Reviews

The region and characters are still a blast so if this is your first time with Hoenn it's worth a play, but for anyone who DID play the originals back in the day there's no need to try this one out.



This generation is the first Pokemon I grew up with, so I was the perfect nostalgia filled audience for this game, but even the 3DS' graphical improvements aren't enough to make this remake feel worth the time. 3D is still framerate ruining and straight-up disabled for more of the game than it's available for. The big new addition is the Area Nav which, despite being much hyped, basically boils down to just an easier way of finding Pokemon with the ability you want. Any other new features are ported straight from X and Y without tweaking, which is a shame because some (like Super Training) had a lot of unrealised potential. 

Other than that several things have also unfortunately been changed for the worse. The much needed changes of pace that were the Game Corner and Safari Zone have been removed (partly due to stricter age ratings on game depictions of "gambling" than when Ruby/Sapphire released), as has the Battle Frontier, but most annoyingly the tradition of Game Freak making each successive game easier, and therefore less interesting, has continued.

You barely need to pay attention to work your way through Hoenn now, as you will (at any point in the game) be about 15-25 levels higher than your opponents and everything will just die to you in one hit. You'll never run out of money or need to use items and tactics only need go as far as spamming your best offensive move until it runs out of PP. The modern features only exaggerate this as the EXP Share now levels your whole team, Wonder Trade can give you super powerful pokemon the second you start the game (I got a Charizard on Route 104) and, bafflingly, entering any online battle fully heals your team - negating the need for ever using healing items. Why worry about ever fainting when you can hop online if your pokemon are low on health and get a free health top up, win or lose.

On top of that healing NPCs and, amazingly, warp NPCs (who put you back where you need to go for story purposes to save any of that off-the-rails exploring) are added around the world in abundance, as if worried that the player might be challenged at some point. Basically all sense of difficulty is self imposed.

Just add different difficulty levels already Nintendo, come on, it's been a concept since before the 1980's for a reason.

To slightly redeem the game the post-game story (known as the Delta Episode) is legitimately great - with build-up, tension and pay-off not normally seen in Pokemon stories. - which makes up for the lack of Battle Frontier for me, although I'm sure it wouldn't for people more into the competitive side of the series.

Not particularly fond of the cartography gimmick as it basically just means you end up always hugging the walls of the maze and then draw a line around your path (the Hollow Knight school of thought on cartography is far better to me) but the game definitely needed some sort of hook because, outside of that, it's a pretty bog standard dungeon crawler (other than the turn order being a complete fucking mystery).

Beyond the random encounters larger enemies show up as avoidance hazards on the map but everything else along the way is just described through visual-novel style text - gruesome encounters, items, and even characters you talk to inside the dungeon are invisible until you hit the examine prompt to read about, rather than see, them. I at least would've wanted models for the few people you meet in dungeons rather than invisible-bar-a-prompt characters.

One thing I do appreciate is the combat. Each character seems to have unique ways of slightly healing party health during their turns, beyond just spells and potions, and the stronger offensive skills cost health as well as MP so you have to try and hit as many of the heal conditions as possible to stack them into a big enough heal to cancel out both your actions and the enemy's attacks. Makes everything take a bit more thought than the standard RPG formula of just throwing out your strongest attacks while your mage spams Cure. Unfortunately the UX design makes all these systems a bit of a slog: there's no reason to limit the amount of collection side-quests you can accept at once (let alone to like 5), the inventory system isn't great, and good luck figuring out how Grimoires work without opening up GameFAQs.

Would be really good as a podcast game if it didn't demand constant attention to notice the tiny difference in wall texture that denotes a shortcut through the level. You can kind of work out the rough location of the atypical flowers using the cartography feature but if you walk by one without seeing it to activate that's a whole lot of time-wasting one way or another - either going a longer way 'round every time you go through the floor, or backtracking (wall-hugging the whole way) when you realise you've come suspiciously far without finding one.

I picked this game up on recommendation that it's got a similar setting to Made In Abyss - which has one of the most well established and interesting settings I've seen, with each dungeon layer having its own distinctive physics/biology quirks that've spawned an entire ecosystem of wildlife unique to it - In Etrian Odyssey the first three layers are forests. It's also a ridiculously long game; those three forests are something like the first 30 hours of the game, and I've put in too much time to just drop it now, I have to see where the story goes and, to be fair, it's not doing anything bad. It's just so boringly paint-by-numbers.

