Note: played on Nintendo Switch Online.

Cold take but Earthbound might be one of the best JRPGs ever made. There isn't really a dull moment and every setpiece felt deliberate and handcrafted. NPC dialogue actually makes you care about the townsfolk you are trying to protect. Porky is a suprisingingly complex villian being a victim of child abuse. The music and sound design don't miss a beat. Out of all the JRPGs that try to have an anti-nihilism/anti-misanthropic worldview stance this is the only one to really earn the emotional moments that are centered around paying off these things.

Consider this post less a "review" than a "first impression" or "time capsule" of sorts of the 0.1.2 PC release of this game. At the time of writing this little spiel this weird mashup of BOTW world traversal, Pokemon Legends: Arceus style creature collecting, and survival/automation games like Factorio or Ark: Survival Evolved has gone viral and lit up the charts like its Woodstock. Is it worth the hype? Well my answer here is complicated and colored by my own (lack of) experience with the survival genre.
THE FIRST ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: EARLY ACCESS
First off I wanna address the reality of this being an early access title. Which is to say there three realities I can't ignore in this write up:
1) The game is in an incomplete state and all the "jank" and design imprecision that comes with that. This is to say several mechanics don't quite "click" as well as I'd like them to. The game's version of creature catching just isn't as satisfying as its Pokemon generation 8 equivalent for example. Often its not really obvious if I have damaged the creatures enough for them to not deflect the ball and I have even had the balls pass through the enemy models at points when engaging in close combat....which is an issue when your opening weapons choices are likely to be a club, repuposing a pick ax or torch for combat, or making a spear AKA close combat weapons. This means the players first exposure to catching is going to be through janky close quarters throws and that even putting aside the long range weapons being put front in center in trailers and such. Its a rough first impression to say the least.

2) The price will likely go up in the future to a full price release. As a $30.00 release? I think this is a good value proposition at that price considering this is effectively a $70.00 modern AAA open world title and the baseline level of polish that entails purchasable at roughly 43% of the total cost. As a full cost game? I think the gameplay loop might be a tad too simplistic for that price point especially when you look at the experiences being offered by many other indie and "AA" devs for less upfront cash.

3) The opening hours of this game can be a bit repetitive currently when you are just building up your wood, stone, blue ore, and yellow ore supplies and building the foundational tools/crafting tables/statues. Lots of walking back and fourth in the starting hillside base since you aren't gonna wanna risk undoing your resource collecting with an ill-advised combat encounter (when playing on default settings). A fact made worse by the very low early game weight limit. Despite my rather negative prose here I actually am of two minds about this setup. On one hand this makes the early game a bit of a slog but on the other it also does a great job of putting you into the shoes of your avatar building out his or her little boom town settlement from literal sticks and stones. This is all to say if this is your first survival game experience you might be in for a rough time if you just wanna jump into the creature collecting aspect but if you stick with it you can be very satisfying to fill out your base and build up a creature army.

THE SECOND ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: THE CREATURE DESIGNS ARE MAYBE PLAGIARIZED
TLDR: Someone on Twitter/X by the name of "Byo" compared the skeletons of the Switch era Pokemon models and several palworld creatures and found them to be eerily similar which may suggest the use of AI as a plagiarism tool given the CEO of PocketPair's very libertarian dudebro persona and pro-AI statements in interviews. To be clear the automation of digital art via AI is something that should be agitated against for several reasons (its a union busting/job killing tool, consolidates more cultural power into the 1%/ruling class, leads to worse art in most cases, etc.) but game development is a multi-disciplinary process. Simply put, is it fair to write off the work of the sound team, game designers, and programmers just because upper management, legal department and the art team screwed up on their ends? This is all to say I can criticize the ethical failings of the game's art team while praising what this game does well and not be contradictory. If anything the fact this team wasn't just a couple hacks doing an Steam asset flip makes the plagiarism accusations more salient and tragic. Had these guys hired a proper art team to their project's scope or hell even just went up to the IP holders of any of these big Pokemon competitors like Namco-Bandai's Digimon or Monster Rancher for the rights to plop in their stock assets and animations into this gameplay system we could be looking at the next big thing on the level of Fortnite or Minecraft. As it currently stands I see this getting blown the fuck out by TPC's lawyers and disappearing by the end of the year. Perhaps resurfacing in a year or two with even uglier looking characters and zero cultural momentum. A tragic fate given the very strong foundations here if the devs could get a chance to polish the early game and catching mechanics.

