The score might be a bit inflated, since Mario RPG is a game that I played a lot as a kid, and I am not immune to nostalgia. That being said, this remake is very faithful aesthetically to the original, and most mechanical changes, though overbalancing the combat in favor of the player, are in service to the overall experience goals I interpret Mario RPG as setting out to fulfill on the SNES. I’d recommend it to anybody who wanted to play Super Mario RPG but never got the chance, It’s a great remake. Not really that surprising, since it was developed by ArtePiazza, the same studio that made well-received remakes of Dragon Quest 4, 5, 6, and 7 that (from what I know) are widely considered to be the definitive versions of their respective games.

For more complete thoughts, I haven’t fully completed the original in years, but given the reputation Mario RPGs and remakes had last decade for sanitizing their aesthetics to be more in-line with what you’d expect from main series Mario games, Mario RPG largely preserving its artstyle in the remake is great to see. It’s great to see a trend starting in Odyssey/Wonder finally leak back into the RPGs which were largely known for being places that Mario was allowed to experiment with character designs in the first place, even if it is only a remake. The only negative thing that stuck out to me was them main series-fying Dry Bones, which sticks out like a sore thumb.

Mario RPG’s story is still pretty cute and fun to this day. Though it’s not anything to thematically write home about, you can tell all Mario RPGs got their happy-go-lucky vibe starting with this one, with quite a few moments that genuinely made me chuckle. I enjoyed the way the party members were written, with Bowser’s need to maintain a powerful, boastful image you can see nobody else in the game buy being funny to watch and Peach throwing herself in the action whenever she’s not kidnapped being a refreshing take on her character. Mallow might be the only character to have an arc, since he spends the game hoping to find his parents, and the moment that plotline gets resolved is honestly really sweet and a bit touching. Don’t have much to say on Geno, he’s just cool. Mario also helps to tie the party together, him being something of a celebrity in the Mushroom Kingdom is fun wish fulfillment for the player but he’s given a good amount of personality despite being unable to say a word. Aside from his excellent miming skills, he has entertaining reactions to situations (i.e. falling over when something unfortunate happens) and he makes for an effective soundboard for party members during their rare emotional moments. The remake doesn’t change too much between the start of the game and credits except for some sick boss introductions and a few cutscenes that forgo the isometric perspective for a more dynamic camera, giving those moments more gravitas. Overall, fun story that set the tone for a lot of Mario RPGs and I feel comfortable recommending it to any fans of other Mario RPGs.

The gameplay is a more interesting to discuss. I say Mario RPG is great for people who dislike turn-based RPGs, and I mean that both affectionately and derogatorily. The game has more content to latch onto outside of turn-based combat than other Square Enix RPGs of the time, such as navigating levels with platforming and its variety of minigames. However, the actual combat is fairly basic. Basic attacks are strong enough to the point where having two powerful attackers fire them off and having one character (often Peach with her overly strong healing abilities) serve as a battery to keep them alive. Combat feels good to play due to action commands making you feel more involved compared to other turn-based games, but its simplicity makes it so that you’re not making very interesting decisions compared to other turn-based RPGs of its ilk. Subsequently, this makes it great for people who dislike turn-based combat but not great for people who crave more depth out of those systems.

The remake makes it slightly easier to explore the game’s depths with the addition of in-battle party member switching. Every party member aside from Mario can be swapped out for another before an action is taken, allowing you to switch out a party member who might not be optimal for a situation. Though this balances the game in the player’s favor, it actually considerable improves the game as it makes Mallow and Bowser worth using. Mallow can be swapped out after using Thought Peak to identify health/weaknesses if he isn’t too helpful, Bowser can be used to throw out powerful physical attacks for extra damage when no other party member is useful, and Peach can be benched when her healing isn’t necessary.

The other big addition to the game is the Action Gauge, which adds more decisions to switching party members in and out. Successfully performing offensive and defensive action commands fills the gauge up, and chaining successful commands together gives your party buffs depending on what characters are in your party. Filling up the gauge completely also allows the party to use one member’s turn to perform a Triple Move, which performs a unique attack defending on your party. These moves can range from straightforward attacks for massive damage to defensive moves like shielding the party from one attack or healing everyone. This helps add a bit more depth to switching in, as you might want to rearrange your party to pull off a specific Triple Move at the right moment or get buffs that best suit your situation.

