Jusant is an interesting game which made a strong first impression, but as it went on the frustrations stacked and it felt like it wasn't really going anywhere. It's a game all about how you move, and the method of using the left and right triggers to control the character's hands feels unique for how much it is in the forefront of the game. Unfortunately the actual movement felt a little like a prototype still, at times being stiff or unresponsive and not quite up to the platforming that the game asks of the player in the second half of the game. Obviously it took a lot of ambition to make a physics based game like this but it could have used a lot more refinement. A lot of collisions were wrong and a few times I got stuck in the geometry. The button mapping was also slightly annoying with your companion, I never remembered which button did what and would often have to sit through the long 'pet the dog' animation accidentally.

The game's story is also a weak point. I think the environmental storytelling had great potential but the game is weighed down by uninteresting datalogs. It feels inspired by Ico or Journey-style games with imposing environments and an isolated protagonist but it doesn't do anything with that idea. Some of the puzzles are nice but it feels like they could have done more.

This was the weirdest release Nintendo has ever done. Why did they go back to localize this game, only to sell it for 4 months? Why did they create a new emulation UI that is legitimately worse than the NES online UI. The ONLY way to save is by using a bookmark. Several times while playing, I accidentally ‘load bookmark’ instead of ‘save bookmark’ and lost literal hours of progress. They also went so far as to let you roll back turn by turn, but only give you one save state. They added a very nice sound test but did not include any instruction manual stuff that is actually necessary to understand what you’re doing.

I've tried to play FE1 a couple times in the past but just kind of got bored and annoyed by having so much critical information only accessible outside of the game (like weapon might or weight) or is just super tedious to do (like counting movement or calculating how much damage you’re going to do or moving items around). But going in not taking it seriously and instead just picking up on the vibes makes it very fun. You can have fun with the game by just getting a general feeling of whether you will double an enemy or withstand an enemy phase. I think trying to play the game too fast can take the fun out of it since a lot of the challenge comes from the way this game handled reinforcements, and I think it's a mistake to try to play this too efficiently.

Not seeing enemy movement or a battle preview got really annoying in some of the late game maps which did get a lot more tedious but aside from Chapter 24 I made a point not to warp-skip anything so I could get the full experience, and I’m glad I did. The reinforcements made me actually try to beat maps quickly, though many of them I have 15-20 turns in just because of the rotten inventory management. I don’t think I even used all my talisman and speed rings because I just didn’t want to deal with convoy management and trading stuff off of characters a certain point. This kind of stuff feels hostile to the player in 2023, but I don’t think it really weighs the game down that much. The core of the game is almost everything you expect from Fire Emblem even if the execution is held back by the technology limitations.

I played pretty loose with my characters. Both Christmas Cavaliers died in the endgame chapters, Wendell valiantly sacrificed himself for the Falchion, and I killed Tiki on the map because I couldn’t recruit her without Bonthu lol. Hardin is amazing in this game and Midia was an MVP. But I think Best girl was Maria, the damsel who is the most thirsty for Marth. Her good ending was just "her enthusiasm for Marth has not diminished".

The game isn’t some hidden masterpiece (but Gaiden is, check that one out). It's worth playing from a historical perspective, and one that every FE fan should beat at least once.

If I was ever going to play a mech game, I'm not playing the one by the Souls team, I'm playing the one by the Harvest Moon team!

Mechs in general don't really do much for me, so I was wary that the game might be unapproachable and overcomplicated, but I think this game strikes a pretty good balance for a “casual+” like me. There's also decent mission and landscape variety, and the early missions are fairly short and forgiving. I think using the trigger buttons was a smart way to design the combat of this game, however playing this in handheld mode or with joycons does not feel great. This game feels like it was designed to be sat in front of a screen with a pro controller or with the game’s custom handheld peripheral… not really designed for the vanilla Switch experience.