My favourite character so far is Raquna who - somehow, in this generic medieval fantasy setting - is a normal Canadian girl from regular old Ontario who likes maple syrup.

This review is for the Switch port - which I put 35 hours into before putting it aside because of a mix of difficulty and performance issues (I got to High Dragun only twice just to take a death to the game hitching at the crucial moments of its final phase attacks). Those hours alternate between fun and frustration but I would still recommend the game on a platform without the Switch version's problems, albeit only to someone who enjoyed challenging games with no difficulty options.

Despite everything Gungeon has beautiful presentation. The title screen and theme is drop-dead gorgeous, and that carries over to the game with bouncy pixel art (which is given lots of time to shine with the huge variety of weird weapons), little touches like your home base changing depending on how many deaths you've had, very amusing puns, and lots of physics particles bouncing everywhere. Unfortunately that seems to come with occasional issues technical issues like hitching when entering crowded rooms and big slowdown with lots of bullets on screen (like against the second and "final" bosses) and the "Speed mode" option makes those worse if anything. Mechanically it's similar enough to give me that Binding of Isaac fix but really it's a whole different beast. Runs are much longer and the game is HARD (reaching that aforementioned second boss took 14 deaths), although it does feel fairer than BoI - runs are much less tied to random item drop rates and more skill based, rewarding you for dodging the bullet hell nightmares. Yes, shockingly it is actually more bullet hell than BoI, and unfortunately there is the odd unfair enemy placement where immediately upon walking into a room you'll get smashed by 2 shotgun shells blocking you in right next to the door with not a lot you can do about it.

The reason runs seem less influenced by item luck is that, so far at least, I've only found items that are more sidegrades or slight buffs - none of the mechanically game-changing insanity of Isaac. So far the pickup that messed with the game's fundamentals the most was probably a Gears of War style active reload which, while fun, doesn't really give a huge benefit or change of pace. Unfortunately there are also a few too many hidden stats at play to make sure you don't get too lucky, for example the chances of getting more than 2 good items in one run drops down to 5%, which means the really fun OP good luck runs you could very rarely get in BoI just aren't possible. Another strange choice (although it might just have been my luck) is that it takes a long time to unlock your first NPC/permanent upgrade shop, something which I can see putting of people who want at least a little sense of progression, but that does have the benefit of meaning when I finally did get a shop I had more than enough money to get whatever I wanted. The shops don't get new items until you buy everything on sale, and there isn't a way to remove them from the item pool à la Crypt of the Necrodancer, so you're sometimes forced to spend money on things you don't want and that you know will actively make the game harder by stopping you getting the items you do want. NPC quests are much more interesting and involved than any other Rogue-like I've played, like Ser Manuel's story and filling up the breach with rescued people.

The teleport system is a big Quality of Life feature: almost every room of interest or branching paths has a teleporter in it that you can near instantly go back to with a tap of the map, completely cutting out boring backtracking, although to balance that any items left in a room (except health) are gone for good. It's much appreciated that they want to minimise the player's wasted time in a game that you'll likely be making hundreds of runs in. On the other hand Weapon Enhancements (combos) aren't as obvious as I'd like - neither telling you which items combine, or the new effects they gain - and because you get so little info about guns/items in general they can be a bit nonsensical, with the only way to know them being to memorise the whole list.

On the Switch version the achievement system is missing, which is a much bigger problem than in most games as it's not just trophy-hunters that are affected. the achievements each unlock a good weapon/item for use in the dungeon and provide a short-term goal to work towards at the start of the game: keeping minute-to-minute gameplay rewarding, incentivising trying out different playstyles and making the overarching long-term goal of exploring the Gungeon seem less daunting. While the weapons still unlock when you reach the achievement milestones they aren't visible in-game (and there isn't even an internet browser on the Switch to keep a list open on, thanks Nintendo) leaving the only sense of progression to unlocking shortcuts, which are intended for experienced players and necessitate lots of luck and near-perfect no-hit runs. The lack of achievements basically cuts out the whole early-game of Enter the Gungeon, and all they need is a Shovel Knight style "Feats" list to fix it. If it sounds like I'm blowing a small issue out of proportion with that imagine playing a Breath of the Wild without any shrines, as they serve the same moment-to-moment gameplay purpose.

