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Charming the player with a whimsical art-style and an elegant, immersive soundtrack, Professor Layton blends puzzle and adventure elements to craft something distinctively original. Even if exploration boils down to shallow point-and-click gameplay framed by an endearing but forgettable plot, puzzles are stimulating and wonderfully diverse, challenging the player's observation, deduction and logical skills in rewarding ways, besides a few tedious, uncreative math problems.

The ways in which Drawn to Life breaks the fourth wall make the experience sweet and endearing, and its unique presentation delights with soothing tunes and exquisitely animated pixel art. However, the story is too bland to leave an impact, and gameplay is even more vapid: with extremely basic and mostly dull stages, platforming rarely gets interesting in challenge or structure, and while the drawing mechanic offers a charming degree of customization, it's nothing but a superficial facet.

It delivers an engaging story that, building on past plotlines, dives into the psyche of its main characters with compelling pathos. Combat, as usual, is enjoyably fluid but contentutistically shallow, and the game lacks Arkham City’s intriguing boss-fights to make up for it, but on the other hand stealth improved tremendously thanks to way more strategic options and diverse threats. Level design isn’t as tight and intriguing as Arkham City’s, but the Batmobile adds effective depth and variety to the experience.

Imbued with the same striking atmospheric artistry of its predecessors, The Last Guardian naturally develops its immersive story through gameplay as the bond between player and companion evolves. Pleasantly diversified puzzles challenge both brains and platforming skills in intriguing if not always intuitive ways, although the companion’s deficient AI sometimes makes them frustrating. Furthermore, the lack of meaningful threats deprive the experience from Ico’s thrilling sense of danger.

Despite an underwhelmingly barren map, the adventure within egrosses the player, tasked to seek dangerous massive creatures scattered throughout an enchantingly subdued, desolate land, and slay them in a series of wonderfully diverse battles involving the environment and the creatures' bodies in highly imaginative, captivating ways that challenge both wit and reflexes. Soaked in spellbinding, atmospheric artistry through the combined efforts of a **** narrative and contemplative mood.

Intuitive, dynamic and engaging puzzles organically lead players through the lonesome atmospheric environments of a wonderfully interconnected, imposing yet peaceful castle, while the threat posed by perilous platforming and hostile creatures create a delightful feeling of dread in spite of the simplistic combat, especially thanks to a perfectly placed checkpoints. A scarcely replayable but memorable journey where gameplay and story intertwine with powerful, mesmerizingly immersive results.

It barely attempts to improve the terribly repetitive exploration loop with only a few, meagre new features, once again leaving only the survival mechanics and rewarding strategy to engage the player, although the challenge is noticeably less thrilling than the previous game's. The story remains simplistic but improved drastically, as a cast of endearing characters unravels the mysteries behind an artistically vibrant, whimsical world balancing nicely humour, heartfelt emotion and dramatic pathos.

Despite a painfully repetitive, shallow dungeon-crawling structure, Mystery Dungeon offers a decently enteratining tactical experience thanks to a wide variety of Pokémon types, moves and items to strategize with, while exploration keeps the player decently engaged through its survival mechanics. The narrative, although weirdly paced and excessively juvenile at times, is a heartwarming story about unyielding kindness told with endearing whimsy but also excellently orchestrated emotional beats.

The game prioritizes combat above all else: the narrative is simplistic and sloppily executed while level design is dull with only some barebones platforming and shallow puzzles present to add some insipid flavor. Despite this, combat is engaging enough to make the experience firmly enjoyable, offering a nicely sized set of distinct weapons combining and evolving to allow great combo flexibility against a challenging set of enemies displaying varied attack patterns rewarding mindful, strategical offense.

UPDATE Pokémon Black introduces us to the Unova region, a bustling melting pot of diverse cities, settlements, folklore and ideas. That is the stage of the player's adventure as playfully vibrant, resounding musical pieces accentuate the lively nature of the region and permeate the journey with an endearingly exuberant feel. A journey characterized by a surprising amount of interesting character arcs, in a much more story-driven experience tackling unusually mature topics for the series like one's purpose in life, the clash of different ideologies, abuse and propaganda. Regrettably, all of this is done in a pretty simplistic way to avoid straying too far from the intended target audience, but it's nonetheless the most engaging plot and cast of characters in the series yet. Gameplay on the other hand doesn't do much to innovate the series' core formula, which can often be quite monotonous and repetitive especially by today's standards, but at least a pleasant level of challenge keeps the player on edge against the strongest adversaries, and the layered level design provides some rich, engaging exploration. Pokémon Contests do not make a return to leave room for Musicals, which are a dramatically worse side-activity with less depth, content and player agency.

UPDATE Pokémon Black 2 doesn't have a story as thematically rich and thought-provoking as its prequel's, but it's far from bad as it makes the most of its sequel nature, diving deeper into old characters and ideas and taking them in new directions, whilst also introducing a couple of new interesting plotlines. Gameplay-wise, the new PokéStar Studios facility is the endearing side-activity that Musicals failed to be, offering a really fun diversion and hours of hilarious cheesy dialogue, but the real gem of the experience is most definitely the Pokémon World Tournament. Acting both as an incredible treat for hardcore players looking for a challenge and a fanservice bomb, the World Tournament allows us to meet and fight every single Gym Leader and Champion from the entire series with remixed tracks and new teams in a variety of battle modes. It is undoubtably the richest battle-focused postgame content in the history of the main series. A beautiful way to celebrate and end the 2D era of the franchise.

