What? A 4 to Hydlide? Surely a mistake...
YES, it's impossible without a guide, YES it's janky as hell (god help you if you aren't using save states), but for 1984 it's an interesting game, and arguably there's a lot still interesting about it today that sticks with me.
There's so many weird little decisions that this game has. When it comes to action RPGs, I always think that if I have trouble or an interesting time killing the first slime... then it could be a good game. and that's the case here with hydlide, where I walked into a Slime while in "DEFEND" mode and promptly died. It felt like a weird puzzle trying to figure out how to get my first few levels.
Standing on forest tiles prevents you from regenerating health, and damages you. There's something moving in this simplicity of logic. Forests ARE dangerous, filled with unknown things, so of course you would get hurt while standing in one...right?
Attacking enemies based on where they're moving will hurt you more, back attacks are safer. But there's this absolute chaos to the chunky movement that makes it hard to consistently do.
As a result even the simple dungeons where you need to go two screens, pick up a chest, and leave... are remarkably tense. Sure it feels like a dice roll whether you'll just die, but there is an interesting layer of strategy that will increase your odds. So much personality and memorability in tiny, simple mazes. Each time you try to find the next place to grind it feels like a little microcosm of a 'new area' in a modern game - the zombie graveyard, the desert worms, etc... it feels like a big adventure shrunk down to this tiny size.
I'm a fan of the quiet narrative 'beats' - slimes being silently replaced by "HYPERS" on the overworld, upon reaching level 5 or 6.
I like some of the bizarre humor - the unexplained screens full of moving rocks and trees that will kill you even at max level. The screen of wasp-infested trees you need to investigate one by one to find a key item. Having to stand outside a cave of worms and slowly swat at them to grind out levels. Is it good? Not really, but the way Hydlide has these boiled-down, janky scenarios that we are familiar with today in action RPGs is sort of heartwarming. For example, the "standing outside a cave of worms" is very similar to cheese strategies for grinding hard enemies... The Elden Ring Moving Ball is similar to the Killer Rock in Hydlide.
The way this game gates stuff with obscure knowledge reminds me of Tower of Druaga, or arcade games in general. It's funny to know that you need to keep killing golden knights to get a key, but if you kill one more, the key vanishes. It's funny to learn that you have to drain the water around a moat to make a dragon vulnerable.
Ultimately, through the lens of 'is this playable and fun right away?' it's not a good game. But all the strange decisions and scenarios feel like they could be spun out and developed into interesting games of their own. So in that sense Hydlide feels like this box of possibilities.

this is the worst kind of direct sequel. gameplay loop is essentially identical but it has almost nothing to do with the previous game story/continuity-wise.

nintendo has always been allergic to lore but there is no time this has been more obvious than this time around.

they completely tapped out on what was good and what was bad about botw and just made the same game with some added crafting mechanics that can be fun but arent very practical to the core gameplay.

