At first, I tried to play this game like it was Shiren 1: attacking the dungeon fresh every time with no items brought over from previous forays. Now, whereas Shiren 1 initially presents one dungeon, the epic 30-floor Table Mountain, Shiren 2 offers three, each gated behind the last: the 10-floor Shuten Trail Easy, the 13-floor Shuten Trail Medium, and the 15-floor Shuten Trail Hard. None of them are as good as Table Mountain—their environments aren't as diverse, their fixed floors aren't as gorgeous, they don't sell the journey as well—and Shuten Trail Hard lives up to its name; I spent a while bashing my head against it before I finished it, and I didn't entirely enjoy the process.

Shiren 1 was a hardcore item management sim with some crafting elements, but Shiren 2 leans more into crafting: you can fuse equipment together not only using fusion pots but also with a new enemy, the Mixer, who also lets you fuse equipment with consumable items to give it special effects. As a result, success depends a bit less on how well you manage your items and a bit more on how many broken effects you can stack on your sword—and when you're not guaranteed to find the items you need to do that, when you indeed might not find a sword at all for several floors, that makes the experience less enjoyable. And unlike in Shiren 1, beating the game requires you to clear these dungeons again and again and again as you gather resources to build your castle. Furthermore, carrying items between runs has gone from painful to trivial, with a much larger storehouse and more opportunities to stock it. (Technically it works the same way—following a successful run, you return to town with your inventory intact, giving you the opportunity to store everything—but in Shiren 1 a single successful run meant you had won the game, so there wasn't much point.)

But after clearing Shuten Trail Hard for the first time, I threw my "no external items" rule out the window and started bringing in everything. I brought so many consumables that dying was nearly impossible; I brought the same sword and shield into every trip, upgrading them until enemies could hardly scratch me and I could wipe them out in a single hit. And I had much more fun doing that—I enjoyed it almost as much as I did Shiren 1 (I still found repeatedly clearing the same dungeon a little repetitive, no escaping that). In Shiren 1, inter-run progression was a sideshow, but here it's the focus: building up your castle, building up your Katana+25, building friendships with the NPCs. And you can't just pretend it isn't.

The final dungeon, Onigashima, was a bit of a letdown: I once again tried to beat it without any items and didn't really enjoy it; and when I relented, I cleared it on my first try without any struggle. Anticlimactic!

The art and writing are also going for something completely different this time around: less mythic, more cartoony. I think the former is a slight downgrade: Shiren 1 is one of the best-looking games on SNES and Shiren 2 is merely very pretty. The latter is a matter of taste, since the biggest change is making the writing a focus at all, but I found the cutscenes funny (and incredibly well-directed, particularly the sequence after a successful Shuten Trail run where Shiren rafts triumphantly down the mountain with his new castle parts in tow).

The sountrack has a few too many Shiren 1 remixes, but it isn't as bad as Torneko 2, where every track was a Torneko 1 remix—which were all variations on the same motif to begin with!

I haven't played the postgame yet and I don't know if I will. I came away from Shiren 1's postgame frustrated—I couldn't beat the third postgame dungeon and I hated the second (the first was fine).

If you can accept Shiren 2 for what it is, it's a worthy sequel.

Having put a good ~40 hours into Balatro so far (and I will be putting more into it in the future), I feel comfortable saying that while it's really good, it's not the be-all end-all of rogue-likes.

What Balatro does well is presentation, style, and simplicity. The game is immediately intuitive if you know poker, the music is calming, the spritework is incredible. You can boot it up, and in an hour, have a solid grasp on all the major mechanics of the game. This isn't Isaac, where the rules of the game are changing with every item you get, nor is it Gungeon, which demands a pretty substantial learning curve. Balatro is accessible, stylish, and fun.*

At lower levels anyway. What I've found is that eventually, you hit a brick wall of a learning curve. When you're halfway up the difficulty ladder and going for harder joker unlocks, the sheen begins to waver a bit. On higher difficulties, I feel completely at the RNG's mercy. Whether I get usable jokers, boss blinds that kill me on the spot, or useful skips isn't something I can affect in any way.

While this isn't out of the ordinary - indeed, you'd be a fool to expect a rogue-like without RNG - Balatro feels especially defeating at this hump. This is still poker. A bad series of draws, an unlucky blind, and you're dead regardless of how well you tried to build your deck. And for some, this won't be an issue at all. But as someone raised on easier roguelikes, these setbacks feel more frustrating than anything.

This isn't to be overly negative, however. Balatro is a wonderful game, and definitely worth your time. It's cheap, and even if you drop off at the 30 hour mark, you'll have more than got your money's worth. It feels fresh, and I'm delighted to have such a prominent, popular, new game on the roguelike block. It's probably the best addition to the genre since Vampire Survivors. Just beware the midgame slump, and don't burn yourself out by playing dead run after dead run for hours.

The exploration and world design in this game is fantastic. They really open up almost everything for you straight away to do in any order you want. There's so many fun things to discover, and getting a new Digimon to your town is always exciting to find out what they'll add, and how it will make things easier for you (and then disappointing when they do nothing but stand there).

This game really does feel like those tamogachi games brought into a fully fledged 3D world. With all the pros of raising a little guy to become powerful, to the cons of having to find a place for it to shit every 5 minutes.

The whole dying and rebirth system is a pain in the ass. Mostly because of the fact every new Digimon will require a lot of repetitive training in the gym. It sucks so much to lose an ultimate level Digimon and then be forced to spend hours getting a new one, because to get back to the area you were just clearing you're going to need your new Digimon to be at least as strong as you already were, if not stronger. The game does very little to mitigate this grind - the new Digimon will get a small stat boost depending on how much your previous one had, but it's so minor that it's really just saving a few training sessions. You can also upgrade the gym to get bigger boosts per session, but the 2 Digimon you can recruit to do this are literally right next to each other at the end of a pretty long section of the story (and that's IF you know where you need to go to get them asap). I don't understand why they couldn't spread them out a bit...

I guess you can't really not have it though since it's sort of baked into Digimon's core design. Still annoying.

While a guide is heavily recommended for the game imo. You probably could get by with just exploring constantly, it'd just take a lot longer. I know as a kid I had no idea what I was doing in the game, and yet there were still places and moments in this replay that I recognised and thought to myself there's no way kid-me would have been able to work all this out. I guess I just brute forced my way through it until I found something that did something.

The requirements for Digivolutions however are a bit of a cluster mess. While players could easily get by either just going with what the game gives them, or trial and error, through stat-requirements, the fact weight and care mistakes matter a lot is something I feel few people would intuitively work out. Weight because many heavy Digimon require massively force feeding the prior form to meet those requirements, and care mistakes because not all Digimon require <x amount made, but some have a minimum amount needed. Who would ever guess that not feeding your Digimon when it's hungry and not letting it sleep could lead to some actually good evolutions? And yet supposedly these things shorten a Digimon's lifespan, so to get certain Digimon you have to shorten their life? That's kinda messed up.

I love a lot of this game. It mostly just gets really frustrating with how often you essentially have to reset the whole process over and over, going through the same slow boring gym training and having very little to show for it when that Digimon dies.