Topic: User Impressions/Reviews Thread

Expand

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Platform: Nintendo Switch

Playtime: 130 hours

The series known worldwide as "Animal Crossing" began life as a Japanese-only N64 game titled Dōbutsu no Mori (Animal Forest) that was released in 2001; Nintendo's last game for the system, and one designed to utilize the 64DD add-on that enabled the game to run on a real-time clock. An expanded port of the game released for the GameCube the next year, and this was the version that was first introduced to Westerners. An utterly unique experience, the player found themselves living as a villager amidst a variety of intelligent animals in a community as they worked to pay back loans they owed to a local tanooki slumlord named Tom Nook and collect various fish, bugs, and fruit to sell and catalog, as well as a variety of things to stuff in their endlessly customizable homes.

As previously mentioned, one of the primary innovations of the game was how it ran on a real-time clock, requiring players to engage with the game at certain times to attend events or collect certain bugs or fish that, for example, only appeared at specific times of the day. More crucially, the real-time structure of the game fundamentally changed how players interacted with the game. While methods existed and continue to exist to circumvent this real world flow of time (primarily, changing the system clock on your console to trick the game, a process informally known as "time traveling"), the game was designed in a way to encourage patience and daily engagement. Get an upgrade that expands your house, for example, and you have to wait until the next day to see what it looks like.

The game, and the series more generally, kept players engaged by constantly anchoring progression and a variety of in-game events in the near future. This incentivized players to play for reasonably short periods of time every day, or every couple of days, as opposed to marathoning it for a finite period of time and then hanging up the hat, so to speak. Such a structure, as one might imagine, changes both the nature of content in the game as well as its distribution and the way this distribution relates to the player experience more broadly. This might speak to one further innovation of the series: it was a single-player game that was never designed with a finite end in mind.

As one might imagine, an endless grind where one acquires stuff, works to pay off said stuff, and then works some more to buy more stuff jives fairly well with the cheerful anarcho-capitalism of the series. This was always balanced somewhat by a sense of community within the game, however, and one had to learn to tolerate and live beside one's neighbors, eventually finding a place within their community. This idea of being one person among many began to disappear with the last game in the series, Animal Crossing: New Leaf for the 3DS. In this game, you weren't merely a villager, one among many, just some normal schlub living their life. Instead, you were the mayor in town: the big cheese. In previous games, this role was filled by an elderly tortoise named Tortimer, but now the role went to the player, and with it a subtle but substantial change in design focus. See, being a mayor meant that the player had a lot more input over the shape of their town. It meant being more important than your neighbors. Intended or not, this started the change of Animal Crossing from being a game where one finds one's place within a community to being a game where one is building a community.

Perhaps that's too kind. The primary advancement in New Leaf was the new level of control provided to the player allowing them some form of self-expression outside of just the stuff they horde in their house. In Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch, the entire world around you becomes a canvas for your self-expression. Gone is any semblance of democracy or governance in your environment. While the game doesn't explicitly say so, your character is essentially the god of their own little domain. In the context of the game itself, you and a couple of other villagers tame and start to build a little civilization on a deserted island. Everything starts from scratch, and it soon becomes apparent that the only limitations on your degree of control over the world is in the power of the tools available to you. This begins with the usual: axes to chop down trees, fishing poles to catch fish, shovels to dig up fossils and make holes for new trees that you want to plant, etc. This eventually, in the post-game, extends to having godlike control over the shape of the world around you, but I'll get into that later.

Readers will notice my use of the term "post-game," which might seem odd in the context of a game that never technically ends. While it doesn't necessarily have a traditional story campaign, for the first 60 - 80 hours of playtime, the game does have some level of scripted progression to it and a goal of sorts. You see, in the world of Animal Crossing, the musician KK Slider (who presents as white, bipedal canine) is the hottest celebrity on the block, and, as your little island develops and starts becoming a proper little civilization, the goal of the game becomes to make a good enough name for yourself that the popular musician will host a concert on your island. You do this by developing your services and economy, attracting more villagers to reside on your island, and generally making the place presentable (weeds and items strewn about the place will count against you). After convincing him to visit your island, the scripted events included with the game's base content come to an end, and you're free to develop things on your island however you see fit to do so. Scripted events will happen over time, though, as special events, holiday celebrations, etc. Usually with exclusive items and rewards associated with completing the activities associated with these events.

