Turn based RPGs tend to be hit or miss for me, even acclaimed ones. This one won me right over though, having a lot of shared DNA with my favourites in the genre. With an endearing story full of loveable characters, a lot of humour, a lot of heart and some truly out of left field twists, and a turn based combat model with a clever twist in the combo system that keeps you active and thinking through every encounter, this had my engagement from start to finish, even barring a couple hiccups (like it’s really abrupt ending which leaves a number of plot points unresolved).

Special thanks to my friend who was a backer and gave me his extra Switch code.

An RPG that feels accessible but not watered down, with lots of customization and role playing options. Your companions all excel at certain roles, so you have to think about who you want to bring and which bases you want covered. I also like how it deliberately puts you in these overmatched checkmate scenarios, forcing you to explore the environment and your skillset, think outside the box, puzzle-solve to win.

Storywise, this has absolutely become one of my favourite Star Wars adventures outside of the original trilogy. Like the Clone Wars series, it feels like a response to problems with the prequels, taking a lot of their established ideas and using it’s characters and conflicts to either point out the holes in some of them, or see through the true potential of others. I wouldn’t be surprised if Dave Filoni ended up drawing a large influence from what Bioware has made here. Every character, every world, every group or faction, is detailed, motivated and wonderfully fleshed out. The writing, the chemistry, the interactions between these characters are charming and full of wit, exploring dialogue options with even the most seemingly insignificant NPCs was one of my favourite things to do. And the themes of the cyclical nature of conflict and the idea that no one is beyond redemption, are all very touching and powerful and true to what Star Wars is.

As far as what I didn’t like, it’s a little janky, the AI can be pretty stupid at times. It wasn’t gamebreaking, but it did screw me over a couple times, particularly once on the final level when I was heavily outnumbered by sith, needed all hands on deck, then this fucking braindead AI decides to run to the other side of the map to dick around with some turret leaving me and my other companion to get slaughtered while I try to get him back. The final boss is also complete fucking horseshit, I only ended up beating him through cheese tactics.

All in all though, this game is a must play if you’re a Star Wars fan.

The gameplay is for the most part the same as Resident Evil 2, but it’s shorter, more linear, less puzzle focused, and I’m disappointed in how it handles the Nemesis. His encounters are all very scripted and easy to predict, I think he goes down too easily, and don’t even get me started on all the “hero throws.” This is in stark contrast to RE2’s Mr X who actively hunted you, roamed the map randomly and, even in the few cases where he actually was scripted, was far more unpredictable. It is ultimately still a decent game that’s worth playing, just a slightly underwhelming one coming off of it’s predecessor.

The more I play and the more I think on it, the harder it becomes to justify giving this game anything less than a perfect score. It takes me back to a different age, when games seemed endless, when I could play them again and again and keep finding new secrets, when they had all these crazy bonuses and different side modes to discover and unlock, when I could toy around and experiment with their mechanics and find all the different cheese tactics. Not to mention it’s ambience, it’s art design, the sound effects, music ques, that safe room theme, despite not playing it before logging it here, I find it evokes a lot of nostalgia in me. I definitely still think there’s hiccups, parts that I dread to play through again, and yet I’m always motivated to power through them. Every time I pick this game up, hours go by. They really captured lightning in a bottle with this one.

It’s like a better version of Pikmin 2, without all the cheapo shit that held me back from truly loving that game, and FAR greater in volume of content. The levels are bigger, more open, and there’s more of them, there’s far more treasure to find, more enemies to face, every Pikmin type returns in addition to the new ones and they’re the most well balanced they’ve ever been. I do have complaints though, mainly in how much of that content depends on what’s been seen already in the other games. I’m also a touch disappointed that, with the exception of the true final boss, the bosses don’t have the same scale or production value that Pikmin 3’s had. Lastly, and this is more a me thing than anything, I kind of prefer Pikmin when it has a certain urgency to it, the timer in Pikmin 1, the need to hunt for food in Pikmin 3, part of what I like about these games is the direness, that push to get things done as efficiently as possible and I didn’t really feel that this time around. Despite all that though, what the game does well, it does pretty damn well. It’s not my favourite in the series, but I can definitely see a lot of fans making the case.

