#pikmin reviews

[subnautica-reviews]

Mamuta (and smokey progg, since it’s the larval stage of the mamuta, same reason why i did ancient and regular floaters together)

Why does it’s baby act like that? I like the adults, but the child can go fuck itself, I don’t even need the 100 pikmin reward, since i would break even at best. The child can burn in hell. The adult’s cool though. 3/5

[luridparty]

hey pikmin does NOT deserve the hate wtfff this game is PRECIOUS to ME ❗

the music is SO GOOD OMG. first on this list because like OH MY GODD i keep just putting my 2ds down for a while to listen to it its just so. sooo lovely and peaceful and strikingly nostalgic for a game ive never played before lol

the pikmin have so much personality in this game?? the lil cutscenes, the way they interact with olimar + each other, their animations for like. jumping on the dandelions and fire and such, the pikmin park..

the levels are fun and challenging yet they are also simple and accessible enough that i dub hey pikmin as a PERFECT relaxing game for a long day of, for example, six hours at work on top of six hours at school. based on personal experience 😬👍

all the models are Wuite cute. olimar looks VERY silly especially during the special cutscenes inside the dolphin ii

speaking of. i reaaaally like the ss dolphin ii i think it is sillay. perhaps one of my favorites. BUT. no ship beats the hocotate ship of course

im no game design prodigy but like. considering you only use the circle pad and stylus plus the two on-screen buttons? the devs did well with including fun (aaand sometimes annoying tbh) mechanics consistently so gameplay doesnt get dull.

also replaying levels is pretty much what you're INTENDED to do which i find fun. go through to unlock all treasures, get more pikmin, more sparklium etc

well shit i just realized you get a little reward/special border for completing a level without losing any pikmin. which i have managed to do. like twice. fuck my obsession with 100%ing viddy games 😬💥

anyways ive just gotten to sector six sooo back to it !!! point is do not believe the haters. if ever you have an opportunity to try out hey pikmin then TAKE IT. its certainly not perfect BUT ! its sweet and entertaining and that seems perfect for a spinoff imho

[genderqueer-miharu]

I really think we need to make it illegal for people to say "the game is too easy" in a videogame review/critique

[i-rate-creatures]

HI the Pikmin games have so many delightful creatures and I love them all and would submit them if I could but my personal favorite is the Nectarous Dandelfly if you'd like!!

ohhh... what a creature.... ohhhhh.. hell yeah... fuzzy, winged,,, HARMLESS ENEMY.... oh this guy is awesome i love it. i havent played any of the pikmin games but it sounds REALLY fun so i might have to try it out. this creature gets a solid 10/10 <3

🪰🦗🐜

[florrrfauna]

My Art Year in Review for 2023! I feel like I had to leave out a lotta really good pieces, since I drew so much ;;

[chocochococoffee]

so yeah, finished Pikmin 4

its notoriously easy in comparison to the other games. it has in mind their new public as its a way to attract both new switch publics And old players.

have in mind that i did a blind run and thus i had to use rewind day from the start for lots of stages, no pikmin death allowed here

ok then, whats what makes it easier? ppl would say its oatchi but in the endgame oatchi its just another unit that has its pros and cons. for me? what is strong and breaks the game itself is the use of certain items + purple pikmin. for example, against sovereign bulblax? haha two ice bombs to the mouth and then rush to the face. without oatchi its just a slower process but still doable. much more if you use ultra spicy spray. its ridiculous.

the dungeons are good but i wish they were randomified so i could feel that the game hated me. come on, pikmin 2 hated me with every piece of its soul, you can do it too pikmin 4

what i got no complaints about its of the controls. fast and secure, dont have problems with leaning to another side while moving (pikmin 3) nor feeling that the pikmin barrage throw is too slow (pikmin 3 again). the pikmin ai is good and unless overwhelmed, oatchi ai is also superb (exception being the stage against 99 enemies)

dandori is frustrating but i still like playing it. both challenges and otherwise.

and most characters suck ass but its cuz they added too much of them so now they got little lines and have no real personality to get attached to. plus the rescue corps dont fucking stop talking i wish they would stop i wish there was a button to shup them up they aint useful at all i Know whats happening when i see the goddman map just fucking go die shepherd and colin shut uppppppppp

anyways... its a 7/10 for me. enjoyable and i love the dogs. a decent level of difficulty if you are a newbie. sadly i got used to the masochist pain level 999999 called pikmin 2 so for old players might feel like a bit of a joke

also why the main characters of pikmin 3 got alternate universe versions but not olimar nor louie? are they constants??

[yoshizora]

another small batch of game reviews. this time i played through Princess Peach Showtime, Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze, and Pikmin 4!

