It's been a long time coming, but I finally beat this fuckin' game.
Before I get into this review though, I want to explain some things. I did a host of video reviews on my YouTube channel a few months ago, and though I do enjoy making them they're incredibly time consuming and time is something I have to ration off pretty hard nowadays. However, these written reviews take about one third of the time, and given how often I beat games (IE: barely ever at all) I could probably throw these out much more easily. So, here's the plan: if I beat a game that I can't get my own footage for, I'll make a written review. If I beat a game that I can get footage for, I'll post it on the YouTube. Besides, its been awhile since I've posted here, hasn't it?
So this review probably won't be that detailed simply because it took me so long to beat this game. I've pretty much been working slowly but surely on this game since I got my 3DS and the Dream Bowser fight fucked me up so hard (we'll get to that very soon) that I dropped the game for about eight months. But finally I got down to it, beat all three of the final bosses, and now I'm done and ready to review.
First, lets start off with the positives. Probably the one thing that kept me from dropping this game early on were the soundtrack and the art design. Shimomura is great as always, so that's not very surprising. Normally I mute handheld games but this one I played with sound simply because I enjoyed the music so much. The art design was also fairly good; the enemies had interesting looks and the settings (especially in the dream worlds) were intricate and lovely. Even the story was cute for a time. For a good chunk of this game I really genuinely enjoyed it -- and that's the problem.
As the game continued, the game seemed to drag farther and farther on. The cool battle system that dealt with well-timed button presses and expert dodging skills became tedious and frustrating. The story began to get nonsensical, as tasks began to list up farther and farther seemingly solely to extend the game time. Hell, I was still getting tutorials twenty hours in, and given how much I hate tutorials in general this was NOT very fun.
So why did they feel the need to extend this game so far? It's a standard that RPGs are around 30 hours long -- how long this game is -- but I feel like having it much shorter while still enjoyable would probably be much better than just giving more game time where the game time is completely boring. Also, the tutorials halfway through the game make me feel like they just kept adding in gameplay gimmicks in just because they didn't know how else to extend gameplay.
Suddenly during the last part of the game however the difficulty increases to a ridiculous level. For the most part the game is fairly easy until you get to the final castle, where things turn crazy. I had to turn on easy mode, mostly because I just wanted to get the game over with but also that I found I was getting one shot by some ridiculous dodging instance. However, easy mode wasn't available in perhaps the most bullshit boss of all -- Dream Bowser.
Now as time went on I got better and better at this fight, but with every failure in it you're forced to go back to the very beginning of the fight which includes some long boring speech by the yellow dude who's name I forget because the story ended up not being very good. There's also a part near the end of this battle which I'm pretty sure wasn't playtested because its literally impossible (also if you lose you still need to go back to the beginning). So during the final phase against Dream Bowser you need to hit him with an even bigger star attack. This part is hard enough as it is -- you need to use the 3DS gyro controls and a lot of the meteors that attack you are hard to predict until you've memorized the patterns (which in all honesty isn't too hard). Still, if you fail then it's Bowser's turn, and he tries to stomp you.
I tried dodging this attack about twenty times total. It asks you to swipe up as fast as you can. I swiped so hard I thought I was gonna break the god damn screen and I STILL failed it every single time. Sure, there might have been harder challenges that took me longer, but none of them did I fail every single time like this one.
Overall my problem with this game mainly came from the length and how it outstays its welcome. My original review of this was going to be 8/10 but now that I've actually finished it and given some time to think about it I think I'm going to have to give this one a 7/10.