*play-time discrepancy may occur due to the emulator fast forward option being used a bit towards the late game, particularly in chapters 7 + 8. Any mechanics or features that may not function as a quirk of the VBA-M 2.1.3 RALibretro emulator core won't be covered.

Mother 3 is what happens when you take a rock-solid foundation for a JRPG and built on it in basically every way. Any thematic ground covered by the first two games storylines is doubled down on here, story is gut-wrenching, music slaps, graphics are expressive as hell and unlike many JRPGs the difficulty curve is fairly well managed to make for an engaging battle system throughout the experience. If this is the compromised vision I can't help but wonder what we might've gotten had development gone without a hitch given the apparently dropped plot points with one of the party members. I've carefully avoided spoilers in this review here since this is a game best played blind. A potato can run this game in 2022 and Nintendo's higher-ups have known about the Tomato fan translation for years and have done nothing to stop it. The only people that I can't really recommend this game to our people of Romani descent due to the very iffy presentations of a certain group of characters in the game.

Pikmin 2 is one of the worst sequels I’ve played that has received some degree of critical acclaim. For those not versed into the Pikmin series Pikmin 2 for Nintendo Gamecube is a sequel to the hit launch title that set out to address many of the contemporary criticisms of the first game by dramatically overhauling many aspects of the franchise’s overlying systems and presentation. In my view these changes to narrative tone, progression structure, and game feel don’t really coalesce into an overall completely satisfying package.

The story is centered on Captain Olimar and his assistant Louie returning to the Pikmin planet in order to find treasures that can help him pay back his employer’s corporate debt. I usually say with Nintendo reviews the plot is simple but works as a vehicle for the gameplay and to an extent that is the case here but I can’t help but feel as though more could’ve been done. The first game had this unique sense of isolation to it that gave it a fantastic atmosphere and the day system synergized with the ship crash plot to give the game a tense mood. Not saying the more comedic tone of Pikmin 2 wasn’t a valid direction to take the series. Hell, if anything I think the game’s light jab at capitalism with the treasure hoard being IRL product placement in this (implied) apocalyptic planet and President character being this incompetent shortsighted oaf that doesn’t understand the concept of predatory loans is neat. I just wish the game had tied this theme of destructive consumerist capitalism into the gameplay loop more but hey its a mass appeal kids game they were probably never gonna go that far. To me the biggest fault in Pikmin 2’s story isn’t necessarily this shift in tone or even an inability to fully capitalize on its anti-capitalist themes but rather how it fails to use its gameplay in a synergistic way with its narrative. To get into this I will need to address overall game structure and how things have changed since the first game.

Pikmin 2 has four main additions to the franchise formula including Purple & White Pikmin, upgrades in the form of the both consumable spicy/bitter berry sprays & permanent upgrades for your space suit, and an additional captain for multitasking. All these tools are promising on paper but never really come together into a cohesive package of interesting choices for one simple reason: caves.

Caves are basically combat oriented dungeons where Olimar will earn much of the treasure to pay off his debt. This cave system does not gel with any other choice the developers make even on a baseline level. The way the combat in Pikmin 1 was set up (and that is largely carried over here) is you throw or swarm the Pikmin horde in a vague direction towards your opponent and avoid attacks aimed at your captain and Pikmin using a combination of movement and whistling. This has a level of impreciseness to it that meant your Pikmin lost in combat were effectively a resource tax you had to play around in the time limit system to ensure you gathered the 30 ship parts in 30 days. Since time doesn’t run naturally in the caverns and the time limit doesn’t really exist on a macro-scale (in other words there is no alt ending system) sans as a form of leaderboard tracking you effectively end up with very basic combat with little gameplay tension. Losing a Pikmin is less “ NOOOO NOT MY REDS!” and “more ugh time to grind more Pikmin”. Unless you run low on troops this game can devolve into the very tedious pattern of killing a ton of enemies and playing 52 pickups with the treasures left behind. Needless to say this creates a ton of dead air. The developers must have realized this at some point in development as this game has assorted layers of mass Pikmin grave creators like roaming enemies, falling bombs, and various flavors of instant kill attacks to create tension via low Pikmin counts close to boss areas. Some of it a player can counter play (as an example: boulders are usually telegraphed with sound effects and a discolored ground texture even before the drop shadow reveals itself thus giving you plenty of time to whistle Pikmin out of the way) but a lot comes off as artificial difficulty on a first playthrough. A lot of falling bomb rocks only seem to trigger upon trying to pick up a treasure for example. Pretty much the only two of these hazards that felt interesting on a decision making level were the boulder which incentivized playing with a smaller squad to scout out a location before tracking down the loot and the waterwraith, an Aliens: Isolation or Metroid Fusion style instant kill enemy chase sequence tied to a timer which forces you to grab the treasure quickly. These are the few moments in the game that really have any sense of tension. In short, most of these hazards feel less like engaging gameplay challenges and more like a resource threshold you have to clear by grinding Pikmin.

