The original DKC is a good game that is held back massively by screen crunch, which can be horrible in many levels. There were other features in level design from this era in gaming also that make you feel like you didn’t deserve to die, and it was the game killed you that DKC also possesses. An other smaller critique I have is that the environments here don’t feel that varied or vibrant, possibly due to the dark color palette each world uses.

As for the good: the level design is pretty good for the most part, music is great, and I think the spritework has aged pretty well.

Mario Odyssey: A Game That Could Have Been but Only Aggravates Me at Missed Potential

Part 1. Introduction
Mario Odyssey released in December 2017 to critical and commercial acclaim and many tout it as the best Mario game outright. I do not share the same opinion due to a few significant flaws in the game: bosses devoid of creativity, and the blatant lack of creative moons. Only two complaints may make this sound like a small gripe, but due to the game’s gameplay loop revolving around collecting moons, and to a lesser extent beating bosses, this is a fundamental error to the game to be an enjoyable experience. Note that there are brief summaries for the two longer parts, part 3 and 4 under the parts themselves.

Part 2. The strengths of Mario Odyssey: Visual design, sound design, and game-feel
Each world in Odyssey has fantastic visual appeal that blends magnificently with the game’s art direction. It is rare that there is a world that is not visually stimulating to look at. An aspect of the game liked pertaining to the visuals are the character costumes. It’s a great incentive to get the player to get coins because the costumes themselves are adorable. The soundtrack of the game is also very well done, with no tracks that I find to be far below the rest. Perhaps the best collaboration of the visual and audio design is the “You Got a Moon!” animation and overlay, paired with the brass-filled score; it never ceases to appeal to the eyes and ears. The game is also a joy to control with responsive, slick feeling movement. Mario’s moveset is undoubtedly the best of the 3D Mario series. The addition of cappy leads to what may be the most satisfying tricks in a 3D platform ed to date. However, I find this to be undermined by there being only a couple sequences of jumps with cappy, soiling the creative platform inf possibilities the game aimed for. These strong aspects of the game may have lead to the game being as highly regarded as it is by most who have played it.

Part 3. Mario Odyssey’s fundamental weakness: The lack of creativity in the gameplay loop- bosses
First, I’ll be breaking down why the bosses left me unsatisfied. Their character design: over half of the bosses (11/20 in the base game) are Broodals. Limiting many of the boss fights to the Broodals puts the creativity of the bosses “in a box”, and when considering that the art direction of this game, most Mario games is a simplistic “cartoony” style that usually doesn’t support more abstract character designs when restricted to a specific species (i.e. Koopalings). This restriction is all the more frustrating, which in turn limits my interest in the ensuing fight. The boss fights that would follow a pattern of capturing an enemy/object or a part of the boss’ moveset and using that/it against them. There were a few boss fights that I enjoyed very much. These are the DK, Mollusk-Lanseur, and the Mecha Wiggler fights. The main separator between the good/great boss fights and the ones that aren’t as good is the emphasis these fights had on being inside their respective worlds and not being inside a closed off circle with transparent purple walls. One can see this as a humorously transparent parallel to my “in a box” comment about the Broodals art direction, but the setting of these fights interpret this comment literally. Putting Mario and the world’s boss in a box (if believe this to be an exaggeration, you can interpret this as a closed cylindrical container instead of a box) kept me as the player from feeling like a part of the world, lessening my immersion a substantial amount. Restricting the player to a circle can be done much better as seen in the Cookatiel fight. It brings a creative twist to forcing this. It organically maintains the feeling of being in a part of the world by the setting of the fight being the cooking pot central to luncheon kingdom.

In summary of part 3: due to the restriction of many boss fights to a sectioned off circle, and the nearly unarguable lack of creative character design in more than half of the boss fights, I find Odyssey’s fights as a whole very underwhelming.

Part 4. Mario Odyssey’s fundamental weakness: The lack of creativity in the gameplay loop- moons
An achievement that makes the pacing of Odyssey faster than that of any other 3D Mario’s is the lack of being “booted back” to a hub world upon getting a moon. Having played Mario 64 and 64 DS I looked forward to this improvement, and I excitedly anticipated exploring each world in conquest of finding their moons; the sheer potential for 999 moons of the same quality to other 3D Mario’s stars/shines is undeniable. Unfortunately, I found that the moons were not of a similar quality upon playing the game. After completing the game I estimated that I enjoyed at most, one quarter of the moons I collected. The moons that I found to be fun to earn (key word choice) were almost all of the moons in New Donk City(which is clear it got more development time than any of the other worlds) and other assorted moons that excelled at displaying the developer’s creativity. I will break down this further in putting the game’s moons into two categories: the moons that I enjoyed and those I did not. Those I enjoyed, I would categorize as being adjacent to the effort you would put into the shrines in BOTW/TOTK with the creativity of the better of those shrines(I’m leaving “better shrines” open to interpretation for the sake of saving myself from over explanation). These shrine-adjacent moons would be:

Better mini game moons(once again I’m leaving “better” open to interpretation)
Many of the non-Broodal boss battles
Well hidden “hidden moons”
A few other creative moons that don’t fit into a specific classification.

