Having a chance to reflect on Wii as a game through unlocking everything for the first time gives me a chance to reflect on it a little bit more than multiplayer revisits brimming with nostalgia, and as such has helped me realise that while it's still a great game, it's one bested by others both before and after it in nearly every department for me. Double Dash and DS nail the track design and have better single player experiences (also DS is still my favourite to play due to the complexity of the drifting system, something that while gone from this game it manages to replace very well), and 7/8 are much better at presentation and variety especially owing to 8D's number of tracks on display.

MKW is often a game that feels larger than life due to what online multiplayer and leaderboards spawned, as well as the completely overhauling mods that I still think of more when I think of this game, but as the basegame itself goes... It's pretty middling. I'd still highly rate it as a multiplayer experience especially alongside a trackpack like CTGP. but as a base it's pretty solid but far from the best the series has to offer.

When I started this, I declared that unless anything drastic happened, it was my favourite Puyo game to date. God how that slipped by the end.


The laundry list:
- Absolutely no gameplay variety (only 1-on-1 Puyo 2 battles in adventure mode despite multiple rulesets being available in other modes)
- Very formulaic tickbox cutscenes (character has an overarching scenario which will be joked about in the first cutscene by that stage's character, said character then leaves very quickly after battle is over, no room for any development of anyone short of their assigned architype for their story mode)
- All over the place difficulty balancing (listed level is often not indicative of how hard they'll actually be because of their usage of support items, also said number decreases and increases at random anyway meaning there's no real skill curve)
- Clearly finished content being locked behind future updates (they're available to fight in the story mode being fully voiced and modeled, but only characters who have story modes are currently playable. On this note, please don't give every single playable character a story mode)
- Currently no ending in the game (I'm sure one will be patched in but to not even have an ending shows either how much of a rushjob this is or how desperately they want you to keep subscribing for the content updates in subsequent months and therefore payments)

All of this left me feeling extremely jaded with the game and honestly with Apple Arcade as a "legitimate" gaming platform in general. Great stuff has come out of it (on their final patches once the year or so of exclusivity is up mind you), but for Apple to continue to prove that they want console quality titles to be their flagships they need to ship them in a state comparable to console games. People moan about how many patches you need to do on console nowadays, but on said platforms I've never seen a game advertised as a system seller just tell you to come back for the ending in a few months time. It's ridiculous.

This game needs far more time in the oven as currently even despite the clear ambitions on show, it just isn't finished and therefore can't even begin to stack up to other far more accessible and affordable offerings in the series. Maybe in a year or so we'll see a final-ish build be shipped out to consoles and PC, but until then this isn't really worth your time, especially if you'd be going out of your way for a subscription and/or an Apple device to play it.

I enjoyed this a lot! It's one of those games that I'd put down for a bit and have to really convince myself to pick back up (hence how long it took me to complete) but once I actually just got stuck into it I'd always have a blast.

It's a short and handhold-y game for sure, but one that gives you a guided experience through some fun gameplay scenarios. Not the world's greatest platformer or anything, but it made me smile all throughout and I'd say I enjoyed my time with it the entire way through, so I'd give it a recommend on that basis. Not gonna blow you away, but you'll be charmed in the process.

Enjoyed it but way too difficult for me even with practice. One of those games I like but feel like because the difficulty I'm locked out of and that always just frustrates me more than anything the difficulty actually throws at me.

I'm aware this is the easy one or whatever but that stage 4 boss would just not budge even after getting there with only one life lost in the prior stages. No way to practice without playing the entire thing again and I know there'd just be some huge difficulty spike in stage 5 that I'd have the same problem with anyways so I'm pretty done.

I had a lot of fun with this campaign! It just feels like a fleshed Out Smash Classic Mode (ironically this game also has a standalone Classic Mode, which feels redundant given) and I can say with certainty that I enjoyed the experience more than the single player content of Smash for Wii U and Ultimate combined, so make of that what you will.