Speaking of grinding Pikmin, doing that for two of the species in this game is a complete pain in the ass that shows the reason a lot of these stylistic choices don’t go together. New to Pikmin 2 are white and purple Pikmin. White Pikmin can dig stuff out of the ground, carry things around quicker, and sacrifice themselves to most enemies for a massive amount of inflicted poison damage while Purple Pikmin are the muscle of the squad that can stun enemies in combat by being thrown and act as strength equivalents to 10 normal Pikmin in the context of the carrying weight mechanic. I do actually like the game play choices they ask of the player in terms of party composition (you have a 100 slots, how many do you want allocated to these just as perishable excess utility Pikmin vs tried and true puzzle solving Pikmin species?). The problem comes from the rarity of these two new species. Since Whites and Purples can only be grown via underground transferring of other species troops via Candypop buds. You end up with a large time sink for dungeon preparation. Want more white Pikmin as prep for those annoying Pileated Snagret boss battles or a poison barrier in the Awakening Wood? Better be ready to take a trip to the Subterranean Complex’s third sub-level with any extra red Pikmin you have several times over. Want 100 Purples for that time sink 1000 carrying weight dumbbell in Wistful Wild? Dear god your poor soul shouldn’t have decided to go for all treasures.

Oh and did I mention that Yellow (due to electric gates, negating some instant kill attacks and the strength of being more able to easily hit various bosses significant more easily with vertical mobility) & Purple Pikmin (stun locking enemies with throw) are overwhelmingly more useful then Red, White, and Blue Pikmin (all of which serve as very basic keys to certain treasures) further exacerbating this design choice to limit Purple growth to caves as it sorta naturally draws a casual players’s eye to this bad pacing for dungeon preparation. Sure players might optimize the fun out of everything (a common retort I see to poorly balanced gameplay systems online) and balance isn’t everything but I feel like it's safe to say that a spammable combat unit you get during the first dungeon trivializing combat is pretty different from say saving great scientists in Civ 5 to exploit that game’s research payout algorithm. Both are pretty gamey and take away player expression but one is much more likely to be noticeable and thus employed by a casual player playing the game for the first time. Maybe if Pikmin 2 didn’t employ cheap design tricks with its falling bomb rock and enemy spam that heavily incentivized unfun, optimal strategies like purple grinding I wouldn’t be making this review but I guess what I am trying to say is that it isn’t just a case of Pikmin 2 being unbalanced it's that the unbalanced aspects are actively brought to the four front via its sloppy dungeon design which in turn is informed by a lack of temporal consequences to Pikmin grinding due to the lack of a day system.

I could go into more detail on other new aspects of Pikmin 2 that reinforce this point with the bitter spray and captain punching upgrades but I’d just be repeating both myself and other folks in the online discourse surrounding this title. Instead I wanna turn my attention to another aspect of the game I think hasn’t gotten as much attention as a gap between the designer's likely intent and the final product: the shoddily implemented multi-tasking system.

In Pikmin 2’s pseudo-midpoint (paying off the debt) you get a mock credits sequence in which Olimar accidentally leaves Louie to fend for himself on the Pikmin planet. In theory this should be a needle scratch moment after the player has gotten attached to Louie as this helpful partner that helped you grow your corporate bank account via the multi-task function. In practice this ends up being a bit of a wet fart of plot point that sorta makes the true ending feel less like a Lethal Weapon like capstone on Olimar and Louie’s unlikely friendship kinda and more just abrupt due to how little you need to use the multi-task function in game. Over the course of my all treasures playthrough of Pikmin 2 I can only think of seven places I was heavily incentivized to use the multitasking feature:

1) The Valley Of Reposes multitasking tutorial.
2)The three berry grinding locations in Awakening Wood, Perplexing Pool, and Wistful Wild.
3) A stone elevator in the yellow onion spawn in
4)The Perplexing Pool’s “Massage Girdle” treasure.
5) A boss known as the Ranging Bloyster that requires constant switching to stun lock him into vulnerability.

