtful and fun the Multiplayer was speaking strictly mechanically, because Multiplayer has its own specific issues we’ll also get into in a bit. Overall though, a must-play with friends if you can get them together for it, because it’s incredibly fun. I'd argue half of my enjoyment was just from reacting and making callouts in call to my teammate. Truly a one-of-a-kind experience.

For singleplayer, you have your trusty Palico friend to help you against monsters. The Palico, much like another hunter, can split aggro for you, heal you, and help deal damage to the monster. I very much liked the Palico not only for this, but because they’re just a very loyal and charming companion that has a lot of cute dialogue and interactions with your hunter. They really made it feel like you were a team with quite a bit of history before the game began. You can also craft gear and weapons for your Palico, which helps them scale up with you as monsters get tougher, and honestly my Palico was absolutely invaluable, even in Multiplayer. I decided to give my Palico a paralysis weapon, which gave me so many openings to attack the monster with, even if it was uncommon, over the playthrough it saved me so many times, and helped me clutch victory. Unfortunately, the Palico isn’t all positives, as if you’re by yourself, you have to rely on the Palico to get you out of specific status ailments. Stun and sleep are the two big ones that you really need your Palico to get you out of. Stun and sleep leave you wide open to be killed, but you can ping your Palico to hit you out of these… unfortunately the Palico is not consistent with doing this. Sometimes they’ll be on top of it and hit you every single time, other times they’ll ignore your cry for help and watch as you die. Because of this, relying on your Palico for these situations is incredibly risky, and I personally ensured this never happened because I didn’t trust my luck. Otherwise, the Palico is incredibly useful, especially for a support role. I gave my Palico vigor wasp spray the entire playthrough alongside a status weapon, and they were an invaluable part of my team and strategy, so overall Palico was an awesome and welcome addition to the game, and my team.

Now that I’ve gone over most of the positives, let’s go into some of the negatives.

My largest negative with Monster hunter world is the single-player experience. Now don’t get me wrong here, you can absolutely play and enjoy this game by yourself, and I have tons of admiration and respect for those who can solo the hardest monsters in the game, but to me, this was the epitome of my bad experiences with this game. A lot of the mechanics and design of this game seemed very geared towards multiplayer in a lot of ways, one aspect of it to me that screams this more than any other is stun. Stun is an overly punishing mechanic that, when hit too many times in quick succession by a monster, you lose all control of your hunter as they stand there like a sitting duck to get killed. Now yes, your Palico can hit you out of it like I mentioned, but it’s inconsistent, and while you can run Stun Resist to completely remove the mechanic altogether, I found it incredibly unfair and not fun to deal with. The game tells you that you can get out of stun faster by wiggling the left stick, however this does not impact much as far as how long you’re in stun for. On top of this, monsters with no split aggro can kill you in a matter of seconds, all it takes is a few swipes, and you’re as good as gone. A game like this, positioning and finding openings is crucial for success, but in my experience a lot of this never mattered when I was by myself because the monster would always be on me and I couldn’t do much about it. Now you do have your Palico friend to split the aggro up for you a bit, but I found it to not be enough to feel comfortable or even confident to go in and fight the monster, most of the time I just ran away and hung around waiting for a move I felt I could punish before going in. This, on top of insane hitboxes, stun, and slow recoveries with items and get-ups, ruined any semblance of pacing during battles and often found myself running the clock out on these hunts. Just as well, I failed many quests where I was assured victory just so long as I had enough time to capture the monster because I played too safe since I deemed the risk too high. Again, this is just my personal experience, and I know a lot of people stand by this game as a single-player experience, but for me, I vastly prefer playing in Multiplayer. Single-Player was just incredibly frustrating and unfun and often soiled my enjoyment of the game in sessions where I had to play by myself. I will say, once I had a competent build with the quality of life skills I wanted, Single-Player was less arduous and annoying, but I still didn’t find it nearly as engaging or rewarding as sharing my victories with my friend, or with other randoms after defeating a powerful monster together.

The roll, or more specifically, the lack of i-frames on the roll. I come from a very Fromsoft background, so a lot of my experience with these kinds of games are the likes of Dark Souls. Bloodborne, and Sekiro. While those and Monster Hunter play very differently, they both share one thing in common, and that’s a roll. In Monster Hunter, the roll allows you to reposition and dodge attacks from the monster, however the amount of i-frames it has does not always allow this. Some attacks are so long or have such giant hitboxes, your roll simply cannot dodge it and you will get hit. Just like Stun Resist, you can use skills like Evade Window to increase the amount of i-frames the roll has, and jumping to increase how far it goes. With that said however, the base roll should be good enough to dodge most quick attacks, because if it did, it’d tremendously help with the pacing and flow of fights once again. Now there is a more committal roll option called a “dive” where you run away from the monster, run, then roll, and you will dive. The dive has plenty of i-frames to dodge pretty much any attack, and there’s specific attacks monsters use with the dive in mind I actually really like. Nergigante’s dive-bomb move being a good example of one of these moves. The issue with dive is it takes forever to recover from, and getting your hunter to dive is too finicky for me. If you have your weapon drawn, forget about diving, it will not happen, and I’ve suffered many deaths from not being able to sheathe fast enough to dive, which very much annoyed me. I understand both this and stun are things you can alleviate or outright remove with certain skills, however skills have their own issues.

Decorations being random drops is something I’ll never understand. I’ve recently learned from a good friend of mine, Lemonstrade whom I’ve been talking to about my experience with Monster Hunter World, that previous Monster Hunter games did not have random decorations, but were simply craftable from specific monster parts. Not only would this have helped make more monsters useful to hunt in my playthrough, because I had so many monster parts just collecting dust, but would also allow you to focus in on decorations you really needed. Decorations are what give you those skills I’ve been mentioning in this review a lot. In order to get these decorations, you get them as rewards from pretty much every activity in the game. The big issue is: what decorations you get are entirely random. This to me is flat-out padding and a really bad idea overall. If I was struggling with stun or my roll being a bit too hard to use effectively, I should in theory, be able to grind for the decorations to help with me, not random chance. So instead, I have to grind monsters for potentially hours, and maybe never get what I’m looking for, which will make these issues much more consistent and noticeable throughout my experience, and surprise, they were. It’s especially bad in endgame when you want to optimize builds, or go for a luxurious build that makes the game more forgiving to play, good luck getting the decorations you need in a reasonable amount of time, though you may get lucky. What’s worse is you don’t even need to fight especially hard monsters to get decent gems, you can fight a special event called Greatest Jagras that’s always available now to grind gems, so it’s not even a matter of skill, it’s a matter of time. Gem farming takes too long, less monsters become useful to get their materials for, makes certain issues way harder to solve, and overall doesn’t feel rewarding, it’s all luck. I was able to get all the gems I needed through dedicated work, but I’m hoping the upcoming Monster Hunter game: Wilds fixes this issue and reverts back to the old way Monster Hunter games did it, by allowing you to craft gems you want, not a slot machine.

Last complaint I really have with Monster Hunter World is how jank it felt to play at first. A lot of things in this game did not come very naturally for me, such as sheathing and unsheathing my weapon, which thankfully running auto-sheathes for you. A lot of the animations in Monster Hunter are long and very committal, so you can’t just mash attack and get away with it, or cancel out of it like roll, at least with LongSword this was the case. I often got too greedy and got hit a lot, which led to some frustration, but I began to understand Monster Hunter is a slower-paced game, so playing it slower helps, but that’s not the case with certain quests only giving you 30 minutes or so, which puts the pressure on. Odd hitboxes and strong attacks were the least of my issues when it came to traversing areas, specifically the Ancient forest. Visually, it gets across how nature-focused this game is, but on the other hand, what an absolutely terribly designed area overall, and a nightmare to traverse. This really shouldn’t have been the first area, since later areas don’t suffer this labyrinthian design like Ancient Forest does, but have their own fair share of issues. While the game is called “Monster Hunter” actually hunting The monsters felt like a chore a lot of the time. Having to find footprints and markings, collecting them, gaining research, and then the scout flies tell you where to go. Not only do the Scout Flies sometimes just don’t tell you the right way to go, but it feels very hand-holding at the same time, I’d much prefer finding the monsters on my own without all these extra steps. Of course, you obviously can ignore the Scout Flies and the track-hunting most of the time, but some missions require you do it, and it bogs the game down so much. Much later on, you’ll have to find tracks for some particularly special monsters by revisiting older regions, and only once you fulfill the research requirement can you locate them and fight them to progress the game. Once again this feels like padding, since no other Monster Hunter game does this, so it’s an odd choice World would decide to do it. Though I’ve been informed many times that World is an “outlier” when it comes to Monster Hunter, these criticisms will likely only apply to this entry. A lot of the actual controls for the game felt fine enough, but as I mentioned before, diving was sometimes inconsistent, odd hitboxes, bad roll, stun, the entirety of the Ancient Forest, sheathing, it all felt janky for a game made in 2018. Now I will concede a lot of this stuff I adapted to overtime and got used to it, but initially these things turned me off from the game, but I really wanted to get into this series, and my friend helped me a lot along the way, so I’m very thankful those first handful of hours were easier because of that. I wouldn’t say even World as accessible as it might be for the series, is still quite intimidating and very hard to get a grasp of, but once you do and it clicks, it becomes a very addicting and satisfying experience.

Sieges, more specifically Zorah Magdaros. Every mission involving this oversized lava cake I did not enjoy whatsoever. The scale is quite amazing, and can be quite exhilarating when you first begin one of these giant monster sieges, but you quickly realize just how shallow it is. You use some special weapons like the cannon and the ballista to deal damage, you wait around for an eternity, you get a cutscene, then you do it again until the quest ends. It’s not engaging, it’s mechanically shallow, and it’s unnecessary. I love the idea on paper, but the execution is just so bad, I couldn’t wait for them to be over with, and I never went back to grind these missions either because they were so dull to me. Zorah Magdaros has an excellent introduction at the start of the game and presents tons of interesting questions and ideas about where the plot might go, which unfortunately is rather… mediocre. Gameplay wise? It’s just disappointing.

Last, but certainly not least, The Handler. Now The Handler has a notorious reputation for being annoying and constantly getting into trouble, and yeah I see where people are coming from. To be completely blunt, I did not care about her in the slightest, nor any character in this game. They all feel so shallow with little character besides a few quirks that helps them at least not meld into the same NPC’s, but there’s not enough there for me. With the Handler, she’s certainly annoying, but I don’t hate her as much as others. My issue is, with a character so paramount to you as a hunter, she should have far more caution and experience in the field, but she comes across aloof, and a liability, which is irksome. The game literally gives my hunter the background of being an A-list hunter from the Old world, a seasoned veteran, but then my Handler acts like a complete new blood? That doesn’t add up to me. Missions where you have to follow her are even worse, because her corny dialogue doesn't help her case I’m afraid, on top of gameplay slowing to a crawl so I’ll care about what she’s saying, or her well-being when the character isn’t well-written enough for that to be a possibility. Honestly, most story sequences I did not care for, all I really wanted to do was hunt monsters and become stronger, which is both good and bad. Good because the gameplay is good enough for me to want to get back to it, bad because the story is so boring and inconsequential to me it’s getting in the way of what I truly enjoy. Add unskippable cutscenes and friends not being able to join each other until everyone has seen the cutscene within a mission, and you have the recipe for disaster and a lot of annoyance. I digress, the handler, let me reiterate, I do not hate as much as others, but she is the golden example of one of my big issues this game has, emphasizing boring characters and a boring story I do not care about, I just want to hunt monsters.

Since we’re nearing the end of this review, I’ll quickly go over the music. Monster Hunter World has a surprisingly good soundtrack with plenty of memorable tracks, though it also balances it out with just allowing the nature of the World to speak for itself without music. There wasn’t too many songs that caught my ear while playing, but generally most songs were pretty good! My favorites were: Pride of a Nameless Hunter, Nergigante Theme, and Bazelgeuse Theme.

Monster Hunter World was a monumental, refreshing yet equally frustrating experience that I already look back on quite fondly. As a Multiplayer game? It’s top-notch, and one I’d highly recommend if you can find people to play with, there is nothing quite like that rush of taking down a new monster, or mastering the patterns of older foes. Satisfying gameplay loop with even more satisfying progression, great combat with a bit of jank in level design, mechanics, and hitboxes, a lackluster story with even more lackluster characters, and quite a bit of padding that you’ll either tolerate or dislike. Incredibly immersive monster designs and behaviors, excellent interactions, fantastic environmental interactivity, slow-paced yet fast, methodical and savage in tandem, it’s truly remarkable. I have to say, I loved Monster Hunter World, and cannot wait to dive into other games in the series, like 4U, Rise, and Wilds in the near future! Thank you all for reading this review, this is by far my longest review, and I’m still not done talking about this game! The Iceborne review will be out sometime soon, but I hope this review can tide you all over until then. As I’ve mentioned in other reviews, I'm still going to wrap up FFIV soon, and start Va11-Halla very soon as well. I also just want to say thank you all for the exponential growth lately! You all only continue to inspire and drive me forward with writing these, so please look forward to more as I continue to put more and more into this. Truly, thank you all so much! I’ll see you all in the next review, until next time.

Sekiro is undoubtedly one of Fromsoft's best works, but I often don't see it talked about nearly as much as Bloodborne or Dark Souls. After coming off Elden Ring, I found myself finding it to be a great experience, though overtime the flaws have become more clear to me. I don't think it was until I played Sekiro however that I realized how many steps back Elden Ring took compared to Sekiro.