While this game is generally adequate all around, it struggles to maintain my interest too much or pull me back in after I set it down. The story doesn't have much intrigue. It introduces a ton of characters, so that you can later unlock them as teammates, but as a result you don't really feel connected to any of them. it’s hard to tell what the actual stakes are, and the enemies are undefined AIs without a clear motivation. There are some named enemies but the game has you destroy them at the end of each mission, so it does not feel personal. The progression is also slow and incremental, I don’t feel much different after an hour or two of playing. Overall it’s somewhat disappointing as a RPGish experience, but I’m ok with it being the type of game I can passively absorb over a long period of time, without needing to focus on. This isn’t a game I feel a need to finish or see everything, I can just chip away at if I ever want to jump back into a mech suit.

Botany Manor is a charming puzzle game that does an excellent job of creating a sense of space. The game is designed around combing an area for clues, sorting out which applies to each plant, and then doing the mental math needed to make the plant grow.

It's a low-fi, calm experience, and I think a lot of the satisfaction comes from walking from place to place, picking up on small pieces of environmental storytelling, and having to create a mental map of the manor in your brain. While the puzzles will not challenge you like in Myst or the Witness, it does a great job of putting you in a place and letting that space be play a role in the puzzle.

They captured the romance of life at a quiet estate turned into a garden, where life is simple and one could just spend their days studying exotic, fantastical plants and the stories behind them. It's an easy game to recommend and a nice way to spend a couple hours.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a good time. It feels like a sequel to the Mario Maker series more than it feels like a sequel to Mario World or the "New" subseries. If Mario Maker and its kaizo and troll levels are a postmodern lens to view the mario formula, then Mario Wonder feels like the logical next step of being an earnest metamodern attempt of Nintendo's professionals to try to show the audience something familiar but new. Finally Nintendo gave a little bit of creative liberty to the people who have the full set of development tools and it’s good to let them go a little off the rails even if it comes at the expense of making a fully cohesive game.

There are a few misses when it comes to trying to subvert the audience expectations (such as just giving you the royal seed as a freebie in world 3 instead of having you do a castle). But overall it's hard to nitpick when you do get plenty of secrets and just about every level brings something interesting to the table. It's funny how much Mario fans want worlds to be incorporated in games like Mario Maker 2, and then this game finally included them… as a major afterthought. It doesn’t bother to have much consistent theming, and aside from light minimap exploration there’s not much of a point in this game separating things into 'worlds'.

I was a little worried it would feel like flash over substance but the core of the levels is platforming that’s as good as its ever been. The powerups have more restraint than I expected and but still a ton of utility in adding game variety. Though it does feel a little like Bubble Mario is the Mario Odyssey powerup and Drill Mario is the Splatoon powerup. I’m less keen on the badges, but I can appreciate that it’s fairly optional and some make the game harder. I think the mario team did a good job of balancing each level within the itself… but I do wish at some point I was in danger of having a ‘game over’. I also appreciate the little challenges with unique clear conditions all over the map, and while it’s good for short portable play sessions it feels like the same kind of bloat that makes Mario Odyssey not as replayable as its predecessors. Mario 3 + World are easy to pick up and see how far you can get in 2 hours, but I don’t think this game works that way.

This game offers the player two different voyeuristic experiences. First, is the one the game designers created, where you creep around unlocking suggestive images. Second, is the one that you human behind the keyboard is doing, as you peer into the psyche of the type of person who created or consumed this game 30 years ago.

This is not a very good stat-raising game or dating sim. But it is sort of compelling, despite being very juvenile, aggressively horny, and having a messed up translation. The characters and their actions are often manipulative, creepy, or nonsensical in a way that is not making any kind of statement. The game, like many of its contemporaries, operates on its own game logic about women. This game avoids any attempt at self-reflection it clearly is just targeted at a certain kind of person at a specific place and time, and I think that can be interesting to experience. I would not recommend this game to anyone looking for the traditional things you get out of a game, be it storytelling, challenge, a sense of satisfaction, etc. But instead as an anthropological find, it's interesting.

I think Bayonetta 3 is symbolic of what can go wrong when there's too long of a development cycle. Bayonetta 1 and 2 had a vision which was always apparent even when it wasn't perfectly executed. Bayonetta 3 feels like many games at once... and leads to it feeling overcooked and overdesigned, losing a lot of what made the first two games special.

