2024 Games I Played: Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (2024)

Okay, it's been a while, but I finally beat the remake of The Thousand Year Door. My "The Prelude" post outlined all of my thoughts on the original game that had accumulated since I first played it, but now, I want to go over my full experience with the remake in complete detail. Despite having been more disillusioned with TTYD than I've ever been before, I tried to go into the remake with as much of an open mind as possible, and... umm... I think I kinda love this game now? I was originally intending this to be me carefully dissecting and taking notes on every bit of design in the game, but I feel it unintentionally devolved into a full-on character arc. How did this happen? Well, you'll just have to read to find out...

Why I Love Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

Mario Kart has always been my go-to game for multiplayer. It's the only one I have any interest in competitively, it's the only one I actually say I'm any good at, and they're probably the games I've sank the most hours into across my entire life. While I grew up with Mario Kart Wii and have a lot of fondness for it, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is far and away my favorite game in the series due to just how incredibly refined and definitive it feels.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was the first of many Wii U ports we would get on the Switch, but more than any other, I really like this one just kinda usurped the original in every way. Aside from the Wii U Gamepad map and the stamp achievements, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe polishes and fixes every gripe one could have with what was already one of the best Mario Kart games.

Mario Kart 8's steering is honestly perfect. I know MKWii's physics is more exploitable and broken, but driving around in MK8 feels incredibly natural and smooth. You can bump off walls depending on your trajectory rather than coming to a full stop, your car flows from drift to drift really seamlessly, you can precariously hang your car off of ledges without falling, and Deluxe even introduces a third drift level that lets you boost incredibly far. But it's not just me who loves MK8's fluid controls, it also makes this the easiest Mario Kart for me to introduce to people unfamiliar with video games. I have a ton of friends who don't play video games but love Mario Kart 8, and I didn't even mention all the accessibility features like smart steering that allow me to cast the net even wider. Mario Kart 8 also has the most varied traversal due to not only bringing back the gliding and underwater mechanics from its predecessor, but by introducing antigravity which lets you drive on walls, ceilings, and corkscrews, which allows for more wild level design and strange shortcuts. And it's not just for show either, since going into antigravity turns your vehicle into a hovercraft that can get a boost by colliding into other vehicles.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe also has one of my favorite item games in the franchise, at least on a strategic level. If I want pure chaos and item variety, I'd go for Double Dash, but Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is the first that actually feels like it's properly built around having 12 players in a race. Double Dash is chaotic and owns it by making most of its items telegraphed projectiles that you need to try to avoid, Mario Kart Wii often floods the first place player with Spiny Shells and Lightnings they can do nothing about, and while base Mario Kart 8 introduces the Super Horn for dealing with Spiny Shells, it also hands you useless coins as items at the worst possible time. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, on the other hand, allows players to hold up to two items at the same time, which mitigates the coin issue and introduces a level of strategy by putting double item boxes on the longer paths. This makes trying to stay in first place more engaging than ever since you have to scramble for resources and weigh your options to make sure you're well-equipped for whatever the players behind you have to throw at you.

The track design in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is also fantastic, densely-packed with memorable setpieces, satisfying shortcuts, and tight turns. There's a really impressive consistency to 8's nitro tracks, with hardly any weak points. Even the typically underwhelming Mushroom Cup bursts out of the gate with tracks like Thwomp Ruins, and from then on, there's really no brakes in the action. From the sprawling Toad Harbor, to driving down a waterfall in Shy Guy Falls, to driving through an airport in Sunshine Airport, to the flashy Electrodrome, to Mount Wario which stands out as the best sectioned track in the series, there are so many highlights here. The retro tracks are also incredible, the selection not being quite as strong as in 7, but the HD visuals and many gameplay additions means every track gets completely reimagined and remade. The Lightning Cup in particular is pretty much perfect containing fantastic remakes of four of the series' best tracks. And on top of that, Mario Kart 8 even added four DLC cups with their own fair share of incredible nitro and retro tracks, like the jaw-droppingly beautiful Wild Woods, the charming Zelda and Animal Crossing tracks, the absolutely bonkers F-Zero tracks, and an adorable reinterpretation of Ribbon Road.

As far as content goes, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is also truly impressive, especially as of 2024. With 48 tracks and a whopping 48 characters out of the box, five engine classes including the absolutely nuts 200cc that every game should have from here on out, a kart customization system with 10,000+ combinations, and all the expected modes ranging from Grand Prix to Time Trial to VS to Online Play, this really feels like a definitive Mario Kart experience. The icing on the cake was the Deluxe exclusive Battle Mode (we don't talk about base 8's battle mode) which contains an impressive five gameplay modes and a bunch of pretty neat arenas, really rounding out the package. I also just need to give special mention to the crossover elements in Mario Kart 8. I already mentioned how the game has tracks based on Zelda, Animal Crossing, and F-Zero, but you can also play as Link, Villager, Isabelle, and Inkling which is just really cool and makes me wish for a full Nintendo Kart crossover one day.

If this was it, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe would've already been this high on the list. It's been such a big part of my life for a decade now and I still pull it out constantly when friends are over, but since apparently that still wasn't enough, we recently got a DLC pack with 48 tracks borrowed from Mario Kart Tour along with eight new characters and some pretty sick new features like the ability to fully customize the item selection. I'll be the first to admit that the new tracks in the Booster Course Pass don't look half as good as the rest of the game and I wish Nintendo took the time to make them more visually polished and cohesive, but that doesn't change the fact that we still got many of the series' best and most iconic tracks like Coconut Mall, Maple Treeway, Waluigi Pinball, Wii/3DS Rainbow Road, and DK Mountain ported to 8 pretty faithfully. We even got some pretty neat re-imaginings like the more tightly-paced Choco Mountain and Kalimari Desert remakes, and the flashier Waluigi Stadium and Bowser Castle 3 remakes. And even the Tour tracks have some real gems like Ninja Hideaway, Vancouver Velocity, Singapore Speedway, Merry Mountain, Yoshi's Island, and Squeaky Clean Sprint.

While the Booster Course Pass did look a bit underwhelming, that's still not to discount how good the rest of the presentation in Mario Kart 8 is. This was the first HD Mario Kart and Nintendo really took advantage of it to give the tracks so much extra detail, vibrancy, fidelity. To this day, this is still one of the best-looking Mario games ever made, it's so clean. There's so many charming little details on the sidelines of the track ranging from posters for fictional Mario themed businesses, references to other tracks connecting them to each other, and NPC interactions like that Yoshi that sings Totaka's Song. Speaking of music, Mario Kart 8's soundtrack was performed almost entirely by a big band and it shows, this is one of the richest jazz soundtracks (and smoothest sax solos) I've ever heard in a game. Pretty much every track is a banger, though special mention goes to Mario Circuit, Shy Guy Falls, Mount Wario, Bone Dry Dunes, N64 Rainbow Road, Wild Woods, and of course, Dolphin Shoals and Big Blue. While I don't believe it was also done live, the Booster Course Pass has some serious bangers too, like Tokyo Blur, London Loop, Singapore Speedway, Moonview Highway, Piranha Plant Cove, Bowser Castle 3, and especially Vancouver Velocity, which might just be my favorite track in the franchise. Either way, this is easily the best and most vast soundtrack to a Mario Kart game, and stands up there with games like Galaxy, Origami King, and Dream Team as one of my favorite Mario soundtracks period.

In my book, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is a perfect Mario Kart game. It knocks everything out of the park. It controls perfectly, its item balancing is arguably the most fair given the amount of players on the track, the track design is nothing short of stellar, the sheer amount of content it offers feels never-ending especially with the Booster Course Pass, it looks and sounds like a bajillion bucks, and it's accessible enough that you can put a controller in front of anyone and they've be able to give you a run for your money within just a few races. This is the greatest couch co-op game of all time in my opinion, and is absolutely deserved of being as much of a best-seller as it is.