Sekiro has an incredibly rich setting, filled with disturbing and elegant creatures, the balance struck in environments is top-notch. I can appreciate a lot of Sekiro's melancholic winter feel while also being able to be bright and beautiful in many instances. This delicate balance between the monster and environmental design makes it stand out in the same ways Bloodborne does with an incredibly rich atmosphere complimented by the nature of the world and story. I think Sekiro does a bit better in specific instances like with the giant white snake, that really highlights just how great the environment can look without being compromised by gameplay mechanics. Just as well, Sekiro’s environment provides new gameplay opportunities such as being able to swim underwater, and the option of stealth elevates Sekiro higher since the environment and gameplay mechanics are married perfectly together and don’t fight each other, making for an incredibly immersive and engaging experience.

Environment design is probably some of the best I’ve seen in a game purely from a gameplay perspective as well. Right from the start, Sekiro encourages and rewards using stealth to take out enemies, since you can assassinate them and take them out in one shot while also not alerting other enemies nearby. While you can most definitely play Sekiro like any other Fromsoft game and rush in to fight everyone all at once, it’s how Sekiro balances both playstyles of stealth and aggression that’s particularly amazing. The grappling hook allows you to approach many battles in many different ways, since the environment has plenty of spots you can grapple onto, once again not compromising environment design for gameplay while still working perfectly. You can either take out foes one-by-one, using the grappling hook to stay in their blind spots, as well as bushes and other obstructions to methodically get through a fight unscathed. Or, you can rush in, and use the grappling hook as a quick method to reposition if you get overwhelmed, allowing you to take the high-ground and using your ranged tools to dispose of enemies, or to get the jump on them, or even to get away and heal. I believe this to be one of Sekiro’s strongest assets, since every part of the game maintains this balance between both options, it never neglects what was introduced at the start which is really commendable.

Actual combat in Sekiro is very much focused on parries and breaking your opponent’s stance to get a fatal blow. It’s just like a rhythm game to me, since every enemy has specific parry timings you need to learn to defeat them. Though not every enemy needs to be parried to be disposed of, some enemies will allow you to get away with mashing light attacks, though most enemies will require some skill to beat. Other enemies, such as beasts require less parrying and more damage to their vitality so their stagger bar fills up faster. I think Sekiro’s combat is incredibly unique and satisfying, but definitely the most demanding combat of any Fromsoft game so far for sure, since you really need to have good timing.

Prosthetic Tools are another aspect of combat that adds even more layers to combat. Prosthetic tools are softly required to deal with specific enemies, like the loaded axe to break through shields, the Flame Vent is particularly good with beasts and enemies afraid of light or fire, and the firecrackers allow you to stun more aggressive enemies, and are especially effective against beasts as well. While you can get through the game without using the prosthetic tools much, you are rewarded for experimenting and figuring out what’s weak to what, which adds depth and is just fun to do. While some of them aren’t even somewhat required to deal with enemies, the advantages and variety available to you is impressive, and being able to upgrade them throughout the game is even better. Upgrades can be a bit tedious to grind for, but it allows you to personalize what you want them to do that suits your preferences and playstyle, so it’s very a fantastic inclusion I really loved overall.

On top of Prosthetic Tools, you’ll also be able to upgrade your swordplay as you progress the game. A lot of these skills aren’t even required to finish the game, but provide substantial advantages against enemies which makes it a bit easier on the player. Though there’s one specific skill that’s so strong, it overshadows all the rest once you get it, but until then, it’s really up to your discretion on what you want to specialize in. You can increase how many times you can use your Prosthetic Tools, you can gain new sword techniques, new combo routes, and new techniques that all play back into the idea of wanting to be more stealth oriented, or more aggressive. This duality continuing to persist even among these options really hits home how important it was for the developers to maintain this balance, even among the entirely optional components, which I deeply respect and like a lot.

Combat isn’t just about parrying or using your prosthetic tools though, there’s also some specific moves you can’t simply parry. Sekiro has three specific types of attacks that require you to adapt on the fly, which makes combat much harder, but much more satisfying. Each of these three attacks has a visual cue of a red kanji symbol flashing above the enemy using it, which makes them be reactive to and fair, but you do need to be quick to not be punished. Sweeping attacks need to be jumped over, if you do jump over it, you can jump off the enemy who did it which rewards you with a bit of stagger bar. Thrusting attacks need to be countered by pressing forward and circle, which gives you a lot of stagger bar in return for it. Finally, and very rarely are electrical attacks which require you to jump, parry in mid-air, and then you can reflect the lightning attack back, stunning the enemy for several seconds and also giving you some stagger bar gain. While the electric parry is definitely the hardest, the other two are definitely hard to learn initially, but flow incredibly well with the combat. You could get away not doing them, but it’s strongly encouraged you do, especially since many bosses and enemies later will very commonly use these attacks to keep you on your toes. I personally love these additions because it truly doesn’t make any attack unable to respond to, which makes it very fair on the player. Yes, it’s got strict timing, and you got to practice, but I think the reward and flow for these attacks and counters is brilliantly implemented to not make it feel like a chore or unnatural. Though later bosses will start combining them together, like a sweep into a thrusting strike which can be very hard to adapt to, but it feels like a steady progression of difficulty overall. There’s also some variants of the sweep attacks larger opponents use that you can’t jump off of them for, which makes sense in a realistic sense, but definitely a small shortcoming.

Boss fights in Sekiro are spectacular as well. You’ll be fighting all kinds of beasts and warriors. Boss fights really do boil down to rhythmic timing, dodging, memorization, and immense skill. There’s definitely a few that aren’t very good, especially one particular… demon that goes against everything Sekiro hammers into you throughout the game only to throw all that away for a not so spectacular boss fight that not only is frustratingly long, but again, just doesn’t fit with the combat of Sekiro at all. Besides that one boss however, every boss feels amazing to fight, there’s certainly some difficulty curves throughout the game as well that will really challenge and expect you to master the game. My personal favorite fight in the game though is Guardian Ape, because it’s a combination of a beast you need to attack, but also an opponent you need to parry to defeat them, while also taking advantage of your grappling hook to avoid particularly dangerous moves. I think Guardian Ape balances every mechanic and enemy archetype in the game perfectly and was awesome to fight. Some of my other favorites were Genichiro, Owl (Father), and the final boss. Bosses overall were really good, with two or three stinkers, but that’s par for the course in Fromsoft games, so it’s not a big criticism. While the bosses can get insanely difficult later on, Sekiro tips the scales by allowing you to respawn after you die once, giving you another shot. Had this not been in the game, I’d actually say the difficulty might be the slightest bit over-tuned, but since you do get one more chance after you die, it motivates you to get back up and make a comeback, which I really appreciate.

The actual story of Sekiro is much more involved compared to other Fromsoft games which I really enjoyed as well. Having actual characters driving the plot forward was refreshing, and while none of them are exceptional or anything, they definitely had me a bit invested in the plot and how things were going to conclude. What I really appreciated about Sekiro’s story though was how it took a lot of direct inspiration from Japanese legends and folklore, seeing it all being realized in the setting and story was awesome, and definitely made Sekiro unique and stand-out in all the right ways I’d say. Much like Souls and Bloodborne as well, there’s plenty of interesting lore to read on, and how something as trivial and game-like as respawning is explained in the world and why it occurs, which I really liked.

Graphically stunning as I’ve mentioned before, and the music is also quite great. I actually don’t listen to the OST outside the game much if at all, but while playing Sekiro, I can say I enjoyed it and it only enhanced the experience. I really enjoyed the unique Japanese instrumentation in a lot of the tracks since it really helped emphasize the setting is Japan. While the tracks don’t really stick in my mind much methodically speaking, they are very well done and match the bosses, environments, and story beats well.

Sekiro is truly an amazing experience, and it’s such a shame Elden Ring couldn’t recapture the amazing environmental design of Sekiro, or really the quality of the bosses either. I understand Elden Ring is an open-world game so there has to be certain sacrifices to achieve that, but after I played Sekiro, I was honestly shocked at the difference in quality to me. Not to say Elden Ring is a terrible game or anything, I’m just surprised by Sekiro’s quality really since I neglected it for a long time thinking I wouldn’t like the emphasis on parrying attacks, but boy was I wrong. Sekiro is definitely the hardest and most demanding Fromsoft game I’ve played that is also fair which is a huge achievement. This game is absolutely not for everyone, but absolutely give it a chance if it looks interesting, you will not be disappointed! Thank you all for reading my review. I've been trying to do one review a week, so I hope I can keep the momentum up from here. I’m very close to finishing Final Fantasy IV, so please look forward to that review soon as well! Got some other reviews in the works as well, so I hope you all enjoy reading them as they come. See you all in the next one!

Super Mario World is an absolute classic, and is my favorite 2D Mario game due to it being one of my most beloved childhood games. I would always come home from school to play Super Mario World, the bright, cheerful aesthetic and music combined with the addictive gameplay always made me happy and left an impact on me to this day of being very much partial to the SNES, and sprite-based games. Eventually I would branch out and start playing Super Mario World Romhacks way back in the early 2000's as a kid. Romhacks like Kaizo Mario really opened my eyes to how much potential the mechanics of this game had, and Brutal Mario being my personal favorite, showcased just how customizable and adaptive platformers could actually be, it was an incredible experience. This is one of those games I play every other year, so I like to think I have a pretty deep understanding of this game. Today, I'd like to point my critical eye though and see just how good or bad Super Mario World really is.

First thing I think makes Super Mario World incredible is the World Map. Right from the first world, Super Mario World makes it clear that there isn't always one way to go when progressing. You start the game with a fork in the road, the path on the right clearly indicates it'll lead to the first castle, as well as teasing a few levels ahead, such as the first water level which I really enjoy. On the left however, it's a path that leads somewhere we cannot see yet, which adds mystery and curiosity on where exactly it will lead. Progression versus curiosity is a strong opener since either way, both choices are correct and will reward the player regardless. Curious players who decide to take the left path will make their way to the Yellow Switch Palace which will make every level after activating it that much easier by providing blocks that will prevent you from dying to pits or make certain sections easier, and also give you additional super mushrooms in the levels. Going this path also allows you to see the next upcoming World, which not only could excite the player for the future, but also present a great sense of scale in that the first world you're on is just a small island compared to the infinite possibilities ahead of you once you leave it. Even if a player decides to not take the left path, they're rewarded with faster progression which will allow them to leave the first world faster, allowing them to take in that sense of scale still just by comparing how much bigger and open the next world is compared to the island you were just on.

This stays true for the remainder of the game, as every World after this always has multiple paths that can lead to shortcuts, Switch Palaces, hidden levels, and of course, the Star Road. One thing I love about Super Mario World though is how they present striking landmarks to inform you that there might be an alternate route from the one you're taking. Take the pipe in the upper left of Vanilla Dome as an example. The pipe itself seems completely unreachable and potentially just a decoration, but its contrasting coloration and what pipes represent in Mario will make the player notice it and wonder where it'll go. Just as well, Donut Plains does something similar with more pipes and even a Boo House that seems impossible to reach, but since Donut Plains establishes Boo Houses as levels, it becomes immediately apparent to the player that they probably can reach it and be able to play it. However, even with these visual cues, it could be far too vague which levels lead where which could be very frustrating and demoralizing. Thankfully, this is not the case, as levels with multiple exits are marked with a red dot rather than a yellow dot, which is an incredibly important distinction that they establish early with Yoshi Island levels all being yellow dots and the World itself being incredibly linear. Even if you didn’t know what the red dots represented, their presentation alone should indicate some sort of difference that would be easy to distinguish with a bit of thought..

One of my favorite additions to Super Mario World though is The Star Road. Star Road is a secret World that has special teleports to other worlds you can find. Star Road also has five unique levels of its own that upon finding the secret exits for, will connect to another different teleporter. These teleporters can be used anytime, though some of them will lead to dead-ends, but give you a substantial clue to what levels have secret exits in order to unlock them which is a nice consolation and encourages replaying and thoroughly exploring more levels. However, one specific teleporter will actually lead you straight to Bowser’s Castle with the path unlocked for you, allowing you to finish Super Mario World in record time. Star Road by all means is the definitive evolution of Warp Zones from previous Mario games, though instead of just being some pipes, or a world select, they took the time and care to not only make it visually striking, but also give it unique levels that, while short, are very fun to play and find the secret exits to. It doesn’t end there for Star Road however, as by completing every level’s secret exit, you will gain access to a secret sixth teleporter which will lead you into the “Special Zone”. The Special Zone is the final challenge of Super Mario World, as the eight levels here are tremendously more difficult than any other level, even harder than Bowser’s Castle. While these levels are very hidden, I love their inclusion because the levels themselves justify putting so much time into this game, from the amount of effort it takes to unlock, to gaining the mastery of the game itself to overcome these levels. While it’s a staple now to have this sort of “secret final world” in Mario games, I feel like the requirement is less cumbersome from future incarnations, such as New Super Mario Bros. Wii’s 9th World which requires grabbing every star coin in a given world to unlock the correlated level. While it does serve the same purposes of putting in time and mastering the game, it also requires 100%’ing the whole game, whereas Special Zone only requires you find it to play it, which I vastly prefer. Also, I feel as though the final reward for completing the Special Zone is so much more interesting since it could allow someone to play the entire game again and get so much out of it. I personally don’t, but it’s enough to make it feel meaningful and worth doing, which I very much love.

