Pac-Man World 2 Re-Pac is a short, sweet, simple, and straightforward 3D platformer that I think is worth the $30 price tag. Colorful, bouncy, and puzzle-like. The biggest downside is that the whole game takes less than 10 hours to complete, but it was fun while it lasted!
Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles releases today, and then the next 3 Thursdays are also going to be great: This Thursday (10/2) = Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2; Next Thursday (10/9) = Yooka-Replaylee; The Thursday After (10/16) = Pokemon Legends: Z-A.
Jumped to a random spot in that and looked at the buildings. Still seems to be a weak spot of the series that the background is more boring than a forest or similar outdoor design when they focus so much on the city.
Definitely agree. I don't care much about graphics or realism, especially in a Pokemon game, but this environment is certainly simple and not very intricate. There are ways to make the surroundings feel less empty while still working within the hardware parameters of the Switch 2.
I've been playing quite a bit of Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, and I think my initial expectations for this game were a bit too high, because of how much I loved playing Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (which is a completely different game from Final Fantasy Tactics). FFT:TIC is the remastered version of the original FFT, and I had never played the original FFT. I'm a fan of Tactical RPGs - games played on giant environmental chess boards, where armies are moved piece by piece and engage in turn-based combat - like FFTA, Fire Emblem, and Advance Wars. There is a lot I like about FFT:TIC, and there are a few themes that are frustrating to me.
Voice Acting: 10/10... the actors absolutely crushed their roles Music/Sounds: 10/10... on point for cutscenes and battles Art Style: 9/10... beautifully remastered pixel art, rarely fuzzy Classes/Jobs: 9/10... most are great, a few are lazy or too reductive Skills/Versatility: 9/10... solid customization options, some redundancy Combat UI: 9/10... clear, helpful, easy to understand for strategizing Maps: 8/10... colorful, compact, sometimes cramped/claustrophobic Story/Characters: 8/10... interesting plot, slightly cliche/superficial Overworld UI: 8/10... navigating menus/jobs/shops is generally fine Battles: 7/10... some redundancy, optional grinding is unrewarding Writing/Dialogue: 6/10... non-stop over-the-top rhetorical style/devices
I've been going back and forth between grading this game as an A or an A-. The writing/speaking style of the game doesn't personally appeal to me, but that's not a huge priority. For RPGs, I care most about my enjoyment/experience with battles. The combat is great in some ways, and boring in others. I was also both astonished and annoyed to realize that even after grinding tons of sidequests and leveling up my characters, I didn't feel any stronger. And that's because all the enemies always keep up with your level and strength, so even when I have more gear, HP, MP, and skills, the monsters still take the same number of hits to be killed, and I'm never any safer or better equipped. If I double my HP, it doesn't matter because the enemies now deal double damage; if I double my damage, it doesn't matter because the enemies now have double HP. I spent a few hours grinding out optional battles just to unlock some additional classes/jobs, but I ultimately didn't feel as rewarded as in other games because the battles didn't get any easier or more interesting. The extra effort didn't pay off, which was a notable letdown for me.
That being said, the game is still very fun and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys Tactical RPGs
Original FFT is top3 game of all time for me and I have played Tactician (hard game of the remaster) from the start and that plus the voice-acting makes the game just awesome.
Also grinding actually helps since your mastered classes/ability combos should dwarf anythign the AI can throw at you. :o Especially the later classes are just so much better! What difficulty have you been playing?
ah yeah then that's what the mode wants you to feel. :D if you play normal then you get the normal progress feeling where more grinding = more overpowered and progress. Tactician is the one where you should have to think in every battle
A mysterious 4-minute Pixar-style video was just posted by Nintendo:
No confirmation yet on what it's referencing. Could be related to the upcoming Nintendo movie though!
My initial guess is that this is actually related to Pikmin. Some of the items look like they could be carried by small Pikmin hidden behind the items, and there are flying Pikmin too (to account for the flying pacifier). Additionally, at around 1:21 in the video, when the baby's face is facing the screen and looking at the close-up pacifier, for just a second in the background (left side) there is some fuzzy movement, which could be red Pikmin with white flowers on their heads, walking underneath the crib.
Pokemon Legends: Z-A comes out this Thursday! I think the real-time cooldown-based combat is going to be a great change, Pokemon Legends: Arceus is probably my favorite Pokemon game of all time, and I'm hoping that this second Pokemon Legends game will be just as good, if not better, than the first.
I'm pretty skeptical about being as blown away with Z-A as I was with Arceus though. For one thing, Z-A seems extremely limited and small compared to Arceus. Maybe there's a surprise underground/catacombs, similar to The Depths in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, or maybe you really can leave the city, but there's been no evidence of either yet. I just can't wrap my head around having hundreds of different Pokemon within a single city's limits, especially when there don't really appear to be many designated biomes. I suppose they could double the number of Pokemon by having some appear only at night vs. during the day.
I've also never really enjoyed temporarily changing Pokemon through mega/dynamax/terastallizing power-ups. Additionally, I didn't really like Lumiose City in Pokemon X and Y (and I thought the X and Y games were just okay, too): https://tl.net/forum/games/515297-nintendo-switch-thread?page=214#4272
That being said, I'm hoping that Z-A will change how I feel about mega evolutions and Lumiose City, but it also has some huge shoes to fill, as it follows in the footsteps of Arceus.
On October 13 2025 02:10 Laurens wrote: Arceus was a glorified tech demo, and that's being generous. Will happily give Z-A a skip. How you can rate that game so high is a mystery dbp
Pokemon came out when I was entering into 5th grade. Between the anime and the first generation of games, a lot of kids envisioned a world where most Pokemon would be out in the wild, the same way actual animals were. The Kanto region was fantastic and the tall grass of Red and Blue were convenient places to store invisible wild Pokemon, but realistically they would be out in the open too, swimming and flying and traveling in groups. Getting to experience all that visually in Pokemon Legends: Arceus and explore completely wild territory - not only before the Pokedex, but even before so many Pokemon were caught and domesticated - made me feel like a kid again. Pokemon Legends: Arceus is the closest Pokemon game to what ten-year-old me envisioned it would be like to exist at the beginning of the Pokemon world, which I always wondered about.
That being said, Pokemon Legends: Arceus definitely isn't perfect. There were nearly zero trainer battles, which I had always enjoyed, and some of the research tasks were frustrating (for those of us who wanted to 100% the game). Pokemon Legends: Arceus significantly broke the mold and took a lot of chances - even when it came to regular combat - which I respect, though I can also see why some Pokemon fans would be frustrated or disappointed by it. For me, the game pulled on a lot of sentimental heartstrings from my childhood in a very unique way - in a way that repeating yet another region-plus-gyms game hadn't done in several generations.
Also, warning: Pokemon Legends: Z-A leaks are circulating the internet, so if you're worried about spoilers, maybe stay off of social media platforms for the next few days! The game officially releases on Thursday.