Why I Love Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance

 I'm not much of a fan of stealth games, I usually like to rush in guns blazing. I also don't play many cinematic games and I'm strongly against auteur idolization, so while I appreciate Hideo Kojima in a lot of ways, I'm not some die hard either. So while I respect and enjoy the Metal Gear Solid games well enough, I can't really say they've always been for me. However, even I can't deny the sheer quality of Metal Gear Solid 2. Over time, more and more people have started to hold this one up as the best in the franchise, and yeah, I can see why. Metal Gear Solid 2 has some of the best gameplay in the franchise, boasts one of the most interesting stories Hideo Kojima has ever told, and its Substance version is one of the most content-rich packages in the entire medium.

Metal Gear Solid 2 is a fascinating entry in the series. It had a massive hype cycle behind it, with a demo so impressive that people went and bought Zone Of The Enders solely to experience it. It's still the most critically-praised game in the series, but when it came out, it turned out to not be at all what the fans were expecting it to be. Sandwiched between the influential first game and the crowd-pleasing third game, MGS2 ended up becoming the black sheep of the franchise... but over time, people came around on it hard. Nowadays, it's often held up with Snake Eater as the best game in the series, so let's talk about why.

Before I get into the game's story, the deconstructionist elements, and the stuff in Metal Gear Solid 2 that's purposefully meant to be underwhelming, I do want to get one major thing out of the way. In terms of pure moment-to-moment gameplay, this is not just a massive refinement over the original, but it's also just my favorite game in this aspect. MGS3 onwards would introduce survival mechanics which really aren't my speed, so 2 really stands out as the best iteration of the more arcade-y stealth gameplay that the earlier games had. Everything just feels more polished in 2, shooting is more accurate, the cover mechanics are more fleshed-out, enemies are smarter, you can use pretty much everything in the environment to your advantage and disadvantage, and it all runs at a silky smooth 60fps. The level design is more open, the bosses are more fun, the gameplay is just borderline perfect. On top of that, MGS2 was an absolute technological powerhouse, cramming in all kinds of different effects, destructible objects, water physics, and it still feels really impressive playing it today. 

Like many of Kojima's games, Metal Gear Solid 2's story is... dense, to say the least. One might even argue that it's the densest and most incomprehensible of the franchise, to the point that even after consuming countless analyses of it, I still can't say I understand the full scope of what happened on a plot level. It's less of a direct follow-up to the first game and more of a response to its success, in the same way that Chrono Cross felt like a direct response to Trigger. It shouldn't come as much of a surprise that both games had similar receptions then. The first hour of the so of the game has you play as Snake going on a mission on a tanker, and it's great. With an impeccably designed nonlinear map, tons of opportunities to use the game's new mechanics, and Snake being as badass as ever, it feels like the perfect representation of what an ideal Metal Gear Solid sequel should be... and then Snake dies, and the game starts anew.

The tanker sequence was just a prologue, the vast majority of Metal Gear Solid 2 has you play as a new rookie named Raiden who's infiltrating a facility called the Big Shell. Sudden protagonist shifts like this never go well in a fandom like this, and it almost feels like MGS2 is doing everything in its power to make the shift feel as uncomfortable and jarring as possible. The snowy atmosphere of Shadow Moses has been replaced with a garishly orange oil rig, you get the basic tutorials forced onto you again despite having played the game for over an hour, and Raiden himself seems far wimpier than the grizzled action hero Snake was. As someone who got into the series post-Revengeance, I never hated Raiden even in his first appearance, but I could definitely imagine how people would absolutely despise him at first.

Of course, that's the point. As the game goes on, you start to notice that Big Shell has a lot of similarities to the design and events of the first game, to an uncanny degree. Despite his seeming death, this idealized version of Snake also keeps showing up, at one point even using a cheat that gives him infinite ammo. Eventually, it's revealed that Raiden is basically being put through a simulation to recreate the magic of the Shadow Moses Island to appease and control society. This is the most iconic cutscene in the game and it's the one that really makes the game and reveals all of its themes. Metal Gear Solid 2 is a commentary on fandom culture and the spread of information. Despite being made in 2001, Kojima managed to do a shockingly good job at predicting the current state of the internet, from the abundance of echo chambers to the sheer quantity of false or manufactured news. Hell, even the game's infamous advertising campaign and first hour meant to trick people into thinking Snake would be the protagonist just proves it point, showing how easy misinformation is and how the way you wield information can be used to provoke or control fans. The first game was elevated as a gaming action classic and Snake was idealized as a perfect action hero, so Kojima went ahead and recontextualized it into what is essentially a nightmare scenario for Raiden, an analog for a Metal Gear Solid fan. He is pointing a mirror at the people who played and loved his game, and they do not like what they saw. 

Of course, a game being postmodern and having interesting themes doesn't make it good, but I think Kojima's attempt at subverting expectations and deconstructing the medium improves the experience in this case. For starters, as I've hinted at before, MGS2 has aged remarkably well. Nowadays we have plenty of postmodern video games like Spec Ops: The Line or The Stanley Parable, but in 2001, there was nothing quite like this. And yet, most of what Metal Gear Solid 2 has to say still holds true, to the point of continuing to shock people by its prescience to this day. The internet has only gotten more segmented and hard to trust over time, and fandoms have only grown increasingly more volatile yet predictable. The twist also makes Raiden a more interesting character by introducing themes of free will as he tries to break free from the aforementioned simulation and make his own life, culminating in him tossing away the dog tag with the player's name on it. And on top of that, it also works as a commentary on being a special agent and having to ditch ones identities for an assigned codename, so even outside of the meta context, the themes of Raiden's arc still apply. And most of all, despite how surreal, loaded, and meta this game gets, it never conflicts with the gameplay. From start to finish, Metal Gear Solid 2 is a better-playing game than its predecessor, that doesn't change. While the first and third games have generally better-crafted stories that are easier to follow, Metal Gear Solid 2's story is more interesting and generally has more to say. 

And back to the gameplay, Metal Gear Solid 2 eventually got a special edition called Substance, and it's absolutely massive. The main campaign itself is already quite beefy whether you're tackling the different difficulty levels, finding all the dog tags, shooting for the best ranks, or finding all the various weapons or power-ups, but Substance adds so many extra modes that really make for the definitive Metal Gear experience for me. VR Missions was always one of my favorite things in the series and Substance adds over 500 of them, there's an entirely new campaign set in the Big Shell where you can play as Snake, there's a theater mode that lets you change up in the character models in all the cutscenes, and there's even a hilarious skateboarding mode where you can grind across the Big Shell as Snake or Raiden, and I still don't think I fully scratched the surface. Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance honestly has some of the most robust side content out of any game I've ever played, it's just plain staggering.

And that's really it, Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance just feels definitive for me. It has everything I've come to expect from a Metal Gear game and then some, it's the most Metal Gear game, and probably even the most Kojima game. It's both a wonderful evolution of the formula that perfected the series' stealth gameplay, and Kojima's densest yet most prescient story, while also packing in hours upon hours upon hours worth of Metal Gear Solid goodness. It's equal parts gutsy and incredibly well-executed.

Why I Love Wario Land 3

 The Wario Land games have a pretty consistent level of quality. VB Wario Land, Wario Land 4, and Shake It in particular are all fantastic platformers that could be easy candidates for best in the series. However, they do have a tendency to be pretty on the short side, which is part of why I think Wario Land 3 stands out as my absolute favorite. It's one of the grandest and most ambitious adventures the Game Boy Color has to offer, and a perfect example of why I have so much admiration for that console.

Wario Land 3 involves the titular character being sucked into a music box and being tasked to save the world hidden away inside it by finding the scattered Music Boxes. From there on out, you're let loose into the world to try and find all of them, and I really mean it when I say "let loose".

One of the best things about Wario Land 3 is its progression. Despite being broken up into individual levels, WL3 is structured like the best metroidvanias out there. The first hour or so of Wario Land 3 is strictly linear, as you'll mostly be hopping between an intended set of levels with little room to deviate from the path. There are a few moments where the path briefly splits and you can pick between two levels, but the path quickly converges soon after. However, before long, you'll start finding abilities and items that open up multiple levels, and those levels will in turn open up even more levels, and Wario Land 3 will ultimately sprawl into an entirely open game that you can go through in any order you want. And even more, over half of the treasures are completely optional, so it really feels like you're given total freedom by the second half of the game. That being said, there's no reason why you wouldn't want to collect everything because Wario Land 3 just clicks together so well. Every treasure serves a purpose, from modifying the world, to opening up gates, and it feels really satisfying to see how all the puzzle pieces fit together. 