Easily the most substantive change in the game comes in the form of its new crafting system. In previous Animal Crossing games, you bought all your stuff at a store, but New Horizons has overhauled the formula to allow for the ability to use raw materials to craft tools, furniture, etc. Use axes to knock wood out of trees. Use shovels on stone to collect stone, iron, etc. This dramatically changes the experience of the gameplay. You can't just craft everything at once, of course. Rather, your character has to learn DIY recipes in order to be able to craft something. The game drip-feeds you recipes every time you play: you might learn some from a book you can purchase from your local store. A helpful villager might be building something in their house, and offer to teach you the recipe if you drop by and talk to them. Some recipes you learn just by collecting items and engaging in activities. More often than not, however, you learn recipes randomly from balloons that will lazily drift across your island every five to ten minutes, or from bottles that will wash ashore on the beaches of your island.

Long-time players will understand immediately why this is such a big deal. For one thing, it incentivizes players to actually interact with the environments around them every day, which I found simply wasn't the case in previous AC titles. Sure, a piece of furniture would occasionally fall out of a tree if you shook it on the right day, or hitting the right rock with your shovel might give you some money or a precious mineral, but, more often than not, you were simply killing time, given the utter lack of reason to do much of anything in previous titles. And this really becomes the biggest difference: the presence of a crafting system, and interacting with your environment to gain crafting materials, grants a sort of inherent value to everything in the game. No longer are you planting flowers or trees for the hell of it. There's a nest of rewards and incentives when it comes to doing just about anything in this game. Which brings me to the next big, game-shaking alteration in New Horizons: Nook Miles.

In New Horizons, you have "Nook Miles" rewards available to you all the time. These are reward points that Tom Nook will send to you automatically for engaging in the sort of mundane activities that people have always done in Animal Crossing games. Catch three fish? Plant some trees? Catch bugs? Attack rocks with your shovel? Virtually anything you do can provide you Nook Miles, which can be redeemed for a variety of special items only obtainable via those points, as well as for bell vouchers ("bells" being the universal common currency of the Animal Crossing universe), special recipes (especially expensive end-game recipes), and tickets you can use to visit randomly generated islands that might have different sorts of fruit (only one type of fruit, which can be sold and eaten, and which are an important source of reliable income generation via fruit trees, will be native to your island; every other fruit must be acquired from random islands or from other players) or flowers to import to your own island. While this arguably detracts from the identity and relaxed vibe of the series, which was one of the few to not treat the player like they were a rat in a Skinner Box, I can't deny that Nintendo overhauling the gameplay to add a much larger focus on rewarding players for doing stuff has made the game more enjoyable. Operant conditioning doesn't work IN SPITE OF how our brains work, after all, but because of it, so I can't be too mad that Nintendo's revolt against traditional game design in this series is beginning to come to an end.

Another important function of Nook Miles is how they wordlessly and organically function as a sort of tutorial for new players. If you're new to the series, you might not understand what actions are available to you, and even seasoned vets will need some sort of guidance on the new mechanics. In rewarding players for engaging in normal activities, Nook Miles silently guide one to build a conceptual framework for what is possible and desirable to accomplish in the game with surprising grace.

It's also worth mentioning how changes to your environment also help to structure the game and keep the player on a silent guided path early on. Your island is actually fairly large (larger than the towns in most previous Animal Crossing games, perhaps aside from the more sprawling towns in the original game), and, this time around, is segmented into sections naturally by large streams and imposing cliff faces that are impossible to traverse early on. The game limits your movements around the island in this way for several days until you progress enough that items such as the vaulting pole (to jump across the streams) and ladders (to climb the cliffs) become available to craft, allowing you to more thoroughly explore your little island. These navigational methods are, themselves, a bit of a hassle, and the game will reward continued development with even finer innovations for making your town livable: you'll eventually be able to build bridges over the water and ramps or stairs to connect to the cliff faces. It's many tens of hours before the next evolution of your ability to shape and improve the environment becomes available, but it's a doozy.

