amphibious_ReViews

Most of my gaming in 2025 was with Xenoblade Chronicles X. I picked it up on launch day in March, and didn't finish it until early November. Relative to my usual gaming consumption, I hardly played anything else during that time, devoting most of my attention to this release. I entered the game with the expectations that it was going to be a starkly different experience from the rest of the games in my favorite series, but also that I would still like it just about as much. On both accounts, I was nearly correct.   While some of the standards held by the rest of the series are disregarded here, Xenoblade Chronicles X was not as different from the rest of the games as I had anticipated. Because you control a customized character, the story makes room for you to have some agency, even in cutscenes, so the usual TV-show-like quality of the story is lost. One can (and I have) watch a compilation of all the main story cutscenes from any of the other games and it plays like it was design...

I knew that I was going to like the next Final Fantasy in my backlog, but it took me a long while to finally take the plunge. Most of the Final Fantasy's I've beaten in the past have taken a good long while to finish, always in part due to a mid-game motivation slump. To try and avoid that, I wanted to start playing when I knew I had the time to finish it properly. Now, I have good and bad news. The bad news is that I horribly misjudged this game's runtime and didn't even make it to the second half before Xenoblade Chronicles X came out and inevitably split my attention. The good news is that I still beat it, and it managed to become my favorite in the series so far! Final Fantasy VI, like the other even-numbered 2D entries in the series, places a high priority on the game's narrative. However, it also implements some degree of the mechanical freedom seen in FFIII and FFV 's job system. I didn't go back to my previous reviews to confirm this claim, but in m...

I have owned a copy of Pokémon Sapphire on the GBA for years, but I got stuck grinding levels for the same battle both times I started it, and ultimately gave up on it. I still wanted to play through the Hoenn region, though, and with the modernizations of the sixth generation, I was planning to do so via Alpha Sapphire. It took a friend who lives abroad to get me to turn my attention back towards the original release. He's working on completing his Pokédex in FireRed, so I lent him my copy of Ruby and agreed to play through Sapphire so we could exchange version exclusives next time he's in town. It surprised me how quickly I got hooked on the game this time around, despite my poor past experiences and my interest in the remake. In fact, I only meant to play it in bits and prieces, but ended up blowing through the whole thing in about a week! Pokémon Sapphire has all of the expected mainline Pokémon tropes, but I was surprised by how many additional gimmicks were stacked on top...

Postknight 2 is a prime example of how to properly monetize a free-to-play game. While there were still some aspects that I didn't love, it is clear that the developers respect their players. Similar games may use banner ads or unskippable pop-ups to supplement their micro-transactions, but Postknight 2 puts its players in control. If I wanted to, I could have played the whole game without seeing a single ad or spending a single cent. I had enough fun with my time in the game, and the incentives to watch ads were excellent, so I didn't take that approach, but I'm impressed that it was even an option. Postknight 2 is a simple action RPG, trimming down the genre so it's conducive to quick play sessions on a small screen. You take on the role of a fledgling postknight, and your job is to brave the dangerous wilds of your world in order to make all manner of deliveries. You'll face hostile animals, monsters, thieves, and more, so you'll want to be well-equipped. The...

While its sequel is an overall marked improvement, I felt like my journey through the StreetPass Mii Plaza wouldn't be complete without revisiting the original Find Mii. It may not be the one that I played the most, but I have a lot more nostalgia for this Find Mii than I was expecting. Something about it reminded me of playing the 3DS's built-in AR games in my brothers' bedroom while I was still discovering what the incredible new handheld could do. Thinking back on those times gives me a nice warm feeling that I just don't get with  Find Mii II . The original Find Mii is a relatively simple affair. There's no potion shop, no pairing up, no helper hare, and no branching paths. It's a linear quest where you use StreetPass-tagged adventurers to move from place to place and defeat the monsters that get in their way. This meant I couldn't cheese my way through with just one or two teams as I did in the sequel, but the journey was so much shorter that I didn...

