A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

I love this review, as it pretty much sums up how I've felt for years, but which I keep on the down-low since it seems to upset Nintendo fans. The bad stuff is bad enough to be memorable. The good stuff is, meanwhile, forgettable.

I think the enormous problem with Nintendo evangelists is that they conflate historically impactful, interesting and fun. Games can easily be 1 or more of those. Nintendo fans insist that all entries to their tent pole franchises are always all three.

Change fun to "in a vacuum, without historical context, still fun to play today on its own merit" and that's exactly it. In reality, it SHOULD be hard to hit all three. If it's so easy a game like Mario Land can get through the door, then it's not an achievement at all, is it?

To a large extent, that's why I enjoy your reviews. Games can and *should* be reviewed within that vacuum. If a review makes allowances for flaws because of how great other games in a series were, it's not really a review, just a nostalgia trip. Not wrong, just not a review.

I am NOT a vacuum, as I have my own preferences and biases. But I do my best to be open to every game. I did have to think about Mario Land. For all my bitching, the level design (of the platform stages) is *really* good. But the controls are *really REALLY* bad.