Princess Peach Showtime: 5/10

unfortunately i am not the target audience for this game! i am no longer a child! the concept is cute as hell but DAMN is this game numbingly simple. the simplicity isn't necessarily a bad thing; i can see this being a great entry to video games for younger children because there's nothing terribly complex going on, but it does mean that it's not fun for OLD PEOPLE like me.

phantom thief peach was probably my fave. the detective levels were the worst. i thought patisserie peach was also neat. sword, kung fu, and superhero all felt somewhat redundant to one another. there were a lot of neat concepts in there and the levels were short enough that it never got outright boring, but it also means that imho this game isn't worth 60USD and only has that price tag because of the nintendo/mario brand name (i didn't buy it, it was just a library loan). i could see this being a Barbie game, honestly. it's not a bad thing ftr!

somehow, Yoshi's Crafted World is more challenging and complex than this game.

Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze: 6/10

i'm sorry if i'm committing some kind of blasphemy by admitting i didn't fully enjoy dkctf but......... yeah.... full disclaimer, the only other DK came i've ever played was the one with the bongos on gamecube lol.

the level designs and music were both impeccable and i love the vibrant atmosphere, but the controls?? look, maybe DK games are just slippery by tradition but i wouldn't know that, i only know how to play bongos, man. i had heard that this is a hard game but the difficulty feels contrived from slippery, unreliable controls rather than the actual platforming.

to compare; celeste has tight controls but a high difficulty because of how precise your movements need to be, and hk's path of pain is difficult for the same reasons, while tropical freeze feels difficult because sometimes donkey kong will slip on an invisible banana and clip an enemy by his toe and get hurt and fuckin die even if you meant for him to jump away out of a roll, which he does not, because he gives no fucks.

there are clear distinctions between challenges that are difficult in a fun way and challenges that are difficult in a frustrating way, and unfortunately dktf ended up being the latter for me. skill issue!

Pikmin 4: 9/10

oatchi.

since i only have pikmin 3 under my belt for comparison... 4 is definitely easier and more forgiving imo, even when it comes to the big bosses. it's not a bad thing! sometimes i don't want pikmin to die!! i love the abundance of treasures and olimar's side story and the dandori challenges, buuuut i wish enemies would respawn in the overworlds and not just the caves. it does make returning to grab remaining treasures a lot easier, but it also means there's 0 reason to revisit an area once you 100% it, which is kind of a bummer.

i also did NOT like how much tutorial and beginning exposition there was, so i knock a point off for that. everyone pls stop talking i just want to go out and throw pikmin at things.

at first i didn't really like how you're limited to 3 pikmin types, but i kind of got used to it after a while. i also wish there were more dandori battle options like with customizable pikmin teams, but i thought the gathering challenges to have more replay value anyway. the endgame dandori challenges are hellish but excellent!!! that's what i'm talking about when i talk about challenges that are difficult but fun!!! i want more dandori!!!!!!

[shower-racoon]

is there a New Game+ mode in Pikmin 4?

[struttinevilshroom]

A Narrow Perspective of Pikmin 4

So, I played Pikmin 4 with my friend. My friend, a guy who has played every Pikmin game (including hey Pikmin and the Pikmin game in Nintendoland) and has 100% completed Pikmin 2 which happens to be the most challenging Pikmin game. As for me, the extent of Pikmin knowledge is basically just what my friend tells me and I guess also bingo battles in Pikmin 3.

I'm trying to say that, I have a Narrow Perspective on Pikmin (boom title drop).

Sorry about that, I accidentally pressed on the question and I don't know how to remove it.

I went to my friend's house and he said that we were gonna beat Pikmin 4. I was only helping him with the final cave and final boss. I should also preface that this won't have any spoilers.

How Pikmin 4's co op works is that the first player is doing all the Pikmin throwing and the second player is kinda like the second player in Mario Galaxy, it's an offscreen entity throwing things to help the first player out. The second player can throw rocks to damage enemies or to speed up Pikmin who are carrying treasures to the ship and the more rocks thrown, the more a meter will fill. Once the meter is full, the second player will obtain an item which can only be used by them. This meter does not fill too quickly or too slowly, I think it fills up at an adequate pace. We played together for 2 hours roughly and we had just enough items, we were never in excess and we were never out of any particular item that we needed at that moment. The one outlier for this would be the PikPik carrots, they were always in excess and I had 80 of them exactly before fighting the final boss. It is safe to assume that I ended the game with 77 or 78 of them because I remember accidentally throwing a pikpik carrot 2 or 3 times.

I always knew this friend of mine was professional, I watched him decimate Pikmin 2's Water Wraith and he's always sharing strategies for cheesing (to beat a segment of a game in a way that the developers did not intend) bosses in these games. I didn't know just how good he was until we worked our way to the final boss, I didn't know just how vast his knowledge of Pikmin was until we worked through this final area. We were going in almost completely blind and once he saw layout of any given map and it's enemies, almost instantaneously, he would devise a strategy. This was impressive to someone like me as I usually became overwhelmed by the bosses and his calm demeanor contrasted my surprise.

