What are you playing?

Beat Paper Mario and Paper Mario TYD again.

Beat Machinarium, Osmos (if you can call it beating), And Yet it Moves, and Super Mario Galaxy 2 (currently 92 stars) for the first time.

 Opinion of SMG2 so far

I can't help but say I'm a little disappointed. I mean, I should have expected it, being a "2" rather than a new title and just by the fact that it was using the same system. But I feel as though I should have paid $30 for this expansion pack rather than $50 for a full game.

The story seems just thrown together to accommodate gameplay and doesn't really make too much sense. The very same "once every 100 years" event happens as the last one, so it brings a lot of questions, though I suppose they could be answered just by the fact that the "universe was reborn" in the last one; although not really. I found the characters, including the bosses, to be lacking on most fronts as well.

As far as gameplay, it more or less is a complete rehash with a few new mechanics used sparingly. I personally ran into a number of depth perception issues in most levels that used clouds which costs me a life here and there. I have yet to see or use any of those easy mode options, so I can't really remark on those. The Bowser boss battles were a particular let down to me... can't say I know why, but they just were.

The world map is a throw-back to SM3, and I personally would have preferred a larger explorable base of operations, but that is part of my RPG tastes. The levels don't have near as many stars in them each as the prior game, so they were able to make many more levels to accommodate the (assumed) 120 stars. This is a positive for the most part, but it makes each level feel horribly linear in comparison to the prior titles. Additionally, they brought back the most frustrating levels from the prior game for the special zone. However, as a flip-side to that comment, I did enjoy the Throw-back galaxy.

Overall it was still a pretty good game, but by no means did it live up to the hype that was given to it by it's predecessor. It didn't have the sparkle that made Galaxy what it was.

Was going to work on Suikoden 2 prior to these, but I got distracted when I heard something about a timed quest chain in the game, and knowing how much I like to explore that detered me until I bothered looking it up to find that nothing significant would be lost, so I'll be jumping into that now. Maybe after that I could shake off my disappointment and wrap up a normal finish on Valkyrie Profile.