Can't give it a perfect right now, as it's not even considered finished by the developer yet, but honestly, it's a hell of a lot closer than I expected. Everything feels like Miro has become something of an indie master at this point. While there are still plenty of derivative elements from media they love here, it feels even more uniquely its own thing than the first, with quite a bit less than expected that I can describe as "just X character/thing from Y", for a game with this title with The Funny Moon right on the cover. The thematic lore/broad plot writing is just as solid as it was in the first game, and while it's even more cryptic than the first game, it's so brilliantly blended together with the gameplay and setting design this time that I'm honestly in awe.
That blending of gameplay, thematic storytelling, and map design is one of two elements that really makes this game so fantastic. I honestly can't imagine a battle royale game that does this better- the first time I killed a character (O'saa, who I accidentally aggro'd but I was sure would have been recruitable anyway later) that wasn't mutated, I felt intense remorse, but because of how sparse saves are and how tight the time limit feels, I couldn't bring myself to reset and lose over an hour of progress. So I pressed on, and became FAR stronger thanks to the benefits killing him gave me, this incident probably leading to my success. Despite being pretty strictly scripted, on a blind run (and the next couple after that), many elements of the game feel emergent- I knew August would show up after fighting Moonless on a second run, for example, but it still surprised me, because I thought he was off elsewhere. This psuedo-emergent design and matching map building feels perfectly tied to the feeling of desperation for community and belonging that the game winds up largely being about- a belonging that, as the transition from night 2 to day 3 surprised and devastated me with, can be shattered in a moment thanks to circumstances beyond our control.
A game about community and the desperate modern urge for belonging would mean absolutely nothing, though, if not for fantastic character writing, and holy shit this game has that. None of the characters are done being developed yet, says the developer, who is currently adding details to all of their backgrounds- and I can't fucking wait for more. Even with what we have right now, these characters feel alive, so much so that an unexpected kidnapping on morning 3 left me sitting dead-eyed for ten minutes, trying to decide what the hell to do.
This is a god-awful ramble, but I just adore this game. Everything works together so perfectly, building on everything (mechanically, thematically, and literally) that the first game created, and it ends up being one of my favorite RPGs in years.
One of the only criticisms I'll give it is that the changed setting and different themes makes the sexual horror of the game feel less justifiable than in the first. There's one fight in particular- a priest- where the sexual element feels entirely gratuitous, unexpected in a way that made my eyes roll in annoyance, something neither game had ever made me do before. It's the only instance of implied sexual abuse of children, and it feels entirely unjustified and without any relevance. It's the only time in either game I felt like something was there just for the shock factor, and it's a shame, because it comes at the end of a very solid, atmospheric level. The game is still fantastic, but god, Miro's amateur-ness still does poke through sometimes, doesn't it? I admire that about their work, but almost every other time in the series, it at least still reads as thematically justified and horrific in ways that the game has built up to.
Game's great, though, and I can't wait for update 2.0.
Funger.

I will be slowly adding to this review, and it will likely end up being really, really long, but my summary is this.

Tears of the Kingdom is Domino's Pizza. I ate it sober, and the critics ate it baked out of their minds. To me, its a greasy bit of open world action that satisfies me, but never impresses. To them, its the best food they've ever eaten.

If you liked Breath of the Wild, this is basically that, but removing the sheikah slate powers with infinitely more impractical ones. Gone are remote bombs and stasis, instead you get the incredibly gimmicky recall and ascend powers. Ascend is a nice get out of jail free card in regular caves, but recall is totally useless outside of puzzles. Fuse is a cool gimmick that bellyflops the execution by making the act of fusing a constant tedious process, thats required to make weapons do damage. 90% of items are useless to fuse because they only affect elemental powers and a static power level.

The Ultra Hand steals the show, essentially being a more unwieldy GMod prop gun. The main problem with this power, along with fuse, is that I expected them to be so much deeper than they are. Fuse only really adds an element or higher DPS to weapons, and ultra hand can build bridges or useless makeshift vehicles for your amusement. To make matters worse, you have to grind up useful interactable props in a gacha machine in the sky. So making your own fun is often prefaced with grinding Zonai cores to trade in.

The other big nut tap I recieved was finding out how weak the dungeons are in TOTK. Theres 4 and a quarter dungeons in the game, and all of them can be beaten with little thought in less than 45 minutes each. The bosses are alright, although too easy with the expection of the thunder boss and final bosses. If there was one god damn thing I wanted Nintendo to fix after 6 years, it was the weak ass dungeons. And they couldn't even do that.

Tears of the Kingdom is stuck in limbo. Its not fresh in the slightest, but it slaps some total gimmicks into a 6 year old game, like a 50 year old lady slapping on layers of makeup. The new powers are now my textbook definition of gimmick, its so face slappingly obvious. They seem like gamechangers for about an hour, before fading into the background for 45. The shrines exist as some form of justification for them, making cool but overly simple physics puzzles involving ultrahand.

The massive underground depths are again, cool at first. But they take way too long to explore, are butt ugly and also don't contain any substancial content. So...from a game design perspective, why even have them? It feels cynical, like making a big, second ugly copy pasted overworld will band aid the severe lack of change.

The sky islands are actually a great addition. They feel fresh, with cool geometry, puzzles and rewards, but there's barely any of them. It pains me to say that, because the thing thats all over the marketing actually works as an addition to good game, and they underdevelop them. What were they doing for 6 years??