Since Louie can theoretically just be chilling at your base or cave floor entrance 90% the game with little repercussions (and generally I’d say sticking to one captain or treating the captains as a universal party is the path of least resistance most of the time) you as a player never really develop an affinity for the second in command thus you end up with a kinda ineffective climax with the only interesting stuff being the implication that Louie might’ve been controlling the final boss to cover up his role in the company going into debt. The game doesn't really do much with this so I don't really have much to add to that other than it sorta being emblematic of Pikmin 2 as a whole of a bunch of good ideas that never really come together in the end.

Pikmin 2 isn’t all bad. There is some nice quality of life changes with Pikmin party management, some of the writing in the treasure horde is generally pretty funny, the arcadey challenge mode is a huge step up from the first game but it just didn’t take into account how much of the franchises appeal and structure of its core mechanics resided in its use of time scarcity to create tension.

Author's note:
Played on Citra Nightly 1946.

This is probably the worst thing I've reviewed on this account and the first thing I've had to drop since New Pokemon Snap. The touchscreen controls feel awful and the level design is just a bunch of enemies with ether high HP (relative to lack of combat depth) or crazy reaction times and a few very basic puzzles that honestly feel like they'd be boring even for kids playing this in 2017 when you compare it to other touchscreen controlled games targeting that demographic in the late 2010s like Angry Birds, Cut The Rope, and the IOS port of Fortnite. Like I am baffled this made it out of playtesting session let alone shipped as a $40 release at launch. People are probably gonna argue I should have played more but if a game's fundamentals are just so plain and unpleasant it can be hard for a player to shake off this initial disgust (for lack of better term) and in my experience that will usually end up with a game being made a perpetual backlog slot that never gets touched again. I honestly don't even thinks this merits a full review with proper structured writing. Hence this rambly blurb. I hope the dev team grew from this experience and used it as learning experience to grow as artists because having this on your resume has gotta be rough.

This falls for the trap so many low and mid-budget fighting games fall into of focusing on a core gameplay system as a determinant to everything else. The presentation is so bland here (though slightly improved by the voice-over update) and the character animations feel a tad soulless. The fighter lines in arcade mode are just lines ripped straight from the show scripts. This also has fewer gameplay features than a small indie game by the same devs (Slap City) of all things. A very disappointing game overall even If I find the core gameplay to arguably be better than several installments of Super Smash Bros. or other higher-budget attempts at the platform fighter genre.

I am probably among the "easy to please" on the target audience spectrum for this game being a political science major and even I think this is a rather weak showing. Like I won't even make fun of the MS Paint art style much since its a strategy game and frankly I don't play these for the graphics but this really feels like someone took the basic conceit of a character centric strategy game and didn't think through what would be needed to update that crusader kings like premise to a democratic government system outside a very basic common sense application of realism. Like a lot of what you do here is a fine foundation for a prototype of the premise but so much more could be done conceptually. Like interest groups and intra-party poltics (stuff like super delegates or early primary Iowa/South Carolina retail politics endorsements) are such a big impactful thing in US politics for better or for worse and yet the trust statistic feels too simple to model those dynamics. This isn't the only failure though. Like how the hell isn't there a deal making and or black mail aspect of the game? Henry Clay, Mitch McConnell, New York era FDR, and so many other famous politicians in US history have used the levers of machine politics to get what they want and yet you can't really replicate that dynamic in game. Hell why isn't making a party that can cannibalize one of the big 2 and create a realignment/replacment party an option? Plenty of examples of that happening in US history. This just feels too simplistic for what it aims to do. Also for the amount of turns you can just automate in this game I feel like this could have benefited from a skip to significant week option.

Edit: There is a skip option but its rather hidden on the UI so I missed it at time of writing this review.

INTRODUCTION
Plants Vs Zombies was in many ways a game that can only come out in 2008. Any earlier and it’d likely just be another dime a dozen flash game on some now defunct website you gotta find mirrored on www.definitelynotgonnagiveyouavirussoenjoythisfungame.com. Any later and it’s a free to play game littered with one dimensional skitterbox design shilled by B-tier YouTubers desperately convincing themselves Manscaped ad revenue and their obsession with Brie Larson will make their degree in digital media studies worth it. No, Plants Vs Zombies had to come out the same year as Julia & Julia to be what it is.