Art is generally pretty nice, bodies and in-world paintings especially, but the animations are stiff and janky as all hell - the walking animations in particular look like everyone has a plank shoved down the back of their trousers. Background art is atmospheric and colourful but nothing amazing technically, and misses lots of opportunities to have movement (especially in the final area). Prologue story set-up is quite absorbing but there's some very clunky exposition and both the characters and world-building don't seem to have any depth to them for the first part of the game. You've got truthful genie, and fire guy (even though it makes more sense that the jinn should have the fire powers, what with being made of smoke) that are nice, but pretty on face level, and your character has no personality to speak of. Magic is just a kind of "It's there, it works how it needs to at the current moment," sort of deal.


Some conversations are "ambient" in that you still have full control while they're playing out. The first time this happens is a good showcase for that tech, although the subtitles desync from the voicelines, but interacting with certain objects when one's happening cuts it off, with no way to replay the dialogue you've missed so you just have to wait awkwardly for it to finish. The pause menu also for some reason DOESN'T pause these conversations. Mouse control feels bad - by default it's set to go way too slow, but after being cranked up it seems to have a bit of a delay from when you start moving the mouse and has a form of 2D aim assist that is more of a nuisance than a help. Screen tearing happens whenever the camera pans.

The first big moral decision is a good one, not because the choice is an ethically hard one, but because of the strain it'd put on the character ENACTING your choice. Which was a good sign, meaning that I was already caring about a character that early in. It does take quite a lot longer than it should but right around when you get a few more characters to talk to the original 2 start gaining a bit of fleshing out, rather than just repeating their main character traits. Hearing the (now very varied) perspectives on different things is cool, and the later additions are all really interesting characters. The moral choices are almost all NEARLY as strong as that first big one too.

Being able to choose which 2 characters to take with you on cases feels good, giving some variation in dialogue and how puzzles are solved to arrive at the next plot point. This isn't enough incentive to be worth replaying cases (the differences are very slight) but it does help keep the game fresh being able to spend time with whoever you feel like at the time, and having their different tools at your disposal. The team switching mechanic isn't flawless however: because all puzzles must be balanced around having anyone in your party the game cheats a bit - saying you must always have one of the original 2 team-mates, so there are only 5 team combinations (but that is plenty). More annoyingly the game will sometimes say "No, you need this guy." for reasons that aren't justified to the player, or just switches out your party mid-case if needed. Sometimes this switching is well justified in-universe and sometimes it's too transparent ("Oh, you're here now, how did you get here? how did you know you were needed?" "I just did." "Okay."). That said it's impressive how smoothly this system is handled overall, especially with all those fully voiced conversations. Dialogue only once felt out of place despite all those variables (Logan forgetting his lengthy conversation with a Wall Street ghost) and that was after one of those mid-case forced switchups.

Puzzles are more straightforward than the average point 'n' click game but if anything that really helped my enjoyment of the game: there are no obscure "combine the rubber duck with the elevator" solutions and with your team-mates normally being very helpful you probably won't have to reach for a walkthrough once, which is great. Only one case had me looking for a guide and that was half because the second half of the game can be completed in any order, so by dumb luck the abilities I had to use hadn't come up in quite a long time and I'd forgotten they were a thing. Overall I think they got the puzzle/difficulty balance pretty bang on.

In traditional adventure game style it seems like whichever choice of people you take will always somehow be the wrong one. This was particularly annoying when one of the characters tried to make taking the ghost-studying fire mage to deal with a ghost and wood spirit retro-actively seem like a bad decision because she was a better fighter. Fire mage. Come on. The game's ending also falls into the trap of reeling all your choices back to you in a big twisted-negatively list. It's a tired trope that hasn't been effective since the first (AKA good) season of Telltale's Walking Dead, and that helps contribute to the game not quite nailing the landing. It's a serviceable conclusion but not quite a great one. That said the third act way twist is very good and hinted throughout by almost none of the supernatural entities you encounter being pure evil - they all have some sort of relatable, or at least understandable, motive. I was disappointed the worldbuilding and intricacies of its supernatural systems never got too in depth, even by the end of the game. It's got tone-setting and atmosphere but when it leaves things unexplained it doesn't fell like it's doing so to preserve a sense of mystery, more like it's just saying "We're doing Urban Fantasy, you know how it goes by now." where it could've had details that built it apart from that.

The game is fully voice acted (a rarity in the genre and a first for this developer) but there's only one BAD bit of voice-acting in the game: it's a low quality, crackling recording for Chipman the baker who, Luckily, plays a very small part. All the other voice acting is good and the main characters' grew on me until I REALLY liked them by the end.

It's good, really damn good, but it just isn't Brawl 2. And after putting in 40 hours I've realised that's what I really wanted - especially when it comes to single-player. Recommend if you have even 1 person to regularly play with/against, skip if not.

