I never had the chance to experience the original, so this is my first time coming to this title and I have to say that there's a lot that's impressive about the cohesive world design and maps that truly came to later define Immersive Sims. I think I agree with the take that this is more of a dungeon crawl than an Immersive Sim. It's also a solid story with memorable beats. Cyberspace and a couple of the levels still kinda suck in that way some 90s games did of being too obtuse and poorly paced and I'd have liked to see that stuff simply streamlined out but maybe that would have pissed off the fans.

Still, much better than I expected it to be and I'd recommend just setting cyberspace to 1 so you can get through that as quickly as possible.

I missed this at the time it was released and I know there was a lot of controversy at the time with how Square Enix handled the launch and micro-transactions in a single-player only game. I'm not saying that stuff is bad, but now 8 years later, playing the game with none of that stuff attached to it anymore, it's an amazing game with so many great moments and fixes the few nagging problems I had with Human Revolution. The only downside is the abrupt ending and the occasional parts when you can tell they were constrained by time and budget to achieve their full vision. Still, one of the best of the Immersive Sim genre and well worth a play for any fan of the series.

You wonder (pun intended) what Nintendo could do new with one of the longest running game series and then they basically make a game where each level is a new idea, often polished to a perfect sheen, and what you are left with might be the best mainline 2D Mario platformer. Yes, I said it. Take off the nostalgia glasses and the old games have lots of problems and the new games have some rough parts too. This one feels like the team went back and looked at what made every single 2D Mario game good and said, let's do that, but even better.