I don’t know if I’ve ever played a video game quite like Natsu-Mon: 20th Century Summer Kid. Imagine a JPRG where the young hero who’s supposed to embark on an epic adventure to save the kingdom doesn’t actually embark, and instead just spends a month fishing, exploring caves, and resurrecting the town festival. That’s this game.

But that’s not to say there’s no adventure to be had. On the contrary, Natsu-Mon is all about finding your adventures where you are. You play as Satoru, a young boy whose parents run a traveling circus. The circus runs into some issues in scenic Yomogi Town, so Satoru is left in the care of an innkeeper while his parents attempt to resolve those issues. With nothing more than his childhood curiosity and a school assignment to guide him, Satoru sets out to make this an August to remember.

And how does he do that? By exploring. By talking to people. By basically just running around until something catches his eye. Gameplay is mostly centered around total childhood freedom—the kind few kids have anymore, at least where I live.

Occasionally, the game gives Satoru specific tasks to complete. He may wake up, for example, and find himself invited to accompany friends to a specific location. These provide scripted moments that help prevent Natsu-Mon from feeling completely aimless. For the most part, however, how Satoru spends his day is up to the player. There are always bugs and fish to catch, all of which are documented in his notebook.

There are coins and treasures to find (were 20th-century Japanese homeowners really this cool with kids traipsing across their rooftops?). There are paid jobs to accept. There are ghost girls to…wait. Ghost girls?

Part of what makes Natsu-Mon: 20th Century Summer Kid so endearing is that it expertly captures the wonder of being a kid. Did that little girl by the tree just vanish into thin air? Is she a ghost? Well, unless someone has a better explanation, she has to be. Let’s play games with her and find out!

Natsu-Mon provides bigger goals, too. One of your first tasks is to climb some specific buildings. Your stamina meter, however, won’t let you get close. So, you have a month to increase the meter and figure out how to get to the top of those structures. What a great goal that is. I recall my own childhood when a friend and I decided to hop the barbed-wire security of a radio tower and climb to the top. Did we make it? Of course not. Our stamina meters weren’t high enough. And it was also quite scary. And stupid. But we tried. Memory achieved!

Satoru has to uncover and complete all of these tasks over the course of a full day. They begin with breakfast and a morning exercise session (provided he was home in time for a good night’s sleep the day before).

Then, he’s free to roam until supper when he’s automatically located and returned home. He then gets the evening to wrap things up, but has to be home by 10:00 if he doesn’t want to oversleep the next day. This was annoying at first, as the game didn’t provide a clock; you have to buy that yourself once you make enough money. Maybe the point was to miss your bedtime, but I preferred to just hang around the inn until weariness took over. Even with the clock, it sometimes wasn’t worth abandoning my current task to complete the long journey home in time for bed, even with the ability to take the bus.

The length of the days can be adjusted to suit your playstyle. You can get more done by making the days last longer, but the adventures lose their sense of urgency. You also lose replayability that way. Tear through the game on short days, and you’ll be more likely to play again, making different decisions on how you spend your time. Shorter days, however, also make it more difficult to complete certain assignments and jobs, which can be frustrating (especially those that require precise movements).

This is especially true of the tasks that require platforming or reaching far-off locations. The game’s open world is colorful and nicely detailed, but getting around can sometimes prove difficult. This is largely due to somewhat clunky controls, especially when platforming is in the mix. And because Satoru can climb nearly anything, he’ll often start climbing things you don’t want him to.

Natsu-Mon also doesn’t do a great job of guiding you on your tasks, or even helping you figure out how to go to bed. Random exploration was very fun at the beginning, but by the time you’re approaching the end of August, a little more help on how to get things done would’ve been appreciated. A fortune-telling circus member eventually shows up to help, and you may even locate a mystical port-a-pot to help you get home in an instant. Still, expect some gaming sessions to be more productive than others. Maybe that’s a development decision—you can’t expect to complete a childhood’s worth of adventures in a month, right? Especially when there’s already a DLC adventure to embark on.

Also, it forces you to talk to people, and that’s one of the game’s greatest strengths. Almost every person you meet has something to contribute. Even better, their individual quirks (and Satoru’s response to them) make them fun to engage with. The conversations are a joy to experience, even if you are oddly forced to select every dialogue option before leaving them. And, like in real life, you never know which conversation will end up shaping the course of your summer.