I haven’t even gone into gameplay yet, Super Mario World’s gameplay is amazing. Mario controls like an absolute dream, combined with the SNES graphics, this game not only plays perfectly, but looks fantastic. Every innovation from Super Mario Bros. 3 is here, as well as some new inclusions like Yoshi, the Cape Feather, and the spin jump. Yoshi brings a lot of unexpected depth to Super Mario World, as Yoshi can eat enemies and spit out shells. Koopa shells of different colors give Yoshi different abilities and attributes, such as shooting fireballs, gaining a stomp, or even wings. Yoshi provides you with an extra hit, but he’ll run away, forcing you to chase after him and remounting him to stop. A lot of the time he’ll run into a pit and that’ll be the end of it, but it does require some skill to get him back if you lose him, which is a good negative to have since Yoshi provides you with so much utility You can use Yoshi to gain a lot of extra height on a jump if you think you can’t make it, and is even used for a secret exit or two which rewards the player for learning it. There’s even some niche mechanics utilized as well, like Yoshi being able to eat objects through walls which is also used for a secret exit, which is really clever and makes use of the programming very well. Yoshi cannot enter castles or boo houses, or any level with an anti-Yoshi sign at the start via a cutscene, which I like because becoming too reliant on Yoshi can make this game even easier than it already is. There’s even different colored Yoshi’s that will provide the same ability no matter what shell is eaten, but can only be found in Star World usually, giving Star World even more benefits. Very rarely however, you can find a pair of magic wings in question blocks that you can grab as Yoshi to turn him into a Blue Yoshi. Blue Yoshi is arguably the best one since any shell consumed gives him wings, and wings pretty much allow you to skip levels with ease, as well as find secrets in the skies.

Speaking of wings, the cape feather is the only new power-up in Super Mario World, and is only one of four in the entire game, the others being the Super Mushroom, Fire Flower, and Invincibility Star. It’s definitely arguable Super Mario 3 had the better selection of power-ups, but the cape feather has so many applications, I think the depth it brings to the table is just about equal to Mario 3’s power-ups. You can spin with your cape to deal with pretty much any enemy with ease, but cannot reflect projectiles like it can in Smash Bros. The cape also allows you to fall slower than normal, providing much more control on where you land, and being able to make longer jumps. There is one capability however I think trivializes the entire game a bit too much, and that's flying. In Super Mario Bros. 3, the Super Leaf granted flight upon filling your P-meter and you’d be able to fly for a little bit before you stopped and would float back down. The only time the Super Leaf could fly through an entire level was if you had a “P-Wing” which made your P-meter full at all times for an entire level, essentially letting you fly over it without any issues. The caveat was once you used the P-wing for one level, the effect would go away, reducing it back to just a super leaf in the next level. In Super Mario World, this isn’t the case, with enough practice, the Cape Feather’s ability to fly is endless. You can fly over any level without a ceiling with very little effort, as long as you had a cape feather. It makes so many levels feel so meaningless when you can just fly over everything, it becomes especially bad as a crutch if a level is too hard or feels unfair, you can simply grab a cape feather, practice a bit, and skip the level. That is until you reach a boo house, castle, or most of Vanilla Dome since these levels have ceilings that pretty much disable the ability to fly over them, which is great. Had every level allowed you to skip it by flying, Super Mario world could feel really meaningless and boring, but I think they strike the balance really well here having enough levels that prevent you from doing that. There’s also levels that won’t scroll up for you while flying, which makes the visual cue for timing your flying harder, but unfortunately doesn’t stop you entirely from doing it, but makes it a bit harder which I can appreciate. Overall, the cape is certainly flawed a bit, but I think the amount of mechanical depth it has that is really pushed in Romhacks is incredible, and I think in the original game, it’s a bit over-tuned, but not fully compromising, definitely the largest flaw in the game. Though I will say, mastering the cape is incredibly satisfying, and I quite like the idea of having to get good with it compared to the Super Leaf in Mario 3, though even the Super Leaf has its difficulty curve with utilizing the tail swipe effectively since it’s so small.

The last addition Super Mario World added was the Spin Jump. Spin jumping allows you to jump onto dangerous hazards and enemies by bouncing off them rather than dying, you can also destroy yellow bricks underneath you if you’re big Mario. Spin jumping to me was an amazing idea because it now allows you to jump on enemies like spinies without having to break all of your momentum to slow down and jump over them like hurdles. It helps level pacing, and adds much needed variety to how you tackle obstacles in this game which I think makes this game stand out a bit more. Interestingly, spin jumping on an enemy you can normally jump on crushes them, but you immediately land afterward, you aren’t able to jump off them to gain extra height and momentum, so the spin jump rewards you especially for using it on the correct enemies as well, which helps the balance of both jumps being consistently useful in different scenarios. Spin jumping also has less jump height which is another interesting difference. On obstacles such as the buzz saws, Mario can continuously jump on them with the spin jump, but it requires finesse as well, as you need to keep readjusting to the moving object in question to keep bouncing on it, but spin jumping onto something usually pushes Mario around some, so you really have to make minor corrections every time you bounce off to ensure you don’t die or mess-up, once again, it’s just a minor detail that makes spin jumping incredibly fun, but also requires effort to get good with, it’s not always the best universal option, but when it is the solution, it’s not so simple that you can relax or be neglectful, you really got to pay attention. Yoshi’s boots have the same attributes as the spin jump as well, though the bouncing effect seems a bit more severe, making it a bit harder with Yoshi specifically.

A lot of the new enemies in Super Mario World are very iconic, so much so they’ve been staples in the series ever since. Though their popularity is one thing, what they bring to the table for the game itself is more interesting. Charging Chucks to me are the most interesting new enemy introduced as they have many different variants that make each encounter with one interesting. From triplicating themselves, to throwing different sports balls at you, some of them have unique one-time attributes like the whistling Charging Chuck underwater that wakes up the sleeping Rip Van Fish. You have the underutilized Banzai Bill that really demonstrates the SNES’s capabilities, but also just the potential extent to the size of enemies. You have a lot of very popular enemy debuts here as well like Fuzzy, Wiggler, Magikoopa, and Monty mole, each with their own unique mechanics like Fuzzy following lines, Wiggler getting mad when you jump on it, Magikoopa being able to turn blocks into something different, and monty mole that jumps out of the ground and walls to surprise you. A lot of the level design becomes so much better having these enemies present since it can completely change how you approach a level, and a lot of enemies will have a higher priority to dispose of, which gives levels more depth. Overall, there isn’t a single new inclusion in Super Mario World as far as enemies that feel poorly integrated, or just unbalanced, they’re all great and fun to interact with.

A lot of the music in Super Mario World is awesome, but the level theme is actually always the same song, just with different instrumentation and tempo. It’s a lot like Luigi’s Mansion in that regard actually, and I don’t think it’s a negative. While it is the same song every level, the vibe always changes to fit the theme of the level it’s played in, so it makes it come off very differently every time, and because it’s done so well, it doesn’t feel repetitive, uninspired, or bad, it works really well. Without that though, the world themes are all amazingly well done that really enhances them a lot. I specifically really love Vanilla Dome, Forest of Illusion, and Valley of Bowser the most.

There’s really not much left to say really. While I didn’t go into too much of the staple gameplay of Super Mario World, that’s because at its core, it’s still Mario. I much prefer talking about what the game added to the formula that made it (for the most part) a better, more refined experience. While not everything is to its benefit, I think Super Mario World is an utterly amazing game worth playing. A lot of people I know write off this game in favor of Super Mario Bros. 3 which is such a shame because I think a lot of what Mario 3 introduced was improved substantially here, like the World Map and the amount of different routing choices you have to explore and complete the game. While I don’t think the power-ups are better, I do appreciate the attempt to make a power-up with a skill curve only for the reward to be far too good for the game’s own good. Yoshi was a phenomenal addition, and spin-jumping helped Super Mario world increase the enemy variety a lot more without having to compromise the pacing of levels too much which was another plus. Overall, I think if you’re looking for a game to get into Mario with, I’d easily recommend this one because it’s not too difficult of a game, certainly easier than any previous Mario game, but the charm is unmatched, and it’s just an incredibly fun game with a whimsical and really bright aesthetic. It makes you wanna keep playing it, and can put you in a good mood if you’re feeling down, I know it has for me many times over the years.

Thank you all for reading! It’s been close to three months since I’ve written any reviews. I’ve definitely been in a slump as far as video games go, and I’ve definitely been busier than before, but I’m definitely getting back into things by writing this review. I have since restarted Final Fantasy IV in hopes of finishing it this time. I've also been gearing up to play some other games like VA-11 Hall-A, so please look forward to those reviews and more this year. I also just want to say thank you everyone for the support lately, I’ve broken 60 followers and over 400 combined likes on my reviews, so thank you all so much for that. I’ll try not to fall into another slump this year, but do forgive me if things get a bit slow here and there. Thank you all for reading, I’ll see you in the next review!

This isn't gonna be a long review since there's not much to talk about, but I would like to share my thoughts on Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising.

Granblue Fantasy is a series I've been meaning to get into for awhile, as a lot of my friends play the original game and always recommend it to me. This was the perfect game to bridge the gap and introduce me to Granblue, and I gotta say, it's very fun. Great character designs, fun world, fantastic music, pretty much everything you need to make a great first impression. I was actually pulled in by this game particularly by my friend showing me Siegfried. I immensely enjoy his design and playstyle, so that alone sold me on this game.

Twenty-five hours later, I've got a pretty cemented outlook on the game now, so let's get into it. This is by far one of the best-looking fighting games I've seen in a very long time, definitely Arc Systems best looking game, very vibrant art style that's incredibly expressive, whimsical, and detailed. Character designs are downright amazing, really I didn't find any design to be too silly or ridiculous, it's all rather well-grounded that really lets you enjoy and connect with the characters, especially the ones you will play as. Fantastic size of a roster, great stages, tons of extra modes to break up the experience, a lot of things you can work to achieve as well besides ranked, which I really liked. Rollback is essential for fighting games, so seeing it here is good, day one crossplay is another plus since it allowed me to play with my PC friends which I'm very thankful for.

Now for the not so good parts about this game. One thing I want to immediately mention is the sheer simplicity of the game itself. Granblue as a fighting game is incredibly beginner friendly, which I appreciate, however I think this focus on simplicity hurts the game in the long run. For starters, everyone does a ton of damage in this game. Most rounds will go for maybe 40-50 seconds, which I actually like how fast-paced it is. What I don't like is the amount of mistakes you can make before losing. If you make two or three mistakes? You're most likely dead without even a shred of a chance at a comeback, snowballing in this game is unreal. Because of this, this game seems to greatly reward aggression more than defensive play, especially due to how many moves are plus on blocks. For those who don't know, being plus on block essentially means when you attack someone who is blocking, if it's plus you basically get to attack again without much fear of being punished for it. So many moves are plus or minus in this game, it's really in your best favor to play as aggressively as possible. This sort of leads to a lot of games just being who can press the button faster than the other, and depending on who wins, you're either stuck blocking for a good amount of time, or wailing on your opponent without really needing to think. A lot of fighting games boil down to this though, but I think the balance of offense and defense is off here. Let me say I'm not a pro player, nor am I the most experienced fighting game player, so I may be completely off the mark here, but this game felt like it rewards aggression way more than anything else and feels off-balance a bit.

As far as balancing goes, it's actually not too bad. A lot of people complain about specific characters, which is a given, but the game hasn't been out long enough I think yet for people to figure out certain match-ups. I personally do think some characters need to be tuned a bit, but otherwise every character feels viable and incredibly fun to play. They're also all very distinct from each other in personality and playstyle, though there's a lot of overlap in move sets which sorta waters them down a bit, but not bad enough where picking a new character feels unwarranted or boring.

Honestly? Not a bad fighting game by any means. I definitely prefer others to it, but this is just a solid game. I'm currently A rank in ranked mode, but I mostly just enjoy playing it with friends. Definitely not a game I'd grind or put a ton of time into, but it's definitely a fun choice if you're looking for something flashy. I play Siegfried, Charlotta, and Yuel for reference, all characters are incredibly good and very good at mashing buttons. I wanted to mention that in-case my outlook on the game is skewed due to my preference in character playstyles, so I invite any to give your opinion on this game, and if you agree or disagree with me or not. With that, thank you all for reading this review, I've been putting off God-Hand for about three weeks now, so I'm gonna get to it and finish that up, so please look forward to that. Until next time!

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'd literally rather play Sticker Star. Does this really constitute as a game? 'Cause if it does, we've bridged the argument gap about what a game can and can't be. Visual Novels are not games? Nah, you haven't played Drowning in Problems yet (not that I thought VN's weren't games, they certainly are). You think a certain game is bad? Compare it to this, does the game in question do literally anything more than this game does? If it does, then congratulations, that game is now better all thanks to Drowning in Problems. The only problem I'm drowning in is this being classified as a "game".

There is literally no gameplay outside of clicking, no music, nothing,. Just text that is so arbitrary and trying to convey some semblance of a narrative, or reflection of humanity, or even attempt a self-reflection unto oneself is laughable at best, and an outright insult at worst. What offends me most is how the game wastes your time so brazenly, it doesn't even try to hide it, as if to reinforce whatever this "game" is trying to say. It becomes hilarious then that by doing so, the message is lost on me, and I felt like I lost valuable time of my life I could be doing something else I enjoy. If that's the point of the game, at least make it interesting or endearing in some fashion, this is just pure laziness and utterly soulless, nothing of value to be gained, everything to be lost.