My only complaints are that I hate the number of fakeout endings (one of my largest gaming pet peeves) and a glitch where I kept spawning under the platform ended a run right at the end which cost me 40 minutes or so getting back to that point. Otherwise a pretty solid experience!

Bakeru is a fun platformer but one that never really wows or perfects anything it does, instead it's pretty alright. I wish they'd just put the time they put into making 60 levels into instead halving that list and making each one feel more memorable, because the slog that the number of levels psychologically and tonally creates is honestly the worst thing about the game, everything else is pretty good but hopefully the seemingly poor sales don't kill the chances of a sequel.

P.S. Also technically unrelated to game design but the performance is abysmal. Worse than Scarlet and Violet but at least those games have a fantastic game lying underneath the issues, Bakeru is just a very slightly above average platformer. I played on an overclocked Switch which was 1.5x faster than a standard Switch and it still 90% of the time ran at 20FPS or lower. Plus lots of input drops which don't just happen at inconvenient times but all the time.

P.P.S. I played through this using Team Oceanic's fantastic fantastic fan translation which I would highly recommend if you are interested in checking this game out.

I had a rhythm game itch and while said gameplay is serviceable, the wrapper around it leaves so much to be desired. Enjoyable but ultimately meaningless interactions plus grind makes for a very forgettable experience. Top that off with a meh song list that had the potential to be great had they not shoved it out the door a year after base-P5 and yeah, disappointed.

We were robbed of Royal, Animation, Q2, Strikers and even Tactica music in here instead of 10 songs remixed 3 times to fill a track list.

A very, very good game with few flaws, but still flaws nonetheless. The perviness of the plot given some of the subjects covered for the first half of the game just feels sleezy and held back my enjoyment of it somewhat, despite how well said plotpoints feel told even despite the stark contrast to just flaunting off the female characters whenever they feel like they need to grab the player's attention again.

My other issues mainly come down to a lack of clear communication for first timers on how to best interact with the game and specifically the progression of certain events later in the game, but given how well the rest of the game is explained and laid out, it's not too huge of an issue and something you either already know or will quickly learn.

Otherwise, I had a good enough time to put in 75 hours over 3 weeks, so when I say I really enjoyed it, I mean it. Looking forward to getting deeper into the rest of the series after a bit of a break with some smaller games.

MadWorld is a game I REALLY want to like but whenever I go back to it, I either get bored or stuck and give up until I pick it up again years later. This time I wanted to give it a proper go in time for the 15th anniversary, but my patience wore thin by the time I got to the castle area.

I was already feeling that the stages were becoming a bit monotonous with how much point pushing it felt like was needed each time just to get to the boss fight, but not only does the castle area ramp this up, but it also introduces annoying BS which feels like runtime padding considering on average this game takes 5-10 hours not really including all the times you need to reset 20 mins back to the start of the stage. In particular on the shitlist, this level has:
- Randomly spawning enemy that takes 1 life per hit. You have 3 lives per stage.
- Enemies that grab you, forcing you to perform a QTE to avoid the one hit death enemy.
- Enemies that can only be attacked in a certain way as they otherwise respawn in packs. Only method of attack that works uses up a pretty fast draining attack meter and has to be done in a certain direction subject to motion controls working.
- A bossfight on average 20 mins into the stage where you are ganged up on by around 10 creatures that respawn when you kill them.

After already struggling with other levels for an hour or so beforehand and debating throwing in the towel, dying right at the end of this ordeal was as good as reason as any to figure that it doesn't get much better than this (I've heard it does, but I don't want to sit through this stage multiple times to find out to be completely honest, a complete moodkiller when said mood was just already "meh").

Sick soundtrack, mostly good presentation (enemies blend too much into the background sometimes due to black and white) and an intriguing plot do a lot of heavy lifting, but monotony and stage design sink the ship. Also, why is this game stuck in 480i? It came out in 2009. Not only could it have looked way better, but it would've helped with the colour clashing issues this game can sometimes suffer from. Don't really see Platinum pulling this game out of their backcatalogue (even with heavy re-edits since some things are pretty dated) but something that would at least help it somewhat.