I am well aware about how much people dislike Nintendo as a company and they are right to do so. They try to sue anyone who even comes near their trademarks, do copyright claims on content they dislike and all sorts of stuff that is legally within their right but just kind of considered to be a dick move. However, I am a Nintendo kid, I grew up with a Gameboy Color – I still have my purple one with the Pikachu holder – and swapped to the Nintendo DS when I could afford one. I loved playing Pokémon as a child and even though my mother absolutely hated those games, thinking they got me addicted to video games, I was obsessed. I remember that I would make my own text-based Pokémon game with a friend of mine to substitute the one on my Gameboy because I wasn’t allowed to play. We would basically just imagine that there were wild Pokémon everywhere and then battle them. I’d worked out an entire system when it came to leveling, experience points and attack values. Man I wonder why they never figured out I had autism back then. Either way, there is something about Nintendo games that brings back that childlike wonder and I don’t care if the money goes to the devil himself, I’m buying every new console and game on day one. So with that out of the way, what games have I been playing and what do I think about them? Well let’s start with the bad ones.

Pokemon Legends

Yeah, I was looking forward to these games a lot and I was very disappointed. When I originally returned to Pokémon Scarlet after the Switch 2 came out and it got a large boost in performance I was very surprised by how much I enjoyed it. More than Shield or the Pearl remake, that much is for sure. So the Legends series were a way for Pokémon to become something more than it was by adding some new mechanics and making it a more modern game. It did that, it just so happened that I strongly disliked most of the new mechanics that it added. Roaming Pokémon – like Scarlet had as well – is very cool and being able to just throw a ball at them in the overworld makes catching them much more convenient and streamlined. Unfortunately that is where the praise ends. Both Legends Arceus and Legends ZA have a system where the wild Pokémon also attack the player directly. I did not like that mechanic one bit. Having to focus on the battle as well as having my character dodge and sometimes just get knocked out by random attack from offscreen is so frustrating. Some days while I was playing the game I wanted to headbutt the wall, I was so annoyed. And adding to this were a bunch of RNG mechanics that really felt like they shouldn’t have been that heavily reliant on RNG and at no point was this worse than during the DLC for ZA. Having to grind for berries to make donuts and there being no real clear reason to which berries drop where, you just have to go around and do random dungeons until you get what you need. It also added a way to make catching shinies much, much easier. Seriously, I caught an entire box full of shinies in like a week. It kind of makes it feel like it’s not really an accomplishment anymore. The fun of it was how stupidly long it took, that was the point. They hold no actual extra value for the game anyway. But at least Legends ZA was great for helping me get closer to a complete living dex in Pokémon home. I’m missing only 11 mons now, 4 of which I should be able to get if I replay Scarlet. But that’ll have to wait until after Winds and Waves release next year, because I’ve had enough of Pokémon for a while. At least the mainline Pokémon games, that is.

Pokopia

I’ll be honest, the first four or five hours of this game left me incredibly bored. With little unlocked and not a very clear goal in mind, this game felt like a more boring version of Animal Crossing because I wasn’t playing it with friends. But once things started to get rolling and I figured out a bit more how the game clicked it was over and I ended up spending so many hours in this game. Building this thing, going to a Dream Island, gathering some of these materials, finding some new Pokémon and then even going to the next area after rebuilding the Pokémon center. If I have one complaint about this game it is that some of the buildings take until the next day to complete which is a little bit annoying. If you like Pokémon, Animal Crossing and Minecraft, this game takes the best of each of those games and turns it into a very cozy game about building a town for all your new friends to live in. There’s nothing that requires any skill in this game, you can’t really fail and it’s just a nice time filled with positivity. If you’re a completionist like me, then you’ll have a ton of things to do in this game, from creating every different habitat to catching every Pokémon to finding all of the ancient relics, artifacts and CDs that you can then play. Pokopia is probably the best game that Gamefreak has their name attached to. I was surprised they co-developed it since initially I figured that a game this good couldn’t be made by them. If they have this sort of potential in them, maybe the next few generations of Pokémon might finally have some top-tier innovations. One can dream, right? I still have the Mystery Dungeon remake for the Switch 2 sitting on my to-do list but after that I will be a bit done with monster collecting games. Between all those Pokémon games and Palworld that have been several hundred hours spent on the genre and as much as I love it, everything gets boring if you do too much of it. Well, most things do, I have yet to get bored of Stardew Valley and Terraria, but we’re not talking about those games today. 