Delivering an interesting story diving deeper into the grounded psyche of characters without forgoing its cartoonishly flamboyant elements, it also concocts one of the best combat systems ever through multiple playable characters each with their own mechanical quirks with varying degrees of cumulative technical complexity making up a rich, rewardingly deep, wildly expressive combat. However, level design is arguably the worst in the series with an excruciatingly monotonous, shallow exploration.

Stealth is basic and painfully unbalanced, and while Combat isn't much deeper, it nonetheless proves to be quite enjoyable thanks to a defined focus on fluid reactionary play, despite little enemy variety. Exploration, although heavily streamlined, is nicely diversified thanks to plenty of decent environmental interactions and some unique set-pieces. The plot isn't brilliant, but the combined efforts of the moody soundtrack, grim environments and lively dialogues craft a unique atmosphere.

The perilous journey through the artistically-inspired, visceral wonderland of Alice is very entertaining: while maintaining a general simplicity, level design morphs constantly as each area develops distinctly: descending, rising and twisting on itself while introducing new platform challenges, environmental features and gimmicks. However, combat is excruciatingly bad, annoyingly chaotic and tedious due to disproportionate hitboxes, erratic enemy animations and bosses with repetitive, dull attack patterns.

Although deepened, the fluid combat remains tediously limited at its core, as does the repetitive stealth, but the game entertains greatly in spite of it by taking the player through an intriguing variety of different battle scenarios, stratified maps, atmospherically immersive side-quests and dynamic boss fights interspersed with tons of simplistic but diverse environmental puzzles and interactions, while an engaging plot unites a huge number of historic Gotham characters into one cohesive narrative.

Although the story of Breath of the Wild is a lot more insipid than that of most previous entries, travelling through the game world is a joy thanks to the mix of tools at the player's disposal, allowing for wonderful levels of interactivity and rewarding freedom during both exploration and combat, and the sheer amount of content and situations to be experienced within the world itself. However, enemy variety isn't great, and combat suffers greatly from unbalanced mechanics and low weapon durability.

The world of Bioshock is artistically vibrant, highly atmospheric and filled with traps, defensive systems and hostile creatures to create a wonderfully tense journey characterized by a sloppy but nicely diversified combat, repetitive but pleasant additional systems to interact and manipulate the environment and optional moral choices to deepen the narrative. Alas, the total lack of any real penalty for death removes all challenge and lessens any feeling of dread that had been established.

Side-quests and boss-fights struggle with severe repetitiveness, and the side-activities scattered throughout the world, although varied, are monotonous and basic. Nonetheless, Ghost of Tsushima provides a simple but extremely engaging combat system that creates a wonderful tension with its fast-paced flow and focus on methodical reactivity, with many additional abilities and tools allowing for satisfying growth. Framing the gameplay, a beautifully crafted historical setting and serviceable plot.

Finishing what Drake's Deception started, A Thief's End explores the deeper bonds and emotional vulnerabilities of its old and new characters with grounded, believable nuance, crafting what is most definitely the best narrative in the franchise. Gameplay improved as well, but not as much: shooting remains basic although stealth now offers a soft layer of strategic freedom. Smiliarly, adventuring has been made somewhat less monotonous thank to mechanics that slightly challenge the player's timing.

Attempting at a more grounded story than previous chapters, Drake's Deception gives more depth to its main cast, but the plot itself is poorly written, with weirdly repetitive, unexplained plotpoints and aimless themes. Gameplay-wise, the experience is roughly of the same quality as its predecessor: puzzles are as awful as ever, and even if action set-pieces aren't quite as many as Among Thieves, it makes up for it with slightly deeper hand-to-hand combat and more complex, diversified maps.

Drake's Fortune's gameplay displays great heterogeneity by cycling through shooting, puzzle-solving and adventuring segments to keep the adventure varied and entertaining. However, the quality of the individual elements is mediocre at best: shooting is extremely limited with few weapons, little enemy variety and basic maps, puzzles are awfully bland and adventuring sections boil down to a tedious sequence of buttons presses. The story is serviceable, merely existing to justify the action.

Like its predecessor, it doesn't do anything particularly well: shooting remains basic although maps are now much more interestingly structured, adventuring segments are still mechanically poor, puzzles terrible and the narrative merely decent. What makes Among Thieves so decisively better is the way in which its multiple elements efficiently blend together to create exciting set-pieces challenging the player to move and fight in highly dynamic scenarios, with shifting environments and moving hazards.

Sound design, lighting design and a diegetic user interface work together to create an exceptionally unsettling, immersive atmosphere, helping Dead Space be memorable in spite of its simple, bland plot. Even if exploring is far from engaging, with monotonous level design and mostly basic puzzles, the experience remains decisively enjoyable thanks to a simple but unique combat system, rewarding precision aiming with some strategic nuance and a decent variety of weapons and creatures to slay.