You might make the argument that some games like point and click adventures, as well as visual novels I mentioned earlier, or something like cookie clicker could fall under the same category as this game. With no "real" gameplay as I described it. The main difference to me is that those games have other contributing factors to make the gameplay significant in some manner, such as visual novels allowing you to make choices. Point and click adventure games also have this, player agency, consequences, rewards, branching paths, and branching story. Even Cookie Clicker for just being a "clicking" game has a lot more going on than you expect compared to Drowning in Problems. I want to make my perspective crystal clear when I make a statement like "this shouldn't be considered a game". Because I genuinely believe that, but I'd be more than happy to delve deeper into the topic should someone ask me. Regardless, I do not consider this to be a game.

Thank you all for reading! Next review, something of far more substance and positivity! Until next time.

Katana Zero is a game I’ve been meaning to play ever since it got released, I just never got around to it until now. Two and a half playthroughs later, I have experienced almost everything the game offers in record time. Despite the short length, Katana Zero is a quality experience with plenty to talk about.

Katana Zero’s gameplay is simplistic, yet its demand for you to master it is what gives it rich depth and addictive replayability combined with its short length. You can kill enemies, toss objects, and reflect bullets, you also can slow down time for more precision, and dodge rolls with invincibility frames to avoid hazards, and roll through enemies. It might seem like a lot when I list it, but really all of it ties together nicely for a smooth learning experience I enjoyed. Katana Zero is about trial and error throughout a section, with plenty of checkpoints and open-ended design which allows players to tackle obstacles in their own ways, complementing its short length and strong replayability nicely. I found solving each room satisfying, and every mechanic I could utilize felt impactful and necessary due to how simple it all is in practice. Slowing down time helps alleviate tighter timings that require more skill like reflecting bullets, or more generous opportunities to dodge but is never required but a single time in the game, which I really liked. Reflecting bullets might be the most demanding mechanic right from the start, but slowing down time very much helps with learning the timing, audio cues are especially important and well implemented into this game which is another plus. I never found the game too demanding or too fast-paced for me to keep up with what it asked me to do, and the variety of gameplay mix-ups present is impressive and kept me engaged the entire time.

Katana Zero’s setting and history is also very fascinating. It’s very much a metropolis setting with the right amount of sci-fi, dark humor, and history behind it that makes it feel very realized and immersive to experience. Every locale struck all the right notes that embodied the setting without ever feeling out of place until the end, however that drastic shift in setting is justified by the story and how it plays out, so it never felt shoehorned in or out of place at all. Combined with the incredible synth-wave style of music Katana Zero presents, it creates this beautiful atmosphere that elevates the metropolis setting, but creates an impression of something being beyond the curtain you can only see at that given moment, giving both the music and the setting further depth that makes it imprint itself upon your mind that much more. It’s also just incredibly complementing to the slow strategic nature of the game, and/or the incredibly fast-paced decision making and vitriol on display, it’s truly universal in its effectiveness.

Narratively, Katana Zero does not disappoint either. It’s full of twists and turns, shocking revelations, impactful decision making, and enough variation for me to say the agency of the player’s choices feels important. While I can’t say with utmost certainty how impactful every dialogue option is, I don’t think it really matters since the writing of the characters you interact with, as well as the one you play as are incredible and consistent. While I do think the emphasis of cursing and everyone just being unhinged could turn a lot of people off, or just become grating, it all serves the tone the game is going for, so I never minded it or batted an eye at it really. What I will especially praise however is the psychological elements this game presents, they’re incredibly surreal and compelling, it was by far my favorite aspect of the game, and thought they did way more with it than I expected. There’s one specific instance that absolutely floored me, and for that reason alone, Katana Zero is very much worth experiencing.

While I have done nothing but praise Katana Zero so far, let’s get into the negatives, particularly the one negative I did have with the game, which is Hard Mode. Now since Hard Mode is entirely optional and doesn’t unlock anything but an achievement, it seems arbitrary to complain about, however if I were to neglect something in the game I thought was flawed, that would be negligent of me as a reviewer I think, so let’s go over it. Hard Mode as the name implies is a harder variation of the main story without cutscenes and much harder enemy placements. To me, a lot of Hard Mode boiled down to simply increasing the difficulty artificially by increasing the number of enemies in a given room to create a challenge. While I do believe many rooms have smart enemy placement that flows incredibly well and is beyond satisfying to figure out, most of the time it felt bloated and unfair to the point of pure frustration. Hard Mode has its perks, such as new enemy types that change how you approach rooms, and I’m sad to see these enemies not implemented in normal mode, since it would’ve helped the small pool of enemies you’re always fighting and made everything just a bit more dynamic. Instead, these new enemies are shoved in with tons of older enemies which dilutes their impact overall to me, even though mechanically they are unique and present specific restrictions I really liked. Overall, Hard Mode was a disappointment, though again, it being entirely optional does not taint my overall outlook on the game at all, it’s merely a blemish I wanted to talk about.

This is definitely on the shorter end of my reviews, but really I don’t have too much more to say. Katana Zero is short and simple but was a very fun and worthwhile experience I can’t wait to see more of in the future. Katana Zero has superb presentation with the pixel art, setting, and music accompanied by gameplay that you can play at your own pace, whether that be fast or slow for the most part. Amazing potential with the story, psychological aspects are done exceptionally well and really make the narrative that much better. Fantastic variation in gameplay, good humor, and is very consistent. My only issue with the game is Hard Mode, but it's optionality makes it easily excusable. Four stars may seem low for all my praise, but I will say I personally don’t feel I can rate it higher for the simple fact that I didn’t always find it so fun and high quality while playing, but it’s definitely there, and I recognize that. Excited to see where it goes from here all the same. Thank you all for reading my review, next up will be God Hand, thanks to a “secret Santa” event, but I’ll go more into that in the next review. Until next time!

Super Mario RPG is an absolutely essential video game for Mario. It was the starting point of Mario's RPG adventures that would later split into two different RPG series that borrowed many concepts and creativity the original offered, those being Paper Mario, and the Mario & Luigi series. While these two series have their own unique concepts, mechanics, and art styles, at their core they both used Mario RPG as a foundation. It is rather unfortunate then that Mario RPG was left behind in favor of the other two series because Square left Nintendo, but also because Mario RPG still somehow sets itself apart drastically even to this day. Mario RPGs currently aren't in the best position, Mario & Luigi has since ended since AlphaDream's bankruptcy. and Paper Mario being an absolute shell of its former self, it seemed like Mario RPGs were doomed to losing relevancy and positive reception with fans. When the remake was announced, I was unbelievably excited at the prospect that perhaps this was what the Mario RPG space needed, a reminder to both players and developers that there still exists a large fanbase of passionate and dedicated players for these games. Perhaps the success of this game would give Mario RPGs the turnaround it needed to succeed again, but if the game isn't any good, then Mario RPGs as we once knew them may be lost forever. So, was Super Mario RPG's Remake any good?

Super Mario RPG's remake is the most faithful remake I think I've encountered in a very long time. Almost no dialogue was altered from the original, with the exception of some awkward translations and some name changes, everything else was exactly as it was from the original release. This includes a lack of censorship as well, which surprised me. They kept a lot of dialogue and concepts here that I expected to not be included, but I am so glad they did because all of it culminates into what Mario RPG is, and without it, it'd feel just a bit less like how it should.

There's plenty of changes and new additions in this remake as well that are a rather mixed bag for me. Firstly, and most importantly are the changes to timed hits, the remake gives you indications on when to time your attacks, and when to time your guarding. Having an indication to know what the perfect timing is allows players to learn it much more consistently which feels more rewarding overall rather than guessing like in the original. Timed hits and guarding also come in two forms, early inputs, and perfect inputs. An early input like the original will give you more damage and blocking, but not fully, in the Remake this is showcased by the font of the damage that pops up on the screen which is a useful visual aid so players can tune their timings further. A perfectly timed attack or guard have substantial rewards in the remake especially, a perfectly timed attack will allow you to deal smaller splash damage to every other enemy you didn't target in battle, which speeds fights up tremendously. Perfect guarding negates any and all damage you would've taken from the attack, which encourages you to learn the timings of every attack an enemy can use on you which feels really satisfying to master. This new and improved timing system ties into two new mechanics in the Remake which further rewards your mastery of them, chains, and your special meter. Chains is a number that increases the more timed hits you do correctly in a row, the first four or five in a chain will actually buff your stats, which is already a strong incentive to go for, but the chain actually never stops counting your streak. I never found out if there was a limit or not, but my personal best record was seventy-one times. I enjoy that it keeps track of it for so long because it can add a lot of personal challenge to try and hit one hundred which gives the game a small minigame almost within combat to go for which is really fun and can help break up the monotony of random battles if you're feeling a bit burnt out, which is a welcome addition. The special meter ties into timed hits because every correct timed hit will fill up the gauge slightly, when it's filled to 100% you can utilize a "triple attack" where all three of your current party members will do an attack together to deal some really good damage. All of the animations are charming and provide a few unique advantages not found in the original. I actually found them pretty charming and cute, so I liked this addition. Really all of the new additions for combat in the remake are nice because it all ties into the mechanic of timed hits that doesn't make it feel complicated to learn, it's also not as busy as it might look at first glance, which is really important because Super Mario RPG is very beginner friendly for an RPG. This is an easy recommendation for someone who wants to get into the genre.

Unfortunately, while all these new additions do enrich the combat, the side-effect is the absolute downgrade in difficulty. Super Mario RPG was never considered a difficult game, but to make the game even easier can turn a lot of players off if there's no challenge, because then mastering timed hits and all these new additions seems pointless if nothing can stand up to it. Surprise, nothing can, the game is still very much balanced with the original in mind, so a lot of these buffs and the triple moves just decimate everything in their path without any issue whatsoever. I mentioned this in my Super Mario Wonder review, but I do not expect Mario RPG to be difficult, rather I expect the game to at least gradually make me master the mechanics presented to face the ever more powerful and capable enemies and bosses as I progress. That natural progression of the player's skill and game's difficulty is smeared due to the new mechanics in this remake that dulls down the experience a lot, and mastery of timed hits and blocking, while emphasized and rewarded far more than the original, do not matter when said reward one-shots everything. The reward should be justified through the difficulty the game is presenting, but since this game is incredibly easy, those rewards in turn don't feel as necessary or substantial either.

Now, difficulty is incredibly hard to pin down per individual, so obviously someone may have a very difficult time with this game compared to myself. But even in the original, I would get my ass handed to me if I wasn't at least a tad considerate of the capabilities enemies and bosses had against me. That's really my big issue, nothing really poses a threat in this game like the original. You could argue that later in the original, you can damn near one-shot everything anyway, so why am I making this a big deal? Well, there's one extremely big difference I haven't mentioned yet, which is the enemy magic attacks. In the original, every magic attack could not be blocked, meaning you were taking full damage from them every time, along with any status effects those attacks had. In the Remake, most magic attacks enemies cast can be blocked, which I think was a nice change overall, but definitely made the game easier still. There are some magic that still cannot be blocked however, which I think was a good idea to try and keep some stake in fights, but I think they were too broad and selective about which attacks can and can't be blocked, and wished it was more even rather than being able to block most of them. I was overjoyed to be proven wrong with one extremely specific fight I won't spoil, but it was the highlight of the game for me because it rewarded me for mastering my timings and utilizing every single advantage I could possibly get to win, it made all the mechanics and new mechanics feel justified with the extremely challenging nature of that battle, which made it all the more satisfying and fun. If you can just breeze through everything like a picnic, nothing feels as necessary or fun as it should or could be, and that's my biggest problem with this remake.

Graphically, the game is once again amazingly faithful, but does not let this new technological leap go to waste by any means. Every area has backgrounds now that really makes the areas come to life so much more and makes it feel much larger than what you're capable of exploring, which I loved. Every area had an amazing glow-up, and nothing looked off or changed at all, it's honestly impressive how well they nailed the area's vibes while giving them a new coat of paint for them to really shine to their fullest potential. The new remixed music is a mixed bag, some tracks have transcended their originals by a mile, others definitely don't feel as charming or accurate to the originals did. I will concede though that most tracks people know about are done perfectly, they still have their iconic instrumentation and sound, while being upgraded with more depth to make them somehow sound more complete than they already did, which is an achievement. If you don't like the new renditions of the songs, you can actually switch to the original soundtrack in-game, which really shows me how much the devs respected the original, and the fans of the original to even have that option. I very much respect them for that, but I insisted on keeping the new tracks on because I wanted to try and have as new of an experience as possible while playing this remaster, and that was definitely fulfilled in a sense by doing that.

The new cutscenes and boss introductions are phenomenal and really give the game more personality, as well as the bosses. The minigames in the Remake have been altered a bit to throw you a few curveballs for veterans, and for new players, a good sense of difficulty progression. All of the optional content is still here, tons of secrets to find, They give you a specific accessory earlier to help find the hidden treasures in the world much easier, there's a plethora of additional items the game gives you. They updated the inventory system, to where rather than having limited space, you can only hold so many of one item. I like this change, but also don't like it because now the small decision making of what items are essential to you, and which ones aren't is no longer present, you just grab every item you see without worrying about it, and any extras you get go to your storage for safe-keeping. While this helps minimize waste, the player isn't forced to make a tough decision on what item they deem more valuable at that given time anymore, which is a shame, because I personally really enjoyed that aspect of the original, it also wasn't as cumbersome as a game like Earthbound, which made it more bearable as well. You can switch out your party members now mid fight, which makes the game even easier, but I actually like this change because games like Final Fantasy VI already allowed you to do this if you wiped. Unlike Final Fantasy VI however, you can also swap out party members if they have a status that keeps them from fighting for a while, which is another mixed bag. For one, I actually like the change because it no longer kills momentum of the battle to just have one ally not be able to do anything for four turns, but it also doesn't punish the player nearly as hard for not being prepared that something like this could happen. You just switch out your party member and you're good to go. It also just makes specific status nullifying items lose their value later in the game when you can just switch out, though to be fair, status nullifying items got outshined in the original as well in favor of better accessories, and obviously if you swap your party member out for someone else and they suffer the same status effect, it's not even an issue at that point because the fact stands they weren't prepared for it. Platforming sections and other puzzles in this game that were harrowing in the original are still difficult here just due to the isometric perspective of the camera, though I wish they polished it a bit more because some sections were still a nightmare to progress through in this remake.

