I had to grind more in this than the og. Please never recommend this to people to start with even if you like it I'm begging you.

Society where this game has fast travel:

I think the only time I ever see this game mentioned is me reminding people about it when they say another game is the weakest 3D Mario, followed by them going "oh yeah, I forgot about 3D Land."

The game's not horrible or anything but it's so safe and outclassed that it just kind of looks sad in comparison to the other 3D Mario games.

This is probably one of the most exhausting games I've played in my entire life. The game its self is pretty weak, a really weak cast with some exceptions, a pretty boring story in the first half and the worst character in the franchise getting driven to a whole new level of awful in the second. The combat is pretty much just the bare basics too, and it gets SUPER repetitive too. And then the credits roll.

...And the game then goes on and doubles its length. And because of dumb localization, the second half of the game isn't even dubbed, so yeah, say goodbye to voice acting outside of special situations. The story honestly improves a bit since now at the end of the game it decides the characters should start to actually have things going on now, but I hope you enjoy backtracking to previous dungeons ONLY outside of the final one, which is just a boss rush of recolored enemies. I don't think any of this game is worth playing, even for Tales veterans, it's boring at best and exhausting at worst. Soundtrack is pretty solid though.

Outside of 5 or so cool minigames and sidemodes I have no clue why anyone would ever play this over 6 and 7.

Waker? That's ironic, whenever I'm on the ocean I'm on a bit of a snooze cruise instead of an epic sailing moment.

2017

I'll never forget when people pretended this game was a secret masterpiece for like two weeks after Min-Min was announced for Smash Ultimate and then went right back to not acknowleging it.

Absolutely wasted potential. They made a character with a really cool moveset and then just put him in Shovel Knight's level design where you just fly over everything. It's extremely lame and disappointing, only made more so by the scattered instances of levels being designed around Plague Knight that are great. This game is like putting Sonic in a Mario level, sure it works but it just ddoesn't tap into the potential there.

The final boss took me over 7 hours.

When Tierno danced my jaw dropped. When he struck a pose I clapped. Beautiful game. I have a poster of Trevor and his excellent Pokedex on my wall.

Kinda overhated in my opinion. It's definitely no Battle For Bikini Bottom, the level design is worse and 100% is definitely less fun, but I don't think it's a bad game. It's sorta fun, there's some cool challenges in it, the slide levels are fun. If you love BFBB I think it's worth a try.

One point for each unique track in the game.