While its repetitive and unbalanced real-time action strategy struggles to be entertaining, 13 Sentinels' narrative offers something truly special. With a non-linear, highly-interactive style of storytelling, the game dares to turn its overly complex but compelling plot into an investigative struggle for the players, challenging them to keep track of its huge cast of charismatic characters, emotionally-charged drama and fascinatingly structured sci-fi concepts, all of it told with a mesmerizingly unique art-style.

52/100 Pokémon Soulsilver recreates the world and experience of the original SIlver with a stunning amount of additions, modernizations and creative quirks that make this one of the best Pokémon games ever made. The original Silver was already packed with content thanks to the two regions and 16 gyms available, and the remake builds upon that even further incorporating the Crystal storylines, new areas, upgraded gyms with deeper level design, expanded story and Pokémon teammates following you on the field for immersion. So even though the core battle structure of Pokémon can be extremely repetitive and simplistic, this experience is nonetheless one of astounding content richness. Most notably, the new Pokéathlon facility hosts a rich selection of diversified action minigames, constituting a very fun breather from the usual gameplay. Lastly but not least, the Pokéwalker offers a revolutionary way to bring some of the game's experience into the player's real life routine, with a simple but extremely charming set of minigames and functionalities to make it work both on its own as a portable entertainment device and an immersive companion piece to the main game.

52/100 Devil May Cry 4 lacks the great weapon and enemy variety of the previous installment, and attempts to make up for it with a couple of new mechanics that add interesting new twists to the flow of combat, giving the gameplay a solid breath of fresh air, but this trade-off can only do so much to cover for the massive recycling of many bosses and areas, leading to some majorly boring sections after the halfway point. Nonetheless, most enemies and bosses offer a pleasant fair challenge and/or push players to master the new mechanics in engaging ways, even if the boss design of DMC3 remains more polished and layered. Level Design also gets noticeably weaker, with beautiful settings to look at, but essentially returning to the extremely simple maps and barebones progression of DMC1 with little platform challenges. On the other hand, the camera decisively improved, finally managing to efficiently keep the focus on the enemy, only rarely failing. Narratively speaking, DMC4 follows the path laid by the previous entry with the same exaggerated over the top action interspersed by more dramatic emotional bits. The new main character is sympathetic and the atmosphere is a pleasant departure from previous titles, but most characters lack those interesting emotional arcs seen in DMC3.

55/100 Spider-Man perfectly translates the comic book character's iconic powers to the videogame format: swinging around Manhattan feels extremely fluid and intuitive, and during battle the free-flow combination of ground and aerial combos, web shooting, throwing, dodging and counter-attacking grants the player an impressive strategic freedom. The fluid animations allow for smooth, malleable combos, chaining wide varieties of attacks together, as the webs allow your surroundings to become an active element of combat thanks to deeply rewarding environmental interactions. Regrettably, the game's various gadgets and power-ups unlocked throughout the adventure are mere extensions of already-established powers or provide extremely minor changes to combat's flow. Because of this, as great as it is, combat is stagnant and starts to feel repetitive towards the end of the campaign. The game world does an amazing job at recontextualizing the iconic characters and villains, establishing a new spider-man universe through both the main story and optional content: collectibles and side-quest might feel redundant at times, but do a great job at exploring the background of this peter parker and delineate this world's history, just as the crimes throughout the city, although a little repetitive and overly present, immerse the player in the role of super-hero. The story stays beautifully true to the spirit of the character, merging peter parker and spider-man's lives to craft an emotional story about hope and selflessness that involves both worlds and their intertwining struggles, with the player often taking control of the non-human characters to expand on the setting and immerse the player in the narrative. Alas, from a gameplay standpoint these segments are tremendously bland and simplistic, interrupting the experience's flow with abysmally tedious stealth sections. They are the game's weakest parts alongside boss fights: easy, repetitive and formulaic, only the last ones become decently layered and challenging enough to be engaging.

55/100 Spider-Man Miles Morales, much like its predecessor, offers an extremely smooth combat system that offers a wide arrange of offensive options to chain combos contextually to the environment, but feels stagnant since it doesn't renew itself enough throughout the campaign. Even so, the addition of new offensive and stealth core mechanics makes the experience sensibly deeper, expanding on the already-rich combo possibilities and allowing the now mediocre bosses to showcase more depth in turn, on top of an improved moveset variety. Sadly, many of the new power-ups and gadgets suffer from notably poor balancing, allowing for an excessive exploitation of stealth. Thankfully, the abysmal non-spider-man sections have been removed, but the quality of the few puzzles in the main campaign still leaves much to be desired. The narrative once again perfectly captures the essence of the original character with a story about sacrifice depicted through engaging character drama, but said drama ends up terribly undermined by bland characters, a plethora of clichés and stereotypical villains.

