Sakurai really fucking knocked this one out of the park. It's crazy that this game is really this good and flew so under the radar. This absolute brainchild is an excellent combination of TPS and Rail Shooter and manages to do both mixes extraordinarily well. Featuring some excellent enemy design that never falters and solid rail levels that really push the stylus-point combat well, all wrapped up in a excellently written package due in no small part to the wonderful voice cast who perform so well here, creating a rather elegant package that is exemplified by the beautiful aesthetic and music it runs with.

It's not perfect of course, there's quite a few level parts that felt disgustingly brutal as a difficulty spike, and the system for health could've been made a lot more interesting. But even still, the completely in-your-hands difficulty setting and great replayability mitigates these issues. For something that isn't entirely 'my thing' in terms of how combat works (the arena combat doesn't really satisfy me in ways I assume will satisfy most others, and that's very much a main appeal) I can't recommend it enough.

A great way to celebrate Sonic's history. While I do prefer the Adventure-style controls for 3D Sonic, the boost playstyle definitely leads itself to a ton of amazing set pieces. Unfortunately trying to do any kind of platforming as 3D Sonic feels clunky as hell. At least while the camera is behind him, the side-scrolling parts aren't too bad.

The 2D Sonic in this game may not quite feel as good as he has in the past, or in Sonic Mania, but it's pretty close, and I personally prefer the art style for his stages here over the more cartoony ones used in his solo games. The stages look so detailed and much more alive. 2D Sonic definitely benefits from using 3D Sonic's stage designs.

So while I can't say this is the "best of both worlds", I do find both of them to be incredibly fun.

Playing through classic stages as 3D Sonic, or newer stages as 2D Sonic was such a great mix of nostalgia and brand new experiences.

The game is unfortunately pretty short, with only 9 main levels. The themes also feel lacking, with 4 out of those 9 being city stages. Luckily they do all have their own unique personality, with the only two feeling too similar (at least aesthetically) are City Escape and Rooftop Run.

The game pads out a lot of extra content with optional challenges. These vary massively in terms of uniqueness and enjoyability, but overall I found them to be a very positive experience for the game, and allowed some mini games that wouldn't have fit in the main stages. It also allowed Sonic's friends to show off their own individual characteristics without getting too overbearing.

The story is overly simple, which isn't too much of a problem, but the cutscenes still manage to feel cheesy as all hell. I'd almost prefer them to just not be there if they're going to put so little effort into it.

I struggled to decide if I should give it a 7 or an 8, but I think a weak 8 is deserving as even with its lack of stages, it had enough extra content to keep me playing for a while, and most of the stages were so fun and had so many paths that I didn't mind replaying them so many times. Except Planet Wisp Act 1, which is both way too long and has a horrible gimmick.

I've seen this sold as "sure it may be a bad RPG but it's still a fun adventure game!" but the reality is that it's a bad adventure game too. The exploration is slow, tedious, and goes out of its way to be as obnoxious as possible (especially with how you get kicked out of levels every time you pick up one of the main collectibles, and since a lot of levels have multiple of these collectibles you have to replay old stages constantly). There's also more forced encounters compared to Sticker Star so now you have to deal with the boring battle system whether you like it or not.

It does have some nice environments later on though.

This game is almost fascinating with how completely antithetical and misguided it is compared to what came before it.

Into Dreams was a focused, very tight 7 mission experience that didn't overstay its welcome, whereas Journey of Dreams bombards you with insane amounts of cutscenes (it takes nearly 15 minutes to get to the first level!), pads the structure to hell and back, and regularly makes incredibly strange diversions from the main gameplay. This time there's 31 missions and only a small number of them actually feel meaningful; the rest are spent on throwaway gimmick sections, godawful 3D "platforming", and completely out-of-place vehicle stages.

And you want to know the craziest part? It's a 5 hour game! There's this much padding in a five hour game! If Journey of Dreams just stuck with only having one mission per world and cut the rest of the dumb bullshit (which would make it a 7 mission package again) then maybe I'd be willing to say that it's an underwhelming successor but still okay for what it is. At its best it doesn't add much interesting to the NiGHTS formula--the transformations are a great idea squandered by being used so uncreatively--but it'd still be passable. But when the experience is filled with so much bloat and uneven pacing it's hard for me to recommend it even to fans of the series.

The most masturbatory sci-fi I've ever witnessed. During this immense narrative juggling act, it still remembers to have a really fun cast of characters, and presents this all with the most beautiful art in video games. Though there are definitely nitpicks to be made here. The combat is very easy, even on Intense. The blistering pace of the plot can reduce the impact of some key moments. Some of the music here is awesome, and some of it is some pretty generic orchestral stuff.

All that being said, I highly doubt I'll ever play a game like this again. While the whole thing was a great ride, I would give anything to experience the utter confusion of those first 10 hours again.

Despite his terrible concept of pacing, I honestly really enjoy Nomura stories for how it juggles concepts, especially relating to this one. It's a very interesting story surrounding memory this time around, leading to quite a few emotional moments that left me satisfied. It also still holds a lot of that KH charm, as well as some boss fights that are a bit interesting on their own.

That being said that's where the praise stops, the gameplay here is NOT good. In fact I'd say it's anything other than that. Other than the basic enjoyment of deckbuilding, the combat here is some very weak idea of spacing, then spamming either your broken deck setup (because ReChain has awful card balance), or just any set of attacks and you'll be fine either way. It's not even visually pleasant to fight which is something the series tends to be good at in spite of the lack of depth in most of its areas. The Riku story side does offer a neat twist in that the decks are prebuilt so the balance is fine tuned, but without the enjoyment of creating your own deck it's actually worse for it because Riku's decks are not fun to play around with either, other than the initial fight with each deck understanding where the card combos are.

It probably hurts that I tried out Slay the Spire this year and it makes this game a pile of trash. (4.5/10)