WE’RE COMING!
The game essence is that of a rather simple tower defense game with a surprising amount of depth under the surface. You have 5 lanes of grass that are entryways to your home (base) and you have to use your plants (weapons and tools) to defend it from zombies (enemies) while managing your energy to grow plants (sun). This defensive process can take several different forms and require different considerations that need to be mixed and matched depending on your circumstances. In short, Every plant type in your garden composition is a lever you must pull at the precise time. Is the zombie horde coming at your base composed of a bunch of digging zombies? Better use the David Cronenberg pea plant that shoots backwards in your garden composition . Are the zombies in the opposing army tanky? Gonna need to have some instant kill plants like the cherry bomb or chili pepper on hand. Fog in the area inhibiting your strategic view? Blow it away with the clover plant. I could go on and on but surely you see my point by now. The game has a shitload of flexibility with room for player expression without overwhelming its core demographic of casual players. One of my favorite anecdotes about this actually comes from my middle school years where I used to exchange tips with a teacher up the hall from my language arts class that hadn’t touched a controller since the NES. It bears mentioning this is a conversation that probably wouldn’t have been possible without the intuitive touch controls of the IOS releases. These controls made the game inviting to less experienced players while also making the gameplay ceiling higher by allowing for quicker on the fly reactions. Thus allowing the dev team to throw complex zombie configurations like the Zomboss fight and endless levels at the player by the late game regardless of skill level.

WE’RE GOING BOWLING!
The mingames of Plants Vs Zombies are pretty emblematic of a strength of this dev team to build a simple easy to understand formula and subvert it in basically any way they can imagine to give the player a shitload of varied gameplay to experience when going for 100% completion(even pulling from other Popcap titles at times for inspiration). From the more reflex focused walnut bowling to testing the players improvisation skills with the random convey belt levels George Fan’s team did an excellent job ringing out every angle they could out of this premise to the point this almost feels like the video game equivalent of lean gimmick set piece action movies like “Speed”, “Crank”, and “Hardcore Henry”.

I use “gimmick” purely as a term of endearment to the style of craftsmanship as I think it has its place.

ZOMBIES ON YOUR LAWN
Popcap games tend to be very “function over form” games in terms of presentation. This is to say they prioritize communicating a gameplay concept to the player or a decent frame rate performance over visual flourishes. This is a long way of saying the game’s enemy designs do an excellent job of articulating how they work to a new player. As a case study I’ll highlight the pole vault zombie. In 2008 there was a summer olympics games so the idea of pole vaulting would’ve naturally been in the public zeitgeist even if someone wasn’t a sports fanatic. Thus, when a player is first exposed to this enemy they are likely to infer the enemies ability to skip a tile and plan accordingly with plant formations. Sound design follows a similar train of thought with zombies sounds being used to signal a wave is coming soon so the player has a few seconds to rebuild their plant flanks or collect any sun or cash laying around the garden.

CONCLUSION
Plants vs Zombies is probably one of the best smartphone centric games ever released due to its intuitive controls and kirbyism like design philosophy. While I think the “free” to play aspects of the smartphone side of the industry often incorrectly paint deeper experiences as an impossibility for the sector. I believe this game shows that it is largely more a consequence of late stage capitalism optimizing everything into a grindset treadmill than an intrinsic quality of the platform.

Note: MegaMan Legacy Collection Volume 1 for Nintendo Switch was used for this review. Some amount of rewind and saving was used that was not present in the original NES/Famicom release

"MegaMan" is an action platformer published by Capcom for the Nintendo Entertainment System in which you use a variety of ammo-limited weapons and gadgets earned by beating bosses to take the fight to evil scientist Doctor Albert Wiley. If I were to describe the hook of the MegaMan series to a casual player who is perhaps a tad younger and wanting to see if the series is for them I'd say the mainline series has three defining characteristics on the macro level:

1) Percision-based platforming with ranged weaponry.

2) Boss prep strategy/non-linearity in the early game.