The follow-up to the cult-classic EarthBound , Mother 3 never officially came to the West, but that didn't stop its fans from doing the work themselves. I'm so used to translation efforts for games that I care about petering out before anything playable comes from them, so I was shocked to learn that the fan translation for Mother 3 came out as soon as it did. With an initial Japanese release in 2006, the translation patch came out just two and a half years later and expertly replicated EarthBound's voice and tone. While an official translation would be amazing to see someday, there are certain elements to the game that I think will prevent that from ever happening, and other than a few Easter eggs, I can't see anything that Nintendo would need to change from the fans' amazing work anyway. However, the fan translation wouldn't be very exciting if the game itself wasn't as well-crafted as it was. I loved how Mother 3 approached its narrative. As an evolution ...

I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to complete Find Mii II. Unlocking only after you beat the original Find Mii at least twice, Find Mii II is longer, offers multiple branching paths, requires multiple playthroughs of the same routes for completion, and has a secret second quest that does that all again, just bigger! For a long time, the Find Mii games were the only way to unlock new hats for your Mii to wear in the plaza, so their slow grind was still rewarding, but it truly felt like I was never going to be able to finish it. Thankfully, with the combined powers of NetPass and a 3DS Play Coin hack, I finally collected all of the hats in both quests and can move on with my life. Find Mii II is functionally and aesthetically a very similar game to its predecessor, yet it has enough improvements to effectively replace the original. For comparison, the relationship between PAC-MAN and the far superior Ms. PAC-MAN comes to mind. Just like in the first game, your goal is to save ...

My return to Fantasy Life did not end up going how I expected it to. I first got this game for Christmas in 2014 and it quickly became one of my absolute favorite games for the 3ds. I only played the paladin life, but I loved the gameplay, the story, the characters, and pretty much everything else about it. With nearly a decade separating me from that initial playthrough, I thought I'd try the game again, but go through all twelve lives this time, and maybe even try out the DLC that I never bought as a kid. All the same magic from my first playthrough came back for a little while, but trying to play through all twelve lives soon transformed one of my favorite 3ds games into a mundane chore. I still love Fantasy Life, but when I get the sequel on Switch, I won't be repeating the mistakes I made here. I would describe Fantasy Life as a cross between a life simulator and an action RPG. The gameplay has a good, albeit a bit generic, foundation of combat and exploration, but the tru...

I first tried playing the original Super Mario RPG on my SNES Classic years ago. I was actually really enjoying myself, but I bungled the state-saving functionality and lost hours of progress in one disheartening swipe. After that, I put the game down with only a vague intention of returning. Fast-forward to the June 2023 Nintendo Direct and a full remake of the game was announced for Switch, opening up the door for me to try the game again without feeling too much like I was rehashing all of my lost effort. It seemed a little weird to be buying the game again, but playing it on Switch with this shiny new coat of paint was definitely worth the entry fee. As the progenitor of both the Mario and Luigi and Paper Mario series, Super Mario RPG obviously does something very right. This is evident in its solid formula that uniquely combines RPG tropes and Mario's more action-oriented roots. This combined DNA pervades the whole game, but is most clear in two key elements of the experience....

I was born late enough that all the discourse I heard about EarthBound described it as a hidden gem, so much so that I wouldn't even consider it "hidden" anymore. Fueled by these discussions and a curiosity about the enigmatic psychic kids in Smash Bros., I was excited to give the series a try. However, being who I am, I couldn't start with the sequel when there's a whole NES predecessor I still hadn't played. After multiple attempts over the past few years, I realized that was a losing battle and ended up playing EarthBound without finishing Mother (EarthBound Beginnings). While I'm a little disappointed that I couldn't maintain my motivation in the NES original, I'm ultimately glad I gave up because EarthBound is just so much better. The SNES is an absolute juggernaut when it comes to RPGs, but this game is genuinely unique amongst its peers, truly standing out amongst the crowd. EarthBound is obviously a JRPG, and it doesn't hide that fact f...