As far as controls go, Wario Land 3 is the best Wario has felt up to this point. Of course, Wario Land 4 would introduce an entirely new level of fluidity, but the fact that this game is a GBC exclusive means Wario gets a lot of redone animations and movement tweaks that allow you to dash pretty fast without breaking the momentum. Being a metroidvania, you also have that great progression where Wario starts out fairly weak, but he grows more powerful as he collects certain items across the world, which no other game in the series does. Wario Land 3, like its predecessor, also has a unique system where Wario can't take damage or die. Lives are not a thing in this game, instead they're replaced by annoyances. There are no pits, but falling off a trickly platforming section while probably send you all the way to the bottom and force you to climb it up all over again. Getting hit by an enemy will either make you lose coins with some serious knockback, or forcedly transform Wario in a manner that often forces him to the back of the level. It's a unique approach to an invincible protagonist as it still lends the game a degree of difficulty. But also, these transformations aren't just used for evil, many of them are also necessary to get some of the items, and they can be quite fun to use.

What really makes Wario Land 3 my favorite game, though, is the sheer scope of it all. This is a massive game, especially considering it's on the Game Boy Color. There's 25 levels to explore, each with four treasures to find (totaling 100 treasures), but there's also a day-night cycle meaning each stage has day/night variants with a unique color palette and modified level design. I mentioned before that I always found it funny how obsessed the GBC seems to be with day/night cycles, but Wario Land 3 is particularly noteworthy for how much it influences the way you play the game since certain treasures can only be gotten at certain times of day. There's also an impressive amount of side content like how each level has eight Musical Coins to find, all of which feel quite rewarding to scout, there's a hidden Golf minigame with unlockable courses, and you can even unlock a Time Attack Mode in case there still isn't enough in the way of replay value. As I mentioned, Wario Land games have a reputation for being somewhat short and often unsatisfying, but Wario Land 3 feels genuinely beefy and substantial in a way that none of the other games do. It even ends on what many consider the best final boss in the series, a tense encounter with a giant clown named Rudy who's the only one in the game with the ability to actually kill Wario.

As far as presentation goes, you know what you're getting with a Wario Land. Wonderfully weird imagery, imaginative level theming, and a hefty amount of wacky enemies and strange bosses. I already mentioned Wario's improved animations, but I really think the entire game ranks as one of the best-looking Game Boy Color games, boasting some impressive shading in the environments, a very detailed map screen, and that aforementioned day/night cycle allowing for a wide range of colors across the game. The soundtrack is also one of the better ones out of the Wario Land games in my opinion. Kozue Ishikawa is back after doing the music for the first two Wario Land games, but she really stepped it up with this one, embuing the score with a strong sense of adventure. Out Of The Woods may not be Ratl Ruins or Greenhorn Forest, but it definitely deserves a spot as one of Wario's best leitmotifs, and it's used to great effect in tracks like Peaceful Village, Vast Plain, Desert Ruins, Pool Of Rain, The Big Bridge, and Tidal Coast. And that's not even mentioning how nearly every stage has a calming night version, or the series' absolute best final boss theme.

Look, I love Wario Land 4 and its gameplay with all my heart, and I couldn't be more excited about all the indie games coming out inspired by it, but Wario Land 3 is something else. It's the only Wario Land game to really feel like a grand treasure-hunting adventure, exploring a big world where you can unravel all of its secrets. The Wario Land series always had a bit of a Indiana Jones energy to it, but no game leans on it harder than Wario Land 3. It's also just a perfect showcase of how big, ambitious, and fully-featured the Game Boy Color's library can be, I truly adore this game.

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door - The Prelude

Disclaimer: These are all my thoughts on The Thousand Year Door prior to the release of the remake. While some of these opinions do hold true, a lot of them have very much changed and I don't exactly agree with everything I've written here now. However, I still want to keep this prelude review up just to establish what my thoughts on TTYD used to be. It's a necessary compliment to my proper review where I end up changing my tune on the game a bit.

Oh boy, this is going to be a behemoth of a review. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is probably the biggest Nintendo release of the first half of 2024. It may be a remake, but it's a remake of a game fans have been wanting back for decades, and a sign of Paper Mario's return to form. However, my thoughts have always been a lot more conflicted. I like The Thousand Year Door, I really do, but I haven't kept it a secret that it's a game I have a lot of problems with. Part of it is admittedly due to expectations. TTYD was one of the last entries I played after years of it being hyped up at the expense of games I had a lot of attachment to, and it didn't live up to the hype. It simply did not resonate with me in the same way that Super did, or TOK did, or even its predecessor did. It's hard for me to feel like TTYD being remade is a return to form when I like several of its successors more than it, and I definitely don't think the collective fandom even deserved such a remake after decades worth of whining about the new games and shitting on people who happened to like them.

However, with the remake finally out, I want to really give the game another chance and take in everything it has to offer. But before I can do that, I need to talk about the original version of The Thousand Year Door, along with what I liked about it and what I didn't.

TTYD is praised for its darker story and how atypical it is for a Mario game. Many of the species and NPCs you encounter are entirely unique to this game specifically, and the game touches on darker themes like death, grief, familial abuse, and even sex to a degree. And yes, that certainly is refreshing, but darkness isn't what makes a story good. TTYD's strength in terms of its narrative is in the individual chapters and situations the characters get into. Solving a murder mystery in a train, fighting in an arena and uncovering a conspiracy within the competition, exploring a town where all the citizens have turned into pigs where Mario's identity gets stolen by a ghost, those are all incredibly cool and memorable arcs that are some of the first things that come to mind when I think of TTYD. I also think the partners tended to land a bit more often than the ones in 64, at least in terms of writing. Goombella is a perfect starting partner and easily one of my favorite characters in the series writing-wise, Koops is basically just an improved Kooper, Ms Mowz is a fun and unique bonus partner, and Vivian is obviously amazing, barring the fact that Nintendo itself seemed confused about her gender identity. I love the 64 party, but for every Bow and Parakarry, there's a Kooper, Watt, or Lakilester.

However, my fundamental problem with this game's story is that the overarching narrative falls short by comparison. The individual arcs are fun, but they feel completely disjointed from each other and don't really add up to anything beyond Mario getting a Crystal Star. While I love the partner's arcs inside the chapters, they still usually feel completely sidelined after the chapter ends. By comparison, Super and Origami King take a more serialized approach where each chapter builds on the previous while still feeling distinct, and I think that approach works much better for an RPG like this. The villains are also pretty weak, partially because there's too many of them and rarely any of them get the proper development they needed. In particular, I never found the X-Nauts interesting at all, they have none of the personality of Bowser and his minions, and Grodus in particular feels pretty paper thin. The Shadow Queen is better in that she's intimidating and has a cool design, but she also has nowhere near enough screentime to feel as developed as, say, Dimentio or Olly. The best villain is Beldam, a cruel and realistic depiction of an abusive sister, but she has her own issues.

I also have a pretty big issue with TTYD's approach towards its female characters. For some reason, damn near every female character in this game has a crush on Mario. It's borderline a harem and it's bad. Even Goombella starts crushing on Mario like crazy and she's a college student, that's just weird. I also already mentioned that the stuff around Vivian's gender was also just an absolute mess in the original game. But the worst treatment of a female character in TTYD has to be Peach. In the first game, Peach gets these intermissions where she sneaks around Bowser's castle and plots out escape routes, but in TTYD, her intermissions mostly consist of her standing around while in captivity while TEC ogles her the entire time. Not only does she have zero agency this time, but her entire role kinda just feels like being a plot device for TEC's creepy arc about learning to love. But the worst thing about TTYD's story is the awful ending. Not the final boss, that's great, the epilogue where every antagonist is revealed to have been redeemed and every seemingly dead character is revealed to have been alive the entire time. It feels cheap at best (TEC being alive somehow?) and problematic at worst (Vivian immediately forgiving her abusive sisters who did nothing to deserve it). Say what you will about the modern games, but at least they have the guts to kill off their characters. I admire TTYD for its attempts at tackling darker story material and themes, and it works in some cases like Bobbery's backstory and Mario's culture shock in Rogueport, but the writers fumble the ball almost as often.