3) weapon experimentation/light exploration (not exploration in the sense of a Metroidvania but more that you are rewarded for getting to hard to reach places usually in the form of extra lives or ammo).
Since this is my first time covering an entry in this franchise I'd also like to highlight a general shortcoming I find has come up when playing these games in the past. Mainly that I generally find Classic MegaMan bosses to be a tad plain to fight. The fights tend to amount to several "skill checks" in the form of:

1) Managing your HP/lives during the stage to ensure you have resources to burn on learning the pattern and fishing for weaknesses. (I generally like this part since it leans on the strength of the platforming by rewarding thorough and complete execution)

2) Executing on said pattern. This frequently turns into replaying a stage until you internalize the boss patterns to the point of muscle memory. I find this pretty tedious even if I can understand it as a quirk of this era of game design. I might be more open to this if the timings on certain bosses like FireMan and Yellow Devil weren't so strict.


With that context out of the way, I will say I find the original MegaMan to be a respectable prototype to the franchise highs of MegaMan 2 + 3. I'd certainly go back to it more than comparable entries in other franchises like say Super Mario Brothers or the original Legend Of Zelda though it still certainly has its antiquated elements. The art style for example feels slightly off here compared to the rest of the NES entries (mainly in the form of the color pallet feeling slightly off but this could 100% be all in my head). The game also features a rather superfluous scoring system as a quirk of the game releasing in an era where arcade gaming was still the most dominant form of the medium and console games were trying to sell themselves as the home version of that experience. Perhaps the most egregious of these outdated aspects is the non-linear aspects of the design lacking polish in certain regards.

In theory, you are meant to be able to tackle robot master stages in any order you want but in practice, you basically always have to go Gutsman first or second if you want to play optimally since the OP platforming gadget known as the magnet beam (which is basically required to finish the gun platform parts of Iceman's stage and literally required for Wiley Castle stage 1) can only be unlocked by using his weapon at the halfway point of Elecman's stage. Even putting that flaw aside Cutman being slightly weak to the default gun also means you are overwhelmingly pressured to pick him first by the game.

These misgivings aside though I generally find the game to be a satisfying and breezy experience held together by the rest of the level design being fair building on the design philosophy of introducing a platforming stage gimmick(s) and remixing them across several contexts. Spike free-falling and block platform segments have become a franchise staple and retro game meme for a good reason. Combine that with some solid music and an art direction ahead of many of its contemporaries and you have one of the NES's strongest first outings.

NOTE:
Original hardware and various nightly builds of PCSX2 from 10-1-22 to 10-8-22 were used as the baseline of the experience.

Katamari Damacay is a game with a rather simple premise: roll up as much shit as possible to grow your ball like object to a certain size in a given time limit. It is through this simple game-play loop that Katamari portrays a brilliant satire of capitalist excess as the player is forced to optimize everything to the enth degree to please a never happy authority figure that berates you regardless of how well you do. The "flow state" of 100%ing Katamari (an all comets run) almost feels like a fun version of the daily grind as you chip away at tasks repeatedly until you optimize your route down to the moment you make a sharp turn at a certain size. This flow state is further aided by sound design that does a great job of signaling concepts to the player in a few seconds. How do you know you got the object you are trying to pick up without checking the corner of the screen and risking a mistake? Listen for a sound effect related to the object like the boing of a ball or a girl screaming. Combing this with a relaxing happy go lucky J-POP soundtrack, sharp dialogue, and some surrealist low poly visuals makes for a very memorable experience. For as much as I enjoyed my experience with Katamari Damacay I do want to warn newbies of some first installment syndrome. Sometimes it can be hard to intuit when you can pick something up, pass through a tight corridor or can scale a wall and that can unfairly knock you out of the flow state of the game. That being said, if you own a PS2, Switch, or PS3* this is a must play. Very few "arcadey" score attack style games manage to have this level of moment to moment satisfaction from the learning curve and even fewer manage to have a deeper point while doing so.

Goes by the title "Katamari Damacay Reroll" on Nintendo Switch

*Katamari Damacay was released as a PS2 Classic on the PlayStation Store. Be weary this option might no longer be an option if you are reading this years later.

Forgot to log this earlier in the year. Going to give this a shorter review as a result as I haven't played since March and can only remember the general experience. TLDR? Pokemon Legends Arceus is probably the freshest Pokemon game we've gotten since the XD: Gale Of Darkness. The changes to the battle system, mission structure, and catching are generally speaking a nice change of pace but I have some reservations with a few design choices. The noble Pokemon boss fights and stronger emphasis on catching is neat but both are kinda too repetitive to be a the large portion of the play time they are. Presentation-wise I'm also sorta conflicted on being incentivized to catch multiple of the same Pokemon for Pokedex completion especially with the true ending being tied to it. It kinda reduces the whole "bond with your magic pet" ethos the games are built on even if you ignore the negative externalities to gameplay. Music and sound design is good but not particularly rememberable and graphics/character design is generally pretty awesome (the new hisiuian forms are dope, UI is good and readable,)... with two exceptions: framerate and cutscenes. Framerate can start to chug and make Pokemon look like a slideshow from afar. Meanwhile a lot of in-game cutsenes look like badly staged puppet shows with the amount of unexpressive animation in them. Ashame given this IP was launched off the back of a successful animated show in the west. This could've used a few more months in the oven...so its a modern Pokemon game.

