imainmeleekirby
2018
As someone who's not normally a fan of platformers, this game absolutely blew me away. Not only is this some of the best gameplay in any platformer I've ever played, but the music, story, characters, and aesthetic of the game are all top notch as well. Genuinely a masterpiece.
Despite this game starting many infuriating trends in this series that persist to this day, I find myself strangely fond of it. While the overarching story was slow and uneventful, the individual characters were mostly very charming and fleshed out. The school setting also lends itself well to a series known for its cast of lovable NPCs. The other students at Thor's felt just as memorable to me as the inhabitants of Crossbell or Liberl, maybe even more so. While this game marks the start of a significant downward trend in the series, there's still enough to enjoy here for me to consider it a good entry in the franchise.
This was a return to form for the trails series I really didn't think was possible after the absolute dumpster fire that was Cold Steel 4. I had absolutely no faith in them to make a good game, much less a good game with such a heavy focus on the Cold Steel cast, but they managed to pull it off. There are a lot of small issues with the writing that I think are just going to be permanent fixtures of the series going forward: things like the constant joking about Tita and Agate being a couple and the bizarre apologetics for every single villain. On the whole, though, this was a great way to send off this era of the series that felt like they actually got someone competent in the writer's room.
The story does a really great job of hooking you at the start, but after that it felt like it wasn't really going anywhere for a while. The RTS battles were more fun than I was expecting, and once the story gets going it's genuinely great, but it took longer than I would have liked to get me fully invested.
This game features a lot of interesting ideas that I'm sad never made it into subsequent games. Towards the end, navigating the world started to get a bit frustrating and I had to use a guide to find the last couple of dungeons. Subrosia didn't really feel like it added anything other than needless complexity. Overall, felt like kind of a step down from Link's Awakening but still quite enjoyable.
Fun chaos with friends. Nothing more, nothing less.
Despite my name, I've actually barely touched the Kirby series. This was a great experience and has gotten me interested in trying more games. There's a ton of replay value so I may go back and play more at some point.
A genuinely adorable little story about the importance of honesty and owning up to your mistakes. Combined with the simple and relatively easy gameplay, this would be a fantastic game to play with a young child. It really is like an interactive story book.
This game is hardly a step up from the previous one, which is to say thoroughly mediocre. The ever expanding cast of characters continues to get less interesting, and the story is outright nonsensical at points. There are few cool ideas in the plot, the school setting is almost as charming as it was in CS1, and it has one of my favorite endings in the series. Outside of that, though, this was an absolute slog to get through. Really not worth playing unless you're very committed to playing the whole series.
2023
I don't really want to regurgitate all the criticisms I'm sure people have already heard, so I won't. I didn't enjoy the game, but I can understand why others did. If you found this to be a refreshing change of pace for the series and enjoyed it thoroughly, I am genuinely very happy for you, but I found next to nothing that I loved about it. It's far from the worst game in the series, but I'm not looking to go back any time soon.
2019
This is absolutely one of the video games of all time. This is a very interesting concept, one that I think was used to great effect in Her Story, but the problem with this game is that they made it quite a bit longer so the repetitive loop began to wear thin. I can't say I would recommend this game unless you're a diehard fan of the idea, but the story it tells is decent and your own mileage may vary.
Reviewing this game after playing Cold Steel 4 has given me more appreciation for the ideas in this game that weren't terrible (few and far between). I found next to nothing interesting about this game. Huge chunks of it feel like complete filler, with most of the characters having the soul sucked out of them. It's also truly impressive that this game managed to retroactively make Crossbell worse through a series of very simple but very stupid decisions. Many of these problems would carry over into the subsequent games, and at times are much more glaring than they are in this game, but this was the first Trails game that was a complete disappointment for me and I've never really gotten over that.
This game has aged like a glass of milk in Texas. I don't generally like NES era games, since the controls are usually clunky and janky, and nowhere is this more true than menu heavy RPGs like this. The core map design is actually quite good, and once you get the power to warp skip every map it's decently fun, but there is absolutely no reason to play this over the remake other than pure novelty.
2013
It's a very tough balancing act to make a game feel both stressful and fun at the same time, but this game pulls it off flawlessly. The simple repetitive game play makes it easy to slip into a rhythm which makes it all the more important and stay on your toes. It's a really fun gameplay loop that could very easily have veered right into frustrating territory but it manages to stay fun throughout.
This is some truly great mindless fun for any Naruto fan, especially if you can grab a friend for some multiplayer. The single player is a bit weaker than other Naruto games, but that's obviously not the core appeal here. It's the excellent core formula of the Storm series polished to a shine.