I will categorize the remaining moons as being more adjacent to korok seeds. It’s a nearly universal opinion that korok seeds are not fun to collect, and no one wants to put in all the time to collect all of the korok seeds in BOTW or TOTK due to their monotonous nature. Some of the moons I’d put in this category include:

Moons available for purchase
Most of the seed moons
The rocks
Costume NPC moons
* A multitude of not well hidden “hidden moons”/glowing spots/cracks in the ground/ground pounding lumps that are out in the overworld not hidden very well.

Of course, I am bound to be missing some types of moons in the two categories above, but this is purely an estimation of the types of moons the player will encounter in Odyssey to help illustrate what I value in what makes a moon enjoyable. It is clear to see that I enjoy creativity and variety in moons, and when I repeat a task again and again, especially if it is a task that displays the (Nintendo’s) low estimation of the consumer’s intelligence(yes this is a game for people of all ages. They are still underestimating a child’s intelligence), I lose my patience; my boredom grows. I find it interesting that there are many direct parallels between the majority of the game’s moons and korok seeds but many don’t see this parallel. I believe the reason many don’t mind or even enjoy doing these monotonous moons is that they are completely enthralled with the game’s visual and auditory charm. Moving from platform to platform with the same sequence of jumps with cappy to ground pound a lump is not enough for me to feel like I “earned” the moon; note that I am being generous with this example considering some of the moons of this type are just out in the open, no platforming required. For me, these korok-adjacent moons felt like a chore, so I was only able to complete the main story for the sake of giving the game a fair shake. Due to the fact that the majority of the moons are uninteresting(korok-adjacent), since the moons are the majority of the game, makes the game as a whole uninteresting. I am of the belief that moons may actually be worse than korok seeds because at least there’s no real content locked behind getting 999 korok seeds. In contrast, there is content locked behind 500 moons in odyssey. With my estimation prior, this is equivalent to having to get around 380-400 korok seeds, which in turn leaves you with 100-120 good moons (at best)(not accounting for all 3 moons for each good boss). Someone may think that I have just proven myself wrong since that there may be 120 good moons and there are 120 stars in Mario 64. For one, if only a quarter of the game is enjoyable, that’s a big negative-I don’t enjoy the game roughly three quarters of the time. I also believe that the stars in Mario 64 are usually better than even the good moons in Odyssey.
For instance: to get a star in Mario 64 you might have to navigate a desert and find your way to the entrance of a pyramid; once you’re inside you have to platform your way to the top to get a star. There are moons that are considered by some to be a few of the best moons in Odyssey that do the same thing(going inside a pyramid), and I’d agree that these are some of the best moons. I’d consider that star to be around “the middle of the pack” in SM64, and there are multiple moons in the pyramid in Odyssey, which re-emphasizes the decreased amount of time an enjoyable moon takes in comparison to a star in SM64.
A counterpoint may be the fact that in 64 you exit the level just to return to that pyramid. This counterpoint and the original pro-64 stars argument both crumble entirely upon realizing that the amount of quality in a game doesn’t matter as much as the density of the quality (as most would agree), so even if there are more good moons in Odyssey than there are good stars in 64, I don’t think this matters as much as the ratio of good to bad moons and good to bad stars, respectively.

In summary of part 4: the majority of Odyssey’s moons are “korok-adjacent” and not fun to pursue; the good moons are less interesting than average stars in SM64 (and Galaxy, not mentioned though an argument similar to that of SM64’s stars would have been used), and New Donk City’s moons are a shining light in a deeply flawed variety of moons. The quality of 64’s stars lead to a quality dense experience, while the overall lack of quality of Odyssey’s moons form a game that isn’t as dense with quality, but still has some quality content within it.

Part 5. Conclusion
Odyssey has much to offer with great visual and audio design and game-feel, but is lacking in its core gameplay loop due to a limited variety of creative moons and bosses. The experience left me with a craving for a game with less moons and more of an emphasis on making the player feel a sense of accomplishment in collecting each moon. The game is beautiful and feels amazing to play but upon further inspection these aspects are only a facade for a flawed experience.

This was my first really in depth game review lmk what you think! I wanna talk with ppl of well thought out points of view of any opinion on this game I’d be glad to have some discussion.

This is a great Pokémon game. We need more of this, hopefully a sub-series: “Pokémon Legends”. A large problem is that in terms of open world games, there are many better ones due to the pure quantity of them and that this was taken out of the oven a bit early. I did find it repetitive at the points when I wanted to level up my badge; at times I just wanted to explore the next area already but I needed to grind to level up the badge. I didn’t feel like there were many surprises in the open world (like Orebrough Cave, my personal highlight) and the environments weren’t varied enough to make it constantly exciting to explore. The main driving force of the game was finding and catching Pokémon. The battle system is seem-less and the feeling of catching an unaware Pokémon is fantastic. Possibly the worst aspect of this game was the story. The story is something that bored me very much, and I found that I never cared what was happening and just wanted to get back to the open world.
Overall, It’s probably the best Pokémon game since gen 5, or just the best one outright.