Introduction
Honestly I've never gravitated towards Kirby as a game franchise. The niche it occupies as a beginner's platformer series is important for the industry at large but that also tends to make the games really simplistic for anyone with experience in the genre. Most 100% runs that tend to be intended as a way to add challenge for more experienced players also tend to necessitate back tracking with specific powers to complete puzzles. This can get tedious quick as often your opportunities to pick up needed powers for a collectable are few and far between. As someone that has the fast paced and difficult Crash Bandicoot as one of his first exposures to video games this "easy unless you slow down" design always turned me off as a platformer design foundation. I'm happy to say that I think Kirby And The Forgotten Land has tweaked the formula just enough for the puffball to click with me without sacrificing the creative intent of a more casual platformer. In fact, Kirby's 3D Switch outing might dethrone Super Mario Galaxy for the best platformer made by a Nintendo developer.

Story
Kirby isn't know for having a complicated story given its targeted towards kids and this game is no different. Kirby and company end up in a weird alternate dimension where the waddle dees get kidnapped by a mysterious crew of animals. Its up to Kirby to save the day. Simple but it works as baseline motivation and context for the gameplay. I do like having the collectables being depicted as saving waddle dees as it gives you a much more personal motive to take down the "main villain" Leongard . I'm surprised more platformers don't go this route for justifying there collectibles. Outside of that loose narrative thread contextualizing the gameplay of the levels you mainly have quick boss introduction and defeat cutscenes as your main form of story progression. These have some decent cinematic flare to them (truck kirby vs the actual main villain is especially a great sendoff for the main story) and give you a nice bit of characterization for the wacky cast of characters (shout out to incel armadillo). These characters are further fleshed out with hub world dialogue as well as backstory tidbits from figurines that serve as a secondary collectables. As it turns out Kirby apparently has deep lore and some light social commentary on the destructive tendencies of industrialized society going on under the surface if your willing to do some research. It's cool to have that extra layer to things for those willing to explore a bit more.

Gameplay
Kirby is a series best know for two things: a floating based movement option and getting a variety of powers via consumption. The first of these has always been a bit of a sticking point with me in the 2D games. Again, I get why its there but in most cases I feel like it neuters what devs can do with level design. I honestly think this ability works way better here since the cool down effect from excessive floating largely prevents you from just gliding over everything and ignoring copy abilities outside of forced combat encounters. Combine that with the new mouthful items taking away the ability in exchange for different skills in certain instances and you have way more opportunities for interesting level design. There is a section where you dodge around meteors, an auto runner section with some light puzzle elements, and even a outrun style racing level. The amount of variety on display here is really incredible and speaks to how versatile Kirby is as a character. Combine that much more careful copy ability placement and a lot of issues I had were addressed pretty well. Its now a ton of fun to go hunting for the various collectable in each stage. The fact you also effectively have two copy abilities on hand most of the time due to mouth full mode also means you get some really creative puzzles that wouldn't have been possible in prior games. combine this with the money system feeding into power ups for you copy abilities and the backtracking isn't as big of a pill to swallow. This rambling is all to say Kirby And The Forgotten Land did a lot to remove some points of friction for me with this IP that allowed to sit down and fully get the most out of the rock solid conceptual bedrock that has been present since Kirby's Adventure on the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Graphics
KIRBY AND HIS WORLD IS SOOO ADORABLE. YES I'M A GROWN ASS MAN BUT I'M NOT MADE OF FUCKING STONE.

Music
Some nice jazzy remixes of King Dedede's theme and Meta Knight's Revenge aside I kinda find quite a bit of the music here forgettable (including the opening and ending theme), It works for the atmosphere the game wants in each level but I couldn't hum anything from the game if you held a gun to my head. Controversial statement I realize.

