A game of supreme quality and workmanship. Team Asano’s tightest and most engaging story work yet. Fantastic characters with complicated motivations and quiet interpersonal stories. This is one of the most polished packages I’ve ever played and a true joy. And I’ve only just completed chapter 1! I think there is real potential for it to become an S-Tier all time favorite. I adore Octopath 1, but this one is a mechanical and artistic improvement in almost every way. It’s a shame its competing with such an outstanding year of releases because I really want to go back to it but keep getting drawn into something else. I know this game rewards me for taking my time with it, but it will probably take a year+ to beat it at this pace.

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.

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.

It’s such a nice contained experience. It’s only about 7-8 hours to see most of the game, and the sense of humor and musical numbers are so much fun. The characters are very well realized, I love how Cornet’s relationships developed with Kururu and Etoile. My only complaint is that it’s incredibly easy. I set hard mode in the options before I started, but I still managed to get very strong very quickly and never felt in danger of having a character fall in battle. This really feels like a lot of care was put into it despite its relatively small scope.

EARLY ACCESS REVIEW:

I’ve been highly anticipating it ever since I saw the fantastic art style and thought I’d take a chance on early access, even knowing that it’s pretty unpolished. The presentation is better than screenshots capture. There’s a great twist that the 2d environments “shift” into 3D when 3D-modeled bosses appear. Fantastic vision and well executed.

It definitely pulls a lot of inspiration from the Kiseki games, with its sense of humor/puns and fourth wall breaking by clicking on different objects. You can also have your character do silly things that subvert the forward progression of the game. The battle system has a very solid, if simple, foundation. It’s not challenging, but the beginning of JRPGs hardly ever are. The enemy encounters and animations definitely take inspiration from Chrono Trigger, and there’s a scene at the end of the first chapter that really drives that home.

But unfortunately despite its short length, it does not really value the player’s time. For example, the main protagonist’s journey starts with her teacher lampshading that he’s assigning you menial tasks. And menial they are. At one point, one of the quest givers/protagonists of another story was sleeping, and I asked for a list of supplies they wanted me to buy. But I missed part of it and clicked again to read it and the character went back to sleep and wouldn’t wake up as a joke. So I literally had to just find a walkthrough video and scrub through to rewatch it. Leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. It’s made all the weirder that the game as it is right now is made up of 3 5-hour character stories and this is how the time is spent. Hopefully the stories get better, but for now they are by far the most amateurish part of the game. This type of nonsense does not seem like it would be changed, unless they kind of rewrite the whole thing. There’s so much great potential here but I have a feeling it might always come across as a pretty amateur effort as a result of the tone set by the weak story.

I still feel conflicted about this one. It lacks the sense of discovery and originality of Breath of the Wild. The game is bloated full of "content" that does not really enhance the gameplay, and in many cases distracts from what I am doing moment-to-moment. When I got into a flow state with the game, it was great, but my overwhelming memory is just kinda going through the motions.

The star of the show is the game's new abilities, and my first 5 hours with Ultrahand were surprisingly satisfying, but as the game went on, I grew to dislike the feature. The ascend ability similarly was great when it worked, but I found myself searching for opportunities to use it far more then when it came up organically. Fuse similarly felt like a solution in search of a problem. The Rewind feature is a downgrade from stasis. All of them lack the elegance of their BotW counterparts.

I have mixed feelings about the game's zones. I enjoyed what they did on terrestrial Hyrule, it felt familiar and different at the same time. The sky area being so fragmented and disconnected, yet sometimes requiring platforming was about as good in practice as it sounds on paper. Not terrible, but not terribly well integrated. Finally the underground went from being a very pleasant surprise to a big disappointment. I find myself not enjoying the design of the underground, it didn't feel much like I was exploring new areas. Once I saw enough of the underground, I saw all of the underground, and that includes the secrets.

As someone with no investment in the Zelda story, the story-driven portions of the game did nothing for me. I found the non-chronological storytelling to work against the game, as I did not feel grounded in the world. I understand why they designed it this way, but I think linking the story to the location was a mistake -- they should have kept it in chronological order.

The biggest tragedy of this game is that it brought the flaws of Breath of the Wild into greater focus for me. In hindsight BotW benefited tremendously from the switch library being empty for a year, because I would think about my backlog every time I turned on Tears of the Kingdom. The reward for exploration was simply not as novel as it was in Breath of the Wild.