63/100 Kingdom Hearts 3 offers players a stunningly wide array of rewarding, heterogeneous combat options taken from many previous installments, keeping the experience extremely fresh throughout, and adds new gamechanging mechanics such as the possibility to defend while airborne or switch Keyblades on the fly, which is a massive revolution allowing for more creative combos and a more fluid combat flow. Even after all of this, combat still greatly suffers from a restricted player agency due to the somewhat random and awkwardly time-restricted nature of Situation Commands, instead of the rewarding resource management on which KH2 relied. Nonetheless, just like KH2, KH3 offers a massive set of combat options, and while the main campaign is a little too easy with mostly simplistic bosses, the post-game content provides a wide array of challenging, deeply variegated bossfights with multifaceted movesets and interesting mechanics. Level Design is breathtaking, with huge open spaces developing in different ways in each new area. They lack meaningful platforming or environmental challenges, but they're packed with various collectibles, secrets and most of all minigames. KH3's greatest strength is in fact its gameplay variety and richness: on top of the tremendously upgraded Gummiship section, we find a staggering amount of polished, charming fun minigames and side-activities to enjoy and master, both self-contained and tangential to the core gameplay structure. The game's greatest weakness, on the other hand, is the story, especially as the finale of a saga lasted eight games. Most blatantly a horrible cutscene direction, with awkward silences between lines and stiff, slow action scenes. Most painfully, an unimaginative plot that tries to unravel the massive tangle of storylines built throghout the years in the quickest, simplest ways possible leading to a linear, bland story that disregards many previously established rules thus creating an embarassing amount of plotholes in a series that ironically prides itself on the importance of its story and complexity of its lore.

60/100 Kingdom Hearts 2's story is an enchanting chronicle that blends the dreamy-like mood of a fairy tale with the cheesy, spectacular epicness of an anime, sustained and tied together by a powerful emotional core elevated by unique memorable music. Superbly directed scenes that can deliver and convey the tender, melancholic drama amidst the wacky, bizarre concepts of its world and lore, thanks to both being inextricably tied together. Alas, in gameplay, we instantly notice that Level Design got a massive downgrade. The intricate, fun maps of KH1 have been replaced with dull hallways and hollow rooms, with chests scattered here and there in esthetically pleasing but structurally barren environments, with only a single optional area providing any engaging platforming. The game experience is saved and recontextualized thanks to the absolute beauty of Combat: the already incredibly snappy and fluid base combos are the solid ground on top of which an exciting amount of engaging heterogeneous possibilities are stacked. On top of Abilities, Magic and Summons, Fusions and Limits have been introduced. Fusions especially significantly change the gameplay with different playstyles while also providing a new layer of strategic resource management to progression, as Limits offer an additional, tangential support. All these new additions are perfectly balanced, to be upgraded and unleashed against a strongly diversified army of enemies and bosses as the various levels countinuously add new twists and variations to the battle formula to keep things fresh through new attack patterns or external gimmicks, with the only serious flaw being the oversimplified, underdeveloped Reaction Commands (It must be also noted that enemy pose a meaningful, satisfying challenge only on Critical Mode). The game also offers an incredible amount of thrilling, greatly polished optional bosses to push the player's skills to their limit after the main campaign. Gummiship sections have been made much more enjoyable thanks to a faster pace and more visual flare.

58/100 Devil May Cry 3 crafts one of the best combat systems in the history of Action games with a weapon selection that while not particularly big, provides exceptional variety thanks to its weapons offering incredibly distinct, solid balanced movesets to unlock, upgrade and master branching out to different playstyles. This variety is further expanded upon through Styles, a new mechanic that allows every player to find their own unique strategy through additional power-ups and special abilities, which can be expanded as well. All of this blends together to form an exceptionally layered, beautifully variegated playground. To help this combat system shine and express its potential, there is great enemy variety and monsters generally offer a much more thrilling challenge than previous titles, even if a couple of them have annoyingly confusing attack patterns. Likewise, the quality of bossfights is mixed, with some being overly simplistic and others uniquely engaging with shifing movesets and diverse mechanics, but they're always fair and rewarding. The camera, although greatly improved, still struggles a little too often to keep the focus on the action. Most notably, as amazing as combat is, it really is the only great thing that this game has to offer: its level design, although greatly improved from the previous games with more platform challenges and a more interconnected map structure that sporadically challenges the player's memory or orientation, offers nothing truly significant. The story, lastly, is where Devil May Cry finally finds its true identity, fully embracing an endearingly flamboyant love for exaggerated, cheesy over the top action, without disregarding more heartfelt, dramatic moments.

50/100 Spectre's Call timidly attempts at evolving the gameplay structure established by the original trilogy, both inside and outside of puzzles, by making environments slightly more dynamically interactive and hosting an appreciable amount of surprising puzzles with unexpected solutions that stimulate players to think outside of the box. That being said, unfortunately the game hosts what is possibly the least impressive puzzle selection in the series thus far: while still fun, greatly diversified and entertaining, most of the ones provided by the first half of the game are way too easy or simplistic to be rewarding, leaving only the second half to offer meaningful challenges, along with the traditionally nice variety of minigames. The new trilogy goes back in time to dive into the past of some historic characters, as they unravel the mysteries of a quiet, isolated town soaked in superstition, folklore and corruption, making for a refreshingly bleak atmosphere amplified by a beautifully brooding, **** soundtrack, balanced with some uplifting, more light-hearted new characters. Them, along with the unique tone, do a great job at giving plenty of charm to a plot that, while with good emotional weight, suffers from bland antagonists and mysteries that although fascinating are often too obvious or bizarrely solved.