Geez, that was a lot. Thankfully, I have less to say about TTYD's gameplay because that's where most of my praise is. The Thousand Year Door expands and improves on the original in a lot of ways. The addition of paper curses gives the player more ways to navigate the overworld, partners now have their own health bars, Mario can do a more effective superguard with the right timing, and the pause menu now contains a variety of bestiaries chronicling your tattles, badges, and recipes which vastly bolsters the 100% campaign. The towns are more fleshed-out and unique, with Rogueport in particular being one of my favorite hub worlds in all of gaming for how densely-packed with detail it is. Frankly, Rogueport is so well-designed, it makes the rest of the game feel worse by comparison. The dungeons are also pretty great, none of them are massive steps up over the first game's, but they are all incredibly fun and varied. And I already mentioned how fun the setpieces in this game are, especially the Glitz Pit and Excess Express. When it's firing on all cylinders, TTYD is an absolute blast of a game that's packed with variety.

However, for every step forward TTYD takes, it also takes a step back from 64. Mario's overworld traversal may be more fleshed out, but the removal of the spin dash leaves it feeling more sluggish. The battle system does have more going on, but it also introduces frustrating RNG stage hazards that grow more frequent as the game progresses. The towns, dungeons, and setpieces are fantastic, but the actual world design is often straight, linear, and lacking in variety. PM64 had branching paths, exploration-focused nonlinear areas like in Dry Dry Desert or Jade Jungle, and platforming challenges in equal measure. Most of TTYD's overworld consists of straight paths with minimal elevation and little to interact with beyond enemies and the occasional Star Piece hidden under the floor. And of course, I can't be remiss without mentioning the abundance of backtracking in TTYD that the original game just didn't have. Most chapters will have you walking back and forth across the same few screens at least once, some times for completely arbitrary reasons. Like yeah, sure, going all the way back to the start of the Boggly Woods to retrieve Madame Flurrie's necklace is totally doesn't feel like blatant padding, no way. At its most infamous, you get Chapter 4 which has you going back-and-forth across Twilight Town three separate times, and Chapter 7 which has you painstakingly searching the entire world map to find a Bob-Omb named General White who it turns out was in the original spot the whole time. These are serious issues that kill the pacing of TTYD making it far less replayable than its predecessor for me.

I don't have quite as much to say on the presentation, though, I think it's pretty great. The original TTYD is incredibly clean and smooth, even running at a consistent 60fps. I will say I'm not quite as huge on the limited puppet rigging that's used for the characters compared to the more expressive sprites of 64 and the modern games, but it's a tiny nitpick and I otherwise do really like this game's look and overall style. The music is also pretty unambiguously great. I've always had a soft-spot of TTYD's more techno soundtrack and when it works, it really works. Despite my incessant praise towards the music of The Origami King, it's that quirky techno that TTYD and Super used that really feels the most distinctly Paper Mario. I can admit that some tracks, particularly the boss themes, can feel a tad interchangeable since so much of the soundtrack uses the same instruments, but for the most part, TTYD's soundtrack is the one aspect of the game that I have pretty much zero qualms with. It's just plain fantastic, my third favorite OST in the series behind Super and TOK.

So that's my take on the original Thousand Year Door. It's a far more inconsistent game than its predecessor with higher highs and lower lows. Gameplay improvements and detractions in equal measure, a flawed story I'm incredibly conflicted on, and a much larger scope in terms of scale and content, for better or for worse. I don't dislike the game, not in the slightest, but it's a game where every time I start to really enjoy it, I get hit by one of those moments. It's a good game, maybe even great, but it feels like it has too much holding it back from being amazing.

4/5 Stars

I just got the remake today. I will be playing through it in its entirety and going over every single bit of game design, writing, and presentation, along with all the major changes it made. Will it improve upon my issues with the original game? Will I grow to like it more? And will I come to see what everyone else sees in it? Well, we'll see in a few weeks...

Why I Love Super Paper Mario

With the TTYD remake coming out, I wanted to finish covering my bases and do the last of my three Top 100 posts about the Paper Mario series. I went over why I love 64, I went over why I adore Origami King, but now, it's time to talk about my favorite Paper Mario game... kinda.

Super Paper Mario is my favorite "Paper Mario" game, but it also doesn't feel like a Paper Mario game. Sure, it shares similarities with Paper Mario like the visual style and the RPG mechanics, but they're minor at best. It almost feels unfair to call this the best Paper Mario game when it lacks most of the stuff I love about Paper Mario as a series. Hell, it's not even made of paper, it's all digital. If you ask me what my favorite Paper Mario games are, I'm not going to say Super. I'm going to say 64 and TOK. Comparing Super with any of the other games is a waste of time, because there's nothing to compare.

And yet, I love Super Paper Mario more than any other Mario RPG, and the fact that it isn't like any of them is its greatest strength. Not only does it not feel like a Paper Mario game, it honestly doesn't feel like any game I've ever played. With Super Paper Mario, Intelligent Systems and Nintendo pushes the medium in some truly mindbending and unconventional directions that demonstrates its capacity for story-telling better than most games out there. Its impact is indescribable.

Super Paper Mario is a game where everything about it is in service of the central narrative. The gameplay, the music, the visuals, the level design, it all prioritizes pushing the story and its themes forward over what can be conventionally considered "good design". So to actually dive into what makes Super Paper Mario's story so good, I need to start by talking about the gameplay.

Super Paper Mario has some of the most unique gameplay of any game I've ever played. Instead of being a turn-based RPG like the other Mario RPGs, it's an action RPG fused with a side-scrolling platformer. So the game plays like Super Mario Bros and you attack by jumping, but there's still RPG elements like XP and items. One of my favorite touches is how your experience is determined by score, so you level up by engaging with the level design, breaking blocks, finding secrets, and stringing together jumps across enemies... but not too many. You might want to be cheeky and try to pull off an infinite 1-Up trick, but SPM has an anti-grinding measure in place that detracts points if you jump off an enemy too many times. And that's good because this game is already very easy. Yeah, as it turns out, when your main method of attack is bouncing off enemies, there's only so many ways they can try to attack you. However, there's still a decent amount of complexity involved between racking up score to level up, unlockable Pixls that give you movement and combat options, being able to play as Luigi, Bowser, and Peach each with their own abilities, and of course, the game's main mechanic...

While most of Super takes place on a 2D plane, you'll quickly get an ability that will allow you to shift the world into 3D for a limited amount of time. Platforms will go out of sync with each other, walls will hide away collectibles, and often times, you can even walk on the scenery. It's such an awesome and inventive mechanic that's not only used often but whose novelty never really wears off. Going 3D in this game is always cool, from start to finish. I was a bit iffy on the addition of a timer at first as I wanted to be able to explore each stage fully in 3D with no limitations, but I actually think the timer adds to the magic of this mechanic. While going 3D may seem cool at first, later stages will force you to spend extended amounts of time in 3D racing against the clock, and it really serves to emphasize just how... unnatural this ability is in universe. There aren't many NPCs in 3D, the tightly-packed 2D stages feel far more empty and liminal with this perspective.

