I’ve heard the same about the collectibles when I tried to look up help, but just today I realized you can use the mask you get to occasionally access spirit memories to highlight not just chests and such, but also footprints of the Rot. So the game does give you the means to find everything, but I don’t remember if it ever tells you about that.

I’ve completed the first major section of Kena and I’m very impressed so far. I like that the Rot don’t just follow you around like Pikmin, but just exist in the world until you need them. You enter an abandoned house and they are already there, just hanging out on the shelves and such. The combat gameplay is very much ‘3rd person action game 101’ without any standout features, but I don’t consider it a major part of the game, considering no enemies ever respawn. I found most collectibles on my own so far, but I had to consult a map for the last few.

Curious to see what this will be. I find the Splatoon universe really interesting, but I have zero interest in team-shooters.

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When you have Breath of the Wild, you don’t really need anything else to play for weeks. For some people, that’s probably true for Mario Kart as well. For me, it’s really just an upgrade without any hype attached to it.

I generally always recommend playing in order of release, but it doesn’t really matter here, the games are completely standalone. Brothership does have very minor references to the older games though. One game gets an entire character returning, but I haven’t played that one either.

Mario Kart Update: One cup has a remake of an SNES track as the first one. It’s not very interesting and five laps long. More laps than the other three (more interesting) tracks in the cup combined. I really don’t understand what they were thinking…

I love the water segments though, very Wave Race!

I finally beat Brothership yesterday. It should have ended last weekend, but the end of the game really drags on. You know that obligatory five minute cutscene about the friends you made along the way that a JRPG tends to have in between the final boss and the true final boss? Brothership turned that five minute cutscene into a three hour backtracking segment! And the true final dungeon is very long, too. Something I wasn’t really in the mood for anymore…

It was a good game though! The cynic in me expected the RPG side to be very simplified and easy, but it’s the Mario & Luigi it has been when I still played it on the GBA. And the optional boss re-fights in the late game hit hard!

My main criticisms are:

• The plug system gets very annoying with you constantly needing to replace them. At least let me favorite some of them so I don’t have to find them all the time.

• First strikes are very awkward. For comparison, my first strike rate in Thousand Year Door is easily ~98%. I’d be surprised if I got more than ~5% in Brothership.

• Overworld travel gets very tedious after a while. It basically becomes Spirit Tracks without any of the action.

Now, I planned to beat the game before the Switch 2 releases, but now I had a comparison here, too. I didn’t notice load times being much shorter, but the game definitely runs smoother in those moments when it matters. There’s a Bro Move that has you alternate the A- and B-Buttons quickly, which is easy enough. But about halfway through the timer the game would briefly slow down, which always messed me up until I started to specifically slow down in anticipation. That slowdown is gone on the Switch 2!

Next, I plan to play Kena - Bridge of Spirits on PC, a game I know nothing about. I picked it out from my backlog because I was in the mood for something green. I wanted to frolic in nature, but most games in that category are large RPGs that I wasn’t in the market for, because Xenoblade X was the game I intended to replace Brothership with. There’s nothing to stop me from just playing Xenoblade now, but I already had Kena downloaded and installed when I decided to focus hard on Brothership.

And on the side, I dabble in Mario Kart World. I can’t say much about it yet, but I was blown away by the fact that they have a track that acknowledges Super Mario Land! That’s so rare… But I can’t say I’m a fan of the Grand Prix format. Driving from one track to the next is cool, but if it comes at the cost of reducing all but the first track to a single lap, I’d rather not have that at all.