What I loved about Bayonetta was the grace and dexterity of a fast-moving protagonist, exploring the surprisingly long levels, seeing a variety of enemies in different situations, fast and frantic platforming, and some well-timed surprises. In Bayonetta 3, Platinum Games tried to one-up themselves in every aspect but ended up compromising much of these things.

The elephant in the room are the technical limitations of the Switch. Even when the game wasn't running poorly you could see how it limited the creative vision for the game. The game was based around summoning large Kaijus and Infernal Beings to take part in the fight so that every fight was a big showdown. However, this meant only a couple of enemies on the screen at a time, typically one big oversized boss and possibly some other repeated scrubs surrounding them. The drawback is you never feel quite so overwhelmed because the battlefield is never filled in the way it was in Bayonetta 1 and 2. It also makes the game feel like one large boss-rush as they are constantly emphasizing one enemy at a time in these fights. In order to damage larger enemies, Bayonetta must use the infernal beings, which hitches the frame rate and slows the pace down. The game feels balanced around spamming these summons, and as a result Bayonetta's combos feel weak in comparison and it feels like the game is constantly slowing her down. Specifically Gomorrah's fights feel painfully slow and there are a couple of sections that amount to rock-paper-scissors and are excruciatingly long. It's very clear this game values spectacle over smooth combat.

Outside of battle, there’s too much fog of death in this game, and the game feels like it’s pushing you into it constantly while you’re platforming. The worst of this is early on when you get the spider and have anti-gravity platforming, as well as any time that ‘weather’ effects blow you into the fog or a room has fog covering the floor. The other problem is that during typical platforming there aren't enemies chasing you down, so it feels like there is less danger or urgency. The exploration as well feels far more formulaic than in the past, with repeated patterns for how secrets are hidden.

I respect that they are trying a lot of new things, like the elevator action sections, door puzzles, inter-shmuptions, and the Audioshield-esque game in Paris. But combined with the ever escalating action sequences it all added up to a lot of noise and having so many different set pieces diminished the memorability of all of them. They got carried away with making everything ‘special’ that nothing feels meaningful. This is also evident in the story, which they clearly tried to raise the stakes and involve mystery but it resulted in a confusing case of "too much too soon."

The story is bad, I know many have spoken about how it falls apart at the end but it's pretty bad all the way through. The whole multiverse bullshit is over-saturated and uninteresting to begin with. I think the only way to play this game is to believe that it is “Bayonetta 3’s” game, and that it doesn’t impact the other two preceding games. Because otherwise, it means the earlier games aren’t really about anything any more. Those games were self contained and had good consistent worlds and this one just decided to make it fuzzy for some reason. Bayonetta's characterization in the final scenes is disappointing, but the story is so incoherent it blends together for me.

Overall I did not enjoy this experience, and while it's not the direction I would have chosen for this series, I understand why it is like this and what is coming next. I just think Bayonetta might not be for me.

I came across this and liked the art style, and thought it might be fun to pop into a modern 3-hour retro styled Zelda game that evokes the gameplay of Link's Awakening or Oracle of Seasons. On the one hand this game succeeds tremendously in being an imitation, but it's about as flavorful and substantial as a water cracker.

There's not much here to speak of, no story to sink your teeth into, dungeons and puzzles are very straightforward and lack much of a challenge, and while the gameplay is as smooth gameplay as would expect from something like this, it feels like a carbon copy of any other game in the genre. Overall the world layout is well designed (aside from one spot where I got stuck and had to restart the game). It's just very unambitious, and I think that's a bigger sin then if the game didn't play as smoothly. The high point of this game is the spritework and atmosphere, at times it hints at having a personality, but ultimately this game does nothing to distinguish itself. I'm sure it is a satisfactory miniature Zeldalike experience for many people but I hope the developers challenge themselves to do something more with their next game.