While it definitely has the personality and charm of Pikmin, the moment to moment is still fun, there’s just so many choices in this one that annoyed the hell out of me and drag my opinion of this game down. Tutorial texts are frequent and intrusive, most of the maps are just recycled from the first game, I don’t like how much time is spent in the caves, I find them really bland and unmemorable in terms of art and layout and they deal in a lot of cheap bullshit, things like bomb rocks randomly falling out of the sky and nuking half your pikmin (if any purples or whites were among the casualties, I would just reset), not to mention the exploration is downplayed in favour of a more guided lock and key kind of progression which I don’t think really fits Pikmin. It’s fine, hence the score, but I really didn’t have the motivation to beat it before the release of Pikmin 4. Maybe I’ll come back to it at a later date.

I was reading about how this game was born out of a tech demo to show off the Gamecube’s capabilities, it got me missing the days when the jump to next gen meant developers doing wild and imaginative things mechanically that couldn’t have been done before, not just prettier graphics. Simple and direct, it delivers a quick burst of it’s unique gameplay loop and doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. It does suffer from a bit of jank though, the Pikmin AI can frankly be completely braindead at times with them getting stuck on walls and corners at the best of times, and diving into lakes to their deaths en mass at the worst. I definitely spoiled myself a bit by playing Pikmin 3 first with all it’s quality of life. Still, this series’ uniquely serene yet hectic gameplay loop is one of a kind, and holds up even in it’s most basic form.

Gameplay. It’s…fine. It looks more visceral than the first, but otherwise it doesn’t really feel that much different from the first game, I didn’t feel like I was playing it much differently. It’s basic, but flashy enough to be satisfying in it’s best moments, though it doesn’t evolve much and starts to feel repetitive towards the latter hours of the game,

Story. I went into this open minded. Crayon eaters crying “woke” aside, I do think this story is a downgrade from the first with a lot of cheap, manipulative, grimdark storytelling, a lot of one note, unlikeable characters who make a lot of frankly baffling decision-making, all very much reminding me of what The Walking Dead dropped off into, not to mention a structure that felt completely out of order, bringing all narrative momentum to a halt at points, and to top it all off, a pretty bad case of ludonarrative dissonance, trying to make you feel guilty for your violent actions, but giving you no alternatives to dishing them out as mindlessly as in any other shooter game. That said, the story had it’s highlights. I thought every part featuring Joel was great, they really show his growth from the first game and I really don’t get why there are people who think this game was disrespectful to his character. Surprisingly I liked Abby the most out of the new characters, the moral teeter totter that made up her character was fascinating to me, never feeling manipulative or hammed up like almost every other new character in this game, so was her relationship with Yara and Lev. Even still though, your sympathy for her feels like it’s meant to be somewhat ambiguous and begs more player agency over where it ends than what we were given.

I don’t vitriolically hate the game, but I did find myself taking frequent breaks from it to play Tears of the Kingdom and Risk of Rain 2 instead, so what does that tell you.

Atmospheric, suspenseful, a map that becomes more intimate and familiar the more you traverse it, an ammo economy that forces you to pick and choose what to fight and what to run from while still giving you enough to deal with the mandatory threats. Then there’s Mr X, who throws a wrench into your rhythm once you start feeling comfortable, and raises the suspense up to 11 with the knowledge that he can smash through the wall like the Kool-Aid man at any given moment and corner you in a tight space full of enemies that you tried to avoid. The only thing I didn’t much care for was the bosses, but otherwise this game is excellent.

I liked the colourful PS2/Gamecube era looking artstyle and hud, I like the concept of boss weapons being weaknesses to the level in addition to just the boss at the end, and that’s it. This game is otherwise atrociously bad. It controls like ass, the graphics and animations look incomplete, having to dash into enemies to absorb them doesn’t have the same satisfaction as blowing them up, the levels are just plain poorly thought out with infinite air dashes trivializing platforming, but with cheap enemy placement, cheap insta-kill obstacles, and the bosses having cheap insta-kill attacks that’ll all be sure to cheat a death or two out of you. Then there’s all the little technical things, the way mouths don’t move when characters speak, the sound bugging out, clipping issues galore, and countless other glitches. Blatant levels of polish were not applied here, and I could only imagine how backers must’ve felt when they got their hands on it after anticipating it for so long.