I love that they give you so (comparatively) few characters to start with and then unlock them super frequently, so new players don't get overwhelmed by choice and the rewards are constant. It's weird they didn't take this approach with the stages too though - best I can tell they're all there from the start, crammed in one huge list - and I miss the "new stage has appeared" feeling. Classic mode is super fun. Each character has their own rule tweaks (like Kirby's campaign starting you damaged but dropping food items everywhere) and the adaptive difficulty seems perfect: I almost beat it first try, the final boss launching me on literally the last hit of health, but every fight was so close as to be super tense and satisfying when I won. CPU difficulty in general seems geared up, with the random challengers posing a very real challenge now. The idea of having the beautiful mural as joint reward, difficulty select and payout multiplier is a cool one, although the payouts being several different types of virtual currency in Smash Bros of all places makes me feel a bit melancholic, as do having mobile game real-time wait periods in the single player mode. Music is amazing, as you'd expect, all the menu theme remixes of World of Light are beautiful, my only complaint so far is my personal favourite is still the Brawl theme, and it's woefully under-represented: you can listen to it in the menu, but for some reason can't select it to play on the non-character themed Smash stages despite every other Game's theme (and even the Brawl remixes of earlier ones) being there in the list.

On the subject of Brawl I'm going to be honest - Spirits are a weak replacement for trophies, and I miss them. I get from a development point of view how much of a nightmare trophies were - having to custom make gorgeous 3D models of obscure retro games that may have only ever been seen in 2D - but that amount of time and love put into them was what made Smash feel like such a celebration of gaming, both old and new. I could deal with the comparatively basic licensed 2D sprites and artwork if they hadn't also got rid of the interesting written paragraphs that went with each one, saying which games they appeared in and obscure trivia about each of them. Sure this let them double the amount (544 trophies to 1297 Spirits) but when they're reduced to just a single picture and a gameplay trait (or lack of) it's not an improvement, they're just Stickers again.

The World of Light single player mode is an interesting concept of fighting hundreds of 1v1+ matches with fighters themed to match those spirits/stickers (for example fighting an Arcanine would really be a giant sized, firebreathing Duck Hunt Dog), there are loads of creative ways these have been implemented - with by far the best being a recreation of the whole Street Fighter 2 story mode (I found it amazing even as someone with barely a familiarity with Street Fighter, I bet a fan would've been freaking out) - and the Spirit levelling/combining adds some complexity, as does the FF sphere grid of upgrades, and it's all set in a 2D painted overworld in the vein of Cuphead (although nowhere near as beautiful) but I'm really not enjoying it as much as Subspace Emissary, and it's not just those cheap feeling wait timers. While in Brawl the singleplayer had a whole host of gorgeous cutscenes to tell a progressing story, and for everyone's inner fanboy to mark out at, there's only the introductory World of Light cutscene and a few variants on an ending cutscene at the end. There's no co-op and without those cutscenes as well you don't get that great feeling of seeing all these famous mascot characters teaming up to fight the big evil.

The world which Brawl put together with its interconnected levels and well laid out map screen felt cohesive in a way that Ultimate's doesn't, merely being a flat backdrop between warps to random stages, and most of all there needs to be some variety. Subspace's platforming-y levels got a mixed reception but playing them inbetween the boss fights and more traditional Smash stages felt like a journey, and added somethng different. Now they're gone it's revealed just how samey playing hundreds of CPU Smash matches in a row can get, even with the creative rule changes. I guess it could be argued that the tougher Spirit fights could be called boss fights - they certainly feel like one when you run into the massive difficulty spikes - yet they mostly feel unfair because of how many advantages they have to give your opponent to negate the randomness of a one-stock Smash match. Prepare to get rocked 20 times by Rayman before you get his health down to where yours even starts, as he has every possible advantage, but then you'll get into the fights immediately before and after that one only to cheese a win in ten seconds and 3 attacks, without even getting hit. Difficulty settings really don't seem to do much to even this out either, and when you've almost learned one of the difficult one's patterns enough to beat it they'll jump off the stage and die leaving you the world's least satisfying victory and no way to get a proper rematch.



