This game is basically bite-sized speedrun challenges from old NES games. Never had a NES so I had zero nostalgia for most of these except Mario and Zelda. The whole thing relies on you caring about these classic games which I mostly don’t. Honestly a big reason I bought the physical version was because that gold replica NES cartridge it comes with looked really cool.
Each challenge is like 30-60 seconds long. Grab the first mushroom in Mario. Complete a lap in Excitebike. Clear some blocks in Dr. Mario. They’re simple enough that I got gold ratings on most of them without too much trouble. You learn the optimal route and shave off half a second here and there. It’s satisfying for a while.
The variety is decent with 13 different games but when you don’t know or care about stuff like Balloon Fight or Ice Climber it’s just going through the motions. Mario and Zelda challenges were fun. The rest felt like homework. Some challenges string together multiple games which keeps things moving at least.
Those Legend challenges though. These are the ones where you play big chunks of the actual games in one go. Like beating all of Super Mario Bros with warp zones or completing the first Zelda dungeon. These need serious practice and grinding to get good times. I took one look at them and noped out. Not spending hours perfecting routes through games from before I was born.
Online leaderboards are there if you want to compete but I didn’t bother much. The ghost data showing friend runs would be neat if any of my friends had a Switch. Party mode could be fun with the right group passing the controller around but again everyone needs to actually care about NES games for it to work.
The presentation is clean and faithful to the originals. These games look exactly like they did 40 years ago which means they look old. The music is nostalgic if you grew up with it. I didn’t.
Got through most of the regular challenges in about 8 hours and called it done. It’s well made for what it is but what it is didn’t grab me. If you have NES nostalgia you’ll probably get more out of this. For me it was a decent time killer that I’ll probably never touch again. At least that gold cart looks nice on the shelf!