Adventure

the combat and animations are fun. the story's decent (has a lot of potential but doesn't really deliver). the concept of GTA in hongkong is awesome. Overall the game is underwhelming, but still a pretty decent/fun experience. Would recommend picking it up if it's on sale.

ds stylus controls made this one my least fav

Here nintendo took the already tightly designed galaxy and polished it to an absolute mirror finish. Yoshi is back and I just know that blimp fruit powerup has activated something in the young minds of many players. The hub is much less soulful than galaxy 1's observatory but also much less obtrusive to navigate. And just what are the hell valley sky trees?

This is it. At the age of 8 I received a wii with this game for my birthday and from that point on was locked into the archetype of mario autist. No regrets. Sheds many of the movement options from sunshine and even 64 in exchange for some of the tightest level design the series has ever seen. Constantly throwing new ideas at you and moving on before they overstay their welcome. Freezeflame galaxy my beloved. Gorgeous orchestral soundtrack. The motion controls are fairly unobtrusive and hold up today but over covid I 100% the game on dolphin using an xbox 360 controller and it played just as well. Exactly one bullshit hard part (you know the one, where you gotta clear all the rubble by throwing bombs on an extremely short timer) but fortunately that's optional.

The game content however can get a little overwhelming. Even though the mastery system says it doesn't have any dependencies from prior expansions, you will find that you might need masteries in Heart of Thorns to do Visions of the Obscure or End of Dragons. A good amount of content in the later expansions assume that you have access to high level stuff like Griffons or Jade Bot Mastery. At least this is a sign of a game that doesn't release new stuff just to render them obsolete once the next expansion comes. I like the combat style as it feels more actiony than MMO-like.

There isn't too much to be said. Everyone's played Minecraft. Everyone loves Minecraft.