Easily the most highly anticipated change to the formula by returning fans was the inclusion of terraforming options. While not available until the post game, they fundamentally change the feel and flow of the game by allowing you to make significant alterations to your environment. This change perhaps represents the largest symbolic departure from the "just live with it and adapt" vibe of previous games, where you sort of came to love your town's imperfections and crafted your life around them. Not only do the tools allow you to reshape cliffs (or remove them entirely), you can now completely alter the streams and ponds in your island, lay out paths with a variety of tiles, and, in general, radically alter the look and function of your environment.

The change to the flow of the gameplay becomes pretty immense if you get really into it, though. I found myself ignoring the usual activities of fishing and chatting up my villagers in order to immerse myself in the activity of (very painstakingly) altering my island and turning it into something that appears far more civilized and structured than it originally was. Interestingly, this tool completely removes the need for bridges in the game (which, as previously mentioned, were a gating tool early on) because you can narrow the width of your streams in places so that it's short enough to hop across.

Unfortunately, despite some small changes made that improve certain aspects of the Animal Crossing experience from previous games, New Horizons is still plagued by tedious QoL problems across the board. Every mechanic, menu, and function of the game feels clunkier and less user friendly than it realistically should be, especially given how long this series has existed now. WHY do I need to have crafting materials in my pockets in order to use them when it would be so much more convenient to draw them directly from my storage? WHY is there still not an optional reticle that shows me where I'll be digging when I use a shovel? WHY doesn't the game use some sort of obvious visual indicator to help me diffentiate which flowers I've already watered instead of waiting a few seconds to see which flowers are lightly sparkling? WHY can't I craft in batches instead of having to stand around tediously watching pointless animations and pressing the A button over and over in order to craft multiple items?

The list goes on and on. I could probably have filled this review with nothing more than nitpicks about QoL problems with this game, to be honest, but I believe I've made my point. This all doesn't really surprise me, though. The same team that design the Animal Crossing games also design the Splatoon games, and those are also amazing, fun, gorgeous experiences filled with infuriatingly needless little niggles that, taken together, bring the experience down as a whole.

I do want to get into the 'real' problems with this game, though. Because there are several, although they don't all become apparent until you've played tens of hours into the game. Probably the most structural rooted problem with the game is the way changes to the game have made money too easy to come by and not useful enough. Between item duplication glitches, the ability to craft items which can sell for high prices, playing the stalk market to make millions, random islands that can be crafted into tarantula/scorpion factories (which sell for extremely high prices), fossils that you can sell once you've filled out your museum, fruit trees that simply never die, etc. it's simply much too easy to make money in this game. Now, this wouldn't be an issue if late-game functions gave you more stuff to do with money, but the island designer tools trivialize public works projects like the construction of bridges, and most of the best items and functions in the game are not unlocked with money, but with Nook Miles. The ease of making money combines with the existence of another form of currency which is actually quite a bit more useful to devalue what is in your bank account. Once you're done with the story campaign, you pretty much only use money to buy stuff.

Another issue I have with the game is that, to go along with the increasingly decreased social focus of the experience, villagers are nicer than ever, and they never really want to arrange meet-ups or inconvenience the player in any way. Now, this really started to become noticeable in New Leaf, where a lot of the more famously grouchy and/or rude villagers began to lose that edge to their personality. Negative character traits are all but gone in New Horizons, and with it goes the sense that you're living with actual personalities. They never want to come to your house, play games, etc. anymore, either. They limit all of their interactions to short dialogues, and don't really do anything with you other than give you stuff or occasionally ask you to deliver a present to someone else. Now, don't get me wrong: the writing in this game is still delightful, so it can be fun to see what your residents have to say, but gone is the feeling that they're friends or the sense that you have any responsibilities to them or obligations to improve their lives at all. You aren't here to build a community: they're here to make your island look nice and habitated. If anything, I felt more connected to one of the island administrators, Isabelle, who will often sign off her intercom address to the island at the beginning of the day by recalling some small episode from her life to share with everyone else.