20 hours on and whoo this single-player is long, I just got to what I thought was the ending only for a twist and a whole second half that looks about the same size. If you were loving World of Light I'm sure that'd be a great surprise but to me, even though I'm not hating it, I'd kind of been ready to be done. Easy to hard battles are now at a 10:1 ratio and I've stopped even looking at the special rules because they normally don't matter for the 2 seconds the matches last. I've fought the same horde of tiny squirtles so many times that the lack of variety is grating. In fairness the second half seems to have a greater concentration of boss fights and cool themed areas like the Street Fighter one that do break things up nicely although the basic gameplay is still the same. I got unlucky with Giga Bowser being the first boss because, while they haven't all been great, that is the only one that is straight up bad. My only problems with them are how many are repeats of Brawl bosses lacking their original impactful entrances and story relevance and how they're all just easy enough to beat in one go - even the supposed main antagonist was a million times easier than the more bullshit Spirit fights with jobbers like Pauline and Dr Wily. Dracula is actually really good though, and the others are at least pretty decent. The final fight is legit really hype and adds some of that variety at last with a Doodle Jump-like vertical platformer and the really cool chance to play as Master Hand (!) plus taking on both big bads at once, and it is the only fight in the whole mode that gives you more than one stock and therefore that feeling of all these cool characters actually working together (although still no much needed co-op mode). Naturally I took Kirby to strike the final blow - starting it as it ended, and with the being most experienced at hunting Eldritch horrors. The reward for completing World of Light: getting to pick the menu music, and having an almost full roster of characters now, is a pretty damn good one. The whole story mode took about 25 hours but I would suggest skipping it and just playing the other single-player offerings like Classic Mode which, except for the lackluster bonus stage that now remains the same for every character, is pretty damn great.

The general gameplay is good fun, with the unique hook being that each level is a floating diorama that must be tilted and spun to look at from every angle - making controlling the camera just as important as controlling Toad himself. These environments are as varied as they are gorgeous - being an isolated cube floating in an endless void lets the game go from desert world to creepy Luigi's Mansion style world one after the other - although that does make them feel completely disconnected from each other in what is supposed to be one long expedition. There are plenty of levels, and each can be replayed 3 times in different ways if you want to, but there's no forced incentive to do so because the game is confident in how fun they are. There are some setpieces that manage to be truly impressive in how much spectacle they provide while sticking wholly to the game's isometric style and Toad's limiting skillset, such as a beautiful train level and even boss fights. Even with all those levels there is one type that sticks out as head-and-shoulders above the rest: The minecart levels, but they're woefully under-represented as they make up only 4 of the 82 stages. These levels are the closest thing we've ever got (and likely ever will, sadly) to a Pokémon Snap sequel and I replayed them a bunch of times each. Aiming with the Switch's gyro controls you travel down a fixed minecart track, throwing turnips at all and sundry to rack up the biggest score you can, having to look all around you to find all the hidden objects and bonuses.

One of two big negatives is the controls: the game staunchly refuses to let you change the keybinds, which wouldn't be such a problem if camera zoom (something you'll be wanting to use more often in this game than any other) was mapped to the triggers rather than as a three stage toggle on the x button that you had to swap through every time you had to zoom in a bit. Far more annoying is that neither handheld or docked mode is quite perfect, so you'll have to be constantly switching between the two if you want to have the best time you can. The Switch is wide enough that mandatory touch controls - using the middle third of the screen to interact with wheels and blocks in particular - is annoying even for someone with huge hands, and while the docked mode's pointer makes THOSE levels much more fun there's the glaring omission that you can't aim with it in the cannon or minekart levels, forcing you to switch back to handheld because those excellent levels wouldn't be half as fun (or possible) without gyroscopic aiming.

The other downside is the repetition. Everything I just gushed about in the first paragraph is from the first "episode" of four and while the puzzles are of course new, everything else - cutscenes, setpieces, and bosses - are all the same as the first time around. They're tweaked in subtle ways, making them JUST different enough to still be fun rather than feeling like a waste of time, but if they'd put in the effort and creativity for new bosses as good as the first two rather than repeats it would've been amazing. Getting to take control of Toadette in these later episodes is fun, and some of the levels got hard enough that I hit Game-Over a couple times which surprised me by not even being a punishment really, more like giving you a quick pat on the back and a "get back in there" in the form of a bonus to top your lives back up. If you fail a level too many times they'll even give you an optional invincibility mushroom to make sure you aren't stuck for too long, which really made me appreciate how the game is accessible to anyone without relying on an up-front easy /normal difficulty select.