And that's just the beginning as far as gameplay informing narrative goes. The level design in Super Paper Mario is something else, ranging wildly in terms of quality but always fitting in terms of themes. Now, about 50% of Super Paper Mario's stages are totally solid. They're fun side-scrolling platforming sequences with lots to interact with and a ton of neat secrets to discover in 3D, but the other 50% is a lot stranger. The first truly bizarre level you encounter is Merlee's Mansion, where the sketchy maid Mimi forces you to do slaver labor and play tedious minigames to farm money... or you could scout around the area, talk to NPCs, break out of the bounds of the level, and get a hidden password that you can jot down to bypass most of the process. Either way, this level is tough. You'll either have to weather a very long minigame or deal with some tricky adventure game-esque puzzle-solving as you try to figure out another way. Some may argue that this level is poorly-designed due to how much of a time sink it is, but I think it perfectly manages to capture Mario's situation being under Mimi and immerses me in the game and its world even further, and this is just the beginning. The ridiculously long password in the Gap Of Crag, dealing with Squirps' constant detours in World 4, or making it through the hellishly long Underwhere stages in what can only be described as a Sisyphean climb. You could make the argument that these stages suck and are horribly designed, but I just can't bring myself to hate them. There's something so raw and charming about how Super Paper Mario purposefully tries to annoy the player for narrative purposes, especially considering what the narrative is. 

Super Paper Mario starts off with an incredibly bizarre opening where an evil count named Count Bleck manages to forcedly marry Peach and Bowser, which in turn creates a Chaos Heart that can destroy the world. So it's up to Mario along with his new ally, a mysterious and somewhat cold ally named Tippi, to find the Pure Hearts to save the world. For the first half or so of the game, the story is fairly light-hearted. It's got all that classic Paper Mario humor particularly in the Bitlands world, Peach and Bowser quickly join your party and even have their own unique dialogue with the NPCs, and you defeat most of the world bosses fairly easily and successfully.  However, there's an underlying current of dread right from the start. From Level 1, you can see the void that the Chaos Heart created, and with every world, it gets bigger and bigger. You get intermissions with Peach, Bowser, and Luigi as they try to escape Castle Bleck, which itself has an eerie atmosphere, especially when Luigi doesn't even manage to escape. By World 5, the void has gotten so noticeable that it really hits you why the game is so content on wasting you and the characters' time. It's because they're racing against time, and they're losing. 

World 6 of Super Paper Mario is one of the most chilling sequences I've played in any video game. Halfway through their trip through the Sammer's Kingdom, the void gets so big that Mario and the gang are unceremoniously forced out of it without even being able to get what they were there for. You don't even get a victory animation, it feels abrupt and you're denied any form of closure. And when you re-enter, all that's left is a World Of Nothing. The entire kingdom and all its inhabitants been reduced to a white, empty void. Sometimes you see a few wrecked pagodas, but they have all the color sapped out of them too. And all you can do is walk to the right... for 5-10 minutes... with minimal music. In conventional terms, doing nothing but walking right for ten minutes would be "bad design". But it works here, it works so well. Super Paper Mario leaves you to really soak in the ramifications of what just happened, to sit with the tragedy and realize just how high the stakes truly are. While both Super and TTYD are infamous for rewriting deaths quickly (looking at you, Luvbi), this moment lets the player mourn not just one death, but an entire world's worth of deaths. It's incredibly dark for a Mario game, but the way it's handled as effective as it is unconventional. 

Super Paper Mario is known for being one of the darkest Mario games, but it's not the darkness that makes it works. It's how well that darkness is handled. Super Paper Mario doesn't usually go for shock value, every time it tackles a darker subject, it really leans into it. The best example from the early game is Francis, the otaku parody who gets absolutely skewered over the course of his chapter. IntSys dismantles his immature and sexist personality in a manner that has aged impressively well. But from Sammer's Kingdom onward, Super Paper Mario gets relentlessly mature. Right after dealing with the World Of Nothing, you get hit with yet another plot twist where the true villain of the game Dimentio reveals himself to blow up the main party and send them to the Underwhere, the Mario equivalent of hell. Granted, they never actually died, but the fact that the game even went close to that, just a year after Sonic 06's infamous death at that, is wild. However, the fun gag of "hell" being the Minus World keeps things from being too bleak, once again showing how good this game is at balancing tone, not going too far into shock value, and knowing when to use restraint.

After making it to the Overthere (aka heaven), the party can finally head over to the final dungeon, Castle Bleck, a finale so good it makes everything you've been through across the game more than worth it. Castle Bleck brings together every single gameplay element for one final test. Each party member gets their own stage to shine before they sacrifice themselves to help you forward, and the stages tests you on pretty much everything from cryptic puzzle-solving, to 2D/3D platforming, to enemy combat. There's even a very memorable setpiece where you chase Dimentio across all the worlds you've previously been too. The oppressive atmosphere, tense music, and distinct monochromatic color palette also make this part of the game feel incredibly climactic, leading to the grand finale. After what feels like the final battle against Count Bleck, you learn his tragic backstory. Bleck, originally called Blumiere, fell in love with a girl named Timpani. However, his father disapproved and cursed Timpani into becoming a Pixl, leaving Blumiere to fall into grief and become Count Bleck. That Pixl was, of course, your partner Tippi.

The story of Tippi and Bleck is easily the beating heart of this game, and it's executed incredibly well. Tippi gets a really strong character arc as Mario and the others slowly chip away at her hardened exterior throughout the game, all the while Bleck shows increasingly more signs of who he used to be. There are hints scattered across the game over their shared origin, but it's this final segment where all the pieces are put into place. Frankly, all the villains in Super Paper Mario are fantastic characters. I also love the creepy Mimi and the enigmatic Nastasia, and of course, the "true villain" Dimentio, who ends up betraying Bleck and becomes the actual final boss. They all get a lot of great little moments in this final act too, like O'Chunks and Bowser holding a collapsing ceiling up for each other, Mimi getting mad at Peach for sacrificing herself to save her (this is still the best-written Peach has ever been btw), Bleck begging Mario to "end his game" after being defeated as he feels he has nothing left to live for, and my personal favorite, Nastasia taking a bullet from Dimentio for Bleck despite knowing his heart belongs to Tippi. The dramatic writing here is just incredible. And once Dimentio is defeated, Tippi and Bleck sacrifice themselves to stop the Chaos Heart once and for all, and we get one final moment of catharsis showing the two living happily together. I'm not gonna lie, this is the only time a Mario RPG has made me tear up.

Super Paper Mario's story does so much that it's hard to really articulate how good it is. Not only does it just have a well-crafted plot with an incredibly strong emotional core, but it manages to take the Mario cast in a darker direction in a way that feels earned and natural, and it conveys much of its story solely through the gameplay, and it also has the incredibly sharp, meta, and witty writing you'd expect from a Mario RPG. Super Paper Mario swings for the fences in ways I rarely see from a Nintendo game, and I think it pulls it off incredibly well. If the story didn't land, the whole game wouldn't work, but it absolutely does in my opinion. But on top of that, Super Paper Mario is also deceptively influential. Its style of humor has not only aged perfectly but has gotten more relevant with time, and it really feels like indie games have taken after it just as much as the more credited Earthbound. Undertale is the biggest culprit, it's not hard to notice how similar it is to SPM specifically, between the visuals, character designs, story-telling, writing, and even the music. Just listen to the track "Battle Time" and tell me it doesn't sound even the slightest bit like Toby Fox wrote it. But also look at Omori's white space, or Fez's dimension flipping and overall puzzle design, or the entirety of Underhero. There's an indie spirit to Super Paper Mario and that's really weird to say considering it's a Nintendo game.

Back to the gameplay, Super Paper Mario also has some of the best replay value of any "Mario RPG" since it actually has a postgame! Just beating the campaign is only the tip of the iceberg, there is so much else to do here. There's a few sidequests that can lead you to some entirely optional Pixls including a robot replacement for Tippi. There's an arcade with some surprisingly addictive minigames, several of which use the motion controls. There's a ton of collectible cards, some of which featuring the partners from past Paper Mario games, along with treasure maps that lead you to even more secrets. There's not one but two Pit Of 100 Trials, a recipe log like in the previous game, and you can even return to Sammer's Kingdom to finish what you were doing before the world got destroyed. I love how Super Paper Mario just lets you run around the entire world after the events of the story, rather than just booting you back to right before the final boss. It's something more RPGs should do.