53/100 DmC Devil May Cry reinterprets the lore and characters of the original saga with a gritty take in a more modern, urban setting giving the game a stylish personality, although the overly edgy tone can sometimes lead to painfully corny moments. Nonetheless, the deeper characterization of its cast and the dramatic weight of the story makes up a narrative that is ultimately much more engaging than any of the ones in the four original games. Combat offers a set of extremely diversified weapons, allowing for many different strategies developed through combos that feel extremely fast and satisfying thanks to most weapons being available at once, reaching the best combat fluidity in the entire series yet. Fights are made even more fun via enemy types, as their weaknesses and resistances pleasantly challenge the player's quick thinking and adaptability. Sadly, only fights against common enemies offer some real engagement, as Boss fights are few and extremely lackluster, with ridiculously repetitive and simple attack patterns, and the Style Ranking system was also dramatically dumbed down rewarding easy spam rather than strategic play. Level Design challenges the player with a greater emphasis platforming, navigating the environment through jumps, dashes and precise timing, but rarely enough to be truly engaging or exciting, instead merely providing a decent change of pace.

38/100 Pokémon Violet's open-world map is heterogeneous, both visually and structurally, and offers a seamless exploration with great emphasis on layered vertical progression, rich of treasure to encourage exploration, progressively expanded through mobility upgrades. Even so, the world feels disappointingly dull at its core, due to Pokémon almost never interacting with each other or the environment. on top of their slow, passive reactions to the player's presence. Furthermore, most of the treasure throughout the region of Paldea is redundant or functionally useless, leaving only the discovery of the new Pokémon species to act as the main incentive for exploration, but they're not enough to carry the entire journey. The new open-world progression allows players to tackle the various challenges in any order, but the lack of level scaling virtually strips the player from any real agency lest they'll retroactively make the other challenges terribly easy, which happens anyway since the game's difficulty offers no excitement whatsoever outside from venturing dangerous areas. The game tries to add flavor to its fights through the Terastalization mechanic, which adds a decent twist to strategies, and to add flavor to its trials with various minigames, but these are excruciatingly, embarassingly simplistic. Customization received a massive downgrade, with a lot less clothing options. The story is bland and offers very little substance, that is until the last few hours, when it haphazardly unveils its true potential and interesting concepts in a rush.

38/100 Pokémon Sword tries to breathe new life into the series' level design, with huge open areas populated by Pokémon roaming around in the overworld for the very first time, even preying the player at times. These areas are conceptually greatly immersive and visually captivating, but they lack meaningful content to experience as they are overwhelmingly barren and lifeless, with Pokémon mindlessly wandering with no environmental interaction. Most of the maps actually present the traditional linear structure, but devoid of any creative map layout or interesting progression, as the player is constantly confined to what are essentially corridors from point A to B. The Level Design drastically improves in the Crown Thundra DLC with great emphasis on freedom of exploration and fairly engaging multiplayer challenges, but that certainly can't salvage the whole package. The Galar region isn't even particularly interesting thematically, with many concepts being overly derivative from previous generations, but thankfully the musical score remains excellent with glorious, aventurous tunes efficiently capturing the wild, triumphant glory of the region's landscapes. The game's challenge is ridiculous, mainly due to the extremely broken Dynamax gimmick which easily allows the player to trivialize almost all battles. The story might be the worst of the franchise yet, with plotpoints being either painfully unoriginal or introduced without the proper buildup extremely late in the story, all of this aggravated by a cast of painfully bland or disappointingly underdeveloped characters.

27/100 Inazuma Eleven 2 tweaks the gameplay structure of the previous entry for the better with a couple of new mechanics to deepen the strategic action and more intuitive, quicker methods for player scouting. Nevertheless, these new additions are not meaningful enough to succesfully free the campaign from the same old issues: level design, when relevant, is scarce and tedious, and while matches are very fun for the first few hours, their extreme simplicity makes for an overall tremendously repetitive experience, worsened by an excessive presence of RNG within the mechanics. The story, like the previous installment, is severely formulaic and corny with cheap, childish drama, but the sheer amount of characters and plot lines can be greatly entertaining and the whole experience remains distinctly charming thanks to its cheesy, fantastically exaggerated portrayal of football and earnest spirit of camaraderie.

47/100 Nier is one of those rare, special creations that takes full advantage of its artistic medium, telling its story in a way that only a videogame can, often integrating its gameplay, visuals and mechanics into the narrative to enhance the tonal magnitude or dramatic impact of some scenarios. This stylistic heterogeneity doesn't define the gameplay structure alone, but also its framing, with frequently shifting camera angles even during combat. This gives each setting and battle scenario a distinct flare, amplified by the beautiful tracks perfectly conveying the peaceful anguish of this world. The blend of Action RPG and 3D Bullet-Hell gives combat a unique multifaceted feel, but the extremely limited amount of offensive options and their lack of depth slowly marks a painful repetitiveness in the gameplay flow, aggravated by a disappointing enemy variety and areas that are way too big for their own good, leaving players to traverse great lengths of nothingness. The story, as stated, frequently twists and influences the gameplay to better convey itself, even offering multiple endings to fully flesh out its many tender tragedies. Its fictional concepts are creative and the cutscene direction excellent but the narrative is so unrelentingly focused on its depressing and bleak atmosphere that it eventually ends up making the player mostly numb to it. That, coupled with a fluctuating pacing that often awkwardly jumps into climactic, lore-heavy moments without the proper buildup, ultimately reduces the emotional weight of it all.

