This article contains spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity. Also: Final Fantasy 7, for some reason. Also also: Rosebud was a sled. Now you know!
Can a Zelda game be more than a Zelda game? And can a Warriors game be more than a Warriors game?
Today’s title is kind of special in the history of Gogglebob.com. By complete coincidence, this game was significantly previewed for the first time when I was just starting up that Let’s Play of World of Final Fantasy, and, if you follow that whole youtube playlist, you’ll hear our opinions on what the game could be, what it very much looked like it would be as of the demo/release, and our impressions once the game was officially available in its entirety. And that’s neat! There is an eternal(ish) record of what we wanted to see from a prequel to Breath of the Wild, and you can listen to our frustration as we slowly realized such a thing would never come. Disappointment abounds!
Though I suppose it is worth restating my initial position for the record, as no man, woman, or child should be subjected to hours of meandering World of Final Fantasy gameplay for the sake of a Zelda game. Long story short? The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a sad, sad game, and it feels disingenuous to have a plot take place in this world (timeline?) and have it be… happy? Cozy? …. Survivable? If you somehow missed Breath of the Wild, here is its backstory: everybody dies. A century before the game officially kicks off, Princess Zelda of Hyrule heard of a coming calamity, and amassed an army of killer robots, Zoids, and at least one dick of a birdperson to combat the inevitable invasion of Ganon. Unfortunately, she forgot to update her mechanical masses’ security firmware before the assault, and the majority of her minions wound up working for the bad guys about three seconds into her brilliant plan. Thus, her Champions were bumped off, her kingdom got a fiery makeover, and her best knight bit the big one personally defending Zelda against her own rampaging tinkertoys. In a last-ditch effort to stave off a literal apocalypse, brave knight Link was stowed away to recover in an ancient shrine, Zelda sealed herself in the castle to stave off Calamity Ganon’s freedom, and her last remaining allies scattered around the countryside to hide and maybe become esoteric fetishes (“wears goggles” is too a fetish!). Link finally awakens in a world that has been permanently scarred by the Calamity’s nigh-victory, and must venture around this Hyrule infested with monsters to rally a whole new generation of heroes. He eventually, inevitably succeeds, but the cost is high: Link’s “old world” and friends are dead and never coming back, and, while there is hope for the future, the present still has an unruly number of laser robots puttering around bringing down property values. Also, depending on your speed run of choice, Link may have never put on pants, and that’s going to confuse Zelda to no end.
So, naturally, when a “prequel” to Breath of the Wild was announced, there was any number of theories on how that might go down. After all, the backstory of Breath of the Wild is one that sees literally an entire army of heroes completely fail. There are good times! And more specific spoilers!…
Let’s talk about nerd love, acceptance, and solid gold cars.
And, even if the “relationship” only wound up lasting like two week and involved about as much physical interaction as an online game of Pong, it still set me over the moon that someone theoretically wanted me. Goggle Bob! Who did finally cut off that ponytail a year before! Probably a coincidence! But this is not to say all was well with the world. My dear girlfriend had aims to make me “more normal”, and she literally stated that she would go through my closet and get rid of “all those videogame t-shirts”.
And it’s hard to explain to someone that doesn’t have an “unpopular” hobby how this works. Like, you, dear reader, you like music, right? Like listening to tunes? Maybe you listen to the radio when you’re in the car? And I’m not saying you like the same music as someone else, you’re obviously allowed to like pop music as much as jazz-techno fusion or whatever suits your fancy. But imagine, if you would, the moment you start dating someone, you’re cruising along in your finely crafted automobile (obviously a sweet 1960 classic Edsel Pacer), listening to the radio, and your significant other doesn’t simply say, “Oh, I don’t like this song, let’s change the station,” they say, “Oh, I don’t like music. Let’s sit in silence and never listen to music again.” And every time they hop in the car, and you’ve left the radio on from a previous, solo trip, they comment, “Oh, you were listening to that again. Why do you keep doing that?” And, tell me I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure that, after dealing with that for a little while, you would, you know, go insane. And that’s not a great outcome for a relationship!
