ah yes, I'm up to date on that one lol
Anyways, having played it for the last 7-8 hours straight, my presumptions were wrong. This game is
incerdibly fun and immersive. Previously, the original Jak and Daxter was the only collectathon I'd played that I thought absolutely nailed the formula (and I didn't play it until a year or two ago), but Odyssey takes the cake here and does it better than I ever could have imagined, for every last bit I've seen of it so far. It's just funny that it took until 2017 for that to happen when the genre's golden age was twenty years ago.
The main story missions are extremely easy, yes, but they don't even scratch the surface. It's amazing how much content they've packed into every kingdom, and contrary to what I was expecting, out of the 100-ish moons I've collected so far, not a single one was boring or unsatisfying to me. Sure, some are pretty out in the open and simple to reach, but they're always placed in such a way that you'd immediately think "oh yeah, it'd be fun to do that", not least of all because Mario's so fun to control, and every opportunity you get to utilise his mechanics is a treat.
The difficulty is as perfect as I could imagine it being, with every moon (that isn't in the open, but even then...) having a very appropriate level of challenge to it with design choices that feel intuitive, flexible and
never annoying. Even ones that seem like they would be overly cryptic you end up figuring out by what often feels like a stroke of genius, putting two and two together. It subtly feeds you the right information which, coupled with a tiny bit of creativity, will lead you to your goal, even if you don't know what you're looking for in the first place.
That's great game design.
Funnily, I was originally playing the game with the separated joycons like it recommends, but my hands are so fucking big that I couldn't ever get a hold of them properly - every time I went to turn the camera it'd almost slide out of my hand, and I'd have do this weird crampy maneuver to shuffle it back into place. I initially thought the joysticks were just inaccurate and Mario was a bit jerky, but as soon as I slid them into the grip, it was like a weight off my shoulders and he controlled pretty much
perfectly. I won't say absolutely perfect, since there are a couple really minor things, but they're really minor. The only thing that's harder to do with them in the grip is the spiral hat throw, since you have to kind of awkwardly jerk the whole controller sideways rather than just flick your wrists, but I'd definitely recommend playing it like this if you also have 26cm-wide hands.
I'd advise it over the pro controller, since the pro controller's motion detection seems to be a lot more basic and can't recognise upward and downward flicks (which are still easy to do with the joycon grip), and are pretty useful, especially for jumping over enemies and tossing your hat straight down onto them.
It's chilling at a 9 - 9.5 for me so far, and that's a pretty massive deal to me, since I have a hard time "getting into" games nowadays (which has nothing to do with the games industry, I just have other things on my mind).