Started playing the game immediately after finishing Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. You can immediately tell that it adopts the base ideas of the classic Paper Mario games while also improving on them.

The three main characters and the world of Bug Fables are very charming. Most importantly, traversal, for the most part, does not feel like a drag, especially later on in the game when you can sprint and when you gain an item that lets you fast travel back to the Ant Kingdom. In Chapter 2, I started playing in Hard Mode by equipping a medal you can get at the very beginning and had a good time. It also incentivised me to do a lot of side quests along the way and they ended up being fun and not at all boring for me.

There's only a few things I do have issues with in Bug Fables:

The game's obsession with urging you to make a build that asks you to intentionally poison one of your party members felt really backwards. All in all, it took quite a while for the game to really give you attack increasing options that didn't in some way have trade-offs, which made the gameplay progression feel extremely slow for a long time until you suddenly had access to some really amazing stuff.

Some puzzle concepts got rather annoying for me real quick. Especially those where you had to push ice blocks with Kabbu, since that process is unnecessarily bothersome.

Platforming was also a little janky but not that great of an issue.

Started playing the game immediately after finishing Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. You can immediately tell that it adopts the base ideas of the classic Paper Mario games while also improving on them. The three main characters and the world of Bug Fables are very charming. Most importantly, traversal, for the most part, does not feel like a drag, especially later on in the game when you can sprint and when you gain an item that lets you fast travel back to the Ant Kingdom. In Chapter 2, I started playing in Hard Mode by equipping a medal you can get at the very beginning and had a good time. It also incentivised me to do a lot of side quests along the way and they ended up being fun and not at all boring for me. There's only a few things I do have issues with in Bug Fables: The game's obsession with urging you to make a build that asks you to intentionally poison one of your party members felt really backwards. All in all, it took quite a while for the game to really give you attack increasing options that didn't in some way have trade-offs, which made the gameplay progression feel extremely slow for a long time until you suddenly had access to some really amazing stuff. Some puzzle concepts got rather annoying for me real quick. Especially those where you had to push ice blocks with Kabbu, since that process is unnecessarily bothersome. Platforming was also a little janky but not that great of an issue.