Simple and fun traversal, easy to learn but hard to master and rewarding combat, very compelling story with countless villains and references from the comics woven into it - this game is just incredibly fun. There are countless activities and missions to do outside of the main story, which can get a little tedious and exhausting sometimes but you can easily stop and jump back into the main story. Yuri Lowenthal gives an amazing performance that had me choked up in multiple key scenes, but the new model for Peter definitely softens him in comparison to the original, like he's always stuck smirking at all times for some reason.

Very good game.
Light 9

This is my favourite game of all time. I love this game more than I love my parents. There are so many things that make this game special that I could honestly sit here for hours on end gushing about. The atmosphere is just unmatched in anything else, the grandiose and abstract environments, the fully orchestrated beautiful soundtrack, an actual serious story in a Mario game. I've been playing Super Mario Galaxy my entire life, in the morning before school on a shitty CRT, or on my PC in Dolphin, or on my switch most recently, it's just ridiculously fun. The controls are definitely less tight than 64 & Sunshine, but the sort of floaty quality they have is perfect for the level design. Every single star, every galaxy, every enemy in this game is so incredibly memorable I could honestly describe to someone the entire game without needing to stop to think even for a second. While Galaxy 2 might have the tighter level design, the vibes and the atmosphere created in Galaxy is just impossible to recreate or top, the overpowering loneliness of space is something I think has only been truly depicted perfectly in Super Mario Galaxy.

Despite this being my favourite game ever, it definitely has its shortcomings. I think it's really clear now, with Odyssey in perspective, how much the big mission, one star, no collectibles sort of level design Galaxy have can make it feel a little bogged down. It can feel like a chore to have to do a whole star to get to the Bowser level, while in Odyssey you just breeze through and do lots of little chunks of perfected mini-levels. I don't think this makes the type of Mario game Galaxy is worse by any means, but it definitely slows it down a lot. It took me a week to beat this recently (granted I did do literally every star I could before beating the Bowser level) but it definitely takes a lot longer to go through. The post-game content in Galaxy is pretty underwhelming, the purple coin missions are fun, and Luigi does give a nice challenge for a second playthrough, most people just are not going to want to play through an entire game again after they just got every single star just for a little extra challenge with a character that has slightly different attributes. Galaxy 2's green stars are definitely a step up, but I don't think the post-game content that isn't just getting stars you didn't is really crazy fun or anything.

Strong 10

Pikmin is arguably the best game on the GameCube, tied only with Luigi's Mansion in my mind, but very difficult to explain to someone why without sounding crazy. This game is filled to the brim with charm - you can tell there was an immense amount of care put into filling every inch of this post-apocalyptic earth with entertaining and unique critters. No space is wasted in any of the areas, every nook and cranny acts piece in a larger puzzle, laid on top of the gorgeous landscapes and set to beautiful music.

Something about commanding a hundred little guys to destroy various gigantic bugs and making them collect the spoils of your battles back to base camp is indescribably satisfying, the core gameplay loop in Pikmin has been so carefully crafted, down to a T. Everything about this game is just wonderful, it's short, sweet, and packed with charm. The only problem with this game is how ridiculously stupid the Pikmin's AI can be all the time. They constantly get trapped on gaps or fall into water going over bridges. They randomly trip over and you have to go back for them. They are unbelievably easily distracted. The list is expansive, and while some of these are funny little quirks, they get more annoying than cute when time is of the essence and you have to go back for one random pikmin that decided to fall over 10 seconds before sunset. This is improved on immensely in future games, but is definitely at it's most annoying here.

Despite these annoyances with the pikmin and their behaviour at times, Pikmin is just so goddamn fun. The short length and easy-to-learn hard-to-master gameplay makes it a game you can replay over and over and over again. There aren't nearly as many secrets and easter eggs in this first entry as there are in others, but additions like the Smoky Progg definitely help to make the world seem more secretive than it appears, and to make it more rewarding to master your Pikmin wrangling skills to become as efficient as possible.

Pikmin is a must-play for the GameCube, ridiculously fun and satisfying, and cute as all hell.

Strong 8

This is a pretty solid Zelda game all things considered, I like the visual style as much as it tries to emulate Wind Waker in 2D. There is a lot of recycled music (mostly from OoT weirdly enough) which is a little bit disappointing, but doesn't really bother me enough to dock any points. I generally enjoyed myself throughout.

My biggest gripe would be how completely cryptic some of the "puzzles" are at points - there's at least 3 different visual clues (if you could even call them that) used to tell me I'm supposed to bomb a non-obvious wall. I had to retreat to Zelda Dungeon multiple times because I was either completely stumped and it was something that I don't think anyone could have noticed just playing the game normally, or I knew what I had to do but it was just ridiculously tricky for one little puzzle. The little cannon things in Dark Hyrule Castle were unbelievably frustrating and it took me countless tries to get them all to hit at once, god-willing one of them didn't decide to just bounce off in a completely different direction. Both of these things encapsulate what annoyed me the most about this game - there is so, so much tedium.

The final showdown with Vaati was one of the most frustrating boss fights I think I've ever had to beat in a videogame - absolutely no clues on what I was supposed to do were left for me. In the first phase, it was simple enough, I didn't realise until later on I could use the Gust Jar to suck up the dark stuff on his eyeballs, but this was by far the easiest and most straightforward part of the fight. His second phase drove me a little crazy at first, I have no idea why only the bow works on his little eyeballs, and as usual the four sword stuff was infuriating and it took me about ten tries to get him where I could actually damage him with my sword after you flip the eyeballs and everything. The third phase was ridiculously hard to understand - there is absolutely no way I was going to figure out that I could flip his arms after they came up. I think if they added the little golden sparkle that the Cane of Pacci uses maybe I would have put two and two together and realised I could flip them, but there is literally zero indication that that's what I needed to do at all. It should not be expected for the player to shuffle through all of their items mid boss fight just to figure out which one happens to be what they need to use.

There is a serious lack of any sort of consistent visual language that hints at which item you can use in puzzles or annoying bosses. Despite all of this, I still think this is a very solid game. It's fun, I felt accomplished when I beat a lot of the puzzles, and the puzzles in later dungeons are definitely a lot less opaque than a good deal of the earlier stuff. Overall, definitely not my favourite 2D Zelda game I've played so far (Link's Awakening trumps easily) but enjoyable enough that I can start to ignore some of the littler frustrations I had, but the Vaati fight is definitely not one of them.

Light 8