These all combine to create a chill, Animal Crossing-type experience that will make older gamers wistful. It affected me a bit differently, as I had these types of days in my childhood. I explored creek bridges in search of black snakes. I climbed abandoned grain silos. I never hopped on a box car and rode it 30 miles into a neighboring town before disembarking and calling my dad for a ride home, but I have a buddy who did.

Rather, Natsu-Mon makes me wistful for an environment where kids still have this type of freedom (or even just desire it). I imagine that’s why the game was made, as that sense of wonder and curiosity is deeply woven into its core. That makes it a game worth experiencing, provided childhood adventures haven’t lost their appeal. Who needs to go fight God on some interstellar plane when there’s a lighthouse to climb literally right there?

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As I’ve mentioned before on the Pure Nintendo Podcast, I’m a bigger fan of Luigi’s games than of Mario’s. Maybe that’s because Luigi’s Mansion is the first game I played on the first Nintendo System I owned. Maybe it’s because I’d rather explore haunted mansions than jump on the heads of various animals and vegetables. Or, maybe I just prefer Luigi’s color scheme. Whatever the reason, I was really looking forward to re-exploring Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD, and it didn’t disappoint.

Originally released in 2013 for the 3DS, Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon (as it was then known) finds our hero forced to explore five separate mansions in Evershade Valley.

They apparently have a ghost problem there, but they were at least happy ghosts. With the shattering of the Dark Moon, however, the ghosts have become violent…or at least mischievous. Professor E. Gadd once again solicits Luigi’s help in braving the horrors within to retrieve the Dark Moon fragments and set things to right.

More accurately, Gadd kind of bullies Luigi into it. Unlike Mario, Luigi is a reluctant hero, obviously terrified throughout the game. But Gadd at least equips Luigi with the right tool for the job: the Poltergust 5000. Not only can this vacuum be used to suck up and trap the spirits, but it can also startle them with a strobe light and be used to reveal hidden objects.

Luigi must master all three components to safely make his way through the haunted hallways, and doing so is tremendous fun…albeit with plenty of frustration.

The gameplay starts off simple enough. The intro level ghosts are easy to locate and capture. But I guess the five years between Luigi’s Mansion 3 and 2 HD caused me to forget just how difficult these games can be. They’re not unbeatable by any means, but don’t think this game’s cute, comedic approach means you won’t be facing a stiff challenge. The “combat” quickly ramps up to have you facing multiple ghosts at once. While you’re trying to capture one with the Poltergust—a prolonged process of trying to suck it in as it flies around the room—other ghosts can attack and break your suction stream. Get hit too many times by them or the rats, bats, knights, or numerous other hazards, and it’s back to the start for you. You can acquire dog bones that will allow you to pick up where you left off, but not enough to get you past some of the game’s more complicated bosses.

Those bosses, however, are wonderful. Just figuring out how to beat them can be tricky enough, and then actually doing so requires a combination of patience, timing, and execution. They’re the kind of bosses where you don’t seem to make a dent the first time you face them, but then easily capture them the second time when you’re more methodical in your approach.

Getting to them is a blast, too, as the maze of rooms gives you plenty to unlock and discover. Initial exploration never grows tiresome, although getting kicked back to the beginning does make things repetitious. And if you miss any collectibles along the way, or you’re not happy with your ranking after completing a level, you’ll end up attempting them more than once.

Will you want to? I didn’t, as my biggest complaints about the Luigi’s Mansion series remain: the stutter-step of gameplay. Far too often, Professor Gadd pulls you back to his laboratory to talk way too long about things that are obvious. These scenes are sometimes funny, but mostly they’re just in the way of the fun. Then, when you want to go back, there’s no way to do so. You can’t save or replenish your health before a boss fight, for example, so you’ll often enter into those knowing there’s little chance for success. Queue the frustration during the fight, then again when you’ve got to make the long trek back to the boss’s location for round 2.

A new issue is that the elements that were obviously designed for the 3DS effect are still there, and they just feel weird—like when you see a 3D movie in 2D and you’re wondering why so many things are flying into the audience’s face. It’s a sad reminder of how cool things were on the 3DS when done properly.

But Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD brings a lot of new elements that are worth the second ride through the funhouse. The HD, for starters, looks fantastic, and the ability to search these darkened rooms on a large TV really enhances the experience. There’s unfortunately no two-player co-op like in Luigi’s Mansion 3, but exploration and boss battles both benefit from a second pair of eyeballs on the screen.