One of the most controversial aspects of this game was the decision to make it where each Switch console could only host one island. That is to say, everybody who tries to play the game on different accounts on the same system will be sharing an island. This WAS how it was treated in earlier home console entries in the series, but the implementation still really sucks here. Sharing an island means sharing resources, so one player accomplishing tasks in the town that day will make it where other plays are deprived of the ability to engage with those same tasks. Given that these tasks comprise the vast majority of this game's actual playable content, it should quickly become apparent why the decision to make players on the same Switch share an island would be frustrating. A far larger irritation, however, is how only the person who first started the island is allowed to see the opening sequence or actually progress the game. The game treats additional villagers like red-headed stepchildren who are unable to unlock major new features or advance the game's campaign in any substantive way.

As if this all didn't entail enough sacrifice for the horrible "island sharing" concept (an approach which should have been retired with the advent of modern consoles featuring profiles and account systems), it's also the stated reason why Animal Crossing: New Horizons doesn't support save data transfer of any kind. There are other Switch games which weirdly disallow cloud saving, but this is the only game on the console, to my knowledge, that won't allow you to manually transfer your save data to another console. Simply put, your island is trapped on whatever Switch console you create it on, convenience be damned! Nintendo has said it developed some sort of secondary, arcane cloud backup system for this game in case the player becomes separated from their original Switch, but this does nothing for people who might want to, say, play this game on multiple Switch consoles, such as the original model as well as the more portable Switch Lite.

Realistically, the only benefit of the "one island per console" approach is that a family can sit together and play on one consoles. But almost nobody is going to want to do that, because the game isn't designed in such a way that multiple people can easily entertain themselves with the game. Which actually brings me to my last major complaint about New Horizons: the game does a horrible job of giving players, whether on the same island or from different island, reasons to spend time together. The previous Animal Crossing game, New Leaf, actually had a fun tropical island players could unlock early on. This island featured multiple large insect, sharks, ocean swimming, snorkeling, and, most importantly, cute, multiplayer-friendly mini-games called Island Tours that would allow people to actually have fun together. New Horizons, for all its advancements, does nothing to make it fun for friends or family to spend together within the game. As with the fore-mentioned boring random islands, the multiplayer element reveals itself to be not only tedious, but also devoid of anything in the way of substantive gameplay content.

But enough about that. The game as a whole is delightful, and I'd like to discuss other aspects that I feel were handled well. I'll start off with customization and the treatment of gender in this game. Previous Animal Crossings featured limited to no customization of the player character's appearance early on, and, then, still made it a pain to alter your appearance even when it became more accessible. In the previous game, New Leaf, it was often difficult to find a haircut you liked, because you first had to unlock a stylist late-game, were limited to one snip a day, and, here's the catch, the process of actually selecting a cut was arcane, and guided by weird questions that didn't feel like they directly related to the sort of appearance you'd like in anything other than a general sense. So to receive a nice haircut, you often had to deal with days of experimentation, which was particularly irritating if you just wanted something that complemented a new outfit nicely. Well, the days of having to suffer with your appearance are gone: just as this game gives you godlike control over your environment, so it also gives you a massive degree of control over your own features. All you need is a mirror in your house and you can style, not only your hair, but also the shape of your face and body however you like. You also gain the ability to unlock new haircuts with Nook Miles over the course of the game.

The game is particularly welcoming to people who want to play with or mix up the gendered aspects of their presentation. Unlike the previous game, characters do not even express surprise if you appear to be cross-dressing or wearing non-traditional clothing for your gender. As in New Leaf, all clothing is gender neutral, and so you're free to mix and match the articles you wear in such a way as to freely express yourself in this game. This also mixes well with the ability to customize your personal appearance, as it becomes very easy to adopt a new look if the feeling strikes you. New Horizons, like the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077, dispenses with binary gender options as much as possible. It also doesn't rub this stuff in the noses of people who are more comfortable with traditional gender roles, though: Animal Crossing is out to make sure everyone has a good time, not to promote a political agenda.

One other thing I thought I'd mention on this front, the game features a variety of wands you can craft, which have an interesting function to them. Once you obtain a wand, you can register outfit profiles, and then use the wand when you're out and about to automatically change your appearance to match the registered sets of clothing. This reduces the need to waste time in your wardrobe whenever you'd like to change up your look, and, although it doesn't technically change what you're wearing (the wand oufits are a sort of visual trickery that can be undone in an instant), it's a wonderful time-saving tool.