One question I grappled with briefly was whether these additions overbalance the game in favor of the player. I came to the conclusion that while this is true, switching party members and managing the Action Gauge encourage you to play the game in a more engaging way, and balance didn’t appear to be a concern in Super Mario RPG anyway. Even in the original game, strong equipment is easy to come by, it’s easy to amass money to stay stocked with powerful items, and you can receive random buffs when knocking out enemies that flip the odds in your favor. Extra mechanics like these do a great job at letting players easily mine more depth out of the game while staying true to Mario RPG’s experience goals.

Overall, Mario RPG is a fun, casual turn-based RPG that has you navigate a fun, colorful world launching you from setpiece to setpiece, and is a great game for people who aren’t sure if they enjoy turn-based combat but want to try a simple game in that vein and enjoy Mario games. Give it a shot if it sounds cool!

Risk of Rain 2 is interesting in large part because it doesn’t seem to evolve the formula of Risk of Rain significantly, but rather keep the spirit of its series intact while switching genres between games. While the first game was a side-scroller, the second game is in full 3D, often being labeled as a third person shooter. Fortunately, it largely succeeds at this goal and manages to stand out in its own right. If you enjoy either one of these games and can tolerate the genre shift you’ll most likely enjoy the other.

Risk of Rain Returns worked in large part because you were constantly forced to weigh the short term vs the long term. Navigating levels, choosing to take fights, popping teleporter events, and gunning for certain chests are all decisions that have weight because the game always asks you to pick power vs efficiency under the smoking gun of difficulty increasing over time, and often that choice can be extremely gray. Though the way items interact with your player character doesn’t lend itself to interesting decision-making on its own, it’s the way you’re asked to navigate through these challenges that makes the game compelling. Fortunately, 2 is able to retain this focus despite the shift in genres, save for one element that I’ll discuss later.

One of the best things Risk of Rain 2 brings to the table is levels with more identifiable landmarks. Given how the first game was 2D, it could sometimes be difficult to tell exactly where you are in relation to the rest of the level, which is an issue solved by the transition to 3D. Orienting yourself around levels is super easy to do now, and I rarely get lost playing this game compared to Returns where I actively needed to work to orient myself. Players can also now influence which area they go to via the Bazaar of Time, which is appreciated since there’s more area-specific gimmicks this time around. Abandoned Aqueduct has a button minigame to give you access to a chamber, Siren’s Call has a unique miniboss fought by breaking eggs, and Rallypoint Delta has a super expensive bot to repair that only appears in that level.

Players are also granted slightly more control over their loadout. Multishops are more common, allowing players to reliably gauge whether an investment is worthwhile ahead of time. Additionally, 3D printers/scrappers makes so that players can sacrifice random items in their arsenal to guarantee an item they really want, or prepare scrap ahead of time that is sacrificed first to eliminate that element of chance. This does expose a problem the game has with item balancing though, as I often find myself only using printers with the best items in the game (lens maker glasses, harvester scythes) instead of situationally considering duping based on what survivor I have. I only feel like I make that choice with Focus Crystals, an item uniquely good with brawler survivors and situational for all other survivors.

The Bazaar Between Time also lets the player easily purchase lunar items that are powerful but have significant drawbacks. They’re the kind of item that I wish was more common in Risk of Rain, having powerful buffs that are balanced by some negative effect, (the easiest to explain being the Shaped Glass doubling damage but halving your health) and as such are situationally useful on some survivors while being terrible on others.

My biggest complaint with the game that I alluded to earlier is the teleporter event. In RoR Returns, activating a teleporter summons a boss and begins a 90-second countdown. Once the boss is defeated and the countdown reaches 0, the player can move onto the next stage. What made this event so interesting is that it also spawns tons of enemies, and your movement around the stage is not restricted. Enemies stop spawning when the timer reaches 0, allowing you to approach the boss more easily and creating its own set of interesting decisions to make. This turns every boss encounter into a question of time vs efficiency, as you can camp out the boss and deal with mobs until the timer runs out, but that will increase the difficulty in the long term due to you taking a while.