And I don't really need to say it, but after reading countless critic reviews praising it, I need to. The story and writing is abysmal. Characters have very, very simple personalities. There's no wit or charm to the very inhuman dialogue, consisting of what feels like robots constantly congratulating each other. Way to go, Link! Zelda for example, is just a shell of a human, she doesn't joke, entertain or even try to do anything but exposition dump, as does LITERALLY every major player in the game.

I have more to say...but I'll break here for now. I wouldn't normally go this hard, but after beating it and seeing the insane 97 metascore, I feel obliged to kind of, put my hands up and say, "what the fuck, people?" Its totally good, fine, and fun enough, but so are Hogwarts and Jedi Survivor. Neither of which are worse or better than TOTK. Its like giving the Mario Movie an Oscar.

Breath of the Wild felt like a special game with a creative vision, Tears of the Kingdom feels like an unnecessary retread of it. And I say that, experiencing the new additions, feeling they aren't very meaty or interesting, and looking back at it from the end. I'm not like the reactionaries on this site who are disappointed and give it half a star. By all means, its polished and impressive by the standards of a Switch game in a post PS5 world. But it's no big shot mind blower like the original BOTW, or Elden Ring. It's not fun enough to beat out Sekiro, Doom 2016 or Hollow Knight. It's not creative or even close to as smart as Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium or Forgotten City. It's a fun mindless open world jaunt, and I'm not pretending it's more than that.

Criminally overlooked. This game is a turn-based RPG with a heavy emphasis on survival mechanics in a dark oppressive world. There are some clear inspirations here (one enemy is lifted directly from Demon’s Souls, and an important NPC was no-doubt inspired by Berserk), but the game’s overall aesthetic is wholly unique, visceral, and depraved. The art is equal parts gorgeous and grotesque, and the music, if you can call it music, is oppressive and hair-raising. The whole atmosphere of the game just makes you feel on edge, and stressed about what monstrosity you’ll encounter next.

The dev has a great sense of creating fear and stress through gameplay mechanics as well; attacks from enemies can lead to losing limbs, which makes you unable to hold a two-handed weapon, or a shield. Non-player Party Members will die outright with no way to revive them. Your party can be inflicted with poison, bleeding, tapeworms, and infected wounds, which all require precious resources to treat (and if you can't treat an infected wound, you'll be forced to saw off a limb to stop the infection from killing you outright). You constantly have to scavenge for food to maintain your hunger gauge, and pay attention to your party’s fear gauge, lest they become discouraged and abandon you altogether. All of this is propped up by the coin-toss system, wherein a number of actions in the game require you to pick heads or tails to determine an outcome, such as finding better items while searching chests and bookshelves, or whether you avoid a particularly nasty attack. This system causes you to put more thought into your actions, and play the game a bit more like an adventurer would in real life; being aware of your surroundings and considering the potential risks that your actions carry.

Most importantly, however, the coin toss system is used for saving, which is no doubt going to turn some people away from the game outright. Failing a coin toss while trying to save (done via sleeping in beds) can cause you to be attacked by enemies, or more often than not the game will simply wake you up without saving, and will prevent you from trying again for a bit of time. The game isn't totally heartless, however, and frequently hands out "lucky coins" which can be used to flip a second coin, essentially reducing your chance of failure to 25%, there are also a couple of totally safe save points which won't trigger anything nasty, and there is also a rare, consumable item which lets you save on the spot. What I love about this system is how it forces you to take the rest of the mechanics seriously, something you wouldn’t do if saving was a more available thing. If, for instance, you’ve been a long while without saving, and you lose an arm, or maybe a party member bites the dust, you’ll be much more inclined to press on rather than save-scumming to avoid a bad outcome, which makes your playthrough all the more interesting. Having to deal with a main character losing his arm and becoming less useful, or your favorite party member permanently dying, are memorable experiences that take you by surprise. And when reaching the end of the game, battered, bruised and probably down a man or two, you’ll feel like you’ve accomplished the impossible.

I can’t recommend this game enough; it evoked a feeling of helplessness and dread that even the scariest horror games can’t get out of me anymore. It’s tough, often bordering on unfair, but if you’re willing to press on, you’ll be left with an experience unlike any other.