Super Mario RPG Remake was a fantastic remake of the beloved SNES RPG for me. It definitely has some problems and downgrades as I mentioned, but it's not like the original was perfect either. This is a very solid remake, and I think a lot of the changes could be argued for the betterment of the game, but some of them I wasn't the biggest fan of. It's a super solid remake that respects the original and the fans, and does an immaculate job remastering the graphics and music for the most part that makes it feel familiar, but also new enough to warrant playing. I still prefer the original, although I'd actually recommend this version to anyone who wants to get into RPG's, hell I'd recommend it anyway just because it did a really great job, and I think a lot of the new content I didn't go over to prevent spoiling more than justifying anyone to go out and give it a try, even if you played and loved the original. Thank you all for reading my review of the Super Mario RPG Remake! I'm not sure what games I'll be getting to next since there aren't any new releases for awhile that I'm interested in, so I guess we'll have to wait and see. Thank you all again for reading!

Where's everyone going? Bingo? Resident Evil 4 is heralded as an absolutely pivotal game not only for its own franchise, but for Video Games period. Many games such as Dead Space take direct inspiration from Resident Evil 4, such as the third-person perspective, and over-the-shoulder camera style that Resident Evil 4 popularized. But is Resident Evil 4 actually a good game? Did it live up to the expectations for its franchise and be innovative for video games in general? Well, you already know the answer is yes, so let’s get right into it.

One thing I immediately want to talk about is the controls. Resident Evil 4, much like Metroid Prime, utilizes tank controls. One stick moves you in all directions, while the other stick moves the camera angle. Since the camera is always behind Leon’s shoulder it can be very difficult to adjust to these controls. In order to fire your gun, you hold down the tight trigger, Leon cannot move while aiming with his gun, so positioning is incredibly important in Resident Evil 4, while enemies aren’t too aggressive in this game, they can easily outnumber and surround you, so it’s imperative you’re not staying still too long and create distance before aiming. Leon also has natural sway with the guns he aims with, which adds a dash of realism as well as difficulty to fire at things well, which adds pressure for the player to land their shots which I find very rewarding. Most games just give you surgical precision with firearms, but Resident Evil 4 makes you work for that accuracy, which is heavily rewarded for mastering through other facets of the game I’ll go over in a bit. You can also use your knife by holding down the L button, the range of the knife is rather poor, but is very useful for busting open crates and barrels to find goodies, and can be extremely useful to take out enemies without using bullets, so it’s a great alternative that feels incredibly useful throughout the entire game because it doesn’t eat up resources to use. But much like Leon’s swaying, mastering the knife and gaining confidence to use it more is only beneficial and really fun. While the tank controls are… a little rough, I think they work very well in tandem with the resource management, difficulty, and stress of fighting enemies and creating space, which the knife can also help you do if you get too surrounded in a last-ditch effort.

Speaking of resource management, Resident Evil 4’s resource management is absolutely incredible. Since your inventory space is very limited, it’s incredibly important for the player to always make decisions on what sorts of things they want to carry on them. Weapons and ammo are always important since they’re the most ideal way to dispose of enemies and interact with things out of reach of your knife, but sometimes you might find yourself with too much ammo. This presents an interesting conundrum where the player might want the immediate benefits of another item in exchange for throwing away some ammo, but as ammo is incredibly limited, it’s incredibly scary to throw away ammo so easily, so it really makes you weigh your options carefully for your success. Add onto the fact some weapons have attachments that make them better in exchange for more inventory space just makes these decisions harder, but thankfully every single attachment for weapons in this game is completely optional, so you can use them for awhile and then sell them later on when you’ve become really comfortable with a specific weapon. While their advantages are certainly substantial, if you really need the extra space, you’re not at an extreme disadvantage for never buying them or selling them later on. You’ll also find healing items and grenades. Healing items come in four forms, first-aid spray, green herbs, red herbs, and yellow herbs, first-aid sprays fully heal you and can be purchased from the merchant, while you can only buy two at a time, it’s a guaranteed resource he always has, but has to be bought with an equally limited resource, so you have to decide if that’s worth it or not. The herbs you can find all throughout the game, and unlike the First-Aid sprays, the herbs can be combined with each other to take up less space in your inventory. You can combine a maximum of three together, which equals up to six inventory slots, which can be used for something else like ammo or grenades. The green herbs heal you for some HP, the red herbs have to be combined with a green herb to be used, but will fully heal you, and yellow herbs also need to be combined with a green herb, but will increase your maximum health when used. Each herb is incredibly useful and very much worth grabbing since they can be combined alone, but they’re also in abundance, of all the resources in the game, herbs might be one of the easier ones to get rid of for space since you can always buy healing if you need, and if you never get hit, you’ll never need to heal. While that might be incredibly unlikely, it’s something to keep in mind while playing. You can also find other abstract healing items like eggs and fish you can either sell for some cash, or use to heal a good chunk of health.

The last of the items you’ll need to manage are grenades, arguably the most useful limited resource besides ammo. Grenades, like herbs, come in three flavors, frags, incendiary, and flash grenades, each one serves a very important purpose. Frags are great for defeating a large cluster of enemies which can help you save a ton of ammo, frags can also stun enemies not fully within the blast radius to give you an opportunity to get away, or take advantage of it to press your advantage further. Incendiary grenades are incredibly useful because it leaves behind flames for a short period of time, damaging any enemies that walk into it, it can also be used to completely cut off a certain area for a while, allowing you to focus your attention elsewhere, while not nearly as useful as frags generally, incendiaries are specifically very effective against specific enemies as well, so it’s good to hold a few at all times. Finally flash grenades, to me these were my least used of the three, but still are very useful. Flash grenades will blind enemies for a long time, allowing you to run past them or keep them in place for a perfect frag grenade scenario, or to gun them down, or even knife them. Flash grenades can also completely kill specific enemies, and has an incredibly niche use that’ll net you some serious cash and more resources. While they were indeed my least used type in my playthrough, I did find them situationally useful which already makes them valuable enough to me to grab and use. Resident Evil 4 is all about these small decisions you’re always faced with, to grab a specific item, to throw something away, maybe you want to sell a weapon you’re no longer using, or maybe you really don’t need healing items and want more grenades. It’s this sort of dynamic that makes RE4 incredibly rich to play for the first time, but also incredibly varied when replaying the game, which keeps it fresh, engaging, and very fun.

My personal favorite aspect of Resident Evil 4 though is the weapon progression. When you first start RE4, you start with a measly if reliable hand pistol, but overtime you’ll keep finding new weapons to play around with, and the merchant will regularly get new weapons in stock for you to try out. I don’t want to spoil any of them, but there’s a lot of variety here, and you can really carve out your own playstyle with the amount of weapons there are. While some weapons are indeed more useful and their specific ammo drops more often, every weapon in RE4 is useful to some extent which makes sure the player doesn’t feel like they wasted their money on a weapon they don’t need. You can further upgrade your weapons as you progress, but be sure to only fully upgrade 2 or 3 weapons at max, since money in RE4 is another incredibly limited resource you need to manage if you want to succeed. Knowing what upgrades you want, and which ones feel worth it are just more small decisions RE4 presents to you that you gotta think about carefully. There’s plenty of variety, and every playstyle in RE4 is supported, hell you could only use the knife for most of your playthrough and never worry about weapons if you really wanted to, but I don’t recommend that personally. Every weapon has a specific range they do well in, every weapon also has their own niche uses such as high ammo count, high damage, pinpoint accuracy, wide spread, anything you can think of, there’s probably a weapon that does it well. You can also unlock more weapons by completing the game, giving the game even more replay value. While some of these unlockable weapons feel kinda gimmicky, it all serves to expand the sandbox and options the player has which only improves and enriches the experience Resident Evil 4 has to offer. Though to be honest, some of the unlock conditions for some of these weapons can be super tedious, so… no thanks, bro

Resident Evil 4’s atmosphere is another aspect of the game I absolutely adore. Right from the get-go, the game has this hilarious dichotomy of atmosphere with a muted color palette and a realistic artstyle for the time, but then has some of the most hilarious one-liners and dialogue I’ve ever heard in a game. Resident Evil 4 does a damn good job at balancing these things very well, because the environments speak for themselves since Leon doesn’t really say anything in gameplay, only in cutscenes. Because of this, it doesn’t take away the serious nature of gameplay, making decisions, fighting enemies, and the actual areas themselves are intimidating, oppressive, and a bit scary too. But as soon as you get into a cutscene, it sort of reels back on that to serve up some fun action-packed scenes, some humor, or some witty dialogue all while pushing the story forward in a believable, if somewhat ridiculous manner, all of which I love. I think the choice of music especially helps capture the sort of oppressive feeling Resident Evil 4 has during gameplay, when I first heard the save theme it really stuck with me, and honestly gave me a Firelink Shrine impression, and that feeling never really went away from the remainder of the game. It sounds odd to say Resident Evil 4 felt a lot like Dark Souls emotionally, because they’re both games about overcoming insurmountable odds while everything is trying to stop you from achieving that goal. I don’t think RE4 comes close to Dark Souls in terms of difficulty or really any other facet as they’re very different games, but they shared eerily similar vibes to each other when playing it, and I think for that reason RE4 sticks out more in my mind than it should. Regardless, I fell in love with RE4 very quickly, for its amazing atmosphere, fun characters and dialogue, combat, resource management, and music.

Resident Evil 4 is very smart with its cutscenes as well. Most of the time in games, you get a cutscene, and it’s the player’s cue to relax and not have to worry about any gameplay, much unlike RE4. In RE4, depending on how the cutscene plays out, you might have to do a quicktime event to ensure Leon doesn’t die. This not only will catch the player off guard, but will ensure they stay engaged and focused during the cutscene, and gives them the agency they should have at all times. Having stakes in cutscenes like this is a breath of fresh air, and makes the cutscenes that much more intense and memorable. While there’s plenty of QTE’s in RE4, I think all of them are handled incredibly well and never feel overused or out of place, it felt like just the right amount to keep you on your toes which I very much appreciated. The boss battles in RE4 are also incredibly diverse and fun as hell to figure out. They double down as tests of skill and a puzzle you gotta figure out to win, which felt very much like Metroid Prime to me, which I enjoyed a lot. I would want to go into more detail into all of them individually, so maybe at another time I will, but they fall into the same sort of fast decision making, resource management and fun combat I’ve mentioned already which makes them incredibly fun to fight, and also very memorable.

Resident Evil 4 was my first Resident Evil game I played. It left an incredibly strong impression on me, and easily became one of my favorites very quickly. I’m very excited to jump into the rest of the series from here, but Resident Evil 4 was really special. I’ll never forget the experience because it was really unique. I’ve yet to play the remake of this game, but it seems very well done, and I can't wait to play it and express my thoughts on it when the time comes. Thank you all for reading my review of Resident Evil 4. The next game I'll be doing is the Mario RPG remake which I’m incredibly excited for, so please look forward to that!. Before I wrap up this review though, I only have one very important question... you got a smoke? Thank you all for reading!

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is the evolutionary game 2D Mario has needed for a long time. The classic Mario platformers were always very innovative and constantly adding to the formula to make each entry stand tall, this sort of refinement and improvement reached its climax with Super Mario World. The "New" Super Mario Bros. series would be more experimental and loose with concepts and design while using technological advancement since Mario World to add much more depth to Mario's move set and mechanics. Unfortunately, the "New" Mario series became rather stagnant and complacent when it began emphasizing multiplayer as the defining trait of the series, this led to weaker level design and even weaker concepts each entry, eventually leading to New super Mario Bros. U the weakest 2D entry in Mario's history besides The Lost Levels. With such a decline, Mario Maker would take the reins and it felt like 2D Mario's final resting place, until Super Mario Wonder was announced. Considering Mario Maker allowed the players to make every single possible level with many tools at their disposal, as well as unique ideas and mechanics placed in Mario Maker specifically to sweeten the pot of level design and concepts. It then becomes absolutely critical Super Mario Wonder has mechanics, level design, and concepts that cannot be achieved with Mario Maker, nor tread familiar ground too closely to the New Super Mario series, lest it feel unjustified and a disappointment. I can wholeheartedly say not only did Mario Wonder justify itself, but it is the largest transformation of the 2D Mario series since Super Mario 3, and Super Mario World.