50/100 Pokémon Alpha Sapphire makes the bold choice of retelling and reinterpreting the story, characters and lore of the Hoenn games with new lenses, drawing from the ideas and concepts that X and Y introduced. This undoubtably makes them lesser products as mere remakes, but the changes made ultimately make these a much more varied and deep experience than the originals'. The changes made to some characters' motivations make them less childish in concept, and a new original story after the main campaign gives certain characters a more compelling conclusion to their arcs while diving deeper into the lore of the original games. Additions made by XY like the Petting of Pokémon, the Super Training and the Megaevolutions make a return, the latter even being integrated in the narrative in ways that expand on original concepts. Pokémon Contests and Secret Bases are visually revamped with a lot of new content to make them even richer side-activities, but also new features that allow players to hunt Pokémon with more precision or soar the skies of the region while uncovering new secrets in the clouds, which is visually breathtaking and an amazingly immersive concept. Even with the usually repetitive core gameplay, ORAS had the potential to become the best main games in the franchise but are held back by underwhelming care put in the battle aspect of the game, being excessively easy with the Battle Frontier being replaced by an inferior facility with less content.

54/100 Automata aims to explore the human condition through inhuman characters, tackling themes of identity and existentialism, but it fails at it, completely lacking the nuance to do it in a compelling way, with heavy-handed dialogue and simplistic, basic characters. Even with such flawed writing, the plot itself manages to surprise and entertain thanks to a great art direction, coupled with a beautifully melancholic soundtrack and a couple of captivating segments that take full advantage of videogames' systems and interactivity as an artistic medium to enhance the player's involvement in the narrative, even more than its predecessor did. Also like the original Nier, Automata frequently shifts its camera perspective, going from third-person to top-down, from side-scroller to isometric, giving each area a distinct exploration flare with varied battle scenarios. This framing variety accompanies combat's multifaceted structure, since the captivating blend of Action RPG and Bullet-Hell is also back. The combat system is greatly entertaining thanks to a nice weapon variety and fluid combos, while the Bullet-Hell element is now even more relevant but greatly suffers from severely repetitive battle scenarios. Physical combat has a similiar problem due to a shortage of meaningful variables unlocked throughout the experience and an extremely poor enemy variety, but the game partially makes up for it with great boss fights and a pleasantly extensive equipment system allowing players to strategically organize inventory space to add various active and passive abilities, suiting different playstyles and customizing progression.

53/100 The Unwound Future takes the series' old cast of endearing but flat characters and gives them more nuanced, well-rounded personalities, also thanks to a captivating story that explores their past and relationships, intrisically tied with the detective narrative. The story doesn't take itself seriously enough to make the stakes feel real at times, but remains compelling thanks to a rich setting and an exciting investigation that introduces new and old characters in the narrative in an organic way. The writing gradually builds towards the reveal of its driving mysteries with clear, subtly placed clues and an excellent foreshadowing, making them, as outlandish as they are, deeply satisfying. All of this is greatly elevated by the series' memorable, distinctly orchestral soundtrack and its unique, lively soft art style. As usual, the story doesn't leave much if any agency to the player to lead the investigation, but the puzzle collection is the most entertaining and diversified in the entire series so far, with a nigh-perfect balance of highly stimulating and charmingly illustrated deductive, observational and logic challenges, almost entirely deprived of the more monotonous mathematical types. That being said puzzles are slightly but noticeably easier than the previous installments, making for a somewhat less compelling gameplay. The minigames are also at their strongest, with the Parrot and Toy Car minigames offering widely different but equally entertaining planning challenges that are simple but require precise, mindful strategy. The Illustrated Book is a lot less profound and a little too easy, but charming.

51/ 100 The Diabolical Box displays all the visual charm and unique artistry of its prequel, amping it up with richer, more lively illustrations accompanying the puzzles and a superbly composed, richer soundtrack bursting with cheery elegance gradually morphing into mellow sadness to fit the story's evolving tone, as the location changes. Indeed, the Diabolical Box provides a more expanse adventure than the Curious Village, with the cast exploring a much bigger area of various, finely detailed locales inhabited by endearing, witty characters that the plot uses to subtly, skillfully lay down the clues for its main mysteries. Regrettably, not all of them receive a satisfying answer: the story culminates with a tragically somber, emotional finale that beautifully ties many of its plot threads together, but its main outlandish revelation requires an uncomfortably sudden suspension of disbelief that haphazardly dismisses many others. The returning gameplay structure offers a slightly inferior puzzle selection than Curious Village due to an unbalanced variety with a disappointing shortage of Riddle-type puzzles and an overabundance of Sliding-type puzzles. Nonetheless, the game still offers a nice array of brain teasers that challenge the player's observational, deduction and lateral-thinking skills in various ways, now bolstered by a collection of simple but entertaining minigames to deepen the experience.

