I've been going on a Nintendo Switch Online spree. If I'm gonna pay 50 bucks for this, I'm making the most of it. So I've played:
Kirby's Dreamland - Short. Ok. Surprising how many elements actually were still present from the beginning.
Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins - A lot of great ideas here, but controls means it fails. Which is too bad, because it should be good.
Ocarina of Time - Is it still awesome after 36 playthroughs? *Checks* Yep, still awesome
Yoshi's Story - I can appreciate that it did some different stuff with the structure, like needing to play only 6 out of 24 levels or that the level just ends after getting enough fruit and all, but it just isn't that much fun to play. I didn't bother going through and trying to reach all the levels.
Metroid Fusion - Huh. OK, this was the one that got me to get NSO to begin with. It's fine, it's good, but it really didn't grab me. I didn't go into it expecting to reach the heights of Super Metroid or Dread, but still wasn't as exciting as I'd hope. The bosses were cool, but so many were off the screen half the time which made the fights frustrating. The lack of exploration until the very end gave me zero incentive to find the ~45 items I missed. In Super, the fights against Ridley and Mother Brain were battles of attrition, you NEEDED all those missiles/super missiles or else rely entirely on skill or luck. But here, it seems most bosses were intended to be fought with your charge beam, so missile expansions were useless. And since bosses hit hard and you hit hard too, fights are over too quickly for energy tanks to worry about too much. In fairness, Dread is similar in many ways, but I think it was executed in a much better fashion. But hey, at least I've finally played at least one version of all 8 mainline games.
Kuru Kuru Kururin - I remember thinking this was cool when I first heard about it back in 2001. It's simple enough, but the courses get really complex by the end. I think some of those courses get too long, but still, this was pretty fun. I'm glad I finally got a chance to play it.
Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap - Any hope I had that time would mellow out my sour taste of pre-BotW 21st century Zelda is gone. Kinstones makes exploration tedious and unrewarding. An overexcessive use of linear gates requiring heavy backtracking in order to continue the main path makes the core game tedious and unrewarding. Actual dungeon design is solid, but that can't make up for the other issues (especially since there are so few of these dungeons). It still boggles my mind that the Fujibayashi/Aonuma team could do a complete 180 and create BotW after so many of these average experiences.