Of course, every game has the factor of chance and no matter how good you are, there will always be something you can't account for (I'm an earthbound/mother player, I should know this) and this resulted in a few losses. Like, at one point a rolling obstacle resulted in 90% of our Pikmin falling into the Abyss. Another loss, would be our encounter with an enemy from Pikmin 1 and it killed all of our blue Pikmin and the game told us that it wouldn't be wise to progress without them. Other than those 2 losses, we made quick work out each area. I can't speak for my friend but I certainly had a lot of fun even if I was just pelting enemies with rocks and the occasional bomb. I guess it's just fun when someone's really passionate about any given game and they kinda have that capacity to geek out about it and show off their knowledge and skills in regards to it. I was also able to put a face to the enemies and bosses he mentioned in our conversations about Pikmin.

This game also contains one of my favorite things in all of gaming, rest areas. Rest areas are severely overlooked, like yeah, they're gonna save you and prepare the character that you're playing as for whatever lays beyond but rest areas should also prepare the player mentally, one game that does this really well is Mother 3 and I guess Earthbound because Mother 3 gives you hot springs to restore everything and remove all ailments but also there's relaxing music, sometimes there's a rare npc to chat to which always eases my mind before a fight, Earthbound also rest areas, which are usually little parts off to the side of the action with butterflies like in Giant Step, coincidentally this is also usually in caves. I'm going to stop right there with Mother talk because I can talk about that series forever. This game also gives you rest areas both official and unofficial. In my mind, I classify official rest areas as a break from battles where you can heal up and prepare your character for what is to come while also preparing yourself as the player and unofficial ones are just the same thing but they're not there to prepare the character, just to prepare the player (this is not an actual definition, it's just a distinction in my mind). All the actual rest areas are chock full nectar and treasure but they also have ambient music to calm the player. There's also the part after you beat all the enemies on one sublevel and your Pikmin carry everything to the ship and everything is just empty. I know some people find empty spaces unnerving but I find them relaxing, I used to watch those empty mall videos to get to sleep back in the day. Anyway, there's so much empty space in these areas and it's usually a rush to get to the next sublevel but sometimes my friend would excuse himself to go to the bathroom or to do something else and I'd sit there and stare at everything. I'd stare at the emptiness, the Pikmin carrying remnants of humanity away, the dark Abyss that lay below, the beautiful graphics and I listen to the music, it's kind of beautiful in a sense, I have a Narrow Perspective on Pikmin but I wonder if they've ever explored themes like this in previous games, I know Olimar expresses some interest in the previous inhabitants but do they ever explore the idea that people roamed pnf-404 and had each of them had their own lives and now that's all gone? But who's "they"? I shouldn't be calling the previous inhabitants "them" because it's us.

Oh, he's back from the bathroom, I guess let's carry on with the review. Where was I? Oh yeah, the ambient music is really good in this game and when you're actually engaging in battle, there's this almost tribal music that plays, I've jested that it sounds like Monsters University montage music but as good as that is, the beauty of Pikmin's soundtracks always lies in its ambience...

I'm not sure how to transition to this last part so I just put an ellipse at the end of the last paragraph to make it seem like I was leaving you some food for thought even though it was a really blank statement. Anyway, Final boss. I'm not a NARC so I won't be spoiling the final boss for any readers, this is a fairly new game but I will say, if you haven't gotten there yet then please do your best to avoid spoilers because it is a doozy. Even my friend was caught off guard by it and he's a Pikmin veteran, he's crashed on the planet over 4 times now.

I do kinda wanna lightly touch on the characters, just lightly though. I didn't see any of the new characters get fleshed out (do I have to refer to the title of this review for the 3rd time now) so, I'll talk about Louie and Olimar. Louie gets placed in a more sinister light in this game. I feel like the game recognizes the extent of his evil but the characters do not. Olimar is also the most relatable protagonist ever, like he's a family man, who is mistreated at work and can't do anything about this mistreatment. This familial aspect shines through in the way he interacts with the others, (in what I've seen of this game) he acts as an authority and is clearly more experienced, not in regards to using Pikmin but just in general he has more life experience. Also he gives Louie the benefit of the doubt even after all the trouble he caused which just goes to show that he wants to believe that Louie is a good person, it's almost parental, like no parent wants to believe that their child is capable of bad things. I also watched a Pikmin 2 twitch stream the night before, the streamers were actually two content creators who inspire me in writing things like this. If You're into long reviews of old games nobody cares about, then watch Transparency on youtube. Anyway, as a joke they compared the Olimar and Louie to Peanuts characters and I thought that was really funny. Olimar is basically Charlie Brown, everyone mistreats him and he just has to go with it. Not sure who Louie is though.

You decide, which Peanuts character is Louie. I will judge you harshly depending on your answer.