Super Mario Wonder's biggest gimmick are the Wonder flowers, capable of transforming levels, enemies, or even Mario & his friends in weird ways that completely change how the level is played. While wonder flowers are optional for the most part, they are the most important idea Mario Wonder has since the actual levels in Mario Wonder are rather easy and from a level design perspective, play it very safe and rather stale. Wonder flowers make up for this shortcoming since as mentioned, they will entirely change the way the level is played, and it makes every level stand out from the rest since each level usually has its own unique gimmick you need to figure out. This game is very impressive in that every level without fail has a wonder flower, had even half the levels had a wonder flower, it would've broken up gameplay enough from standard levels to make this game memorable and better than the sterile New Super Mario Bros. U. Instead, every single level defines itself, which is incredibly welcome and makes the entire game memorable for how weird it gets, the creativity present is not just to create a false sense of soul, a lot of time and effort were put into each level's gimmick, and they all feel incredible to play and very fun to experience.

Mario Wonder is incredibly easy, I don't necessarily look for challenges when playing Mario, but Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World have very challenging levels that really challenge the player and demand mastery of the mechanics. Super Mario Wonder isn't as strict in this aspect, as most levels revolve around their gimmicks to throw you off to create challenges rather than the actual level design. While some are indeed challenging, Mario Wonder mechanically is not. For example, some of Mario's capabilities in the New Super Mario series is missing in Wonder, which to me is a red flag they definitely simplified levels since if Mario isn't as capable, the levels won't be as intricate. That's not to say they're bad or New Super Mario took full advantage of his capabilities before, because they didn't really, but Wonder is definitely simpler, but the levels are soundly designed, they're just too damn easy. For me, I only started losing lives while playing through optional levels that do present a challenge I very much liked, but the rest of the game I felt like I was on autopilot and never ran into any walls or challenges that really forced me to master certain mechanics. Let me say again, I do not go into Mario expecting challenge, but I do expect a strong progression of difficulty and the game making me master certain things, because Mario 3 and World did this incredibly well, and this is an area Mario Wonder falls flat with for me.

The new power-ups in Mario Wonder can range from good to just okay, it actually has the same amount of power-ups in total as a New Super Mario Bros. game. Elephant is the poster child of the game, and as such, felt like it had the most utility and depth at first glance. Your hitbox is bigger, which makes you an easier target, but you can swing your trunk to pretty much take care of anything from enemies to blocks, anything in your way can be dealt with swiftly using this melee attack. Elephant can also store water in its trunk to water flowers and interact with the level to reveal secrets or gain coins. Elephant was definitely the most fun and impressive of the power-ups since it was really unique but also oddly fit with the wacky nature of the game quite well, I do think it was the most utilized power-up overall, so it was probably my favorite. Next is the Bubble Flower, the Bubble Flower had a ton of potential but was severely underutilized in all the levels it was in to me. The bubbles kill enemies like fireballs but can float, so they could take care of flying enemies or elevated enemies with ease which made it a welcome addition to start with. The issue falls into its two more niche uses, jumping off bubbles, and bubbles going through walls; these two abilities of the bubble flower are never used in the level design, so it’s up to the player’s discretion to make use of them. Unfortunately many levels in this game aren’t too vertical, so it didn’t feel as useful as it could’ve been, it’s certainly fun to bounce off the bubbles, but the usefulness of it felt very lacking. Same situation with the ability for bubbles to pass through walls to interact with stuff, this is used one time in the entire game to my knowledge and never again after that, which is a huge shame because there could’ve been tons of secrets that could’ve been hidden behind walls with a subtle visual detail that would reward players for playing well to keep their power-up, and also reward them for paying attention, unfortunately, the bubble flower never does this, though some levels do without needing a power-up at all. Super Mario world did a fantastic job with the cape feather in comparison, the cape was required for many secrets in Super Mario World that continued to justify its properties, and rewarded players for hanging onto it throughout the level. Anyways, let’s move onto the last power-up, the Drill Shroom. The Drill Shroom is interesting in concept, allowing you to burrow into walls to find secrets, avoid enemies, and could kill enemies who fall on top of you due to the drill on your head. This particular power-up felt the most useless of the 3 since its usefulness only felt valid if the level took it into account or wanted you to have it. There isn’t a single level where the Drill Shroom can’t be found and it’s useful. Mario Wonder emphasizes specific power-ups for levels rather than having every power-up feel useful in every level. Of course they're useful for disposing of enemies, but I’m referring to their specific abilities here, for example, let’s say I go into a level with the bubble flower, but the level gives me the Drill shroom. The Drill shroom will allow me to 100% the level without any issues, but the bubble flower can’t do anything to find a secret exit or reveal a secret area in the level or anything, it’s pretty much pointless. With that said, the Drill shroom is fine, but easily the most underutilized and universally worthless power-up in the game to me, it’s a fun and interesting power-up for sure, just not very useful.

Taking a note from the Mario RPG’s, Super Mario Wonder introduces badges as well. Badges are interesting because it allows the player to give themselves a unique capability in their toolkit to help with traversing and beating levels. Besides badge challenges however, these badges barely have any levels that make use of their unique capabilities, making them entirely optional to a fault. I want to preface that I really enjoyed the badges and found most if not all of them fun or circumstantially useful while playing, but we’ve run into the same problem with the badges as the power-ups I’m afraid. Mario’s wonders levels play it far too safe, so it really defeats the purpose to have so many awesome capabilities not really be used to the fullest like they should be. Badges get away with it a bit more since they have badge challenges specifically tailored to their abilities, which I really loved, I just wish more actual levels did this. Badges do have a multitude of uses, and the passive badges like auto mushroom are great to remove frustration and help you survive longer and help you get the better power-ups right away. There’s also some badges that can make the game much harder, which is very much welcome, and I’m glad they exist because it can create tons of fun challenge runs that will likely make the game much more difficult. Mario’s more limited move-set in this game justifies the badges in a way since it’ll give you something you can rely on in levels and help with trickier sections of levels, it also allows players to carve out their own style more than previous entries, which is a huge plus. Badges are a mixed bag for me, I very much enjoyed seeing them all and what they can do, but I really wish levels took them into account more like the power-ups.

Visually stunning, Super Mario Wonder was such a beautiful and fantastic looking game. The animations were incredibly expressive and had this very charming overexaggerated nature about it that made it incredibly charming from start to finish. Very bright colorful levels, incredibly diverse landscapes that did fall into typical cookie-cutter Mario environments we all know and love, but Wonder did put care into them to make them feel distinct, which I can very much appreciate. Facial expressions were the best they’ve ever been in Mario, the character models are fantastic, fluid animation as well, no frame drops that I could see, it was just an incredibly consistently beautiful and well-running game. I will take note that Yoshi specifically looked a bit off with a few animations, but that was all I noticed in Wonder that stood out in a bad way.

Alright, let’s talk about the voice acting really quick as well. So I’ve been a gigantic Mario fan since I was a tiny, tiny kid, and I grew up with Charles Martinet’s voicing of Mario and his friends from my first memories. The new voice actor (I don’t know his name, but if someone can let me know, that’d be awesome!) does a really damn good job voicing Mario. There were maybe two lines in the entire game where I noticed “oh, that’s not Charles anymore, right” other than that? Great performance, really looking forward to hearing more. But, I gotta say this, the Luigi needs a bit more work. I don’t want to sound petty criticizing the VA, but Luigi just sounded a bit too high-pitched. I’m sure the VA will find a very comfortable position with Luigi in the future, and really not every voice line for Luigi even sounds bad, it’s mostly good, but I noticed it more than with Mario, so I wanted to mention it. Otherwise? Fantastic work, looking forward to hearing it in more Mario games moving forward!

Super Mario Brothers. Wonder was a wonderful time… Sigh. All corny jokes aside, I very very much enjoyed this game and think it’s an incredibly bright future presented for 2D Mario I hope gets expanded upon with another entry or more DLC. I stand by my criticisms of the game no matter what though, and I hope they get addressed. Even if I critique a game to kingdom come, I can still very much love and enjoy it, too. Thank you all for reading my very long review of Super Mario Bros. Wonder, I've been trying to make my reviews longer and delve into the specifics of games I talk about more rather than just dissect it by story, gameplay, music etc. I hope you’ve all been enjoying them, thank you for all the support, and I will see you all in the next review!

Mario & Luigi Superstar saga is the first of a long lineage of Mario & Luigi RPGs that were both faithful sequels to Super Mario RPG on SNES, but also a variation of the Paper Mario RPG series that took concepts from both. Since Mario & Luigi games were always released on handheld consoles, it's reasonable to assume M&L as I'll refer to it from here on, was meant as the portable RPG series, while Paper Mario would be the home console series... at least until Sticker Star. With that in mind, M&L might come off as an afterthought or not nearly as ambitious or high quality comparatively, but not only does it succeed expectations, it's incredibly transformative of the Mario world and really sets itself apart from its contemporaries.

M&L Superstar Saga is as ambitious as it is transformative. The emphasis of Superstar saga is the simultaneous control of Mario & Luigi, and how they put their skills together to traverse and clear puzzles, or separate and tackle objectives with their own more limited skillsets. While ultimately the pacing can be reduced to a crawl in many sections requiring constant "Bros. Moves", the level design is very proactive to keep these capabilities in mind which allows for more creative concepts in level design to keep it interesting and unique. Cycling through the Bros. Moves can be a chore, and swapping the positions of Mario & Luigi grows tiresome especially when it's required to do multiple times in one section, which is probably why the next few entries do away with it, to remove intrusive requirements for progression. With that said, all the animations and interactions Mario & Luigi have with each other using these abilities are incredibly charming and pretty funny, especially if you don't have a specific ability yet and attempt to use the action combination, you can see Mario or Luigi get rather angry with the other, which I really like.

The story and general world building of Superstar Saga are simple, but present some very interesting ideas. A neighboring kingdom of the Mushroom Kingdom, BeanBean Kingdom pays Princess Peach a visit in an attempt to enforce relations and presumably peace. All for it to be a ploy for Cackletta, a rather infamous individual in BeanBean Kingdom, to steal Princess Peach's voice for undisclosed reasons at the start. It's incredibly interesting to have a villain other than Bowser to be the catalyst for Mario & Luigi's adventure, even having Bowser take on a supporting role much like in Mario RPG, unfortunately not playable this time around. While I could tear apart the inciting incident about how the implication of a neighboring kingdom harming another that could easily lead to misunderstandings, war, and many other ugly consequences, I won't because Mario isn't that deep of a franchise, nor would it exactly fit with Mario's upbeat energy and vibe, so we'll continue on. Mario, Luigi (against his will), and Bowser set out for BeanBean Kingdom to stop Cackletta and retrieve Princess Peach's voice, this all goes awry when Fawful, Cackletta's... understudy? Minion? Friend? I don't know, but anyway, Fawful stops them in their tracks, and the real adventure begins from there. While I won't delve into everything here, the story presents a lot of concepts the Mario series has never tackled before which I liked. One thing that really stood out to me is the rather dark undertones this game has, there's definitely a few settings and incidents that come off rather grim or disturbing which was a fantastic subversion for Mario and how the game itself is presented.

Exploring BeanBean Kingdom is great since it presents a lot of settings that haven't been in a Mario game before, but do play it safe with staple environments like a desert and some woods, though the history and purpose of these settings is fleshed out enough and significant enough to Beanbean Kingdom to make them stand out and feel justified. There's also some interesting concepts of Mushroom Kingdom immigration which I find particularly fascinating and wish they delved into that more, but I'm glad it was there at all. As I mentioned, BeanBean Kingdom has extensive history, and you get to go through many historical areas such as ruins, castles, and forgotten structures it really helps the setting of BeanBean Kingdom feel like it's existed for a long time, and has significance in the Mario World without ever being acknowledged or explorable until this game. While it can get a bit repetitive at times, I very much enjoyed exploring these areas and gaining a deeper understanding and appreciation for the setting, since the developers really tried to do everything they could to accomplish that, and I think they definitely did it well.

Combat is very creative while taking notes from other Mario RPG's. Contrary to Mario RPG and Paper Mario that give player input on lowering damage by guarding at the right time, Mario & Luigi takes this concept and expands upon it. In M&L you can potentially avoid taking a single hit of damage through the entire game if you understand enemy moves, timings, and patterns well enough. Rather than guard, Maro & Luigi can avoid damage by jumping, and remove projectiles or other obstructions with hammers, they can even attack the enemy during their turn by jumping on them or smashing them with your hammer during some of their attacks. Not only does this keep combat constantly engaging and forces you to always pay attention, but it rewards mastery and skill remarkably well which is a huge plus. It could inadvertently do the opposite as well though, where the game can come off as too easy and be incredibly unengaging because there's no stake or risk in fights if you never take damage. This is remedied a bit by the fact most enemies in Superstar Saga hit like trucks, especially later on, and attacks become harder to react to with odd timings, wind-ups, and difficult visual tells you need to pay attention to or else you're in a world of trouble. Not to mention the status effects in this game like tripping prevent you from dodging the next incoming attack, which can be devastating depending on the circumstance. It's... an odd system, but I think Superstar Saga does a great job at balancing it and gradually increasing the difficulty overtime to not make it feel inconsequential.