43/100 Pokémon Ultra Moon adds a significant amount of new content to the original Moon, with a richer Pokémon selection, new areas that expand on the original lore, a surprisingly fun and polished new surfing minigame, new challenges and overall a decisively higher difficulty making for a much more engaging experience. Massive changes were made to the narrative as well, ultimately making it notably worse. As much as the new characters and plotpoints introduced have potential they're sorely underdeveloped and introduced quite haphazardly, and the greater scope of the new storyline often awkwardly clashes with the more intimate story told in the original game as some important scenes of character development have been entirely removed, leaving the whole narrative feeling somewhat disconnected. Nevertheless, a new grandiose story episode was added after the main campaign, which creatively builds on the new concepts introduced to craft a surprising narrative with nostalgic returns that perhaps doesn't take itself seriously enough, but still functions as an extremely fun postgame content and a nice celebration of past narratives. Decisvely better than the original, Ultramoon still greatly suffers from its terribly bland level design and the series' somewhat repetitive gameplay.

42/100 Pokémon Moon will take its player to the flourishing Alola region, where upbeat, exotic tunes beautifully clash with more boisterous, violent electronic pieces, just as the game's tropical, traditional tribal setting clashes with the futuristic, sci-fi elements of its plot. Speaking of narrative, unlike XY, Pokémon Moon actually offers one of the best storylines in the series, more intimate than usual as it focuses on the struggles of a troubled family and the more marginalized members of society, with simple but endearing, well crafted character development. Sadly, this focus on the story frequently comes at the expense of exploration, halted and steered by narrative developments annoyingly often. Generally speaking exploration is one of the game's worst aspects, because as much as the locations are gorgeous and full of charm, the Level Design is for the most part dull and linear with laughably easy puzzles. In gameplay, Pokémon Moon introduces a new battle gimmick, Z Moves. These are mechanically way more significant than Megavolutions as they aren't exclusive of only some creatures, but they're just as frivolous and inconsequential since they provide very little change to the fun but extremely repetitive core battle gameplay. Fortunately, even if the challenge is generally tame, it can be surprisingly demanding with certain bosses, requiring great flexibility and strategy. On top of this, the Pokémon petting and customization features from XY make a return, greatly enhancing immersion.

53/100 Birth By Sleep, story-wise, is arguably the best game in the series thus far. A somber, poignant tragedy of a troubled but affectionate group of friends as it struggles against forces bigger than all of them, with events packed with superbly directed scenes brimming with pathos and exceptional character drama. Sadly, the story fails to express the full potential of the script due to the bond uniting the main cast, cornerstone of the entire plot, feeling somewhat underdeveloped. Gameplay-wise, attack and jump animations have been slowed to an unreasonable degree, resulting in base combos that now feel quite clunky and unplesantly sluggish. Even so, gameplay still manages to be undeniably fun thanks to new great mechanics such as Deck Abilities, giving players a plethora of different attacks and techniques to experiment with, select and upgrade, providing huge strategical variety, elevated by the fact that the three playable characters have significantly different combat styles, although repeating the same world can be tedious. In the same way, Shotlock and D-Links also add a new layer of depth to battles. All of this combines to create a quite rich array of options. The beauty of this wealthy system is slightly compromised by some balancing issues, as a few late game Abilities are way too overpowered and can trivialize some of the final fights. Level Design slighlty improves from KH2 with more vertical developments and platforming, but is still far from the deep heights of KH1.

65/100 Kingdom Hearts is a charming videogame. A unique, whimsical epic tale of friendship, heroes and darkness. Its strength isn't a complex storyline but a cast of great characters with heartfelt interactions and a strong emotional core, enhanced by an enchanting soundtrack that expertly blends solemnity and magical whimsy, giving the game a distinct personality. Combat is fun and satisfying thanks to Abilities, frequently adding new layers and variables to combos, a balanced, diversified Magic system that offers various different ways to approach a fight both offensive and defensive, and last but not least a great enemy variety, although a bosses are of extremely fluctuating quality: some great, others very plain. Level Design smartly works around the modest size of its rooms with rewarding level design with a lot of depth and variety. Every new area has a simple but pleasantly distinct type of progression with different maps, puzzles, platforming challenges and many hidden secrets that add content and flavor to the exploration. The presence of many secret bosses after the main campaign offers an additional great challenge for the more daring players. The weakest point of the experience are definitely the sections piloting the spaceship called Gummiship: a very cute idea to add variety, but so slow and tedious that it would've been better to just put that development effort somewhere else.

40/100 Drawn to Life The Next Chapter is a slightly inferior customizable experience than its predecessor, with player creations being a lot less prominent part of the overworld. Even so, the drawing mechanic's potential beyond purely cosmetical purposes has finally been explored, being implented in gameplay, if only through a handful of extremely easy puzzles. And yet, generally speaking, level design has decisively improved: a more compact level layout allowing for a snappier progression, packed with a nicely diversified assortment of platform challenges and enemies, mixed and combined in a variety of different scenarios. It's still a bit too simplistic being very derivative and streamlined, but a solid array of power-ups allow for many decently varied playstyles, even if bosses are extremely few and only one of them is something more than serviceable. The story is also significantly improved, taking the protagonists on a grand adventure. The locations are lively and full of personality, but characters themselves remain very simplistic and forgettable. What isn't forgettable is certainly the finale, unexpected as it is painfully bittersweet, bestowing great emotional significance to this world and its deeper meaning.