With that, I draw this review to a close. We played together for 2 hours, in total my friend had 55 hours and has 100% every area on his first, blind playthrough. Everyone give him a round of applause. Give yourself a round of applause for reading this long ass review. I'm also sorry for giving you an existential crisis at one point in the review, if it's worth anything, I actually love the fact that our legacy on pnf 404 will live forever through Olimar's notes.

Thank you for reading.

[moonpiesanctuaryupdates]

[maojin]

Pikmin 4 review

i finished playing pikmin 4. i have mixed feelings about it. i didn't like oatchi at first, but he grew on me. his mannerisms were quite cute. i didn't like that there were so many different characters that you had to talk to for quests. but you kind of had to do them in order to continue the game at a regular pace. on the good side, it was definitely a more expansive world with many different things for you to do. if you want variety, this one beats pikmin 3.

unfortunately, it had one really bad weakness that made me nearly quit the game: - you cannot turn off the auto locking cursor. there were many times a boss would kill my pikmin simply because the autolock would lock me onto something that i didn't want. i had to waste extra time tilting the stick just lightly enough so that it would lock onto something else. it was very frustrating. other things: - pikmin intelligence seemed a little different than in pikmin 3. i remember the benefit of flying pikmin in 3 was that they would fly pretty much in a straight line over obstacles, shortening their path. but in this game, there were times they still defaulted to following paths like all of the other pikmin.

[subnautica-reviews]

Whiptongue Bulborb

These guys are funny, but annoying to fight. What kinda bulborb is awake during the day? 2/5

[iamgrowingstronger-blog]

RECENT GAME ROUNDUP

Whoops! Haven't posted in a while. I find that a lot of the things I want to say about games I feel would be better in a video format. I don't have the skills to do that yet, but I feel like I would get my points across better than a big fat stinkin' wall of text. Audio-visual game reviews are the future!

Anyway, here's some of the games I played recently.

CONFESS MY LOVE: Found this randomly for free on Steam, and wow! Lovely little game. Super short, can be beaten in a few hours. It seems simple, but when I started getting deeper into the endings, it was amazing!

SUPER MARIO BROS. 2 (JPN): A sequel in the truest sense. If you play this before beating the first game, it seems washed up and bad. But once you beat Mario 1 (without warps!), it gets so much more fun! It's like a challenge pack add-on!

SUPER MARIO 64: Controls like a dream. The camera is a double edged sword; it makes the game harder to play at first, but when you figure it out, it makes the game feel MORE fun. The thing I don't like about the game is that... the midgame is kinda bad. The first several courses are awesome, but once you get into Shifting Sand Land, Hazy Maze Cave, and Big Boo's Haunt, it feels like the game noticeably dips in quality.

DOOM: Been having a lot of fun with this! Advice: DO NOT go into this game thinking it's super fast action-packed gun slinging insanity, because it isn't. When you first start out, it's a lot more methodical and slow, and the action segments are pretty spaced out. You'll be using your minimap a lot to figure out where to go next. But on second playthrough, you'll know the layouts better and get through it faster. Later, even faster. The more you learn, the more action-packed it gets. It's a slow boil, but super worth it. I've only beaten Episode 1 so far, but hopefully the rest of the game is good!

GARTEN OF BANBAN: Yuck! I thought this would be funny-bad, but it was just bad-bad! The drone controls terribly, the chase section is unintuitive, the game is optimized like ass, and it's over before you know it! Super bad game. Even though it's free, I wanted a refund when it ended.

FITNESS BOXING FIST OF THE NORTH STAR: Man! When I saw this in a Nintendo Direct, I got so hyped! This sort of thing is right down my alley. But goodness, Kenshiro's English VA is so BAD. That just turned me right off the game. The rest of it was pretty whatever. I wasn't expecting the world with this one, cause for what it lacked in quality, I would fill in the blanks with my own enjoyment, but this game is too lukewarm even for that! Bleh!

PIKMIN 3: Right as the long-awaited fourth game releases, I start playing the decade-old third game for the first time. I don't know entirely how I feel about it yet, but it's a Pikmin game, so it's a good game.

[bikwin5]

pikmin 4 thouts

i haven't actually posted that much about pikmin 4 now that i think about it but i finished it a while ago. as close to 100% as i think it can be. i don't have the drive to make a complete review so i just wrote down a list of things i liked and didn't like. there are no huge spoilers in this until the very end