Risk of Rain 2 makes a couple of critical changes to the teleporter event: you can only “charge” the teleporter (RoR 2’s equivalent of the timer) by standing within a set radius of the teleporter, and while the teleporter event is still active (i.e. the boss is still alive and/or the teleporter is still charging) the player is prohibited from interacting with anything outside of the teleporter radius. These two changes combined reduce the flexibility of the teleporter event significantly. In Risk of Rain Returns, you could pop it earlier and run from the boss to explore the level as the cost of higher enemy spawns, and if you kill the boss before the timer hits 0, you can explore in the meantime to see if you can grab anything before going through the teleporter. In 2, if you don’t struggle with a boss there’s often minutes of wasted time spent waiting for the teleporter to fully charge so you can finally play the game again. Though this could make searching for chests after the event more committal, I don’t think it’s worth all the dead space created in the event you shred the boss. At the same time, I recognize having some limiter on the player’s movement is necessary, as it is far easier to dodge attacks in an enclosed 3D space than an enclosed 2D space. I would propose solving this issue by making chests openable during teleporter events and making the teleporter charge much more slowly instead of not at all if you step outside the radius. Because difficulty increases over time, fighting permanently outside of the teleporter event would be a poor idea. This would make running away from a teleporter event to maybe loot chests or deal with mobs sub-optimal and inefficient, but not outright impossible, which could improve the dynamic of teleporter events significantly.

Overall, Risk of Rain 2 improves some things from Returns’ formula but the flow of the game being interrupted by teleporter events makes me go back and forth on which one I prefer more. Overall though, Risk of Rain 2 made the jump to 3D pretty well all things considered, if you played the first game and liked it or find this game interesting from my review and enjoy third person shooters I’d recommend giving it a go.

One of my favorite comedy games.

The levels do kinda bleed together a bit and the game is kinda jank but it's held together by one of the funniest stories I've ever seen in a video game. I normally don't play games primarily for the story but Spark 2's story toes the line between irony and sincerity so well that you genuinely can't tell which one of the two it is. Several "jaw-dropping" moments and edgy tropes are played so straight that it ends up looping around into hilarious, accentuated by the limited 3D cutscene animation. You can very much tell this was LakeFerperd's first game animating 3D cutscenes, and while the attempt was admirable it gives the cutscenes an additional level of hilarity. Play this for the laughs and an interesting take in 3D speedy platformer gameplay, it'll at least get a laugh or two out of you.

I don't play too many rougelikes but I vibed with this one more than I expected. I think the major reasons are due to the larger levels, long-term decision making and multiple playstyles all centering around positioning and crowd control in different ways.

The increasing difficulty over time really ties the game together in a lot of ways. Throughout each run, players are constantly forced to pick between efficiency and safety. Killing enemies grants players gold that allows them to interact with chests, shrines, and shops that act as glorified item dispensers, but killing enemies for gold takes time that players could be using to find a teleporter that functions as both the level exit and the boss.

The player can only use the teleporter to move on after the boss has been defeated and 90 seconds have passed. One might be tempted to activate it early and scour the rest of the level while the timer ticks down, but this has its own sets of consequences between the drastically increased enemy spawns and the boss also causing trouble. (bonus points if it has universal attacks) At the same time, enemy spawns are decreased after the timer ticks down, which can allow the player to camp out the chaos if things get too overwhelming at the cost of taking more time and increasing the difficulty long-term.

This gets even better with the variety of characters the game has on offer, with each offering a different way to manage the game's often overwhelming crowds. A few standouts involve the Huntress kiting with her arrows, the Sniper using their immense mobility to position themselves for deadly horizontal shots, the Engineer using autonomous entities such as turrets and mines to control space, and Acrid using various damage over time sources to chip away at crowds over time.

If I had to criticize the game, some areas where you dump money don't allow you to make overly informed decisions (i.e. grey chests, some shrines, the colored chests are really good though) and I'm not sure how I feel about random proc effects. Though they are undeniably helpful, them being random makes me less likely to actively strategize around them and instead be another mindless addition to my basic attack. To my knowledge it also unfairly favors faster-firing weapons. I might turn around on this the more I learn the game though. Ancient Valley is also a really unfun map, it has too much verticality navigated with ropes and as a result it's much harder to plan out navigation or reliably interpret what of it you have left to explore.

Overall, the core of Risk of Rain Returns is a game that constantly asks you to balance the short-term with the long-term, and that alone makes it really engaging to play. Would recommend to anyone who likes roguelikes.