And I assumed this was a wholly accurate assessment until I was in college. I dated another woman, and I assumed, like in many previous relationships, she barely tolerated my videogame addiction. She watched me play 
Not to dash any dreams of a romantic ending here (that’s for Friday), but this is in no way the story of how I affirmed the love of my life over Mario Kart. Boy and Girl broke up with time to spare before the following Valentine’s Day (and it certainly wasn’t because Boy was a cheapskate and didn’t feel like buying another gift in a relationship that was already DOA, because Boy is clearly blameless in this situation). And, just in case you thought this whole tale was heading in that direction, this is not the story of how Boy thus realized his true love was videogames all along, and how he now sleeps in bed every night curled around his precious copy of Chrono Trigger. No, this is a story about acceptance. This is a story about how someone can accept you for who you are, even the parts of you they might not understand.
And then, one day, there was someone that accepted me. There was someone that tried to understand who I was, preoccupation with blue sparks and all. There was someone that wanted me. All of me.
So, did you beat it? Wholly and completely, with Mirror Grand Tour and on two player cooperative. That solid gold car is mine, now and forever.
I feel like I’ve been tricked so many times, I’m sad when I’m not being tricked.
But we live in a world where no game can ever truly be finished, so Pokémon Sword/Shield earned two whole new “campaigns” in the name of downloadable content. In the Isle of Armor, your trainer visits a hitherto unexplored island that is vaguely Eastern-themed, trains in a Pokémon dojo, and eventually defeats the grandmaster while earning a new, karate-based Pokémon. Meanwhile, in the Crown Tundra, your customized protagonist goes on a quest in an occasionally frozen wasteland to discover a host of legendary Pokémon, and maybe help out some manner of telepathic deer with popularity problems. In both areas, there are new whacky characters to encounter, challenges to overcome, and, of course, Pokémon to catch. Pokémon Sword/Shield started with what many claimed was an insultingly low number of Pokémon available to the player, and, while the expansions don’t fill in the entire pokéroster, you certainly have more of a variety available now (still no sign of Drowzee, though). And that’s great! Sure, you can just airdrop your entire living pokédex from Pokémon Home straight into Sword and claim you’ve completed the ‘dex, but it’s a lot more fun to pedal out into the ocean, and discover a tenacool for the first time all over again. This is bloody Pokémon, dammit, go out there and catch ‘em all.
“mainline title”, that is every Pokémon game to a T. There have been some tweaks over the years (some were amazing, some should have been there from the start [looking at you, Wrap]), but every Pokémon title works like good DLC. So it should be absolutely no surprise that the DLC for Pokémon Sword/Shield is magnificent: it’s exactly what we expect from a Pokémon game!
And, whether this was inspired by the success of Yellow or a general need to always see improvement, nearly every following Pokémon generation published a “Yellow Version” of its own. 
And, God help me, if we don’t see a Pokemon Sword/Shield 2, I’m going to miss buying the same game again. I’m going to miss forking over money that could be better spent on literally anything else (including another, whole new game), and settling in for more of the same (but with a new hat). I’m going to miss battling through the exact same fights, but slightly rearranged, so I can finally battle a champion that now has a Blastoise for some reason. I’m going to miss wasting my time on something that already consumed hours and days of my life, all in pursuit of one extra Technical Machine that teaches Earthquake. Or maybe a Gigantimax Hypno? I would waste so much sweat for such an opportunity…
Goggle Bob Fact: This expansion was first announced/revealed last year when I was vacationing in Poland. I will never forget being hunched over a laptop in my (now) wife’s childhood bedroom, desperate for Pokémon news… Or maybe just excited to hear something 100% in English. I may or may not have been homesick, so the prospect of a new kind of Articuno is always going to hold a special place in my heart.