As for the presentation, Super Paper Mario goes for an artstyle unlike anything else in the series. Mario and the gang are pretty much ripped straight out of TTYD, but the world of Flipside boasts a unique digital art aesthetic that still looks quite fresh to this day. Not only is it just really clean and visually-appealing, but there's a ton of little details that sell you on the game being played on a fictional computer, like a mouse dragging over Mario every time he flips dimension, or all the mathematical equations floating in the sky. There's a strong usage of minimalism too, particularly in the bleaker locations like the aforementioned World Of Nothing and Castle Bleck. But even better than the visuals is the incredible music. Super Paper Mario goes for a similar techno style to TTYD, but it's slightly more eclectic, slightly more diverse, and a lot more emotionally-charged. Super's OST has everything from catchy level themes (Lineland Road, Gloam Valley, The Open Plane, Gap Of Crag, Sammer's Kingdom), to tense dungeon themes (Merlee's Mansion, Fort Francis, Floro Sapien Caverns, and Castle Bleck), to banging boss themes (Fracktail Battle, A Powerful Enemy Emerges, Brobot Battle, King Croacus, Battle Time, The Ultimate Show), to emotional gut punches like Bounding Across Time, and I still feel like I'm leaving tracks out. Super Paper Mario's soundtrack is an emotional rollercoaster that easily stands as my second favorite in the series behind The Origami King.

Super Paper Mario is an extremely raw game, in a way that Nintendo games rarely are. It's flawed, its visuals are a patchwork of new assets and repurposed ones from previous games, the soundtrack is a bit harsher and more unconventional, and the story goes to some really dark places, but it's that rawness that left such an incredible impact. There's still nothing else like Super Paper Mario, it's got so much soul. The story is engrossing and beautifully told, the gameplay mechanics are inventive and never lose their luster, the soundtrack is phenomenal, and it offers so much that I was able to fill over 10 paragraphs worth of praise and still feel like I left things out. Super Paper Mario is a special game, and it gave me so much more appreciation for what gaming as a medium can accomplish in terms of story-telling.

2024 Games I Played: Mystia's Izakaya

As a Touhou fan, the cult classic fan project Mystia's Izakaya was a game I had my eye on for a while. I originally intended to get it on my computer, but when I found out that it was getting a Switch port in 2024 with all the DLC included, I decided to wait and experience the game as a complete package on my system of choice. I'm wouldn't say I'm a die-hard fan of these kinds of restaurant simulators, but as someone who grew up on Papa's Pizzaria games, holds up Mystia as one of their favorite Touhou characters, and adores the rhythm game genre, there's definitely still a lot that I ended up loving.

Keep in mind that Mystia's Izakaya is a pretty long game. It's meant to be a calming game you can sink hours upon hours into, and with the whopping five DLC campaigns included, it would take a very long time for me to put out a review if I did all of that content. So, this review is more going to be a summary of my early impressions after putting a few hours into the game. Thankfully, these impressions are mostly quite positive.

Mystia's Izakaya is a game about Mystia Lorelei, a night sparrow youkai who runs a small scale food stand near where she lives. When her friend, Kyouko Kasodani, almost gets her kneecaps broken for not paying her debt, Mystia decides to pay them off for her, all the while growing her business and unknowingly preparing to satisfy a customer so ravenous she can destroy the world. On a story level, Mystia's Izakaya is really everything I could've wanted. Mystia is one of my favorite Touhou characters because she has a life outside of being the second boss of Touhou 8. She has a business, she starts a rock band, and with a character from a completely different game to boot. Mystia's Izakaya digs into that life outside of the mainline games, showing how Mystia grew her restaraunt and how she and Kyouko started up their punk rock band, and it's really charmingly written throughout.

The game is split into two distinct halves, the day and night segments. In the day, you can explore pretty much the entirety of Gensokyo to gather up ingredients and do quests for characters. The sheer scope of the Mystia's Izakaya's overworld is truly impressive, I don't think I've ever played another game where it felt like I really got to just roam around Touhou's iconic main setting. During these sections, a truly impressive amount of Touhou characters show up and get little arcs and storylines that persist throughout each campaign, and they're all written just as wonderfully as Mystia is. Touhou as a series can feel a bit narrow in its vision, with such a large cast but media so short-form that not too many of them can be super developed, so it's really great to see Mystia's Izakaya work to try to give pretty much every character a time in the spotlight. That's not to discount the gameplay though. While the game slowly opens up with increasingly larger areas so you don't feel super overwhelmed right off the bat, you'll eventually be flooded with options for what you want to do each day, which leads to some really engaging time management.

The night segments are what you spend the day preparing for. While the day has you racing the clock, the night has you outlasting the clock as you need to run your izakaya for the night. This plays out more along the lines of a cooking game like Papa's Pizzaria or Overcooked. You get orders from customers and you need to give them the right one before they get bored. There's a lot of depth and mechanics here, though, and Mystia's Izakaya strikes the perfect balance between easing the player into everything while still amping up the complexity hours into the game. There's Rare Guests who trust you to give them what you think you'll like, brief rhythm segments while you cook that can give you buffs, recruitable helpers who you can level up, and I still feel like there's stuff I haven't learned about yet. These night segments can get pretty stressful, but thankfully, the game remains reasonably generous on a casual level, saving the toughest cooking challenges for the DLC. The debts you need to pay are generally fairly lax given where you are in the game, you can pause whenever you want to analyze your stock without risking running the timer, and you can't burn your food, thank goodness.

As I mentioned above, Mystia's Izakaya is a pretty massive game, easily some of the most bang for your buck I've seen in a while. The main campaign alone is fairly beefy for a $25 dollar game, boasting achievements, leveling up and bonding systems, five major areas to clear, unlockable costumes, and a ridiculous amount of recipes to find, but we also got five similarly large DLC campaigns bundled in with the Switch version. On top of that, Mystia's Izakaya also includes an entire built-in rhythm game with 60+ songs and a ranking system, not too dissimilar from Squid Beatz in Splatoon 2. It's a very fun rhythm game too, I honestly think I could sink more time into it than the actual game. On top of all that, Mystia's Izakaya is just really polished. The game boasts some beautiful pixelart with some lush backgrounds and adorable character artwork, and the soundtrack contains a ton of calming remixes of Touhou music. It's a beautiful testament to just how dedicated the Touhou fandom is, that they can create a fangame that's able to compete with AAA releases in terms of scope and production values at half the price.

So this has all been incredibly positive, but do I have any issues with Mystia's Izakaya? I'd say my biggest problem with the game is that it can jump between iyashikei levels of calm and ridiculously stressful at a moment's notice. It's very easy to find yourself into a nice groove only for things to spiral completely out of control with a single error. But even that feels a bit subjective. Frankly, I think Mystia's Izakaya does what it's trying to do damn near perfectly, but as much as I've been enjoying it, I can't say it's really my thing. I tend to prefer tight, concise experiences with a defined endpoint, but Izakaya is obviously a game you're meant to sink a ton of time into and chip away at slowly. And with a few examples, those are the kinds of games I tend to bounce off of at one point or another. So far, Mystia's Izakaya has been addicting, it gives me that "one more night" feeling every time I play, but I just know I'm going to fall off it eventually, possibly before I even finish the main campaign. 

But maybe that's okay, because regardless of when I stop, the time I have been and will be spending with Mystia's Izakaya has been immensely charming and enjoyable. And with the sheer amount of content, mechanical depth, top-notch Touhou writing, and general production values, I can definitely say that it was worth the plunge. It's definitely one of the best Touhou fangames out there.

4/5 Stars

Why I Love LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga

 Ah, the LEGO games. I don't talk about them much on here, but I love this series. I think they really influenced my love for exploration in games, nothing feels as satisfying as combing a level in a LEGO game for every single stud I can scrounge. However, out of the many LEGO games that have been made by Traveler's Tales, my favorite will always be the very first, LEGO Star Wars.

Disclaimer: It's very hard to find good screenshots of this game so I think I'll have to go without them this time, sorry.

LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga is a game I have a lot of personal connection to. It wasn't just my first LEGO game, it was one of my first video games period. The only games I had prior to it were Wii Sports, Wii Play, and Mario Party 8, all of which were minigame collections. Even more, this game was my first exposure to Star Wars! I heard about LEGO Star Wars through my friends from school who all owned it, and it was through playing LEGO Star Wars that I got into the franchise as a whole.

