Bombarding the player with visible enemies is both assaultive and corny, and arguably as un-immersive as random encounters were in the first place. On the PS1 or maybe the PS2 this would have been progress but nowadays it just isn't cutting it anymore. Pokemon on Switch relies on getting players into battles completely voluntarily. Indie titles gut exploration entirely and throw the player in a guantlet of mandatory battles where the game's mechanics/systems are put at the forefront plus the element of endurance.

Nearly gave up in this game trying to find the house to meet the fortune teller's daughter. Even before then it was obnoxious getting into the bar, I seemed to be prone to entering behind the bar counter rather than the main entrance. Simply doing anything in this town feels slow and laborious. It lacks charm and definitely feels like a downgrade from 2D. It kills any interest I had in the game's world and thus any desire to keep playing aside from the battle mechanics. (i.e. choosing fight from a menu to level up your assholes.)

To save in this game, you have to enter a church. And every time you do it asks if you want to stop playing.

This is just an aside, but it made no sense to me that the townsfolk freak out over the green guy in your travelling party but the game's intro has the three of you march into the town in broad daylight and no one seemed to mind then.

Battle systems that display action on the top screen and data on the bottom, or which distribute either of those across both screens, will render that game borderline unusable without exception.

Gave up right at the start after being plopped into a sky palace and instructed to speak to the headmaster. Never found him/her. Instead talked to a bunch of the same NPC copy pasted throughout the place offering only ludicrously frivolous dialogue (such as "this is a dead end") and going back and forth across the terrible map comprised of artitrary deviations and locked doors.

Ys.. now in 3D!! Try frantically to track your foe while staring at super meters at the bottom of the screen and navigating your spastic hoverblading cursor-person out of harm's way.

Unnaturally high def ground textures also make a return- experience grass fields that will cut your eyes just by looking at it!

An intricate and original storyline that begins with Adol accidentally walking in on a woman bathing in a stream, who flinches and drops her towel! (Wait, where did she even find a towel.. oh who the hell cares.)

Can Adol solve the mysteries of the island and defeat most powerful adversary- the camera- yet?

Will ZEELLO ever get his forty dollars back?

Find out in Wise Eight!

Where does Level 5 get the money to keep making bad games. They must have some mafia connections or something. Jeanne has..

No job system.

A thematically meaningless three pronged elemental system tacked on for no reason whatsoever. (I thought of another one they could use: groan, eyeroll, snore.)

An absolute childish cringefest of a story.

Tutorial box piggybacking. ("Well seeing as we've already interrupted you to tell you about this thing integral to gameplay why not we seize this opportunity to tell you about, like, I unno five to eight other things right this moment and see how much of it you remember five minutes from now!! GAm DEzinE!!") sound of Level 5 employees high giving each other

Party members don't have their own individual turns, instead you and the AI take turns moving your entire team at once. Have fun selecting a unit and moving them a handful of spaces forward at the start of a battle before manually moving the cursor back to another unit and doing the same for them. Then do the same on the next turn, and the next turn, and the turn after that. Moving cursor back 'n forth simulator 2006.

Play Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions, and ignore this.

I'm not saying this is the best N64 game. But I'm not saying it's not.

Sadly it takes the cartoon route by having the Pokemon be voiced, although something can definitely be said about hearing the VAs do their best full cringe freakout while a big combo is happening. Adds a certain energy to the gameplay for what it's worth.

The 3D mode is insane and it's a shame it has never been done again in later Panel Pon games, even though you basically can not lose in it. Although the same technically applies to Player 2. Irresistible force paradox, as told by shrieking Pokemon and colored blocks.

ALL non essential targets ought to have affected morality. There was no reason to set aside specific targets for that purpose as essentially nothing more a switch that you flip by shooting a missile at it. ("Kill these if you're doing the evil route, otherwise don't.") It's overly mechanical and offers no decision making like "oh that gun turret is annoying but if I kill it I become evil". The only tension comes from having to guess how many to kill if you're doing the neutral route, since you can't view your new morality in real time. You ought to have been able to.

But in general games with multiple story paths are always maidworky and age with comparatively less grace and are more laborious to revisit. Sometimes you want to be able to just pick up a game and experience it again and not have to get out a spreadsheet.

Anyway, good game. Great music.
hey buddy still alive yadda yadda

The clubhouse is this vast labyrinth of nothingness. First thing you're told to do is establish your handicap but I must have missed the part where it explains how to actually do that or where it is. I was able to find it though, because I'm a gaming god.

Proceeded to play 18 holes by myself to establish handicap then played the exact same 18 holes all over again as part of my first handicap tournament. This is in effect the same as playing by myself a second time, since you don't see the opponent's turns nor are there markers showing where everyone's ball landed as is the case in Pangya on PSP.

Won the tournament on my first attempt which unlocks new clothing items in the boutique, but I have no idea where the boutique is (even my godlike gaming ability has its limits) thereby nullifying the game's own reward system. Honestly, being able to play as my own Mii wasn't as exciting as I imagined it to be, and that's really all the game has going for it. Not really big on golf games, even a really well done golf game is just so-so from a fun perspective. That's NOT to say this is a really good golf game although it is ok. It has these nagging idiosyncracies like not being able to review the button commands for topspin/backspin if you've forgotten them except by starting your shot at which point you barely have any time to read them and react. The game also doesn't know how "one" is spelled. But I guess that's my personal plight as someone who knows how to spell.

Only played up to class A3 or so or whichever one was it with the near impossible license test.

The game has an issue in general with the license tests for a vehicle class often being harder than the actual competition for that class, so the competitions tend to feel like victory laps, while the real challenge comes from doing the license test.

What I like about the TDU series is the vehicle class system which provides an excuse to main many different cars. It'z fun going to dealers, test driving the cars and planning what will be your choice for a particular class. However the more I played the game the more it seemed like some cars were flat out better than the others in that class and some were flat out worse. Obviously this is present in all racing games but somehow it felt more pronounced here.

Another issue is that for general free roam there's no reason to pick an off road vehicle so as not to block yourself off from the dirt routes (of which there are a huge amount) as well as any side missions that make use of them. Any off-road car will do, so there's nothing stopping you from picking from the most high performance class. Taking into account everything I had written up to this point, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that there was a single car in particular I was behind the wheel of for nearly the entire amount of the time I spent playing the game, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one.

Still, I liked driving around and doing the side missions. It was like crack to me although at the same time certainly a downbeat/relaxed experience. I just wish it saved your best record for each mission like it did for races. There were many missions with like a damage or stamina meter that I finished with maybe one percent left and I almost wanted to restart because I know I could have done it better, even though it makes no difference. ໒( ⇀ ‸ ↼ )७

I can't tell you how many times I died because I press the X button in the air and nothing happens, so I just plummet to my doom. What the hell is that? I'm honestly not even sure if I just didn't press the button hard enough (pressure sensitive buttons yay) or the timing window on the double jump is just incredibly stingy. (I honestly don't see why this mechanic is so overused in games, it's not even a full second jump, and seeing as APPARENTLY it's required nearly every gap then it's technically a liability to the player rather than a benefit.)

It takes like five hours in this game to turn the camera around on the X axis. Whereas moving the camera on the Y axis doesn't look up/down, but zooms in/out instead. (wtf???)

Hijacking vehicles in this game is the most bizarre thing where the vehicles hover OFF SCREEN and the only reason you know when one is above you is because the hijack button prompt appears onscreen. Which means that not only do you press the button to hijack the vehicle but also to find out what vehicle it is you're hijacking! I'm not even exaggerating.