By the time I hit the ending, though, I was getting frustrated by the repetition and (as if to hammer the point home) the ending cutscene is exactly the same as the end of episode cutscenes from the first 2 "episodes" except for a tiny but awful twist that, rather than being any sort of satisfying conclusion, made the whole game feel like a throwaway advert for a bigger game. Out of curiosity I looked up the Wii U version's ending, and that was a bit more digestible because it had more to it and was at least directly linked to a sequel, whereas this time it's just the latest Mario game they need to shift copies of. It feels strange being so cynical about a game that at first oozed playful fun out of everything down to its idle animations but that's how much it felt like a cop-out reusing so much of the game, right down to the final cutscene.

If it wasn't for that ending and the game had finished after episode one I would've rated it highly for sure, and if it had kept that level of creativity up for the latter 3/4s as well it might have been up there as one of those perfect, tight experiences that take one simple idea and explore every facet of it - ending up as one of my favourite games, like Katamari Damacy did. I'm not saying that less is always more (certainly cutting the length down by that much would've made it hard to justify as a full price game) but in this case where the "more" is so much less, I could have done with less more.

My full video-review:



Colourful, fun physics platformer that doesn't really push its boundaries. The game's plot (if it can be called one) can be summed up in one sentence, which is good because the characters, although cute, don't really have enough personality to carry a story in the style of the mascot platformers it homages. Short at only 15 levels it nonetheless doesn't really have enough substance to stretch any further as each of the four worlds introduce only a single new coil in the game's, nonetheless solid, base gimmick.

Although it's a bit unfair to say the first world just screams "Stock Unreal Engine assets" and reminds me of those "Mario in Unreal 4" videos which just dump a character model into a bloomy field. World 2 is the best and introduces water, making the levels look absolutely gorgeous and proving very satisfying to slither through. World 3's only gimmick is a fire theme and, with it, hot coals - just another variant on spikes - as a hazard. World 4 doesn't really offer much to sink your fangs into at only 3 levels but uses strong wind to make coiling hard around platforms a necessity and finally makes Doodle less annoying by forcing him to earn his keep flying you around the levels. Physics are impressively put together- as they have to be with the game's enjoyment entirely based on how good it feels to control Noodle's movement - and I didn't have one physics based problem in the whole game. I did, however, have two hard crashes on level 12, losing all progress in a particularly long and difficult part of the game.

Possibly my all time favourite game, definitely my favourite Zelda-like (including the actual Zelda series). I've played this through to 100% completion with every rerelease it's come out with and that probably works out to 150 hours that I've enjoyed every second of. This is without a doubt the most beautiful game to exist: the character designs, artstyle, music, and environments that are each more gorgeous than the last make it a joy to look at and being made by the predecessor to Platinum Games (Bayonetta, Metal Gear Revengeance, Wonderful 101) you better believe it plays like a dream too.

The scenarios and locations you visit are imaginative in a way that means you'd never predict some of the places you end up and even by the highly important (to me) metric of how good the fishing minigame is it's still way up there. The only negative is the re-use of boss fights. They're all excellent the first time round but - thanks to a boss rush at the end of the game - some you face three times with only minor changes.

The best way to play is still an emulated version of the PS2 original as all later releases are missing the climactic ending song, but, really, just go grab whichever version you'd like, this is a perfectly fine port other than that one tiny niggle (although it is disappointing that the Switch version chooses not to use the Celestial Brush pointer controls that could've made it THE definitive version).

Possibly my all time favourite game, definitely my favourite Zelda-like (including the actual Zelda series). I've played this through to 100% completion with every rerelease it's come out with and that probably works out to 150 hours that I've enjoyed every second of. This is without a doubt the most beautiful game to exist: the character designs, artstyle, music, and environments that are each more gorgeous than the last make it a joy to look at and being made by the predecessor to Platinum Games (Bayonetta, Metal Gear Revengeance, Wonderful 101) you better believe it plays like a dream too.

The scenarios and locations you visit are imaginative in a way that means you'd never predict some of the places you end up and even by the highly important (to me) metric of how good the fishing minigame is it's still way up there. The only negative is the re-use of boss fights. They're all excellent the first time round but - thanks to a boss rush at the end of the game - some you face three times with only minor changes.

The best way to play is still an emulated version of the PS2 original as all later releases are missing the climactic ending song, but that's such a minor niggle just go grab whichever version you'd like. The only exception is the Wii version which, despite making excellent use of the pointer for the Celestial Brush, maps attack and dodging to directional waggles of the nunchuck, which couldn't be less reliable. The Switch version unfortunately chooses not to use the pointer controls that could've made it THE definitive version but is otherwise an excellent port.