M&L has a big emphasis on timing with both counterattacks, but also regular attacking. This is very much like Mario RPG and Paper Mario where just before landing an attack, pressing the corresponding button will ensure your attack goes off correctly. Which, once again ensures the player is always focused and engaged with combat encounters so they can get through it quickly or optimally so they can progress the game. M&L takes it a step further with Bros. Attacks. While you're learning different traversal techniques outside of battles, those same techniques can be used in combat to perform very powerful attacks that require multiple different button inputs to pull off for a huge payoff of damage. Bros. Attacks require both Mario & Luigi, and each have different button combinations and timings you need to learn and master before utilizing them properly. The game does a fantastic job with the ability to make the Bros. Attacks easier to perform, but cost more BP (Bros. Points) to use, by slowing down the animation and showing the button prompts on screen. You can increase the difficulty of these moves which will decrease the amount of BP used, but the attack will move at normal speed and with/without button prompts depending on the difficulty you selected for it. I love this idea a lot since it feels like a tutorial while still giving the player's a reward with a higher cost, while mastery of the move only increases the rewards with a lower cost. There's an additional layer to all this as well, if you use a specific Bros. Attack enough times, the move will gain an "advanced" variation which is much harder to perform, but have additional benefits like stealing items, giving status elements, or simply doing more damage. No other M&L game does this, or really any other Mario RPG, so its exclusivity, while sad, is a huge boon this game has going for it. The amount of learning and mastery of these moves only to become harder and more rewarding is an incredible idea that never feels impossible to implement in your gameplay, but you also don't necessarily need to if you want to stick to the normal versions. To be frank, there's specific Bros. Attacks that are so over-tuned anyway, you'll probably end up using them the entire playthrough, which is unfortunate because it sort of defeats the point of all the variety and evolving moves, but it's still a very much welcomed addition.

Sound design and music are phenomenal here as well. There's a ton of upbeat tracks, a good amount of ambiance, good climactic music, everything you need is here. Nothing really stands out in a bad way except a few voice lines that sound a bit off, but other than that, nothing really stood out as bad or distracting.

Superstar saga impresses me as the first outing for this series. A lot of my criticisms are either fixed or at least addressed in later entries, the prospect of a new kingdom, characters, antagonists, and concepts for the Mario world are very much welcome and executed incredibly well while feeling very creative. BeanBean Kingdom feels like it really belongs with an extensive history that is fleshed out throughout the game while exploring it, while also slightly dipping its toes into Mushroom Kingdom immigration and general relations enough to satisfy me as well even if I did want a bit more of that. The combat is very innovative with a strong emphasis of mastery that rewards players constantly and feels very satisfying to master. Bros. Attacks having built-in tutorials for a higher resource cost so you can familiarize yourself with it to increase the difficulty while lowering the cost is great, it gets even better when those attacks get harder variations later with even more rewards to further encourage mastery is honestly something I want to see more of in RPG's 100%. I highly recommend this game since it's very creative and has a lot of unique concepts that you won't really find anywhere else. My largest criticism is really just some of the level design involving Bros. Moves to progress, and constantly having to switch positions to use certain ones can be annoying, but otherwise, everything here is very well done. I suppose my next review will be Mario Wonder in a week or two depending how long it takes, so please look forward to that as well. Thank you all for reading!

Lies of P was a very interesting experience. While I don't think it stands up to the games it's inspired by, it definitely makes enough unique design choices for it to stand on its own merits. I want to preface that I don't find being derivative a bad thing, art is always inspired by something. It'd be like every game with a jump is derivative of Mario, which is such a huge disservice to so many games, this game is no exception. Yes, it wears its influences on its sleeve. No, this does not make it a bad game inherently.

With that out of the way, let's begin with the story, and oh God it's a mess. The initial premise of Lies of P is incredibly fascinating about a puppet uprising and one special puppet who has the capacity to lie which from the get-go makes it more human than the other mindless puppets at first glance. Unfortunately, while this lying narrative leads to many interesting choices, a lot of it to me doesn't make sense. If a puppet who has the choice to lie in the first place is present, that automatically creates nuance and development for this puppet to continue growing through the act of making a choice rather than if you decide to lie or not. There is one particular moral dilemma that occurs later in the game that no matter what you choose, should already be incredibly impactful and evolving for our main character, but since there is no lying aspect to it, our main character does not grow from it at all, which is disappointing, and rather baffling to say the least.

Going into actual narrative, you are a puppet created by the great puppet-maker Gepetto, and are tasked with hunting down and killing the rampaging puppets all throughout the city of Krat. A simple premise to be sure, but there's plenty of twists and turns and lore you can read to enrich the story and your experience which is welcome. Without going into spoilers, the game's first half is phenomenally well done, with strong cohesive settings and an ultimate end goal that is fulfilled halfway into the game. Right before then, and the later half of the game takes a violent shift that tries so tirelessly to tread an uninspired concept while attempting to explain things established since the game's beginning that fumble and ultimately have ridiculous implications that ruin a lot of the game's story and how the world works. Had the game stuck to its guns and delved deeper into other puppets like our Main Character who were exceptions to established conventions and other such intricacies, it could've been much better.

The gameplay of Lies of P in stark contrast is really quite remarkable. You have everything you'd expect from a game of this nature. A plethora of weapons, a healing vial, fantastic animations, interconnected level design, tough enemies, and even tougher boss fights. Rather than focus on that though, I want to focus on what Lies of P does to improve the formula. I want to start with my personal favorite, which is the "pulse cell" recharge. The Pulse Cell is your healing, akin to blood vials or an Estus flask, but with an incredible caveat. When you run out of healing charges for your pulse cell, you can recharge it by playing aggressively and playing well. This is an amazing comeback mechanic that can spark determination and hope in players to keep fighting rather than just giving up because they ran out of heals. I myself do this in the aforementioned games when running out of heals, but I never once had that feeling in Lies of P since I was rewarded for continuing to play and win many tough battles thanks to this mechanic. The other thing I want to touch on is the weapon system. In Lies of P, you can dismantle your weapon down to its handle and blade, mixing and matching different options to see what works. If you find a weapon you really enjoy, you can attach it to a hilt that will scale better to the build you're running with a few exceptions. This essentially prevents many weapons from being locked behind certain build requirements, which makes finding each weapon worthwhile and justified to experiment with. I myself never used this mechanic, but I think it's an interesting choice that promotes using more weapons you normally wouldn't, like its inspirations.

Onto the actual combat itself. There are essentially three important mechanics to combat: dodging, guarding, and perfect guarding. Dodging is standard with invincibility frames to dash through attacks, guarding lets you nullify some damage and recover lost health similar to Bloodborne's rally, promoting aggressive play. And finally perfect guarding, which is pressing block as soon as an attack is about to hit you like Sekiro. And much like Sekiro, perfect guarding will build up a stagger meter on enemies and bosses with their health bar glowing white to signify your opportunity, which is fulfilled by using a heavy attack to get the stagger. First, let's address the issues, perfect guarding is heavily encouraged in this game, especially with frenzy attacks which are essentially moves you cannot dodge or guard normally, you have to perfect guard, or get out of the way. With this said, perfect guarding is very difficult, since the window to land one is much stricter than a game like Sekiro, which means it's an all or nothing gamble, especially against frenzy attacks. You can get away with spamming roll or running away from frenzy attacks, but it hurts the momentum and pacing of fights a lot to do that, but in late-game, frenzy attacks become a little too insane to reliably be able to perfect guard them. The next issue is the lack of a bar or any other visual indication of how close the boss is to being weak to a heavy attack stagger via the white glow around their health bar. In Sekiro, you always saw an enemy's stance bar, which showed your progress on getting the fatal blow which allowed you to play around that knowledge as needed. In Lies of P there is no such indication, the bar will just glow white and you have to react to it. Granted, the requirement to fulfill the reward is just using a heavy attack, but that isn't tied to your perfect guard like Sekiro. This leads to many players getting desperate to land that heavy attack so they can rake in tons of damage, or get a huge window to heal or to repair their weapon, more on that later. Whether they land the heavy attack or not depends on their weapon, you have to land the last hit of the heavy attack to get the stagger, but some weapons have incredibly slow and/or long heavy attacks, you may never get an opportunity to land it, especially during a boss battle. Couple this with the fact there is no poise at all in this game, which means your attack will be interrupted if you get hit essentially, is a huge detriment to the player depending on what weapon they decided to use. Thankfully the blade and handle system can fix this issue, so you can pick a weapon with a fast heavy attack, but every weapon should be able to do this regardless. The positives of this system is you take no damage when perfect guarding, only stamina, you build up their stagger much faster, and it's very satisfying and rewarding to perfect guard a combo. It can also break weapons of enemies, which decreases their damage and range, which is an excellent and unique reward Lies of P offers for those who master perfect guarding.

While perfect guarding has its issues, guarding and dodging are much easier to talk about. Dodging in this game felt fine, but the timing is also pretty strict since the dodge isn't very long, and guarding is always the best thing to do if you think you can't dodge or perfect guard since that health is restorable by being aggressive, but if you get hit without guarding, you lose the opportunity to gain that health back which is very punishing, but incentivizing guarding in this way makes it more important to use. When I was playing Lies of P, I came in with the intention of playing very defensively, always guarding and going for perfect guards first handful of bosses. I then realized some attacks bosses do that you simply can't reliably guard, which makes dodging the optimal option. Every boss is different in what the design demands from the player, guarding or dodging. In the best case, there were bosses that beautifully managed to make guarding, dodging, and perfect guarding all feel important and meaningful to overcome them, which were the biggest highlights for me. In the worst instances, I spammed the roll and got away with it because some bosses have absurdly long combo's that will kill you if you can't perfectly guard most of the hits, so I opted to just avoid them and swing at them from behind. This is when I noticed the second half of the game, I kept doing this strategy, because the demand some of these bosses presents seemed too inconceivable for me with the tight timings and extremely heavy chip damage from just normal guarding, dodging became the most rewarding option every single fight around the last quarter of the game, with one exception. Lies of P I think got a little too ambitious with the later fights that make them absolutely miserable to attempt with the perfect guarding mindset this game constantly reinforces you to learn. Everything before then however is actually balanced pretty well between all three options, and I definitely believe every boss before the last quarter can be "one-tricked" with success as well, like just dodging, guarding etc.

Last thing I will touch on for combat is the grinder. In Lies of P, you have to repair your weapon on your own with a grinder. There is no "blacksmith" to repair it for you every now and again, weapon durability is an essential mechanic in Lies of P. As you fight enemies or bosses, your weapon durability will continue to decrease overtime. When the bar starts flashing red, it's time to sharpen it, or else it'll do no damage and bounce off enemies like a wall. In normal gameplay, it's fine, kill the enemies, sharpen your weapon, keep moving, it's in boss battles when this issue starts cropping up. Bosses are relentless in this game, they don't provide too many huge openings, especially not enough time to sharpen your weapon since it takes longer than healing or rolling away obviously. So if your weapon is in critical condition in the middle of a fight, you might just die and it feels really unfair to be killed in that scenario. Thankfully, in multi-phase fights, the boss is repositioned far away from you at the beginning of a new phase so you have time to use your grinder or buff before they start wailing on you. If you forget to sharpen your weapon during this period, that's on you. Though later in the game you won't need to worry so much about sharpening compared to the start of the game. But in the beginning, when your weapon is in critical condition in the middle of a boss and you have to disengage to sharpen, it once again kills the momentum and flow of the boss, and there's no guarantee you'll get it off before the boss charges at you and punishes you for a mechanic you have no real way of mitigating or improving until later.

Area design is good for the most part. The overreliance on narrow walkways got a bit harrowing, but otherwise everything felt pretty sound. Great interconnected level design with shortcuts and secrets to reward your curiosity, generally interesting settings, good graphics as well with the occasional pop-in texture. Let me be clear: this is not an entirely interconnected world like Dark Souls, it's much more akin to Dark Souls 3 or Bloodborne, of which I do not mind at all. Lies of P is pretty generous with shortcuts, and enemy placements never felt too unfair, though there were a lot of ambushes, so many that it became very predictable but I'd still fall for them, which led to some frustration to be sure.

Lies of P's soundtrack can be amazing, or downright dull as well. Most bosses opt for the typical booming orchestra with the chanting choir, which isn't a bad choice, but nothing really sticks out, it's forgettable. There was two boss themes in the entire game that stuck with me, that's it. The records you collect however, are incredible! They have beautiful instrumentation and hard-hitting lyrics that really reflect a lot on the game in a hopeful or melancholic sense. These records serve more purposes than just sounding good, and considering their meaning and sound, it really does make a lot of sense about the impact they have on certain things.

Despite all of my criticisms, I really enjoyed this game and the experience it offered. Lots of frustration and questionable design at times, but the quality is high, and the potential presented by NeoWiz is both inspiring and incredibly exciting! I'll be very much looking forward to their next game and hoping to see their improvements overtime. I do recommend you play this game, just be warned of the extremely challenging nature this game has. Thank you all for reading my review, I'd love to hear feedback or comments, of which I will gladly respond and discuss!

Metroid Prime Remastered, a huge bombshell announcement that got shadow dropped during the Nintendo Direct no less. As a gargantuan Metroid fan, especially for the first Metroid Prime game, I was absolutely overwhelmed with the news and knew immediately that I had to play it.

I've played the original Metroid Prime close to thirty or so times now, so I'd like to think I have a pretty decent grasp on what this game should feel, play, and sound like. Metroid Prime Remastered hits it out of the park and refines the experience to such a high degree, I know for sure this is the definitive and most enjoyable experience I've had playing Metroid Prime 1.

With a plethora of control options, including legacy options for both Prime Trilogy and original Gamecube version, the one issue I had with the original is erased. I opted for dual stick controls as that's my preference for most First-Person Shooters, and the difference it made was substantial. Accuracy is increased, general control of movement and positioning is much better, and platforming feels super polished and easy to perform compared to the original. Granted these were all issues fixed in the trilogy version, but did force you to use motion controls, Daul Stick controls feels more comfortable for me personally, so I'm praising the Remaster for it anyways.