Conclusion
If you have been reluctant to give this series a try due to its reputation as being a bit too easy for older players I highly recommend giving this a shot. There's currently a free demo on the Nintendo E-Shop at the time of writing. If you are on the fence I recommend giving that a shot as it gives you a good vertical slice of what the game is like.

Introduction
In the wake of my five star review of Kirby & The Forgotten Land for Nintendo Switch and the launch of the Game Boy titles on the Switch Online service I decided to give this game another shot to see if I was perhaps a bit too hard on these early Kirby titles. Baseline difficulty was played for this review.

Gameplay
Kirby's Dream Land is a 1990s 2D platformer centered on floating and using your enemies as projectiles intended for less experienced players for the Nintendo Game Boy. I think Given that development context and creative intent the game fairs remarkably well even if its not suited to my tastes personally ( to avoid repeating myself see my Forgotten Land for more details there). The floating ability is mostly carefully balanced and well suited to a small poorly lit Game Boy screen. That being said, I do feel that my character's hit box is a tad clunky at points with some of the maneuvering you have to do in the third and fourth levels being particularly spotty. That being said, when taken on a macro level everything done with that mechanic is serviceable. What is perhaps less well done though is the very bland and basic use of the sucking and spitting mechanic.

Most of what you can do with this spitting mechanic is exhausted by the second level and even what you see that basically amounts to "see an enemy? Suck it up and spit it into another enemy or "?" block". This not helped by level design that allows you to float over some of the more interesting enemy configurations that test the players grasp on the spitting mechanic. I can sorta see why this concept got deprioritized in favor of powerups (fire spitting curry and air shooter mint sections) in the late game and copy ability based exploration in the sequels. To the director Mashiro Sakurai's credit they were aware of the limitations of their stylistic choices and kept the game short with a normal difficulty run lasting thirty minutes to an hour if you play poorly.

The best use of both mechanics is probably the boss fights which are incredibly well done given that they have to convey and or balance:

A) what a platformer boss is to a beginner to the genre.

B) Making the bosses fun to fight without being brainless.

C) Something you can improve upon further exposure.

This is also why I actually like the final boss rush here while I tend to dislike it in something like say the robot master gauntlet in MegaMan 1-6's climaxes. Enemy patterns are actually decipherable to normal human reflexes so it feels like I'm applying skills learned in prior levels to finish something more efficiently and not just brute forcing the game with sheer endurance/patience.

Story & Graphics
Normally I discuss these categories separately but given how simple Kirby's Dream Land is story-wise and how much of the series's long standing narrative appeal is tied into these character designs I felt it made since to combine these categories together for this review.

Kirby's Dream Land is a very minimalist work narrative-wise. King Dedede has stolen his subjects food and its your job as Kirby to put a stop to his gluttony. This plot is a functionally fine for the target audience and style it is going for. Not much else I can really say.

Really the strongest, most stand out point here is the main villain and how he serves as a microcosm for the game's expressive graphics. You can tell the developers were really focused on pushing the Game Boy to its limit by making the sprite animation as expressive as they did with Dedede being the best example of how well director Mashiro Sakurai understands character design as a craft.

King Dedede parallels Kirby so well during the final boss fight with the monarch having riffs on the pink puffball's main two hooks in the form of a vacuum attack to punish players baiting out his hammer attack and a high jump to counter Kirby's glide. Both moves along with a tripping attack are also telegraphed slowly in order to show just how much of a powerful but clumsy oaf the penguin really is. Thus when you win it feels like a very satisfying "the emperor has no clothes" moment.

Music & Sound Design
Sound design was vital for getting the player to understand how to maneuver with this floaty character with Kirby having sounds effects for both puffing up and sucking/spitting that convey what form you are shifting out of at a given time. You can really see the beginnings of where Sakurai's audio philosophy would evolve in the Super Smash Bros series here.

Music in this game is legendary. Basically every track here is iconic and constantly reused and remixed in future entries for a reason. The upbeat and hyper active chip tune style used here really sells the cutesy but adventurous vibe. Honestly composer Jun Ishikawa doesn't get enough credit for how much of the franchise's identity is tied to their musical style.

Conclusion
Kirby's Dream Land is a fun romp and while I hesitate to say its a "must play" I think the fact that it now comes as essentially a free pack in with your Switch online multiplayer subscription you are likely to already have if you are big enough Nintendo fan to read a backloggd review for a game from 1992. I can say its worth checking out. Especially if you like seeing how auteur creators evolve across their portfolio.