This game does so many good things to improve the Fire Emblem format. The boss fights, which were always a weak point for FE are actually incredible, high stakes, and thrilling challenges. I love that they have many health bars and are aggressive against you. The somniel is some of the best hangin’ out time. The cast is vibrant and likable, but very much blank slates for you to customize. Gone are the days of anime chess, and instead we have insane amounts of choice for better or worse. The DLC however is terribly unbalanced and poorly integrated.

It’s a quasi-3D tennis game, and absolutely brilliant. The game has a fixed camera perspective unlike any other tennis game, where your player’s sprite is centered, and the rest of the court moves as you move. This forces you to judge the speed and distance of the ball more genuinely than any stationary camera game. Risks are amplified with this camera setup and the long animations force you to have patience, because there really aren’t second chances to catch up if you misjudge the ball.

It’s a hard game, but it still manages to be player-friendly. It might first seem way too difficult to judge where the ball comes and where the hitbox is, once you practice and focus, you’ll discover that the game is very fair and even generous. It’s also impossible to play this game conservatively. You have to go aggressive with volleys, smashes, and vary your shots. The name of the game is Aim for the Ace – so there is a big emphasis on serving aces and return aces. It’s easy to get good at serving but you can’t get overconfident with a good serve alone. You have to have a complete skillset.

It’s also a story-driven visual novel game, which makes it even better. Your coach and team motivate you in between sets and it has little scenes at high-stakes parts of the match, which really give this game personality. All of your opponents play differently. I absolutely love that there’s a 14 hour campaign where you play complete 7-game, 3-set matches against your opponents. A fantastic change of pace from most tennis games where it’s designed around 5-10 minute mini-matches between the most elite players at the grand slam tournaments. Instead you take the role of an anxious high schooler just trying to just be a team player and not let down their team, and every match takes its sweet time. You can even lose matches and the story goes on! We need more games about the glory of amateur sports.

I’m tough on this one because it holds a special place in my heart. I love seeing Spira from this perspective and interacting with it in so many new playful ways. It’s close to greatness, but it fails on a couple of counts. First, the active time battle system is a little too overwhelming. I’m rarely in the mood for such chaotic battles. Secondly, the game suffers from too much optional side content required for 100% completion. There is something happening in almost every location during every chapter, and so if you want to see it all, you’re going to be stuck not progressing for a while. The game clearly tries to steer you away from it but showing the player the ‘percentage complete’ all the time activates my completionist brain. I intend to go back and finish it, but it’s fallen down my list of priorities unfortunately.

When you see an art style like this, it immediately feels like there's so much potential to the game. This game clearly seems inspired by Mother/Undertale/Zelda with a dash of Celeste. It looks great and has a cool vibe… but gosh, these games need to cool it on not giving you a real enemy encounter for an hour+ into playing it. The game promises turn-based rpg battles but it appears to only be for boss battles and the two that you experience in the first hour are both scripted for you to lose/not do anything effective. It gave a very bad first impression. Once I got to a real boss battle, lo and behold they aren't turn based battles at all, they're Undertaleish battles where the screen gets very small and you have to dodge enemies like you do in the overworld for 5 seconds. It's not really turn based, though it has you 'miss' attacks a lot making these battles last a long time. It also has you repeating the same overworld puzzles the only difference is that it shrinks everything down to a postage-stamp sized square. If you're steam linking onto your phone like I was, it's not really playable at that screen size. I had to switch devices to finish the game which is not the best user experience.

There are zeldish battles and puzzles in the overworld which are not bad but you are funneled into them quite linearly and you have to finish their very specific tasks to progress, which kinda that messes a bit with the game’s pacing if you miss something minor. The puzzles aren't bad, but it doesn't really go beyond anything too basic. Still not the worst part of the game.

I’ve been in the mood for what this game promises, but it’s running into the same the pitfalls that something like Eastward or Sea of Stars ran into. It’s not bad, but it feels very incomplete and more like an imitation than a game trying to do its own thing. Learning that it’s basically early access without saying it’s early access and it’s “part 1 of an episodic series” has me a little extra cynical about it. This game feels like it needs to find its own voice and focus more on making a system that works internally rather than just being a pastiche of things it likes from other games.