LEGO Star Wars pretty much nailed the LEGO formula right from the get-go. Each level plops you and a potential second player into a memorable setpiece from one of the six Star Wars films of the time, and you basically just get to run around in these memorable movie moments, experiencing them through this tongue-in-cheek LEGO lens. The actual moment-to-moment gameplay in LEGO Star Wars is fairly basic and forgiving, it's basically a light 3D platformer with very simple button-mashy combat, but there is just a bit of extra depth to make it fun. There's a surprising amount of hidden combos that the game never really tells you about, like how you can perfectly deflect or dodge bullets by pressing the attack button just as it hits you, or how blaster users get a context-sensitive melee attack, or how Jedis gets a bunch of super lightsaber combos by pressing attack right at the peak of a lightsaber swing. It's nothing ground-breaking, but it adds a bit of extra flair to the combat.

But even with those extra moves, LEGO Star Wars is pretty easy as you can't die. There are no lives, and losing all your hearts just makes you lose the game's main collectible, studs. Instead, like in Kirby's Epic Yarn, the actual difficulty comes in finding and holding onto as many studs in a level as possible to fill up a meter called the True Jedi meter. This is where LEGO Star Wars (and LEGO games as a whole) really shines. Every level in LEGO Star Wars is filled to the brim with opportunities to get studs, from secret areas, to branching paths, to a ridiculous amount of breakable and interactable objects, making for some of the most satisfying exploration in any linear adventure game. On top of that, each level also boasts 10 hidden Minikits and a Red Brick, many of which can only be obtained by returning to a level with another character, encouraging even more exploration and unveiling even more facets to every level on your second go-around. The impeccable sound design (which I'll delve into more later) makes searching for collectibles in LEGO Star Wars feel even more satisfying, from the clacking coin noise of picking up a stud to the powerful whoosh you hear when you get a Minikit.

But most of this stuff applies to every LEGO game, why is it that The Complete Saga still remains my favorite? Well, I feel like the more the LEGO series goes on, the more automated and restrictive it begins to feel. Bonus areas become increasingly infrequent, the game frequently takes control away from the player to show them something, and combat becomes increasingly reliant on context-sensitive actions and quick time events, but LEGO Star Wars is completely hands off. Aside from some tips that occasionally display at the bottom of the screen, you are never forcedly shown how to do anything. The first level of the game, Negotations, silently teaches you everything you need to know through just the level design. It shows you how to use the force and destroy objects in a safe area, only letting you move onto actual enemies once you've proved you understood how to use it. And beyond that, you are always left to your own devices to explore at your own pace, and the levels are designed with exploration in mind, as many of the optional areas are creative, unique, playful, and filled with fun easter eggs (my favorite examples include the movie theater in Mos Eisley Spaceport, the exterior area in Escape From Hoth Base, and the laser maze in Droid Factory). Even the main hub of the Cantina has a ton of stuff to interact with in every single room, from starting a bar fight to racing along a small track to playing bowling.

I think what helps with The Complete Saga's level design and variety is the fact that it's a compilation of two different LEGO Star Wars games, each with unique level design philosophies. The prequel stages are based on the first LEGO Star Wars game and while shorter and more simple, are also a lot more action-focused. From the incredibly fun Pod Race level, to the dynamic platforming in the Droid Factory, to the pure combat of the Jedi Arena, to the lengthy gravity-shifting gauntlet in Chancellor In Peril, to the bonkers on-rails shooting in Battle Over Coruscant, to the brutal timed platforming in Darth Vader. The prequel stages boast a ton of memorable setpieces and even ramp up the difficulty quite a bit, with the Revenge Of The Sith in particular having some genuinely tough sequences for those trying to get True Jedi.

The original trilogy levels, taken from LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy, are more lengthy, open, and exploration-focused. Most of its levels can clock in at around half an hour, and are filled to the brim with secret areas, easter eggs, and even alternate paths in the case of many of the A New Hope stages. They also introduce a few more interesting mechanics like vehicles, hats you can wear that augment your abilities, and secret Double Score Zone areas that let you really rack up some studs. There really isn't a single bad Original Trilogy level, they're all consistently stellar, from exploring the Jawa's sandcrawler, to frenetically running around the beautifully rendered Cloud City, to hopping around Jabba's palace and sciff, to participating in a lengthy speeder chase across Endor.

And being a compilation of two games, I also have to note that LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga is a behemoth of a game, genuinely massive. There's a total of 36 main levels across the six movies (most LEGO games tend to have around 15-18), each with 10 Minikits to find, a Red Brick that gives you an extra perk, and the aforementioned True Jedi requirement. Each level also has a Challenge variant that shuffles the Minikits and tasks you to find all of them in a short amount of time. There's also a whopping 160 characters you can buy at a shop and swap between at any time outside of the Story, custom characters, 20 bounty hunter missions where you revisit levels to search for specific characters, a multiplayer-exclusive Arcade Mode, two bonus levels for each movie, a Super Story which tasks you to quickly beat an entire movie in a short amount of time, and even an entire bonus area with six unlockable stages ranging from cut levels to the original versions of some of the vehicles levels to some very fun bonus stages which plop you onto a LEGO set and task you to demolish all of it.

As far as the presentation goes, I wouldn't say LEGO Star Wars looks particularly amazing graphically, but art direction wise, it perfectly nails the set design and overall aesthetic of the Lucas Star Wars films, from the futurism of the prequels to the more dusty analog look of the original movies. With 160 playable characters alone, there is a lot of fanservice and attention to detail, and I've already raved about the abundance of easter eggs within the levels themselves. The cutscenes are short especially compared to the later LEGO games, but they have a lot of silly charm without drawing attention to themselves. Later LEGO games would try to force in more jokes, but TCS's cutscenes are mostly funny because of the sheer comedy of seeing these serious movie moments acted out by LEGO characters. They're comedic in how understated they are. Of course, the music is all taken from John Williams' incredible movie scores and they really make you appreciate how consistently stellar his work on the Star Wars series has been, even giving some of the deeper cuts on the scores more of a spotlight. And as I mentioned before, the sound design in LEGO Star Wars is the stuff of legends. The collectible sounds are so pleasing to the ears, the character death sounds are hilariously chosen, and they're all so instantly memorable and recognizable.

Look, I obviously have a lot of nostalgia for LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga, but I think it says a lot that out of the 20-something LEGO games we've gotten since, this is still the game I go back to the most. Despite its simplicity, its heavy focus on exploration, hands off approach, abundance of content, and consistently strong level design make for a game that's really easy to revisit. It's a game where I feel like discover something new about it every time I play, and I think it influenced my love for exploration in video games.

PC Engine Reviews (Gunhed, Legend Of Valkyrie, Valis II)

The PC Engine is a console that's really grown on me over time. I used to think it was a fairly lackluster console filled with failed attempts at copying Nintendo and rarely any genuinely great games, but as I've dug further into its library, I've found a lot to love about the console. From its consistently stellar lineup of shmups, to its colorful spritework and audibly-pleasing soundchip, to Hudson's many overlooked IPs like Bomberman and Star Soldier, to the 90s anime bliss that the PC Engine CD provides, I've really begun to understand why the console has become such a cult favorite. And since I recently replayed a bunch of its games, I wanted to review a few of them that didn't quite have the runtime for a full-on deep dive. Gunhed, Legend Of Valkyrie, and Valis II aren't necessarily some of my absolute favorite PC Engine games, but I have a fondness for all three of them and really wanted to go over why I find them so enjoyable.

Why I Love Pikmin 3 Deluxe

The Pikmin series has had a bit of a divide in it for a while now, it almost feels like two different series. The first and third games are more compact experiences, focused on time management, speedrunning, and pure strategic mastery. The second and fourth games are vaster and longer, with lots of time spent dungeon crawling, a stronger focus on exploration and combat, and difficulty coming less from time management and more from an abundance of hazards and enemies. I'm not critiquing either half of the series, every mainline Pikmin game is great at worst, and there's a perfectly valid reason to rank any of these four as your favorite depending on what your preferences are. For me, I prefer the time management games, and it's Pikmin 3 that stands out as my personal favorite in the series.