Visually stunning. For a long time I held Luigi's Mansion 3 in high regard to graphical fidelity and detail, until I played this. Environments are breathtaking, the entire game was rebuilt from the ground up, with tons of new small aesthetics, brilliant lighting effects, and other smaller details that added up to make me feel the most immersed I've ever felt playing a Metroid game, and that's saying something. Tallon Overworld in particular blew me away as I traversed it, I couldn't even believe how good it looked for the Switch, while maintaining a stupendous sixty frames per second without a single dip below that for the entire game from what I experienced.

For as much as I loved this game, I find myself hoping Metroid Prime 2 and 3 receive remasters of this caliber, because I couldn't even begin to fathom how they would look in this style, all I know is, I want to see it, and badly. Here's hoping this game is a sign for that, as well as a first look of Prime 4, my standards for which have soared thanks to this game.

I absolutely, wholeheartedly recommend this remaster for any hardcore fan like myself. Especially recommend this to newcomers as it fixes any potential jank or flaws from the original that might've turned a lot of people off initially, please try this for yourself. I normally don't recommend or advocate for remasters or remakes, but this to me is the new standard going forward, as you can tell a lot of love, attention, and care was put into this to truly lift the experience to a whole new level, and it succeeded with flying colors. You owe it to yourself to experience this, and for $40 no less, a very fair price for a remaster in my opinion. Physical copies are extremely hard to come by as of now, so I recommend getting it digitally, however you might get lucky like me and find a copy somewhere, but it's unlikely as of making this review.

Final Fantasy VI is absolutely amazing. After a recent playthrough just ending, I'm ready to tackle this gem.

Final Fantasy VI's story is personal, lighthearted, fun, and serious, all balanced intrinsically well. What makes the game shine is obviously the characters and how the game doesn't necessarily choose one among the cast whom is the focus of the narrative or perspective. Going over every character would be difficult, as they all have their own backgrounds, development, and character arcs that's an easy contender for best RPG cast. I will at least highlight the characters I do enjoy however. First up is Terra, she is a very confused person seeking purpose and where she belongs. Locke, a loveable treasure hunter who is plagued by the ghosts of his past which skew him to making promises and decisions he might not be able to keep. Celes, a general of the empire who yearns for compassion and understanding of others. Last but not least, Shadow, a coldhearted ninja shrouded in mystery with his trusty dog companion, Interceptor. These characters were by far my favorite, while I love every character in FFVI, these characters captivated me the most and I became especially invested in their stories and outcomes. From a gameplay perspective I immensely enjoyed Sabin the most, as his Blitzes required common fighting game button combinations and half-circles, making him very rewarding to play, not to mention his stellar damage and versatility also make him a favorite of mine.

Going into gameplay, good gracious does Final Fantasy knock it out of the park. Every character has a unique ability that justifies using them in your team compositions. While they're not all winners, they each have their time in the sun at some point in the game where they're very useful. Dungeons and dungeon design still amazes me to this day. They're not incredibly cryptic or large, but the puzzles and loot to be found is very satisfying, some dungeons also provide that much needed difficulty spike, nothing crazy, just enough to get you to optimize your characters a bit more as you continue to progress, which is perfect. Fighting enemies and the sheer variety found in the boss fights is also a treat, as not only are the monster designs in this game absolutely stellar, but boss fights all feel energetic and intense as you whittle their HP down and buff your party up. Grinding in this game is really only necessary at the start, mostly for GP, otherwise I never had to grind until endgame because I wanted my characters to be at least level 50 and have most of my magic users know all the decent spells. Even if you do grind, there's some amazing spots later in the game that does not make grinding a chore at all, you do have to know where they are, but actually grinding is quick and easy, which I really appreciate. Last thing I'll touch on is the magic system, which I do enjoy. It's easy to manage and level as you're playing, you really don't need to sit and grind for new magic if you stay on top of it, even then there's plenty of spots early and mid game to get spells relatively quick without much grinding. I love the animations of the spells, there's great variety, all the staples from previous entries and more, and a ton of summons you can play around with this time around, which I loved.

Graphically speaking, such a delight to look at. Easily one of the best looking SNES games visually. Colors are both bright and grim, dirty and also whimsical. Monster designs can be cute, off-putting, intimidating, detailed, and grand. Character models took a huge step up in this entry as well, having far more emotes and unique poses and expressions that make these characters come to life so much more outside their storylines. Textures are clean, battle backgrounds are awesome and full of details, and the much more exotic areas make full use of the visuals, presenting some amazing set pieces you'd never find anywhere else that really pushes the envelope further on just how damn good this game looks.

I'm well aware of the many glitches plaguing this game as well. While it is a shame some glitches make certain stats and statuses not work as intended, none are worse than the glitches that can corrupt your save and make the game unplayable. Replaying this game, and playing it for the first time a long time ago, I was well aware of all these glitches and could avoid them, so I'm dedicating a small portion of this review to warn those interested in playing this game for the first time. Please look into the game breaking glitches within this game before starting it!

Another specific section of this review I want to use is for Kefka. Kefka just might be one of my favorite antagonists, he's not so simply just an insane individual, there's a lot of subtleties to his character that are hard to catch the first time. There's actually plenty of very interesting character studies on Kefka you can look into yourself that will do a far better job than I can. With that said, I love Kefka, he has amazingly witty dialogue that aligns surprisingly perfectly with the heinous acts he commits without even hesitating. I am well aware a lot of what Kefka says is thanks to the translator of FFVI, Ted Woolsey, but I really do think Kefka benefitted substantially from it. It painted him on the surface as just some clown with some screws loose, but you delve deeper into Kefka and find an intriguing character with a lot of complexity you can find when you analyze him as a character, his dialogue, and even his physical appearance has meaning behind it all, truly an amazing character that was very well written.

Music is absolutely classic, character themes I especially love in this game. Outside of those, FFVI has my favorite battle theme in all of Final Fantasy, and has some of my favorite Boss music as well in video games period. Normally I go on about how emotionally charged the music is, or how profound it is and how it enhances the setting and story. FFVI does this, to a masterful degree, but I'd honestly just suggest you listen to the soundtrack yourself, it's that good.

FFVI is another JRPG masterpiece I adore with all my heart and will always slot in another playthrough every few years. Replaying this game again, it made me realize that I really should finish this series at some point, as I've only played a few entries in Final Fantasy so far. It's not that I have no interest, I just simply put it off too long I suppose. I digress, Final Fantasy VI is an essential experience for JRPG fans, it takes it a bit of time to get going, but once it starts, there's no brakes, it's full throttle. You can get Final Fantasy VI on PlayStation via the Final Fantasy Anthology, which I want to recommend for the FMV's alone, however load times can be pretty long. I'd honestly recommend the SNES or GBA version personally. GBA version has a better translation and extra content, and fixes some of the glitches present in the original, at the expense of worse graphics and sound. SNES version, despite all its flaws, is my personal recommendation, if only because it's the original experience and is still an amazing game. You can also get the pixel remaster on Steam, I don't know much about the pixel remasters, so I can't really say anything for or against it. You can also play FFVI via the SNES mini if you were in the market for one.

I can't articulate fully why I enjoy donkey Kong Country so much. Part of me feels like the reasoning falls under the shallow lens of being on the SNES and having a unique graphical style that perpetuated the otherworldly feeling this game possesses. Upon reflecting more on how I truly feel about this game, I've come to realize why I love it as much as I do.

Donkey Kong Country is simple, making simple games sounds like a criticism, but it's far from that for me. Making something simple and engaging is not easy, because basic mechanics are paramount to setting the standard and can ultimately make or break a game, an example of this would be jumping. So when a game like Donkey Kong Country excels at the fundamentals of the platforming genre, such as movement, jumping, and level design meticulously designed to fall in line with these controls, it has to meet the same standards that were set by its genre defining predecessors, like Mario. It does this so well, in contrary to a series like Mario that takes it a step further with power-ups like the Tanooki Leaf or Cape Feather to enhance all aspects I just mentioned, Donkey Kong Country is so confident and sound with its basic fundamentals and level design, power-ups are not present, at least not in a traditional sense. Barrels are essentially your "power-ups", most of which you throw to dispatch enemies and reveal secrets, some have interesting properties such as the metal barrel you can jump onto while it's rolling to move faster and plow through enemies with no effort. Similarly to power-ups, these capabilities do not last forever, however Donkey Kong Country ensures their limitations unlike Mario, because every barrel is a one-time use thing, whereas someone could keep their powered up form throughout the entire game in Mario, albeit unlikely. Animal friends also serve as power-ups for certain levels, and can be used for the entire level if you're good enough, but even then you lose them as soon as the level ends, unlike Yoshi from Super Mario World, though Yoshi also has specific restrictions to be used such as Ghost Houses and Castles. The point is, Donkey Kong Country seems lacking compared to other platformers, with no power-ups and your skill not being graciously rewarded for not losing your animal friend throughout the level. Yet the fundamentals like moving and jumping are so high and polished, it stays on par with Mario and fulfills the standards of the platforming genre perfectly.

The most important aspect of Donkey Kong Country's simple design however is in the two controllable characters, Donkey Kong, and Diddy Kong. Donkey Kong is a heavier, much larger character who's platforming capabilities aren't nearly as strong as Diddy Kong's, but is much easier to use for dealing with enemies, he does have a decent movement option with his roll as well, there's even some enemies only Donkey Kong can deal with. Donkey Kong also has a slam move that can reveal secrets. Diddy Kong is much lighter and faster, capable of speeding through levels with ease along with his amazing cartwheel which deals with almost every obstacle without even having to think, but if you try to defeat specific enemies as Diddy, he might just bounce off them and get killed. While the favorability of these two seems one-sided, it's what the two characters represent that's most important, the slow methodical style, and the fast reactionary style, the two extremes of how people might play platformers are embodied by the two playable characters. This is important because it's going back to one of the most important standards in platforming, which is level design. Since you can lose either Kong at any time, the developers had to make sure both characters could clear the level by themselves if they had to. Yes, some levels are easier with Diddy, some are easier with Donkey, but you can still complete any level in this game with either character, which means the developers took the slow methodical style, and fast reactionary style players might prefer into consideration when designing every level because those styles are Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong. It's honestly pretty genius and made creating these levels so much easier. You could argue specific levels like the minecart levels and even some levels near the end of the game are very fast and dependent on your reactionary ability, which you are correct. For Minecart levels, all control is taken from you except jump, and your Kong of choice doesn't matter, it's all about jumping at the right time. Later levels get pretty extreme with tough platforming while juggling another mechanic alongside it, some levels are even catered toward certain Kong's but is still beatable with either.

A lot of the gimmicks introduced with Donkey Kong Country became mainstays for the series and platformer staples overall. Minecart levels I already touched on is the evolution of the auto-scroller from past platformers. The cannon barrel sections and levels test your timing skills and are very tricky to figure out, but extremely rewarding and surprisingly doesn't feel like lazy or bad design, it's engaging and gives this game that little something other games don't have. Water levels are few and far between, but honestly aren't annoying, they're very manageable and the controls are good. Rope sections to me are definitely the worst sorts of levels to me, but even then they present interesting patterns you learn to weave through and is enticing to learn rather than feel like a chore overall even if I suffered a few annoying deaths. Boss fights are simple, they provide a nice change of pace though I'm not exactly ecstatic about any of them. And finally, the secrets, to me this is why you replay Donkey Kong Country. Secrets contribute to your percent completion on your file, so you have to find them all to achieve 100%. I love this idea because when you finish the game, you'll want to go back to find those secrets you missed out on. Sure the secrets themselves don't offer much in rewards, but finding them inside these beautifully designed levels is always a ton of fun to me, since it just reinforces the idea that the developers really put a lot of thought into everything.

As I mentioned at the start, the graphics for this game are unique to say the least. Computer generated graphics scaled down to fit on a SNES cartridge was honestly a brilliant idea. Sure, the character and enemy models look pixelated now, but there was nothing like this before, or ever again really from memory. It creates a very specific vibe that this game only has which helps to prop up the profound atmosphere and environments this game has to offer. Which is something else I've only really felt with this game, putting everything together really feels like you're in a uncharted tropical island filled with so many unknowns it compels you to go forward and see what lies ahead.

Donkey Kong Country's story is absolutely minimal at best. Donkey Kong's banana horde is stolen by the Kremlings and he has to go all around the island to retrieve them. That's it, it's a fine setup for a platformer at this time, so I'm not going to criticize it, but there's nothing to say about it. The original soundtrack composed by David Wise is an absolute masterpiece. Every single song has stunning instrumentation and atmospheric ambience baked into the tracks to really encapsulate every area and make them feel alive and special. DK Island Swing, Life in The Mines, and Aquatic Ambiance are by far my favorites, they're absolutely mesmerizing in ways I cannot explain, all I can say is David Wise has unprecedented talent like many video game composers before and after him, and it's an absolute joy to listen to.

I love Donkey Kong Country, it might not be one of my favorite games ever or anything, but I highly respect its craft and how much was put into it. I do think the game gets a little too hard near the end, and there's some jank here and there, but really most of this you can chalk up to when it came out. Again, not even one of my favorite platformers, but after playing so many, this game feels so refreshing since it lacks a lot of what platformers had back then and today, it'll always have some presence and discussion on it. You can get Donkey Kong Country on SNES, Wii U/3DS eshop (make sure to do so before March 27th 2023), the easiest way to play it right now though is through the Nintendo Switch's SNES library. All 3 games are available on there actually, so give the trilogy a try! I actually have yet to play the 2nd or 3rd entries myself, which I want to get to this year and may or may not write a review on. Until next time!