Beautiful graphics, amazing characters, amazing story, and one of the most enjoyable and satisfying combat systems I've ever played. Pretty much every second I spent fighting things in this game I was enjoying myself and had a massive smile on my face as I discovered new techniques and optimized my way to higher and higher damage numbers.

Every boss fight just kept getting better and better, I didn't even mind when they turned into playable cutscenes - the spectacle was enough to keep me hyped.

My only real criticism is with the side quest pacing. I think a lot of the side quests have tons of care put into them, the stories they tell have to be some of the best I've seen from gaming side quests in a while - a good few of the scenes present in them could easily deserve to be part of the main story. The main problem is that they'll tend to drop all at once after every story mission, with the highest amount dropping at once being just before the final main quest. It takes away from otherwise great quests since I tend to get burned out and start skipping through dialogue. I don't really consider this enough to knock the rating down though, considering I could have easily just chosen to pace it out and do stuff post-game. I'm just insane and need to do everything before moving on.

I usually stick with games longer before reviewing them but I really truly am not being grabbed by this one. With all the hype and the new IP I was thinking this would be the Bethesda game to make me finally understand their appeal - but it's just not happening.

Every system in this game feels like it's half-baked and I can easily think of examples of other games that focus in on those systems and do them a lot better. Discovering new planets feels meaningless when you can't actually fly to them and instead just go through a loading screen, point your ship at them, then go into a menu, then load again. I'm not even necessarily asking for something seamless here, but space travel just feels pointless and I genuinely feel like it could have been cut out entirely?

It wants to tell a gripping sci-fi story - but none of the characters seem very interesting and the complete lack of evolution in their dialogue system makes it impossible to feel anything for them. How they still design these games to match what people make jokes about with the "oblivion NPC" videos is insane to me. The fundamental design of the game feels outdated.

The stars I'm giving it go toward how nice things look in the world, and the lovely UI style (though, the UX isn't the greatest). I also just have to appreciate the ambition at play here and the fact that I know this is going to make a lot of people very happy.

Happily got the platinum on this because I really just wanted to see everything the game had to offer.

Incredible platforming with fluid movement, and fantastic combat with far more options than I ever would have guessed (honestly, my expectation of metroidvania combat is a 3 hit sword slash and a couple of tricks). The game looks absolutely beautiful too, it's got such a strong visual identity I don't think I would ever forget it or even think to leave it out of discussions about game art.

My only real problems are more technical nitpicks than anything else. Despite the main gameplay being polished to hell and back, there are random bugs here and there that just take you out of the experience at random times. I had a good few crashes, and some side quests got bugged resulting in not being able to get a 100% save file. I'm sure those will be fixed in time though. Other than that, the story isn't the strongest. The characters are well designed and fun enough, but everything just feels a bit under-explored. Would love to see a DLC focusing on the other Immortals.

Had to abandon this at the last area when I realised I just wasn't having fun anymore. There's so much here that I love. The music is amazing, the models are really cute and charming, the level and creature design is very creative and fun. But I feel like this remake is, in a weird way, too faithful. There are a lot of dated design decisions in the game that I think would have felt fine if played on the original hardware, but when positioned against the modern improvements they stick out really badly. And there is just a strange sense of things being missing in the game. Like the lack of text writing noises or beepspeech during dialogue - and no character talking sounds at all in cutscenes which makes them feel unfinished.

The characters in general are just kind of... Okay? Bowser is probably the highlight. Peach's character is basically non existent. The party rarely feels like an actual party, and the villain is just a big sword I knew nothing about.

I feel like in a world where the M+L series and Paper Mario series exists it's hard for me to like this game outside of just recognising it's value for what it was the first to do. But there are plenty of better Mario themed RPGs these days to pick from so it's hard for this to compete. I hope the remake is really good for those who loved the original though.

While the plot threads can get a bit confusing at times, and some things seem to be given too much or too little weight depending on how they weave into the overall resolution, this was still an incredibly story and a really great example of how to handle narrative in gaming. It has cute little moments of having to use game systems like audio settings to navigate situations, but doesn't beat you over the head with it like some other "meta" games tend to do.

I think I would have liked a lot more time to be spent on that first night and navigating / working out curse triggers and trying to survive or use your own curses on others - but I guess they wanted to keep the story branching to a minimum since if can get confusing as is.

A game hasn't made me this happy in a long time. The characters and lore are finally being utilised, the soundtrack fucking slaps, new things are being attempted, and it finally feels like I can look forward to Sonic news instead of worrying.

Ian Flynn's writing and treatment of the characters is phenomenal, especially the new character Sage. I wasn't surprised, given what I've read of the IDW comics, but it's so great to finally see it in a game. It's critical Sega keeps him on board for future projects.

The game isn't perfect. It's got a lot of problems (looking at you, Chaos Island), but it really feels like a new era for the franchise and I'm incredibly excited to see where it goes from here.