From a set-up perspective, Pikmin 3 stands out as a particularly unique entry in the series. After the first two games focused on the beloved Captain Olimar, this game shifted protagonist entirely to a crew of three Koppaites named Alph, Brittany, and Charlie. Following up Olimar is a tough task and you could argue that none of the Koppaites are nearly as developed as he is, but I think Pikmin 3 still manages to shine with its dialogue. I adore the interactions between 3's trio, they all have very colorful personalities that bounce off each other quite well. Simply put, this game has a cute narrative and I like the Koppaites a lot.

But as far as Pikmin 3 goes, I think the gameplay is where it really shines. Pikmin is a real-time strategy game where you command an army of tiny plant dudes each with their own unique elemental traits. You can toss them at enemies, command them to do tasks, and use their traits to solve environmental puzzles. As someone who struggles a lot with strategy games, Pikmin's more streamlined and accessible approach always appealed to me more than games like Starcraft or whatever, but its simplicity still belies a ton of depth. When they start out with Pikmin, most players are going to take things fairly slow. They'll carry their entire Pikmin army to a location, wait for the Pikmin to do a task, and continue on. But on replays, you start to wonder if you can try multitasking and taking shortcuts. Maybe you can drop off your Pikmin at a gate and leave to do something else while you wait for them to destroy it, or maybe you can bypass certain roadblocks entirely to get important collectibles faster. This is encouraged by Pikmin's time management system. You only have a set amount of time in the day to perform tasks, and you need to be back at your rocket by nightfall or else you and all your Pikmin will get eaten. The amount of days it takes for you to beat the game will be saved on a high-score board, so a lot of Pikmin's replay value comes from doing runs over and over again to optimize your time.

The reason why Pikmin 3 stands up as my favorite is because of just how particularly flexible it is. No other game in the series has this much sheer complexity in its optimization. Since you're controlling three captains at once, Pikmin 3 allows you to break them up to do separate tasks. You can toss the other captains across a bridge or up a ledge to do something on the other side, you can use a Go Here function to direct them to specific locations, and you can swap between the captains on the fly whenever you want. While 2 and 4 do give you a second captain/companion to control or command, I think Pikmin 3 easily stands as the best in terms of multi-tasking potential. In addition, Pikmin 3 also gives you a limited number of days until you run out of food, so you have to make sure to efficiently nab the game's many Fruit collectibles to make yourself more rations. I've heard people say this system is too generous since if you get every fruit in Pikmin 3, you'll have a whopping 99 days maximum to complete the campaign. However, I have a few defenses. First off, I think Pikmin 3's more generous fruit system is a lot better for newcomers to the series, since I know a lot of people who were put off by the first game's strict 30-day limit. But more importantly, the fact that you can essentially choose how many days you get to complete the game gives you even more flexibility when you're optimizing your runs. Technically, nearly every fruit in Pikmin 3 is optional, so taking into account which ones you want to skip can be an additional challenge in itself.

On top of all that, I just think Pikmin 3 plays the best, but particularly its Switch remake. Pikmin as a series is kind of infamous for its finicky Pikmin AI, with your ranks often getting stuck on corners, getting distracted too easily, and even tripping in the original game. This is not an issue in 3. As a matter of fact, this game still has the best Pikmin AI in the series, even more than 4 which was a baffling downgrade. In addition, Pikmin 3 adds a ton of new combat abilities too such as a lock-on system and the ability to have your Pikmin charge forward. I know these changes are a bit divisive for streamlining combat, but I've always liked how much more precise they are. By the way, another baffling downgrade 4 makes is the forced auto lock-on, that's definitely a step too far. Both versions of Pikmin 3 also have incredibly great control options. The Wii U original lets you use the Gamepad and stylus to intuitively and precisely toss Pikmin wherever you want, or you can use the beloved Wii Remote setup that the Wii ports had. Deluxe introduces gyro controls which mostly play like the Gamecube game, but you can just slightly nudge your cursor in certain directions for better aiming. No matter how you play Pikmin 3, it just feels really nice.

Geez, that was a lot about the gameplay. Thankfully, everything else in Pikmin 3 is top-notch too. The Pikmin lineup is overall quite solid. Reds are as reliable as ever, Blues are as crummy as ever, Yellows are better than they've ever been, and Rock and Winged are both great additions that are both adorably designed and very fun to use. Purple and White have been sadly relegated to sidemodes, but considering how broken Purple was in 2, I can't be too broken up about it. The five overworlds in Pikmin 3 are also a joy to explore, super vast and filled with collectibles without being overwhelmingly large like in 4. Twilight River in particular is probably my favorite Pikmin level period, with its beautiful autumnal visuals and fun lilypad gimmick. And there's no caves, I was never a huge fan of those. And then there's the bosses, which are definitely one of Pikmin 3's best aspects. I never loved how low-key the boss fights were in the other games, but Pikmin 3's fights are these flashy arena battles with wild enemy designs, multiple phases, and intense music. The Quaggled Mireclops in particular stands out as my favorite Pikmin boss overall for essentially being a giant living chunk of ground that can absolutely wreck your shit if you're not careful. Pikmin 3's campaign is just such a blast, it's short and a bit easy, but it's immaculately paced and consistently fun throughout.

However, if there's one thing most Pikmin fans can agree on with 3, it's that the side content is incredible. There is so much to do outside of the main campaign. For starters, there's a huge Mission Mode with a wide variety of missions, some of which taking place in entirely unique settings like a fortress made out of toys and a mechanical cavern with conveyors to navigate around, as well as boss rematches. There's also what is easily the best multiplayer mode in the series in Bingo Battle, itself coming with 12 unique arenas to progressively unlock. And if you have the Deluxe port, there's even more. You get two short but very fun mini-campaigns based around Olimar, a robust achievement system, multiple difficulties for those who find the game too easy, a Photo Mode, and the return of the Piklopedia which not only has unique entries from Olimar and Louie but from the three Koppaites as well. I found that many of Nintendo's Wii U ports felt a bit lame. Tropical Freeze and NSMBU Deluxe just added an easy mode, and Treasure Tracker locked most of its new content behind further DLC, but they went way above and beyond with Pikmin 3 Deluxe. Between its mechanical fixes to the charge and map system, the great new control scheme, the fact that it came bundled with all the DLC missions, and the abundance of new content, playing Pikmin 3 Deluxe felt like experiencing the original all over again, and it helped me appreciate and fall in love with the game even more.

On the visual side of things, Pikmin 3 looks drop-dead gorgeous to this day. As a matter of fact, I think it's still the best-looking Pikmin game. The game goes for this really unique and striking visual style where the characters are cartoony, but the environments are borderline hyperrealistic, and it just looks so pretty. I love how shamelessly detailed all the fruits are, I frankly have no idea how Nintendo made them look this good on Wii U hardware (and then they did it again with the lemon in Color Splash). I think all the Pikmin games look very pleasing but no other game really leaned on that realism/cartoony dichotomy like the third game did. It truly feels like those claymation promotional images come to life. The soundtrack is also one of the series' best, up there with the first game for me. Each stage theme is cozy and comforting, but also just melodic enough to be memorable. There's some great usage of adaptive music, especially in the boss fights, and the entire game has this very whimsical and magical soundscape that feels quintessentially Pikmin. Highlights for me have to be the Garden Of Hope, Twilight River, Tropical Wilds, Boss Theme, and the Fortress Of Festivity.

The Pikmin games are so similar yet so different that, at this point, I feel like everyone is going to have that one entry that appeals entirely to them. Pikmin 3 is that game for me. It's my first Pikmin game, and to this day, nothing else has really topped it. I love its focus on multi-tasking with the multiple captains, how it balances streamlining the difficulty while giving you a ton of options and freedom, how fluid its time management system is, how vast its levels are and how flashy its bosses can be, how much side content it is, and how lush its presentation is.