I played this back-to-back with the original AA trilogy and these two games are damn near flawless. The highlight is the setting: the Victorian and Meiji-era set pieces are fully fleshed out, with the writers/artists managing to cram more world-building and cultural competence into ~70 hours than most open-world games do. This bleeds into the story quite a bit, with the writers being able to embrace AA humor, wacky old-school stereotypes, and Sherlock Holmes parodies while still telling a story about race and justice. The gameplay also has new modes of debate/investigation to keep things fresh and the orchestrated music bangs. It's hard to overstate how well all these points of inspiration come together. Please play this.

Possibly the best Mario platformer. Level design is fantastic as always, but this game is MUCH better at expressing it's creativity with the Wonder effects and new graphics. This game's main (but more subtle) improvement is having a much more fun difficulty balance. The developers did a great job scattering optional difficult levels throughout a playthrough, making them always available (You can get to a secret world before even beating World 1.) Badges aren't a game changer, but the movement expansions can be fun or useful. Particularly, the crouch jump is the most useful for getting to secret areas, and the spring feet manages to turn the spring power-up from Galaxy into something fun. Unfortunately, there's an odd amount of gimmicky filler levels, annoying Toad dialogue, and bland boss fights, but these are partially skippable and don't even add up to an hour of playtime. 2D Mario is back!