THINGS I LIKED -adding a marketable dog is usually a sign of getting desperate. the simpsons did a whole episode about it. even in the ask the devs interview they were like yeah we added a dog to create appeal. but despite all that i ended up warming up to oatchi not just as a character but his gameplay as well. letting him swim, carry, attack, and act as a second leader all works very natural in pikmin's world and he basically acts like a very big and powerful pikmin. it takes a bit of getting used to learning the new mechanics but i think it was a good idea overall. still kind of wish they went with the playable bulborb idea instead. -the biodiversity is kind of ridiculous in this one. pikmin 4 has 100+ different creatures and a piklopedia to interact with them all, making for endless hours of fun without even playing the game. in fact there are so many creatures it felt like some had a pikmin 3 problem where they weren't used enough even though this is a big ass game!! i also like the return of pikmin 2 styled bosses in contrast to 3's where most of them felt very scripted. -the selection of things to collect is no doubt the best in this one. i like that completing a set of treasures lets you look at everything at once. -i like the hub area. its nice to walk around a bit. -having 8 pikmin types is a bold move but they pulled it off pretty well. the 3 types limit on the surface actually works well. i like that each area has "recommended" types but allows you to swap out others regardless. it makes it so advanced players can do more tag barrel switching if they want to. -the level design feels a bit of a departure from past games with how expansive each area is but i do like it, it keeps things fresh. there's still a lot of depth to clearing out each area and cave efficiently. -it was at least harder than pikmin 3!!!! yippee!!!!!! -the gwafics are goregous in this one. pikmin is one of those series that only looks better with visual fidelity. -i like the equipment upgrading system. i enjoy how it allows certain equipment to be optional even after you already make it. this lets me get rid of the power whistle because i don't like it.

THINGS I DIDNT LIKE -my #1 complaint is the auto-lockon feature. i desperately wish i could turn it off. i think they intend you to have motion controls on for more precise aiming but i don't want that. i just want to aim with the stick. the lockon makes some things trivial and some unnecessarily frustrating. there's a FUN to be had in trying to get perfect aim with pikmin! it's a BALANCE!!!!!!!!! but maybe nintendo doesn't realize that… nintendo if you patch this game to give me an option to turn off auto lockon i'll be a good kid and buy your new mario. -pikmin 4 has the best pikmin AI in the series but there some small changes are so frustrating. in particular they REALLY hate the idea of using more than the minimum number of pikmin to carry something. they physically stop you from throwing for a bit and then pikmin that are already idle don't even bother. it's a small thing but it's persistent and it drives me insane. -balancing 8 types of pikmin is not easy. that being said i think pikmin 3's types in particular got shafted a bit. rock pikmin have a weird nerf where they can die from crushing but only on hard surfaces? i guess it's to prevent trivializing certain bosses. winged pikmin don't act much different but they feel like what blue pikmin were to 3 in that they barely get a chance to shine. it's fucked because all the earlier areas probably have winged pikmin paths programmed in that most people will never see… it breaks my heart just thinking about it -ALSO the white pikmin damage nerf was totally unneccessary. as a result all the poison themed enemies are so weak and oatchi can dispatch them easily with the poison upgrade so its like why are these guys still candypop bud exclusive -the controls might be almost TOO tight. particularly the oatchi bunchup is really OP when it comes to fights. i think this game throws a lot of tough situations at you but jumping on oatchi trivializes them a lot of the time. -enemies not respawning is really weird. particularly on the surface where they NEVER respawn. it kind of strips the organic feeling of pikmin away. -everyone says this but too much tutorial. please stop making the characters talk to me every time a pikmin dies on screen. i'd say it feels like nintendo is regressing to the skyward sword era but not quite, if they did then then there would be a cutscene every time you break down a wall.

looking back at this section i sure did CAPITALIZE a bunch of arbitrary words. i think shepherd was right when she said bernard's speaking style rubs off on you.

VERY MINOR NITPICKS -i wish my man hajime wakai was still doing the soundtrack cause you can tell he didnt. pikmin 4's soundtrack isn't bad it's still pretty "pikminlike" but i think you can tell its not the same as it was -for having a "dandori" theme pikmin 4 doesn't feel nearly as incentivized to be efficient as much as 3 or even 1. the fact that night expeditions take up full days bothers me and i can't help but wonder how much replays will be affected with how much stuff they crammed in the main game.

BIG SPOILERS AFTER THIS POINT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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-i think olimar and louie got a lot of fun exposition but the new characters not so much. it feels like they got disregarded later in the story. -final boss was the easiest in the whole series. yes even more than hey! to me. i lost like maybe 5 pikmin total. i think what makes it so easy is that there is very little risk in engaging, you throw 2 purple pikmin on the tail and when it falls over you rush with oatchi and that's it. the one scary thing about it is the final phase where it can do the roar that scatters pikmin into death pits but i didn't get hit by it because i'm epic and awesome like that. even then having one difficult thing at the end of an otherwise easy final boss just feels kind of cheap. -i wish the lineup trumpet wasn't a secret late game upgrade because i would have liked to play the rest of the game with it.

