Major improvement from the NES Punch-Out in terms of overall aesthetics and game feel. There's a few kind of BS fights but I usually got around those by making a save state at the start of each so I didn't get kicked to the beginning of the circuit if I lost enough to run out of continues, which honestly might have to do a lot with why I enjoyed it so much.
The game itself also feels significantly easier due to the Knockout Punch which allows you to speed blitz the shit out of the earlier opponents and also get some good damage on the later opponents due to how easy it is to fill, making the game feel a lot faster and smoother while not actually being faster than the NES entry (in fact, I'd say it's slower due to the virtue of no move being faster than some of the things Tyson or Super Macho Man throw at you). Really, the pace of each fight and how it rewards aggressiveness is the key to making the game as satisfactory as it is here: Even if the payoff at the end of the fights isn't as satisfactory as beating the final NES Punch-Out opponents, getting in the zone while playing this and beating the crap out of everyone with knockout punches feels fucking amazing.
The camera angle and how it jumps around the ring also makes you feel a lot more involved compared to the zoomed out angle of the NES game because it makes everyone seem imposing and makes some fights pretty claustrophobic. Obviously this makes "Little" Mac not that little anymore and takes away from the underdog feel you had when fighting some people in NES Punch-Out, but the additional immersion is greatly welcomed instead.

Obviously the game isn't flawless, there's a few fights that feel kind of bullshit before you figure out the trick to them, but it's not particularly ""hard"" to figure it out except for a couple of fights like the dude with the staff or Rick Bruiser (notice that I don't mention Nick) where I don't know what I would've done without a guide to learn their attacks. Again, the save states probably had to do with this since it meant I didn't have to restart from the beginning of the circuits if I got knocked on my ass enough times, but if you figure the patterns out it's just a matter of being fast enough to dodge everything which isn't hard if you've played the NES game before.

Overall though, I'd say Super Punch-Out is an incredibly solid and satisfying title in the series, which makes me surprised at how little people seem to bring it up. I can see the difficulty being kind of BS for some people due to patterns being generally harder to figure out instead of NES Punch-Out's approach which is testing your reflexes, but even then the game ends up being easier and a lot more satisfying.

TAICHI
YOU ROCKED MY WORLD

Actual review now that it's been a couple of weeks since I finished it: It's been fairly hard to write down my thoughts on C+C, but after a few weeks I have to say that Cross+Channel is a really great VN with a unique, amazing final message and fascinating philosophy on human connection sadly dragged down at points mostly by its translation, but also because of the use of repetition within the story and jarring changes in tone (which might have to do with the translation too).

In spite of that, this is a work that I'm gonna be thinking a really long time about and is more proof in my eyes that Tanaka Romeo is an amazing writer who knows how to write an incredible cast when he needs to, bringing to life brutal yet very respectful depictions of mental illness, and how the isolation that comes with it can alter people in different ways that fundamentally change their way of communicating with the world. The heroines themselves, while not exactly my favorite parts of the game aside from Miki, do manage to get across the themes very well, fulfilling their narrative purpose and making each week feel meaningfully different.

For the sake of keeping this review from being way longer than intended, I'll keep my opinions on Taichi himself brief: He's the perfect protagonist for the story this VN is trying to tell, and seeing his journey into the person who he eventually becomes manages to nail the balancing act of showing how borderline inhuman he can be, to how kind he eventually learns to be to others. Amazing character.

The game's presentation is very good when you take into consideration its budget. From the onset it's pretty clear that the game isn't exactly an AAA behemoth, often having barren backgrounds and the OST being made up of relatively simple tunes, yet I feel like this ends up adding even more to the experience; It perfectly gets across just how much of an isolated place Gunjou is at the expense of its students.

While the pacing might be a sore point for some, and I can understand that, I feel like the story rarely meanders during the first 5 weeks, only somewhat struggling when you need to finish the week 6 routes which often feature scenes that are identical to the ones found in weeks 1-5. While I can understand the reason that this might've been done, I don't think the game benefits from it, as I didn't exactly enjoy reading scenes that I'd already seen before because they don't add to my understanding of the characters (even if some of them are recontextualized with the previous weeks' knowledge) and are frankly boring to reread. The game does kind of make up with it with the endings to these mini-routes, which are amazing and feel properly climatic.

All of this builds up to Week 7, which is an incredible ending to Taichi's journey and manages to land the themes of the story in an incredibly emotionally charged final scene which doesn't fail to make me emotional even when I'm just thinking about it, weeks after having finished this VN.

I'm incredibly glad I read this visual novel, and even if I don't think it's without its flaws, the philosophy presented about human connection and isolation makes it a noteworthy read. However if you ever have the intention to learn Japanese at some point, I implore you to read it in Japanese. All I've heard about this from people who've read this in its original language points to the fact that all three English translations miss huge pieces of what makes Tanaka Romeo's writing so unique, and there were definitely points during my time reading C+C where I thought that this game needed an editing pass really badly.

Fire Emblem Engage has me somewhat conflicted. On one side you've got some of the best maps in the entire series and gameplay that feels fantastic, but in the other side you've got a very bland story that doesn't have any big standout moments until the last 5 chapters. The characters also aren't very good (with a few exceptions like Diamant, Yunaka, and Panette) and are quickly overshadowed by new units that come in every couple of chapters, making it so getting supports, where you'll find the bulk of the character writing, is harder than it should be.

The difficulty in Hard Mode led to some of the most satisfactory moments I've had playing Fire Emblem. The enemies most of the time know how to punish strategies like dodge tanking and don't fuck around with how they use their own Engage abilities (which they can use multiple times). They also rely on items like warp and entrap staves in order to pick out your characters one by one. In one particular map, I had a 15% Entrap hit Alear and drag them all the way to the boss room, where they then proceeded to get Freeze-locked until one of my characters was close enough to use Rescue.

All of this is to say that Engage forced me to think about different strategies more than every other Fire Emblem game I've played. The game is a fantastic experience if you're in it only for the gameplay, but I can't help but feel like the quality of the story and characters makes Engage feel like a missed opportunity to be one of the best Fire Emblem games out there.

I do have to give props for the quality of the visuals, especially in handheld mode. Probably one of the best looking AAA Switch games by a mile, alongside with a decent soundtrack that boasts some great remixes of previous titles' songs and a few bangers of its own, like Fallen Petals.

as you keep playing this over and over (which honestly you shouldn't) it becomes clearer which parts are actually kind of well designed (like the floating snow balls) and which parts fucking suck (like the bucket and jumpscare)
honestly though the biggest takeaway from the replays is that I should stop tensing up so much to the point of hand pain and that playing this game for more than an hour at a time just makes it frustrating in a pretty bad way

edit: I got the golden pot and at this point I can't tell if I just grew numb to the frustrating parts of the game or what but I felt absolutely nothing after my 50th win. Great use of my time!

This game became significantly better once I realized the normal difficulty was actually the JP release's hard difficulty and the easy difficulty was the ACTUAL normal difficulty.
This game is pretty flawed in the sense that the grind is extremely tedious sometimes and your Digimon can die on you in the worst possible times. However, there's a large roster of Digimon and it's pretty fun to grind at the gym and random get a REALLY good Digimon out of nowhere. The battle system is also decent, and the presentation is neat. Really nice callbacks to the original Digimon World, but aside from that, really average game.