55/100 Silent Hill crafts a wonderfully tense, delightfully unsettling horror atmosphere thanks to the sum of its parts. The foggy, abandoned town feels quiet and vast, rewarding exploration with plenty of resources, weapons and optional content, whilst simultaneously feeling claustrophobic and dangerous thanks to the various neverending hostile creatures lurking within the city. Hidden by the thick layer of fog that permeates the map, an unnerving sound cue alerts the player of their presence when nearby, imbuing the whole experience in a constant state of creeping danger. Alas, this atmospheric terror doesn't translate very well in combat, with only a handful of enemies posing a real threat, as well as severely lacking, bland boss fights. Nonetheless, the journey remains overall enjoyable thanks to interesting environmental puzzles and charming riddles that require an engaging level of lateral creative thinking. The story, a gritty blend of visceral human drama and real supernatural demonic concepts, is narrated in a cryptic manner which adds to the obscure mood of the game, and unveils its twisted secrets through multiple ending with different requirements, but most characters are not interesting or explored nearly enough to make their tribulations really impactful.

30/100 358/2 Days is most definitely the worst entry in the Kingdom Hearts series thus far, with painfully repetitive gameplay due to an extremely lacking combat system with very little depth, enemies with decent variety but repetitive, dull attack patterns and some abysmally boring missions. There are a handful of interesting ideas like making Magic and Abilities acquisition more of a resource management matter, giving the gameplay a somewhat strategic feel, but even that is implemented in such a way that it often becomes more of a chore than anything else. The story is enveloped in a charmingly melancholic, somber mood that elevates the beautifully poignant emotional struggle of the main characters, but the drama is severely held back by the tragedy not hitting as hard as it could've due to the friendship uniting the main characters feeling somewhat forced and underdeveloped.

77/100 Cuphead is visually mesmerizing, with beautifully hand-drawn backgrounds and lively charmingly freaky characters that move around with fluid, elastic animations, paying a glorious homage to the "rubber hose" era of american cartoons while instilling its own unique flare to it, as the wacky colorful esthetic comically clashes with the twisted tone of the adventure. Contenutistically, the experience has a pretty barebones offering, mainly consisting of a simple marathon of boss fights, but the quality of these encounters is spectacular. They are erratic, unhinged battles that relentlessly throw at you a multitude of different attacks that can mesh in a myriad of different combinations, constantly challenging the player's adaptability and timing in new ways as the boss shifts and morphs through multiple phases, switching up or layering its offense. There are even two distinct kinds of battles, further strengthening the absurd sheer variety present as each battle feels decisively distinct both visually thanks to the fantastical characters and animations, and techincally thanks to heterogeneity of situations and attacks offered. The challenge is tough, but always fair as each attack combination provides a tight but definite window to avoid damage, or a clear visual/sound cue to alert the player. There are a couple of bosses with trickier attack patterns that can occasionally combine to lead to unavoidable damage just based on bad luck, but it's an extremely rare occasion. The game expands on its fights providing a variety of upgrades and new weapons, which aren't particularly deep but they allow to suit different playstyles and scenarios, giving a more meaningful progression to the experience. To acquire these upgrades the player will need coins, a collectible found within the "run 'n gun" stages, which are the absolute worst part of the experience. These stages are visually stunning just like the rest of the game, and provide some cute level design with unique mechanics, but the fun, fast-paced challenge offered by the bosses turns here into a tedious slog demanding hyper-precise execution as the continuous respawning of extremely fast enemies and overcrowded situations frequently leads to frustrating deaths, only worsened by the absence of checkpoints.

65/100 Dark Souls 2's map of Drangleic aims to be as structurally cohesive as Lordran, but ultimately lacks that same level of ingenious interconnectivity that made DS1's journey so engrossing. The branching pathways leading to the various corners of the world rarely intertwine, with a mostly streamlined progression that often halts exploration with awkward progression gating requiring a single resource, which makes the experience's flow much more jagged and tedious. Even the historical background of the kingdom of Drangleic seems to have less care put into it, with some areas not making geographical sense in relation to their position and extremely few meaningful NPC storylines to witness. Nonetheless, even after all of this, the Level Design itself within each zone can still be extremely engaging, even surpassing DS1 a couple of times, with a solid artistic direction that soaks the ambience in a gloomy melancholy, areas developing horizontally and vertically on multiple layers, hidden paths, environmental hazards and interactivity, and interesting enemy placements that challenge the player to master their reflexes and adapt to their surroundings in interesting ways, especially in the wonderful DLC areas. The variety might not be on par with DS1, but it's still excellent and elevated by a strong enemy variety. Just like in Lordran, the creatures inhabiting Drangelic are extremely aggressive and quick but have clear attack patterns with manageable timeframes, providing a fair, edifying challenge. The main issue is that DS2 has an unhealthy tendency of throwing multiple powerful enemies at the player at once, even when said enemy types don't mesh well together, leading to extremely frustrating, unfairly difficult scenarios, where the player has no choice but to awkwardly exploit the AI's aggro field. These instances do not occur so much that they ruin the entire experience, but frequently enough to make it significantly less fun, also because of a lesser combo variety when compared to DS1. Bosses are the biggest failure of the game, most of them are of significantly lesser quality than DS1 with simple attack patterns and extremely limited movesets, challenging but rarely truly engaging. This is true only for the base game though, as the DLC bosses are dramatically better, with interesting unique gimmicks, tight fast movesets and variegated attack patterns requiring different strategies and approaches.