Donkey Kong Bananza

I’ll admit that I did not really grow up with Donkey Kong all that much. I remember borrowing Donkey Kong Country from a friend and playing it for several hours, but that’s the extent of my tangle with the monkey. When Bananza was announced it looked really good though, so I figured I’d have to buy it. I did, and although it took me a little while to actually get to playing it, when I did I loved it. Being able to run around the map and break everything around you in search for gold was such a fun mechanic. I like playing my Switch in the evening and chill games like this are perfect for it. I did struggle a bit with some of the bosses here and there, but not enough to really make it frustrating. I’m not a gamer, so I’m not very good at a lot of platformers, but I would recommend this one. I did stop playing after I finished the game but I know that my buddy’s son got every single banana you can find in the game and he’s like 4 or 5 years old. 

Mario Odyssey

I did not like this game when it came out and I bought it alongside my Switch. I severely underestimated my skill level when it came to handling a controller and I really struggled with keeping the camera in a good spot while I traversed the early levels. Thus I put the game away and didn’t touch it for several years. My experience with consoles had always been limited and the Gameboy and DS I grew up with also had very different controls of course. But when I picked the game back up earlier this year, I already had much more experience with using a controller and to my surprise it was now a breeze. This game felt very similar to Bananza in vibe, although the gameplay was obviously quite different. What I did enjoy was seeing New Donk City in both games, a place I was not familiar with, but one of the kids that I teach told me there’s a cool crossover and I definitely should play it. I’ll let him know my thoughts after summer break ends. 

Balatro

I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I ended up liking this game. I’m not exactly one for roguelikes, I prefer games I can keep building up my resources in without having to reset it. Sure, in a lot of roguelikes you get something to carry over to the next round, but I often find that it feels like too little progress in a lot of games. That’s more just a personal preference though. Balatro is a roguelike in the purest sense, where you start pretty much from scratch every time, although you do get to keep the jokers that you unlock. The goal of Balatro is to get a bunch of jokers and buffs onto your cards to score increasingly higher amounts of points with your poker hand. It’s a game where the numbers keep going up and they do so rapidly. The goal is to win a game with each deck at each difficulty level. I managed to do so after lots of trial and error. Then there were some other challenges for completion++ which I’m proud to say I managed to do as well. I even got a run to get to naneinf, which means you get a score so high that the game can’t count it and it is not considered a number. I did look up the way to do this though and it required a lot of retrying and some good luck. Highly recommend if you like numbers games, it helped me practice some quick math as well which is always nice.

Ori and the will of the wisps

What can I say about Ori? I don’t like platformers because I’m not very good at them. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not very good at a lot of types of games and if I’m not good at it, it’ll sometimes take the fun out of it for me. But Ori had such beautiful visuals and music and such a heartbreaking story that I decided to check out the sequel too. Now I was a little bit more used to the gameplay and the mechanics and although I definitely struggled to get through the game at times, it felt like the game was never truly unfair. It’s a beautiful game with wonderful graphics that I absolutely loved. The second game is even sadder than the first game and I loved discovering more of the world that we learned about in the first one. There’s a scene with a bird towards the end of the game that genuinely made me bawl my eyes out, and it’s not very often that a game gets me that emotionally invested. Both Ori games are short and sweet and if you even remotely like platformers you’ve probably already played them anyway.

Lastly just a quick overview of other things, because why not. I finished replaying all of Pokémon Sword recently to pick up some of the branched choice legendaries I was missing like Glastrier and Regidrago. I also played through Super Mario RPG which I thought was fine, but I didn’t enjoy as much as I would have liked. I am currently playing through the endgame of Pokopia and doing some landscaping in that game for fun, but I’ve also started playing Mario & Luigi’s Brothership. This is a game I vibe with. It’s similar to the RPG game but it feels more fluid and engaging. It reminds me a lot of the game Mario & Luigi Partners in Time which I played as a kid on a jailbroken DS. I had the strange thought that it’s a similar game to Expedition 33 and it kind of is. You have button timings for your attacks and dodges/parries just like Expedition 33, although this time you’re the Mario brothers and not some French painters. Either way, I’m having a blast and I’m thinking of trying to complete it to 100% which I didn’t do for some of the other games on here. I also think I might one day go back to both Bananza and Odyssey to get all the bananas/moons in those games. But first I need to finish these games I’m working on and then it’ll probably be time for the new Rayman game that is coming out in October which I am very excited about. But that’s me, please let me know if you’ve played any of these games and what you thought about them. Thanks for reading!