[smicklesmoot]

Finished Pikmin 4, fucking loved it

[kitchfit]

Year in Review: Games pt 2

Back to Bildeo Bames! After finishing my big Kingdom Hearts binge, I told myself to cut back on gaming for a while until Tears of the Kingdom came out. That was a huge lie! I love deception and falsehoods :D

Psychonauts

The idea of going inside someone's head to discover an entire universe created from their thoughts and memories has always been a fascinating one for me. I spent a lot of time as a kid imagining what my own or my friends' brain-world would look like and how you might navigate it. So imagine my surprise when I found an entire 3D platformer based around that concept. And for $5 on sale, no less! This had been a cult classic for a long time, but the recent sequel I still need to play elevated it to a higher place in the social conscience.

You play as Raz, a young kid who crashed a training camp in order to become a Psychonaut, people who covertly enter other's minds to extract secrets for the government. At least that's the idea, Raz ends up using his training to help his mind-victims work through their insecurities and psychoses in order to improve their mental health, first focusing on people in his camp, and then on clients in the nearby insane asylum. This isn't just out of a heroic desire to help others, but the easiest way Raz has to save his new camp friends, whose brains have all been cartoonishly sucked out of their ears and placed into jars. This world is so goofy and fun and the premise allows for endless creativity with settings and like. You can write a whole essay on any one of these levels. Damn I need to play the sequel.

The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog

I like Sonic quite a bit. The characters are so expressive and fun and the world is similarly wacky and cool. The lore is an odd mix of typical video-game nonsense and genuinely fascinating tragic backstories. I loved the Sonic X show and Sonic Underground but like. The games... Okay the games are fun, but there's always one thing that ends up giving me a huge headache. Usually the Chaos emeralds. Eventually I'll go back and play through the Origin games and meet the games on their terms, but in the meantime this is the perfect Sonic game for me.

It's just a three hour visual novel written in the style of a murder mystery! It's so cute! Sonic is dead! You spend most of the game as Barry the Quokka, who's name is actually Kitch, a dorky dude in charge of catering on the murder mystery train, thrust suddenly into Amy Rose's birthday party on a quest to figure out the culprit who fake murdered our best blue boy. The game is full of so many adorable designs, fun characterization, and goofy plot tangents that its clear Sega just gave a group of Sonic fans free reign to go crazy over an official project. If you get bored of the visual novel part, its interspersed with random isometric Sonic levels you can plow through pretty quickly. I had a pretty good time with all of it.

Sonic Adventure: DX

In fact I had such a good time with The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog that I jumped immediately into an actual Sonic game. This was Sonic's first real jump into 3D, and I was always led to believe that jump missed the platform and tumbled into badly rendered, inanimate water. This isn't true! The voice acting is pretty bad at times and the animation gets wonky in places, but like. I am a Kingdom Hearts fan. These are not negatives. It also splits a singular story into multiple perspectives, so you discover more context for what's happening the more characters you play as. That doesn't mean the story is amazing or anything, but the effort is commendable and I love when stories do this.

Each character sits in a different genre of game as well. Sonic himself translates his 2D gameplay pretty well into a 3D setting, which is what most people reference when talking about this game. Tails is more of a direct racing game where you can basically skip most of any level due to the fact he can fly. Knuckles is a treasure hunting game focused on exploration. Amy is a survival horror game where you beat the shit out of robotic pyramid head at the end, and Big the Cat is a fishing game that's pretty fun after you tear all of your hair out. The last story, Gamma, is a rail shooter about one of Eggman's robots developing a conscience after learning it is being powered by a small tormented bird, before going on a rampage against its robotic brethren and self-destructing, freeing them all from Eggman's control. It's surprisingly... pointiate? powniant? *checks watch* poignant dammit. I have an English degree. Anyways robot stories like this always get to me for some reason.

Pokemon Infinite Fusion

There are a few communities where the amount of effort that can go into amateur fan content astounds me. The Pokemon fanbase is one of those communities. Romhacks have been popular in this community for a long time, many of them matching or exceeding some of the professionally made mainline titles, in my opinion, at least. Pokemon Infinite Fusion approaches that line with just the shear volume of fan content present in this game.

Any Pokemon of any stage can be "fused" with another to create a new design. Their typing and stats depend on a fairly simple algorithm, but the designs themselves are created by hundreds of incredibly talented independent artists you can find credited in the Pokedex. You can even import your own design if you wish! Obviously, with the amount of possible combinations, not all of them are artist-created, most procedurally generated, but there are just so many that it boggles my mind. Here are a few of my favorites

[Image I.D. Fusion of Mawile and Electavire created by Sadfrog, it has jumper cables in place of its giant mouths]

[Image I.D. fusion of Cofagrigus and Weavile that resembles Midna from the Zelda series created by King Peggy]

[Image I.D. fusion of Charizard and Aerodactyl created by artist Beespoon]

The game itself is a decent remake of Firered and Leafgreen with a significant post game. I have a couple issues, such as the credits being kind of vague and buried, and the gameplay being glitchy in certain areas, but this game is still being updated, so I'm excited to see what else it will offer in the future.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

Ocarina of Time is the quintessential Zelda game, Breath of the Wild reinvented the franchise, but this is my first and favorite Zelda game. When I think of Zelda I think of this Hyrule's landscape, this Link's journey. I can talk at length about the perfect structure of this game, the dungeon layouts, the visuals' mix of quirky and grimdark, the fun boss designs, but I can't deny its all washed in nostalgia.

