Sexism, both quite subtle and unusually overt, and a variety of rulebreaking. Stories that say they’re about Ash but aren’t. Stories that say they’re about pokemon but aren’t! And pacing issues upon pacing issues. (more…)
NaRe2022 Day 6 (18+1)
A lot of stuff centered around Ash and the early season, with even the one that’s about Ash starting in Kalos and the inevitable betrayal-Ash fic both involved emphasis on how many seasons of adventures he’s already had. Possibly the modern accessibility of shows means that the newest fans coming in are now watching from the start again.
Also, yet another quirky character specializing in something else entirely and who clearly had no interest in pokemon battling somehow changing their mind and becoming a great trainer.
NaRe2022 Day 5 (12)
We continue to not have any standard OT fic! However, there is someone being roughly as incompetent, overpowered and poorly plotted but as a baker for some reason.
NaRe 2022 Day 4 (12 +1)
Quite a strange collection this time, including platonic? tickling where Ash considers Kukui his father, a story that was 90% worldbuilding setup by someone who didn’t actually seem to have any interest in the world, a scientist who didn’t know how to science, and a character from our world who tells Oak exactly that.
NaRe 2022 Day 3 (13 +1)
More “why are you saying this is the same character” issues, as usual, and a genre-aware isekai that’s probably is just a usual one but could possibly be a very stealth meta deconstruction of typical isekai instead. Plus an earnest attempt at a science-of-pokemon thing that’s very rough.
NaRe 2022 Day 2 (11+1)
Lot of pacing issues with a dash of why are you saying this is a canon character when you’ve removed the thing about the character that’d make them interesting in the AU. (more…)
NaRe 2022, Day 1 (8 + 1)
The starting batch has a surprising bunch of unusually detailed, narration-heavy non-new trainer stories with unusually terrible grammar. Also, bonus other review.
La-Mulana
La-Mulana is a Metroidvania both famous and infamous for its difficulty. After seeing a review that praised its puzzles and claimed it uniquely required you to think on how to proceed, I picked it up the Steam version while it was on sale to try it myself. I beat Hollow Knight, after all, surely I can handle the difficulty, I thought.
This is a troll game. I quit about 10 hours in after I beat a difficult boss at the end of a long area with no save points, only to investigate a suspicious alcove in the next area, which turned out to be a trap that instantly killed me, undoing all my progress. I’d genuinely like to get a refund.
Inscryption
Inscryption is a game by the makers of Pony Island, a game our esteemed illhousen previously reviewed. While I haven’t played Pony Island myself, Inscryption makes the exact blunders illhousen details in his review: the metatextual elements fall completely flat because it’s clear you’re playing a person playing a haunted video game, not actually playing a haunted video game yourself. In general, I found them tedious and uninteresting interruptions to the actual game. This is a shame, because the gameplay is actually very good.
Mario & Luigi: Dream Team
This is the fourth and final Mario & Luigi game. It might be my favorite in the entire series; the creators clearly listened to criticisms of the previous games and went all-out in their ambitions.
Mario & co. are invited to a relaxing vacation on a resort island; obviously, things do not go as planned. The theme of this game is the power of dreams: Luigi has the ability to open a portal to the dream world when he sleeps, which allows Mario to revive the original inhabitants of the islands, who are… pillow people. Yes, they lean into the aesthetic pretty hard. This dual-world gameplay works similarly to Bowser’s Inside Story, where the real world is in 3D while the dream world is 2D with a greater emphasis on platforming challenges.
Supraland
Supraland is a game I’ve been eyeing for a while, and only recently got the hardware for. (It’s one of those “all games must be computer-meltingly photorealistic” affairs.) It is billed as a “First-Person Metroidvania”, like Metroid Prime, and has a cutely weird premise of taking place in a child’s extremely elaborate sandbox, with every character and object being a toy of some kind.
I liked it a lot more than Metroid Prime, chiefly because it had a mouse-based control scheme that meant basic actions weren’t like pulling teeth. I found it fun overall, but also a bit shallow, with not enough complexity to really carry the full game.
Pokeween Reviews 2021
Actually had an obligatory review, then did the Supernatural as well as Horror subsections because both were pretty quick. (more…)
Into the Breach and Star Renegades
Into the Breach and Star Renegades are two very different games from two completely different developers, but they have a number of things in common I thought worth analyzing.
The premise of both games is identical: Alien invaders are attacking, and you must defend humanity by traveling across timelines and passing on your knowledge and technology every time. Both games have no true ending: After the end of every run, win or lose, there is always another timeline under threat that you must jump to.
What’s interesting is that despite this similarity, their execution of story elements is diametrically opposite, and both left me unsatisfied in different ways.
FEZ
FEZ is a game I got years ago, but was unable to play until now because it used a really specific graphics renderer that wasn’t supported by my crappy hardware. Now that I finally have a proper graphics card, I decided to try it out.
The premise of FEZ is that it’s a puzzle platformer where you move in 2D but can rotate the environment in 3D. This allows you to use perspective tricks like bridging platforms that are far apart at one angle but close together at another.
Unfortunately, this is not the actual gameplay of FEZ.
Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story
The third game in the Mario & Luigi series. I played the original DS version a long time ago as a kid, so I picked up the 3DS remake for this one to see what was different.
The big selling point of this entry is that Bowser is a playable character, and in fact the main protagonist. At the start of the game he is tricked by Fawful (the understudy of the villain from Superstar Saga) into eating everyone in the Mushroom Kingdom, forcing Mario and Luigi to work with him from within his body to fix things.
This was a really great game, much improved from Partners in Time. As I’ve said previously, I love Bowser, and getting to play as him was a wonderful power trip. He and the brothers had distinct playstyles, including in the overworld, and I loved all the bizarre levels inside Bowser’s body. It still lacks some of the things I liked about Superstar Saga (no magic :( ), but manages to be good in a different way rather than feeling like a downgrade as Partners in Time did.