One area where this game excels most is in terms of optimization and visual quality. Simply put, this is a beautiful game no matter how you play it. It's one of the few "big" Switch games that'll play at native res (720p) when undocked, and the resolution boost when docked is also obvious. It also plays a perfect, seemingly locked 30fps, making for a reasonably smooth gameplay experience as well. It might be tempting to look at the simplistic character models and not think a lot is going on under the hood, but there are actually a number of advanced visual settings on display here. It's not uncommon for the game to look a bit like the new Link's Awakening, where characters can look like cute little plastic dolls in a toybox. The use of color is simply superb as well, and you'll see some of the prettiest lighting effects this side of The Witcher 3 when the time of day is right. This might be one of the prettiest games on the Switch.

Shadows are now realistically handled as well. This is mostly a good thing, but it has actually made it more difficult to shoot down the balloons that drift across your island every 30 minutes or so. In New Leaf, you knew exactly where to stand to target them because the drop shadow was always directly under the balloon, but now, with the balloon's shadow being cast out in a more realistic fashion based on the position of the sun in the sky, you have to sort of develop a feel for where you need to stand in relation to the balloon in order to hit it. Not a problem for me, but it took weeks for my poor mother to figure our the positioning that would allow her to constantly pop them.

One of the reasons I've stuck to a more generalized overview of the structure and game mechanics is because, like a few other Nintendo games this generation, Animal Crossing: New Horizons feels like what might be called a "service" game. At launch, it feels a bit anemic content-wise, with several in-game mechanics and services streamlined or stripped out entirely, but over the course of months and years Nintendo adds more layers to the gameplay. Granted, Animal Crossing has always had themed holidays and events, but they're already slowly patching in new mechanics and collectibles to this game. The plan seems to be to consistently support the game with new content and events over time in order to keep people engaged.

In summation, while I don't know that Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a quantum leap forward in game design like games such as Fire Emblem: Three Houses or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild were for their respective series, it is difficult to shake the sense that, in the vast majority of respects, it has made previous games in the series feel less desirable to revisit than ever, much like Animal Crossing: New Leaf before it. This evolution of the formula doesn't come without some growing pains, but I'm enjoying the game quite a bit and am excited to see what it looks like after a couple of years of support. For the moment, there aren't too many better games to waste time with in this very scary year we're all living in.

8.5/10 initially.

7/10 upon reflection months later (January 2021). The game's flaws become more crippling to the experience as time goes on. In particular, the shallowness of the social simulation gameplay.

Expand

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door

Time to Completion: 36 hours

Platform: Nintendo GameCube

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is the first sequel to Nintendo's N64 Mario-themed JRPG Paper Mario, developed by Intelligent Systems, which others might know primarily as the developers of beloved Nintendo-exclusive strategy games in the Fire Emblem and Advance Wars series.

In TTYD, you play as Paper Mario, who travels to Rogueport, a rough-and-tumble 'hive of scum and villainy' that is infested with thieves, brutes, and is controlled by a local crime organization loosely styled after the American Mafia after Princess Peach writes him a letter telling him about a treasure map she bought. Princess Peach is kidnapped by a mysterious group of villains called the X-Nauts, and Mario is swept up into a globe-trotting adventure as he seeks to rescue Princess Peach and find a group of ancient artifacts called "crystal stars" that are used to unlock the ancient Thousand Year Door nestled within the depth's of Rogueport's sewers.

As should be immediately apparent from my description, the world of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is one rife with far more danger and filled with far more personality than is typical of most games associated with Nintendo's famous plumber. This game is full-to-overflowing with new and unique characters, most of whom are reasonably fleshed out and either motivated by some form of past trauma or who are enmeshed in the Indiana Jones-style adventure narrative that spans the game's various episodes.

Another atypical element of this game is the environment diversity. Mario games often tend to be set in very... samey locales, but TTYD features a new and usually very creative environment to explore every time the player progresses into a new chapter: standouts include Twilight Town, a 'cursed' place whose residents are transforming into pigs (with all of the accompanying existential dread one would expect from the people waiting to turn) as a result of some unknown paranormal force; Glitzville, a town built around a massive battle arena; and Keelhaul Key, an isolated island hiding a pirate treasure trove.