I do want to say my perspective from this game is coming at it as a competitive player, so naturally I have a way more critical angle on it, and I don't think my thoughts on the game's quality can really be conveyed by a star score. Splatoon 3 is a game that has changed me as a person dramatically, though it has less to do with the game itself and moreso through the people I met playing it and the competitive hurdles I jumped through. Though I’m very hard on the game in this review, I still really enjoy playing it and a lot of my complaining comes from a desire for it to be better. Anyways, before we get to multiplayer I’ll briefly dip into the other noteworthy modes. Tableturf will not be covered as I have not yet beaten Baby Jelly despite over 800 hours of playtime.

Splatoon 3's campaign merges the hub world progression of the first 2 games with the individual levels/subway structure of Octo Expansion, with excellent results. Aside from defeating 3 bosses, you have tons of freedom on what you want to do, with your only restriction being how many power eggs you have to progress. This results in a great amount of agency given to the player to navigate the game, which is amplified by the campaign levels being fun mini-challenges as they were in Octo Expansion. The finale is also super hype, with the sheer scope of the operation making it a great follow-up to Octo Expansion's finale, even if it doesn't hit as hard emotionally.

Salmon Run, the game’s PvE mode, has also seen many improvements from its predecessor in 2. Perhaps the most significant improvement is the ability to throw eggs. Aside from giving players way more flexibility when passing eggs back to base, it costing 2/3rds of your ink tank makes managing your ink economy a far more interesting and urgent problem than it was in Splatoon 2. Choosing between throwing eggs or keeping your ink for a bomb can often be a difficult choice in the moment, with each having its own set of tradeoffs.

The new boss salmonids introduced are also all good, with the Slammin’ Lid and Fishsticks being highlights for the unique interactions they introduce to the game. One might want to leave Slammin’ Lids alive despite the enemies they spawn in because baiting their slam attack can dispatch any salmonids unfortunate enough to be stuck underneath it at that time. Fishsticks constantly painting over you provides a novel nuisance to deal with, and their pillar remaining after death gives you more terrain to use. However, this idea isn’t too well-realized in practice, as fishsticks aren’t placed in areas that open up new movement options on these largely horizontal maps and mounting them for anything side from their eggs aren’t worth it. Also why is Flyfish still in the game, it having universal range and needing 2 bombs to be killed at a specific interval doesn’t make it a fun problem to deal with. I don’t think we’d lose anything from Stinger being the only universal range Salmonid in the game, since their fragility offsets their immense reach and remote position.

Anyways onto the meaty stuff: multiplayer. The core fundamentals from Splatoon 2 have been largely untouched, with the same excellent mechanics of spreading ink through using weapons and ink being tied to player mobility, making the stage control common in shooters very explicit and easily readable. Everything stacked onto this has been well-considered, from the subtly-improved audio design to the excellent UX to squid roll and squid surge being very natural extensions to player movement. You can also finally play Anarchy Open/Turf Wars with your friend in a lobby after 7 years out of the box, thank you for the measly crumbs of play options Nintendo! All new weapon classes are also excellent, with the stringers and splatanas offering playstyles unlike anything else in the game. The former litters explosives on the ground allowing for a novel form of long-range space control and the latter is a jack-of-all trades, enabling control of several ranges at the cost of being substantially harder to execute.

Unfortunately, a lot of core issues from Splatoon 2 remain. The biggest one of these is the map design. This has been frequently discussed in the competitive community, but to abbreviate it a bit many maps are overly linear and often force players through chokepoints with no way around them. Due to the lack of options for approaching critical areas of the map such as mid, this creates a reliance on specials to safely force your way through these chokepoints and puts several classes of weapons at a disadvantage. It’s harder for rollers and brushes to do their job as close-ranged assassins when they have fewer and fewer angles to approach from. Looking at the current meta of the game makes this even more apparent given how the most popular special is Tacticooler: a special that buffs Inklings’ mobility, and more importantly, their respawn time and special gauge retention. Given how cooler mitigates a lot of risk that comes with a team fight in a game where death is normally very punishing, it’s no surprise it’s considered so vital in the current state of the game where death is almost inevitable given the lack of approach options combined with the need to take space, especially against some of the game’s special weapons.