Often when I play a game that is labeled as unfair and difficult it's not long before this statement is boiled down to “once you understand the mechanics it's not too bad”. The biggest example of something like this is with Dark Souls where large swaths of the game are completely fair as long as you understand what you are working with. Fear and Hunger breaks this mold by genuinely being one of the cruelest and most unfair games I have ever played. Almost every mechanic in the game is designed to work against you. Enemy encounters can leave you limbless, having acquired permanent disabilities or encountering a fate worse than death and this could all occur when fighting the first enemy. The game also heavily uses RNG where simple things such as looting a crate could either reward you with a useful healing item or your sixth duplication of a useless piece of armor. Accompanying this base RNG is a coin toss mechanic that dictates how certain events will play out. Once prompted, you choose either heads or tails, and depending on the outcome you will either be heavily rewarded or dead on the ground. This mechanic is used in enemy encounters, specific world events and even searching treasure chests. Hell, even most save points require you to flip a coin to decide whether you get to save or get bum-rushed by an enemy.

After reading all of this you might be thinking “why would anyone want to play a game that is so reliant on RNG when even one mistake could set you back upwards to an hour”. The answer to this is how rewarding it feels to discover how to utilize everything the game throws at you to your advantage. Never before have I experienced such a sharp learning curve and been immediately rewarded for understanding the game. Some examples of this are figuring out how you can break save areas so that you never have to worry about getting attacked while saving or utilizing seemingly useless scrolls to acquire some of the most powerful equipment and spells fairly early in the game. One of the most useful strategies I utilized was doing a death run where once I saved I played very loosely and did not worry about dying just so I could see what the future encounters were which allowed me to prepare ahead. In all honesty, I feel this game is more of a survival horror than an RPG.

My final point I wanted to touch on was how in love I am with the dark fantasy aesthetic the game has. The setting, characters, and deep lore are all utilized to develop a compelling narrative where mortals go toe to toe with gods. The story displays ramifications one would realistically suffer from if one were to witness beings beyond their comprehension in a world that only seeks their demise. The feebleness of humanity, monstrosities being born from the darkness, and the willingness to delve deeper into hell are all themes I adore. These themes are further elevated by the game's extremely moody art style and soundtrack which worked so well on me that I felt queasy after my first session. The style of the whole game really is something I have never seen before and one I greatly admire.

I was originally going to end this review by saying “I love this game, do not play it” but to be honest I feel there are too many cool things here not to be experienced by someone that might be interested in it. It is a cruel game, yes, but it was probably one of the most unique and memorable experiences I’ve had with an RPG in a while. I know for a fact this game is not for everyone but I feel it has an overall low cost of entry. In conclusion, I love this game, play it.

This is maybe more of a review of the concept of 'dandori' than it is strictly a review of the game, Pikmin 4, a mere vessel for that ethos.

Sometimes there simply isn't a word for the type of work a work of art is. Attempting to take genre classification seriously leads to either the insufficiently academic and endlessly debatable, or mashing together words into meaningless ad-libs. Is Pikmin a puzzle-game? Is it a puzzle real-time strategy with survival game elements? Probably, but neither of these things say much about what the game is. There's no game it's particularly *-like either. We laughed when Hideo Kojima coined the 'strand-type' game, but sometimes, that's all you can do.

The word that the developers of Pikmin 4 decided to use to describe their game is 'dandori', and it's a word that the localizers of Pikmin 4 struggle to translate. Broadly speaking, it's left as is. They describe it in-game as "[organizing] tasks strategically and working effectively to execute plans", which is not inaccurate, but also isn't exactly helpful either. However, the brilliance of Pikmin, and of this game in particular, is that to understand dandori, you don't need words. Pikmin is a game built to teach it to you, the way that Mario teaches you timing and spatial analysis, the way XCOM teaches you to manage risk.

If I were to take a stab at explaining it, dandori is about time management in a workplace. In that workplace, you have tasks, and workers. Those workers take time to complete those tasks, which are varying in nature, and spread out across the workplace. How can you complete as much of what you need to get done as possible before the day is over? Well, you might consider;
- Avoiding idleness. Time spent not working is time wasted (fortunately, in Pikmin your workers do not have needs and never tire, so any ethical concerns with this are neatly sidestepped)
- Knowing your workers, and assigning them the tasks they are best suited for. (Pikmin are pleasingly color-coded, and as of Pikmin 4, have diverse and overlapping strengths. They are also, while error-prone, perfectly obedient)
- Prioritizing tasks that make future tasks easier (You start each day surrounded by a tempting bouquet of flowers, a quick method of bolstering your Pikmin count)
As you can see, the answer is not a number, or a silver bullet. It is a series of principles, applied to each new situation as necessary, taught directly through simply playing the game. The answer is dandori.