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, like the N64 original before it, is a linear, story-driven JRPG. As such, Mario gains experience points when he levels up, although the way in which the game allows you to power up Mario is interesting. Every time Mario gains 100 experience points, he is allowed to power up his character in one of three ways: increase Mario's HP, his flower points (flower points, like mana points in other JRPGs, are used to perform special moves), and his badge points. In TTYD, badges function a bit like a combination between normal equipment in JRPGs and Materia in Final Fantasy VII; it takes a certain number of badge points to equip a given badge,and badges can do anything from increase the player's HP/FP total to granting them immunities, damage bonuses, or allowing them to use special moves. One's badge loadout, as such, will have a dramatic impact on how well one fares across the game's various turn-based battles.

Mario is never alone in battle. Alongside him, he'll almost always battle with one of a variety of partners throughout the game, who are also fully controllable by the player, and who can also be customized via badge points to some extent. These partners can easily be rotated in and out of active use at any time, as they're all traveling in Mario's party. The use of partners outside of battle is mandatory to progress in the gain, as they each have special abilities that the player needs to use to uncover more of the environment. For example, one of your partners is a bob-omb who can be used to blow holes in structurally weak parts of the environment. Additionally, hidden collectibles called Shrine Sprites are hidden throughout the game, and these can be used to further upgrade your partners and give them access to more powerful hidden abilities.

The signature and defining innovation of the Paper Mario series is its approach to turn-based battles. After the player selects an action for a character to perform in battle, there is always some sort of skill-based input required from them afterward. This can be anything from timing button presses to pull of multiple attacks when Mario bounces on an enemy's head to inputting long strings of button commands to properly pull of a particular skill. When Mario uses his hammer to attack an enemy, the player physically pulls back on the GameCube's springy analog stick and then lets go at exactly the right moment to maximize damage.

There is more to it, though. Battles in this game are contextualized as performances, akin to something you'd see in a stage play. As such, you're always playing to an audience. Throughout the game, the size of your audience will increase, and interaction with them will become particularly important in some of the game's lengthy and moderately punishing boss battles. Audience members will frequently attempt to throw objects on stage; sometimes, they're hostile and will throw objects that damage Mario. Other times, they're friendly and will throw helpful items to aid you in winning the fight. The player is prompted to press a button on their controller any time this is about to happen in order to have Mario, or one of his partners, rush out into the audience and attack the offending culprit. This can happen regardless of what the audience member is about to throw, though, meaning that carelessly pushing the prompt any time it pops up can prevent you from obtaining much needed health restoration items, or items that boost your abilities somehow. The player manages a star meter in battle, which fills when Mario and his partner pull off attacks particularly well via timed button prompts, appeal to the crowd directly, or otherwise get their audience pumped, and this meter is used to pull off a variety of special skills that tend to be extremely powerful and will often swing the tide of a losing battle when timed correctly.

In these ways, the battle system does an amazing job of making each encounter feel unique and fresh, and it's, quite honestly, one of the most engaging turn-based battle systems I've ever engaged with in a JRPG.

I already mentioned how partners can be used to help the player progress further in the game, but Mario also find upgrades throughout the game that allow him to assume new forms and travel to locations that were previously impossible to access. This world being made of paper, these upgrades usually turn Mario in some variant of paper object, such as a paper airplane, or a rolled up sleeve of paper. Each of these transformations is typically acquired in a new dungeon or area and is often needed to locate the dungeon or area's primary boss. Additionally, these transformations allow for an increased amount of possible exploration when the player is backtracking through the game's connected world. This incredibly Zelda-esque nest of lock-and-key game design makes it where the player is constantly incentivized to revisit locations they previously traveled through.