The original Super Mario Bros. brought the concept of gaming back from the brink of ruin. So it seems only appropriate that, 35 years later, we examine its sequel, the game that crashed the videogame market forever.
It seems the tipping point for this tale happened when Super Mario Bros. 2 was being exported to America. Howard Lincoln, a man who was responsible for play-testing games for American audiences, felt the game was too difficult, and would not play well with American audiences. He famously said of the game, “Not having fun is bad when you’re a company selling fun.” However, Lincoln’s protests were ignored. While there was brief discussion regarding “reskinning” another title as “Super Mario Bros. 2 USA”, Super Mario Bros. 2 was released as is, with no changes or tweaks made to the abhorrent difficulty of the game. America was going to face down its first poisonous mushroom, and it would not be left in the cold by its Japanese brothers.
As was said at the time: so goes Mario, so goes the world. Super Mario Bros. (1) inspired a thousand 2-D platforming clones that all attempted to capture the magic of Mario. Did any succeed? Yes, a small handful did, but certainly no greater than a dozen. Super Mario Bros. 2 had a similar effect on the trajectory of videogames. Where once a sequel would account for new players (what would eventually become known as the nigh mythical “first time gamer”), all new sequels produced decided to follow Super Mario Bros. 2’s trail. This led to a variety of games that all seemed dedicated to murdering the player within the opening moments. Bubble Bobble 2’s starting “Floor 101” combined a million monsters with a timer that could barely be surmounted. Contra 2 led to a generation memorizing its “ten extra lives code” because you’d lose your first three inside of the opening seconds. Rygar 2 utilized every mapping “trick” available to create levels that had extremely poorly defined endpoints, and Gradius 2’s “poison powerups” made acquiring a shield intolerable. Final Fantasy 2 introduced an archaic leveling system that was about as opaque as a behemoth, and Dragon Quest (Warrior in the West) 2 featured dungeons that contained traps upon traps. Even Nintendo wasn’t immune to its own hype, as The Legend of Zelda 2 released with more invisible walls and spongey “green Moblins” than you could shake a stick at. And, to this day, no one has gotten past the first stage of Punch-Out 2 without tool assists. The only sequel that seemed to dodge this absurd difficulty fate was Mega Man 2, but, even there, some said the infamous Quick Man stage seemed like something that was “Super Mario Bros. 2 hard”.
Though, of course, that was the inevitable end of this trend. Super Mario Bros. 2 was a success, but every game attempting to ape Super Mario Bros. 2 just hammered a nail into the coffin of gaming harder and harder. By the time of the predicted Super Mario Bros. 3 release, sales of Nintendo consoles had plummeted. Sure, this was the system that had Mario, Link, and Kid Icarus, but nearly every game that included a “2” was an awful slog of anti-fun. If this was the direction gaming was going, apparently the general public wanted nothing to do with it. In retrospect, it should have been expected: the Videogame Crash of 1983 was followed six short years later by the Videogame Crash of 1989. Stores stopped stocking videogames at all, and, by 1990, you could no more purchase a Nintendo Entertainment System in America than a pet rock. The fad of “gaming” had faded, returned, and faded all over again within the span of a decade.
company in the modern era is a British gang by the name of Rare Limited, as their most recent release, Battletoads 3, is topping the sales charts. Granted, at this point, topping the videogame sales charts is roughly as financially relevant as selling the most model train sets in June, but it is still an accomplishment.
System: Nintendo Famicom originally, but most of the West saw it as part of the Super Mario All-Stars compilation on the Super Nintendo.
Goggle Bob Fact: Nintendo Power goaded me into finding World 9 and sending a picture of proof so I could earn a badge of honor for my accomplishment… but I’m pretty sure my dad never properly developed the film, and it may or may not have actually been mailed. Regardless, I do not have a spiffy trophy badge, and my life is all the worse for it.