The story is about two people with the rest of their life apparent ahead of them, both cursed and disfigured beyond their imagination and forced into a role they could have never predicted. People say Midna is the greatest "helper" in the franchise, but really she's the hero right alongside our main boy. This isn't Link's story, its both of theirs. And at the end, neither of them can truly return to what they used to be; the curse is dispelled, but the change remains. For Midna this means sacrificing her closest relationship for the good of her kingdom, and for Link this means leaving the town he knew as home. Maybe he's looking for a way to find Midna, maybe he's off on a new, dangerous adventure, maybe he wants to do motion-controlled sharpshooting on Nintendo's cool new console. Regardless of his goal, his adventure changed him in a way that he can no longer live comfortably in the life he grew up in. So he leaves.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD

When this game came out, the biggest complaint about it were the broken motion-controls. Personally, they always worked fine for me, but I'm glad the switch remake added a new control scheme to make the experience more accessible. Now more people can complain about the actual game rather than the controls! Honestly never really understood why this game was so polarizing, the only big problem I had with the original was Fi's constant interruptions (which were toned down in this version), but Navi did that shit way more frequently and no one marked that as an abject flaw. It's a damn good 3D Zelda with excellent dungeons and a really compelling conflict.

This version of Link and Zelda are one of the only overtly romantic iterations of these characters. A classic childhood friends to lovers dynamic. Zelda is on her quest to restore the power of the goddess and Link is set on supporting her, no matter how painful it might be for him. A cool detail I love in this game is after Zelda seals herself up in the Orange Sap of Eternal Agony or whatever, the lines on Link's face notably lengthen and darken.

[Image I.D. Link at the beginning of Skyward Sword. The lines under his eyes are visible, but indistinct]

[Image I.D. Link towards the end of Skyward Sword, the lines under his eyes are deeper and more apparent.]

It's as if the trauma of his journey has physically aged him. Idk maybe its just a lighting thing I'm reading too far into. I'm glad this Link and Zelda get a happy ending. My only complaint nowadays is learning Nintendo almost made a "hero mode" style extra game where you play through Zelda's adventure! And they took it out! Cowards! You get glimpses of what it would be like in the end credits, like they're taunting you.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Breath of the Wild might be my favorite game to just exist in. Every inch of Hyrule is so thoroughly laid out; the environments are gorgeous, the movement is fun, there's always something in the distance worth checking out, and the towns are so heavily detailed. You can spend hours even after completing the game 100% just driving around the landscape or studying the textures and wall decor in Kakariko to find some hidden piece of storytelling. In that regard, excited to say the Tears of the Kingdom is the perfect sequel.

I was concerned when it was revealed we were exploring the same Hyrule's map, just a few years later, but they changed things up so thoroughly, exploring the same area doesn't feel like retreading old ground, but seeing how the area evolved. It's familiar, rather than identical. Not only that, but there are now two entirely new maps situated above and below the old one, each with a new, invigorating aesthetic that are so fun and exciting to travel through. Go to the Sky for some awesome Agoraphobia, or travel to the Depths for some cooky Claustrophobia. You will never know how badly I spelled claustrophobia at first.

The story is nowhere near as elegantly written as BotW, and that's fine, it's a sequel, it only needs to add on to the original, and it brought it me Tears (HAH) for entirely different reasons that BotW. The dragon's tears sidequest had genuinely shocked me with the order I collected them, and the endgame boss sequence was just so incredibly peak. On the lore side of things, and how it connects to the larger mythos, this game makes me want to strangle someone, but this is Zelda, I would not have it any other way. Mechanically, I'm never one to push a game to its absolute limit, but this game has so many tools intended for the player to do exactly that, and I'm excited to see what other people come up with.

Recently, as of writing this, the Youtuber Any Austin put out a video analyzing the woodworking of TotK and BotW, and it might sound goofy, but it got me pumped to return to it in the near future, to just exist in Hyrule for a while longer.

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team Pt 1

This is the first title I'm granting the "pt 1" moniker. Some games have a definitive ending, and then a post-game epilogue that is an entirely new story that I might finish next year. This is a childhood favorite of mine I'm revisiting. The mystery dungeon games have this insane hold over my psyche and always wrench an emotion out of me like no other Pokemon games can. While that didn't change time around, I realized I had a great deal of nostalgia blindness over its story. It's not bad at all, but it plays into a lot of generic adventure story tropes while I remembered it being more unique. In truth, this game was actually my introduction to a lot of those tropes and archetypes, and it pulls them off very well. It occasionally moves into some insane territory, like your cute Pokemon guys are hunted down by a lynch mob at one point.