Another incentive to backtrack is that NPCs frequently change their dialogue in response to story events. I often find myself skipping optional dialogue in many older turn-based JRPGs, but I went out of my way to frequently speak to everyone I encountered in this game. Going along with the atypical flavor of TTYD, character dialogue is often snarky, disarmingly somber (I did a double take the first time I ran across a Toad pondering why he was even bothering to continue living his life), or even riotously funny. I don't think I've ever laughed this much when playing a game before. The superb writing in TTYD extends to both surprisingly nuanced characterizations of its main cast as well as witty banter, recalling a time when Nintendo's localizers knew how to flavor the writing in a game without adding doge memes.

Paper Mario's unique combination of flat, 2-Dimensional character models with 3D environments has always been incredibly striking, and it's not uncommon for these games to be the best-looking titles on their respective Nintendo systems. While the GameCube plays host to a variety of attractive games that have aged rather well over the years, almost nothing else on the system has aged as well as this game. The art design works so well that Nintendo could literally boost the resolution, change a few of the game's environmental models, and sell this as a brand new Switch game. It's flat out gorgeous. These screenshots aren't doing it justice, frankly.

Musically, the game has a decent amount of range, and tracks often suit the environments or situations they appear in. Apart from the final boss' theme (which I'm not going to link, because spoilers), none of the music in this game really stood out as something I'd want to listen to outside of the game. It's a decent OST, but in a game with so many excellent qualities, it stands out a bit as a weak point.

Every game has flaws, and TTYD is no exception to this truth. With that said, I really don't have a ton to complain about. I only have two major complaints. My first issue is with the side-quests in this game. In the hub city of Rogueport, there's a "trouble center" where people will commission you to help them out with a problem. Invariably, this involves backtracking to some previous location and finding or doing something. These quickly become monotonous, though, both because the majority of them don't yield amazing rewards, and because the side-quests themselves don't have properly engaging gameplay or narrative elements to make them feel worth while. Aside from one or two, they're a waste of time, frankly.

This kind of leads into my other complaint: backtracking sucks in this game. Granted, you'll eventually open shortcuts that make the various parts of the connected world easier to get to, but it can still take an uncomfortably long time to go back to previous areas in side-quests or even when you're just hunting around for missing collectibles in order to 100% the game (which I don't recommend, frankly). A big part of my issue with it is that these shortcuts are accessed via Rogueport's sewer system, and this environment is large and complex enough that I often found myself getting lost when trying to find something.

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door was a pleasant surprise. My first experience with the series, via the Nintendo 3DS' Paper Mario: Sticker Star, was negative enough that I was dissuaded from engaging with other games in the series for years. But, while it's not perfect, TTYD is one of the most compelling and consistently delightful JRPGs I've played in a long time, with awesome writing, a huge cast of lovable personalities, reasonably engaging storytelling, RPG mechanics that strike a balance between depth and approachability, and a fantastically quirky sense of humor and saturates the entire experience with personality.

8.5/10

Misc. notes:

• I was surprised by how decent the dungeon design was in this game, and how frequently I encountered puzzles in them. They're not quite as fleshed out as something like your standard Legend of Zelda dungeon, but they're still quite good.
• While the actual locations are often quite large and complex, the environments connecting unique locations are so linear that they feel like themed hallways. It's not a big deal, though, as these are often no more than a few screens long, and are used to add a sense of distance between locations. I do wish there had been more secrets in some of these connecting environments, though.
• I love how even several of the antagonists in this game have compelling character arcs.
• Some of the special abilities you can activate via the star meter are quite creative. One involves clicking on tiles that pop up with alarming speed in order to buff your attack and defense stats. Another, which feels like something ripped straight out of Okami, tasks you with free-drawing circles around groups of enemies to damage them. The larger your circle, the more enemies you can potentially damage; these also take longer to draw, however, so it often makes more sense to limit your circles to smaller groups of enemies that you do more damage to.
• Vivian is best girl. TEC is best boy. End of story.
• The player frequently receives emails from previously encountered characters, news updates on developing events in various locations, etc. These are sometimes informative and almost always extremely funny
• Luigi apparently goes on his own adventure, parallel to your own, and, if queried, he'll describe events that happen and people he encounters in often excruciating detail. It's a small, purely optional thing, but it's just another aspect of this game where the designers went above and beyond with the writing. There are even post-game biographies you can buy in item shops discussing the significance of Luigi's exploits.