Okay so Sonic wasn’t good (see previous review), but Mario, unlike Sonic, has an extremely solid track record of quality up to now (as far as mainline 2D and 3D games go), and the trailers for this were pretty darn solid (I only watched the reveal trailer, but people were hyped for all the following ones too). These are 2 franchises on basically opposite ends of the quality spectrum, and it’s pretty interesting that these bitter rivals saw a release of similar styles of games in the same week.

So really this is just pure hype and, after release, very good critical reception as well, moreso than Sonic. I’ll try not to make too many comparisons in the review itself, but this whole point of reviewing both of these (especially when my review output has been low recently) is to compare them.

So let’s just go with it right now, not much else to say in the intro!

Well, I gotta say I was not expecting this. Trailers for this game weren’t very exciting, so I almost ignored it. But a few people on the twitters were putting up gameplay videos of it and I thought it actually looked better than the few trailers I had seen, so I figured I’d pick it up (plus, with the coupon deal on EGS a couple weeks back, it was 30$ Canadian around launch). Well, I fell in love with it. This game is good.

As to what this review is, I’m more willing to call it an “impressions” post rather than a review if you want. The reason is that I’m not 100% done with the game, but also there’s a bunch of games coming out very soon and if I don’t review this great game now, I might forget to do so. So it’s basically a review, but I do want to be clear that I have not gotten the true ending.

Well anyways, let’s go!

This is a series that has been overshadowed in recent times by a good-but-not-as-good spin-off that has way too much watching cutscenes and nowhere near enough actual “playing the game”. I will review this without comparing it to that other series, because it’s not needed. This is the main series. The existence of an inferior spin-off isn’t particularly important in this case.

SMT is one of those series that is consistently great, and I was hyped as hell when this was announced for Switch… in 2017. Yeah it took a while from announcement to release. Not quite the fifth installment in the series (since Strange Journey is also a mainline SMT game, and SMT4: Apocalypse is a sequel to 4 of course, and also there’s if… and NINE), it’s a series that has always had more of a focus on gameplay and team construction than the story, which is always a little bit barebones on the surface.

Let’s see if the wait for this game was worth it!

What is it with the “New” in the title? Why not called it Pokemon Snap 2? Or Pokemon Snap Switch? It’s only gonna be new for a short amount of time.

That said, people have really been waiting for a new one of these for a long time. The N64 Pokemon Snap was really fun. A bit short, but a cool experiment with mixing rail shooter gameplay with puzzle gameplay, adding a really interesting scoring system too. But somehow it never happened, for 22 whole years. I figured back in the Wiii era that the Wiimote would be perfect for a new one, but nope. So I was pretty excited to finally see this one popping up.

Let’s see if it lives up to the original… or if it’s even better!