amphibious_ReViews

Super Mario Run came out when Nintendo was still testing the waters with their mobile offerings, and it shows. The game is entirely without microtransactions, but to play more than the first couple of levels, you'll need to pay a solid $10. That purchase price does net you a full Mario game that was intentionally designed for one-handed play during bite-sized sessions, but it feels grossly out of place on a platform largely dominated by free-to-play titles. I'm used to seeing console ports like the Final Fantasy series having relatively staggering price tags, but games designed exclusively for mobile rarely require purchases as large as that, at least at one time. Fortunately, once you jump that hurdle, the product you receive is actually pretty good. Super Mario Run is built on the familiar New Super Mario Bros. engine but has a few control alterations to make it feel more at home on mobile. As its title implies, this is a "runner" style game, with Mario consta

Pokémon Picross is a strange one. Not to be confused with the free-to-start 3DS  release of the same name, this Gameboy Color game was never actually released. It was almost entirely finished, and the leaked and translated version that I played felt like it was nearly ready to go, but it never actually made it out to the world in any official capacity. While it may have a few quirks, Pokémon Picross feels like it fills the roles of both a  Pokémon game and a  Picross game pretty well, making it a good time for fans of both franchises, such as myself. When it comes to Picross games, this is a fairly standard affair, feeling very similar to the likes of Mario's Picross , save for two Pokémon -focused features. The first is your partner Pokémon . Every few pages of puzzles, the game will show a mini interaction between you and a Pokémon  who can then appear on the puzzle screen as your partner. The difference partners don't change the gameplay at all, but it's a cute fea

After finishing the stellar Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney trilogy, I was skeptical that a follow-up could actually do the series justice (no pun intended). I failed to see how a quasi-reboot could manage to bring back the magic of the original series, especially with some rando as the new protagonist, but I was more than pleasantly surprised. Apollo Justice managed both to bring back the trademark humor of the original trilogy and to bring new life to the gameplay, resulting in a worthy successor, rather than a cheap imitator, of the Ace Attorney legacy. The story follows newbie attorney, Apollo Justice , who just wants to make a name for himself but instead finds his career sidelined by a surprising betrayal and has to drastically adjust his trajectory. What follows is a pretty standard affair for an Ace Attorney game - chapter-based visual-novel-style gameplay stuffed with wacky characters, clever twists, and an overarching plot that neatly ties everything together. It even relies

After I beat Xenoblade Chronicles 2 , I immediately bought Xenoblade Chronicles 3D and, just as immediately, proceeded to never play it. I definitely wanted to, but with it stuck on my 3DS , I felt more inclined to play my growing library of Switch games instead. Luckily, the game made the leap a few years later with some pretty impressive quality-of-life and graphical upgrades. Now that I have finished it, I'm glad I got to play the Definitive Edition, but I know this game is a fantastic experience regardless of the platform you choose to play it on. The premise for Xenoblade Chronicles starts out pretty simple. Playing as a young man named Shulk and his growing group of companions, you must try to save the giant titan on which you live from an onslaught of autonomous war machines known as the Mechon. However, no small part of what makes the Xenoblade series so good is the fact that the is so much more going on than you understand at first, and you won't fully understand i