We had all known the standalone chapter of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 was coming at some point. It was announced alongside the expansion pass with a "by December 2023" release date, and had received a teaser in February that got me very hyped. I don't think anyone was prepared though when the full trailer dropped in April that announced the release date was a mere week away! I had been holding out for the possibility of a physical edition like there was with Torna , but with no sign of such a thing in the trailer, I downloaded the DLC that same night. I was in the final chapter of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and cleaning up the side quests at that point, but I kicked it into high gear just to be ready. Even so, I was not prepared for what Future Redeemed had stored up for me. This is a game specially handcrafted for the biggest fans of the Xenoblade series, and that means it was made for me. Serving as a prequel to Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Future Redeemed answers a lot of question...

I was heavily invested in Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition when Xenoblade Chronicles 3 was formally announced. Even though I had been hearing the rumors for weeks, maybe months, at that point, the Nintendo Direct still had me giggling like a toddler on their birthday. Upon seeing a game that combined the worlds of the first two numbered entries, brought back old characters, and just looked excellent in its own right, I was sold before the trailer was half-finished. I was just wrapping up Future Connected when my pre-order arrived, but I was pretty quick about starting what would become one of my favorite video game experiences of all time. It was a slow journey, as I became a dad less than a month after the game was released, and a new Pokémon game came out in the middle of my playthrough, but oh boy was this the best thing I've played in a long time. It took a good while for me to understand my feelings about this game, but I can now confidently say that Xenoblade Chron...

As the biggest multimedia franchise in the world, Pokémon has a lot riding on the timely release of its mainline games. Everything from cartoons to cards relies on the characters, locations, and pocket monsters introduced in these titles, so a delay of a game would mean the delay of everything else in the pipeline. Obviously, that can't be allowed to happen, so no matter what state a game is in when the release date rolls around, it's gotta come out. In the past, that hasn't been much of an issue for our pals at Game Freak. However, they took a huge gamble on their latest release by switching out the series' familiar linear structure for a brand new open world, and they paid the price. Pokémon Violet is riddled with performance bugs and graphical glitches that gave it a pretty bad name in the video game community. I experienced many of these issues myself and was disappointed by them, but I was far too impressed and engrossed by the rest of the game to really care that ...

Four years ago, Nintendo debuted a brand new IP as a part of their mobile game initiative. In less than a month from the writing of this review, that IP will be shelved alongside the likes of F-Zero and Kid Icarus . As someone who just picked up the game for the first time a couple months ago (just before in-app purchases were suspended), I'm disappointed that the franchise seems to be ending already, but I recognize that I didn't really do anything to encourage Nintendo to keep it alive. Nonetheless, I'm glad to have had a chance to play it, and I genuinely enjoyed it far more than I had expected to. As it turns out, playing a game in its end-of-life has its perks too. Dragalia Lost presents a very familiar gacha-RPG structure, but with fairly unique g for what it is. The summoning, team-building, upgrading, and just about everything else you do while you aren't playing through the stages, is ripped straight from the genre playbook. I actually had to double-check th...

It took me absolutely forever to beat Final Fantasy V. I came off of FFIV on a high, started this game right away, and absolutely tore through its opening. I was really enjoying the game, especially thanks to all of the humor and pop-culture references included by the localization team. However, by the time I started to reach the late-game content, something just wasn't clicking, and I put it down for almost two years. Revitalized by all the time I need to fill in the middle of the night with my hungry newborn daughter, I went and tackled the rest of the game. It took me a while to realize it, but after finally beating FFV , I concluded that it managed to combine an upgraded version of FFIII 's class system and a lighter version of FFIV 's story and structure to make a near-perfect sequel. I was just too grinding-averse at the time to finish it in one go. Following Final Fantasy IV 's direction, FFV begins the game by introducing you to the party members one by one, ...