Expands on Breath of the Wild to an exponential degree, but at the same time doesn’t entirely obsolete it, trading some of that game’s laid back serenity and environmental storytelling for more immediacy and showy moments. Tons of new enemies and bosses, some of the best puzzle design I’ve experienced in a game since The Outer Wilds, a world, expansive, dense, wondrous, endless at dishing out surprises. The building mechanics, I’ve made everything from hoverbikes to battlebots already, I can only imagine what people online have come up with. The weapon fusing, at first I thought it would annoy me but eventually I became obsessed with hunting down new creatures to see what crazy new thing I could make out of it’s parts in a vein kind of similar to Monster Hunter. Above all though it’s great for that unparalleled freedom to do what you want when you want. The dungeons are incredible, the Wind Temple is probably my favourite overall just for the atmosphere, the build up to it, the boss it climaxes with, the music through all of it, unforgettable. And the final boss had at least three moments that blew my mind, this has easily my favourite incarnation of Ganondorf. This game is so overflowing with unforgettable moments, big and small, scripted or improvised, that just evoke things from me.

It’s not entirely perfect, I think the first hour is weaker than BOTW’s, the building can sometimes be finicky, and I’m a touch disappointed in the rewards you get for certain challenges (like the Labyrinths). But it otherwise does virtually everything I look for in a video game to such an above and beyond degree to which nothing else even really compares. Marking it as complete here honestly feels dubious because even after putting 70 hours into it and beating the final boss, I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of what this game is hiding from me.

I mean this in the best of ways: this game feels ripped straight from the PS2/Gamecube era. Such a unique experience that swings back and forth between very serene and laid back, and very hectic with the dire stakes and all the micro-management. The world, the characters, the creatures, everything in this game is loaded with personality, I always love reading the Piklopedia entries whenever I find something new. Yet there’s also these foreboding undertones, like this world and these creatures are a step above you, the final boss in particular is something I can’t help but fascinate over. The levels are fun to explore and interact with, the collectables are interesting to find, the bosses and enemies are all fun, the Pikmin are all well balanced, and you really feel bad when you lose them, that end of day cutscene is always sad to watch when a few of them are outside the circle. I really haven’t played another game quite like this, it’s something I’m sure to come back and play through again and again.

Thus far, the Resident Evil I’ve played and seen is the fun kind of horror, your John Carpenter, George Romero kind of horror. This one dips into some hard-ass David Cronenberg, Wes Craven kind of horror, your grotesque, grungy kind of horror, your loved ones trying to kill you, upsetting, psychological kind of horror. Also unlike the other ones, it never lets you get to that point where you feel you’re ready to take on anything guns ablazing, you’re always second guessing whether or not you’ll be ready for what’s around the next corner. Ethan isn’t a cop or a soldier like you play as in the other games, he’s just some guy and you feel that vulnerability. It feels like an everyman’s perspective on the events of a Resident Evil game and it’s far more intimidating and suspenseful as a result.

This game is a bold departure from it’s predecessors while at the same time staying faithful to the franchise’s roots, and I honestly think it’s one of the series’ best.

The best thing I can say about this game is that it isn’t a cynical kind of bad, it’s an ambitious but misguided kind. This weird period when every japanese developer was trying to copy the common western shooter trends at the time. It tries to be this fast paced action game, but so many of it’s design choices completely obstruct that. It’s this wannabe Call of Duty/Uncharted knockoff with pointless qtes and filler scripted bits but with all the restrictiveness of a survival horror game, the claustrophobic camera and levels, limited ammo, hands down the most unintuitive inventory system of any game I’ve played, it’s the worst of both worlds. Shooting things feels floaty, the game looks ugly, both on a fidelity level and an art level, the stories are uninspired and again take themselves way too seriously. The only thing I kind of had fun with was the melee combat. The game had these context sensitive animations that are honestly pretty satisfying to pull off, some of them make me think of Evil Dead. Even that is limited though by a tiny stamina bar that expends way too fast and recovers way too slow. I ended up beating the Leon campaign, the Chris campaign, and I made it to the mountain level (the one where if you get hit or dodge at all, you slide all the way to the bottom) on the edgy-bad-boy-who-doesn’t-play-by-anyone-else’s-rules’ campaign before I decided it wasn’t worth it to continue and just put it down.