And dandori is good. Let's assume, for a moment, that there is an inherent joy in the efficient completion of tasks - or at least, that you're the kind of person who thinks so. Pikmin 4 is a wonderful game for getting a lot of stuff done. Your ultimate goals are very straight forward, but the means by which you achieve them involve many different obstacles, cleanly broken down into assignable, varying tasks. They sit there, waiting for you to come and untangle them, wrapped in an overall game structure that wields a gentle, but unwavering time pressure to urge you onwards without ever forcing you to take drastic, unplanned action. That inherent joy I mentioned is found here in spades, and presented to the player with the immediacy typical of Nintendo's flagship titles - aside from a few minor quibbles with controls and pacing.

(There is an awful lot of talking throughout the game, which is time spent not doing dandori. I also found that it was harder than I would've wanted to send more Pikmin to help with a task than were required, which was noticeable, because that is a something you consider doing any time you do literally anything)

These small things cannot keep Pikmin 4 from being an outstanding, enjoyable adventure, that's simple and intuitive to get started with. The Nintendo design philosophy of simplifying player actions and pushing the complexity out into the world works wonders here. Assigning tasks to workers in most any game is at least a couple of interactions. Here, you just mash one button to throw your lil guys at the thing you want until it starts happening. Feedback on the progress of tasks is immediate and clear. Outside of some of the more challenging instances of combat, thinking about something is as good as doing it.
There's next to no barriers between the player and their engagement with the organisational thinking that dandori benefits.

In truth, every Pikmin game has been about dandori, even if the term was freshly coined for the fourth. Every Pikmin game changes the things around that core concept - new tasks, new workers, varying degrees of co-operative gameplay - but dandori has always been there. In all three prior games, you are explicitly graded on how quickly you completed your tasks, which is a direct consequence of how well you managed your workforce, which can only be improved through the application of the principles of dandori. Though the consequences of working too inefficiently have perhaps become gentler in recent games, it is still the thing that drives the player forward.

This is the sort of thing Nintendo has always done, for better or worse. Take some gameplay that's fun and approachable, put class-leading kid-friendly character design on it, and spend the next two or three decades examining it in new contexts, finding new ways to get at that core. Here, in Pikmin, that core is not movement, or combat, or even exploration.It's not any of the actions you perform in-game, though those haven't needed to change much over two decades. The core is the philosophy of dandori, how you think about the actions you're performing in that broader, more malleable context. And unlike previous Pikmin games, Pikmin 4 finds a way to demonstrate how it comes from outside the world of games, exists wherever work and organisation do.

See, Pikmin 4 is actually about half a dozen Pikmin games. Or, it's more like one really big Pikmin game, with a bunch of smaller auxiliary games in its orbit. Each game is presented to you piecemeal as you progress through the story, one level at a time, spread out through a larger story. Most of them are even optional, if you don't like what they're cooking. But all of them, again, rely on dandori. Whether it's a compressed, five-minute version of the base experience, or a survival horror wave defense, or messy competitive battles, you use the same core principles in each and every additional game. Where a game series might normally take entry after entry to explore its core conceit so thoroughly and from so many angles, Pikmin 4 leaps past its predecessors to do it in one. Not only does it teach you dandori - it universalizes it.

That's the wonder of Pikmin 4. It's not that there's so much of it, or that it's so lovingly rendered. It's that it really, truly wants to teach you how fun it can be to make and execute a plan. It wants you to learn dandori, and it will gently hold your hand and lead you directly to it, if you let it. It'll show you dandori from each of its distinct perspectives, whichever ones you find fun enough to dig into. If you're really taking to it, it won't hesitate to let you take the challenge as far as you want. 'How could you apply these concepts in your daily life?' Pikmin 4 asks, in one of many load screen tooltips. Once you've played the game, it might be hard not to look for answers to that question