Speaking of those special weapons, there’s a lot of new ones introduced in Splatoon 3. From old favorites in 1 being reimagined like Trizooka, Big Bubbler, and Kraken Royale to returning specials from 2 such as Ink Storm, Inkjet, and Booyah Bomb to cool new concepts such as Zipcaster, Wave Breaker, and Super Chump, there’s a lot of options for specials. 18 to be exact. Many of these new specials are well-designed, though some are left quite overtuned for a while (looking at you Crab Tank and Trizooka) they encourage fundamentals of good positioning to get the most out of them. To lock down an area with a Crab Tank, you need to be in a good position to overlook the area without getting flanked. When popping Tacticooler, everybody needs to go to that same section of the map to get the buffs and push forward. This trend is good to see despite the balance needing improvement, particularly for autonomous specials such as Super Chump and Wave Breaker. The main special that doesn’t fit in here is Killer Wail 5.1, as although it’s less lethal than infamous universal range specials such as Tenta Missiles and Sting Ray, universal range + lack of interaction on both sides doesn’t exactly make it an exciting special and it’s in a place where a couple of good buffs could make it about as unhealthy as the aforementioned two specials. Also this isn’t a novel observation but Nintendo please why are Tenta Missiles back in the game, there’s specials that can take their place and are more interactive than it. We really don’t need it. In addition, considering how cool of a special Zipcaster is it’s a shame it’s so weak.

Splatoon 3’s kit design, though better than Splatoon 2’s, still isn’t great. A lot of promising kit concepts seem to be designed in a fantasy world where the subs and specials are more viable than they actually are, and they would be excellent in that ideal parallel universe where the game’s sub and special weapons are balanced. Slosher Deco is an excellent example of this, as Angle Shooter’s line could exert marker pressure and make it more difficult for the opponent to move while Zipcaster allows it to get in really weird positions and pressure opponents from odd angles. Unfortunately, it exists in a game where Angle Shooter and Zipcaster are both woefully underpowered, resulting in nobody playing it over its vanilla variant which has good area control in Splat Bomb and a good displacement special in Triple Inkstrike. There’s also a few cases like in Splatoon 2 where a kit is “bricked” by having one excellent sub/special but a really poor third option. For instance, so many potentially strong kits are kneecapped by having Sprinkler or Angle Shooter, the two worst subs in the game, and it sucks that having one of these subs neuters a weapon that much. The kit design could go hard when the game’s weaker subs and specials get some much needed buffs, but for now it’s still very flawed.

As an aside, though this was also an issue in Splatoon 2, it’s been a shame seeing the balance team favor shooters so much. Shooters in Splatoon 2 got several movement buffs for no good reason, making them overall the best class in the game. This trend continued in Splatoon 3, with shooters occasionally getting random buffs for no reason and the devs being very hesitant to nerf their special output compared to literally any other weapon class in the game. They’re too good at filling in holes in team compositions, as for nearly every other weapon you need to carefully weigh its strengths and weaknesses to slot it in on your team but shooters have the tools to be self-sufficient and almost nobody says no to having them on. This also hurts weapon diversity, as flexing to multiple shooters is easy due to many of the most viable ones playing similarly to each other. You can see how certain aspects of the game’s design favors shooters/multihit weapons as well. Torpedos, though well-designed in their multifunctionality, are uniquely difficult for weapons with slower attack speeds to deal with. Slower weapons also often have lower object damage potential, which isn’t great in a game where several viable special weapons are countered by high object damage.

Despite all of this working against the game though, the game’s fundamentals are still rock solid. Paint controlling player movement makes for an intrinsically fun feedback loop of painting to establish stage control and then continuing to do it to improve your mobility options while restricting your opponents. Range generally being shorter than other shooters for most weapons also makes fights way more spacing-oriented, with pre-positioning and coordination often being more important than aim especially given this game’s lightning-quick kill times. Most game-modes are fun, and the game’s volatility and quick rounds makes it so that very few games feel like a lost cause, any team is always a couple of team fights away from advantage and victory is always possible even in the most dire of situations. Most weapons are fun to play, particularly the really unique ones like brushes, buckets, blasters, and bows. That’s a lot of B’s looking back. The groundwork is there, and it’s so close to being great, it just needs a game that supports it better.

Splatoon 3 is a game that improves over its predecessor substantially, but there’s still a lot of work to do. It’s saved by its incredibly strong fundamental gameplay, but if the game wants to truly thrive it needs good maps, good kit design, and better balancing. For the foreseeable future, this ball is entirely in the developers’ park, and it has been notoriously difficult to determine their experience goals with kit design, map creation, and balancing over the past 14 months of the game’s lifespan. For now, though, I’ll keep playing.