This game also established a lot of Pokemon identities in my head, and are the reason Mons like Ninetales and Gardevoir are some of my favorites. Its such a comfortable game to go back to, but it will always be outshined by its successor, in my opinion.

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Skies Pt. 1

No, I didn't misspell that. This is a fanmade improvement hack that adds some quality of life adjustments, like shortcuts for all of your moves, and a bunch of new story sidequests. Most of the story elements are relegated to the post game, so my playthrough was more or less identical to the original. That being said, this is one of my favorite games of all time. The reason I remembered Red Rescue team as having a more in-depth story is because of this game. Upon my umpteenth playthrough of this I can confirm that it is not (just) nostalgia blindness, this is still one of the best video game stories I have ever experienced. You can withdraw all of the elements that make it a Pokemon game and you are still left with a really well written, emotionally driven science fiction story. Wigglytuff and Chatot aren't even Pokemon to me. They're just the chaotic gay couple from this game.

The gameplay is mostly unchanged from the first, with the addition of the lovable 4th generation freaks. The change of focus from rescuing Pokemon to exploring new areas and finding treasure always hooked me and spurred on my imagination as a kid, it captures the sense of wonder really well.

Link to hack: https://hacks.skytemple.org/h/skies

Pikmin

This is probably my most replayed game ever. It's a pretty short game, if you know what you're doing. There was a point where I had the map so consistently memorized I could do a playthrough in my head, lmao. Take that Miyamoto. I pirated your game through MY MIND. YOU WOULDN'T DOWNLOAD A MEMORY.

There's still something magical about the atmosphere in this game that I don't think any of the sequels quite matched. Something about music; the mystery; the sound design; the isolation. It's just one man forced to make friends with these adorable alien freaks to ensure both of their survival. Later entries would focus on the intrigue of exploring what seems to be the ruins of human society from an ants perspective, which has its own appeal, but this game feels most genuinely alien and hostile in the way nature can be, in a beautiful way. I also played this with gamecube controls for the first time in my life man fuck the gamecube controls.

Pikmin 2 pt 1

This game has come under fire in recent years, which I think is goofy as all hell. I heard people call it "the black sheep" of the Pikmin series back when there were only three sheep! And a pygmy goat on the 3DS, I guess. I understand a lot of the criticisms, but this was a dream come true when I first picked it up as a kid. Now you have an endless amount of time to explore the Pikmin Planet to your leisure! You have another dude (he sucks so much I love him)! More little freaks to follow you around! Even more big freaks who want to kill you! I love freaks. I don't know how much time I spent studying through the Piklopedia to understand the wider ecology of this viddy game. It solidified the character of Olimar in my head even moreso than the original.

People hate the caves, (or hated?) but I think that's just because it wasn't like Pikmin 1. There's something to be said about the generic aesthetics dulling down the personality of these dungeons, but it always felt like a suitable expansion of this world. They're bugs! Tons of bugs live underground! Of course that's where they're all hiding. Because of the endless time limit, they did ramp up the difficulty on some of these caves to the bullshit level, which made me want to move on once I paid off the debt. Sorry Louie! I know you like it down there anyways. With the other freaks.

Pikmin 3

I never owned a Wii U, so this game coming out at the peak of my Pikmin hyper fixation was agonizing. I staved off the insanity of not being able to play it by scrolling the fanwiki articles for every new creature it introduced and rewatching the trailer demo over and over again? Huh, I really did that. Finally being able to play it on the switch is fantastic, and I don't have to deal with that stupid gamepad. Sorry, really cool bulky controller with a tiny screen you can't see shit on.

This game is so beautiful. It almost retains the majesty of discovery that the original had. I understand why people often refer to it as the true sequel. It works to strike a balance between the tight survival gameplay of 1 and the explorative aspect of 2 by having your day count tied to the amount of resources you can gather within a day, which also allows the plot to manufacture genuine anxiety when a certain asshole steals all your shit. All that time you spent gathering a buffer against certain starvation for your dudes was worthless unless you can get it back. You can actually lose the game at this point if you aren't on top of things.

I like all the new dudes. They all fit within the pre-established universe very well and contrast nicely against the original trilogy of dudes by being nice and actually liking each other. You just feel bad that Olimar hasn't been living it up with these cool cats all this time, and is instead tormented by his asshole coworkers every waking moment of his life on PNF 404. All three of the coolcats also get original Piklopedia entries from different professional perspectives. All together we get an amateur biologist (Olimar), a cook (Louie), an engineer (Alph), a botanist (Brittany), and a tactician (Charlie). Most of Charlie's are just "can I take this bug in 1v1" and I love him for that.

Cutting this off here for now. Remember how I said I love deceptions? That also went for writing this in a timely fashion. Oh well, one person's Monday night is another's Friday morning. That's how timezones work, I think. Going back to movies next Monday. I don't watch a lot of movies overall, but I have a lot to go through.