The lack of co-op is somewhat compensated for by a series of multiplayer options that turn Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD into a party game for prolonged life. There’s a Hunter mode where up to four players can work together to clear ghosts from the tower. In Polterpup, players face a time limit in which they must locate and catch all the ghost dogs. Finally, Rush tasks players with escaping the mansion within the time limit. Defeating ghosts and finding hidden objects gives you more time, but you could end up wasting it if you don’t defeat them quickly enough.

The multiplayer games are all pretty fun, but the real joy here is in the single-player experience. It’s a good time whether you burn through it quickly or try for 100% completion. And there are so many fun elements along the way. I never grew tired of hearing Luigi nervously hum along with the game’s music, for example. And I’d forgotten how much I loved that staircase level after first climbing it on the 3DS. The developers really know how to turn frustration into laughter.

All that said, I can’t recommend Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD to everyone. It’s as expensive as Luigi’s Mansion 3, for starters, and 3 is the better game. Everything here is a step backward. That doesn’t mean it’s a step you shouldn’t take if you haven’t before, but those looking to double dip may as well do so in the original 3DS mansions if they still have a way in.

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Angry boy with an unfortunate past picks fights until he’s chosen to help save the world. I’d say we’ve seen this setup perhaps too many times, except that it gets a bit more complicated in Megaton Musashi W: Wired, a recent action RPG from Level-5.

Yes, that Level-5. Professor Layton Level-5. Yo Kai Watch Level-5. That should give you an indication of what to expect here; Megaton Musashi W: Wired is a story-heavy game that takes the narrative in some directions you may not expect. It does so with the gameplay, too, but perhaps to its detriment.

Our angry young man, Yamato Ichidaiji (Yamato? Musashi? This isn’t a WWII naval combat sim?), actually has quite a bit to be angry about, he just doesn’t know it right away. The Earth has been taken over by aliens called Draktors. The 1% of humanity who survived the attack are living in fortified shelters, their memories of the invasion wiped clean to…help them not be sad, I guess? I suppose I get it. I could’ve used the same treatment after Super Bowl XL.

But, there’s an initiative to take the Earth back from the Draktors, and that’s where Yamato comes in. He’s provided with his own mech (or Rogue), is given some perfunctory training, and joins the resistance.

It’s never fully clear to me why such resistances are always helmed by socially diverse and uniquely troubled teenagers. Maybe that’s just who’s playing the games. Or, maybe they’re more willing to explore the morally gray areas when they find out their oppressors may not be entirely evil.

If you’ve watched any anime with a group of kids forced to get along with one another while attempting to save humanity, you’ll feel quite comfortable here. Megaton Musashi W: Wired gives you a big main story to dig into with plenty of side missions to help you get to know your teammates. The game very much feels like a visual novel in this regard, with some quality cutscenes to locate and trigger as you run about town. I didn’t find the narrative to be terribly compelling compared to current competition, but it’s presented well, the characters are fun, and it all moves along at a decent clip.

There are even some wonderful cameos, of sorts.

I can’t say the same about the combat component, however, for a couple of reasons. Those reasons, however, could very well be selling points for many players.

Obviously, the combat gameplay is entirely mech-based. And as you’d expect when taking giant robots into battle, there’s quite a bit of customization to do. The battle controls can be quite complex, but that complexity arises from attack and combo button memorization more so than from overpowered opponents. On the contrary, the enemies are typically quite easy to take out…provided you’ve adequately prepared your robot. Megaton Musashi W: Wired is definitely aimed squarely at the gamer who likes to fiddle with customizations before combat, and then fiddle with them again when the next battle completely changes up what works and what doesn’t.

And customization isn’t relegated to hardware. There’s also a skill tree to navigate, and optimizing this with the materials you’ve acquired is almost a mini puzzle game of its own. The whole system is akin to a racing game where you want to spend more time in the garage than on the track. If that’s your thing, then this game will keep you gleefully busy for dozens of hours.

If it’s not, then it may just be something more to slow you down between the somewhat repetitive combat. It’s a matter of depth over arcade-style action, and I wasn’t really expecting that coming into the game.

Further proof of this is the online component which pits you against cross-platform players in 3v3 matches. Here, you’ll either show off the efficiency of your mech customizations, or you’ll get mercilessly crushed like I did. I expected that, sure, but I also expected the game would find opponents closer to my build/skill level. Not so. Maybe that’s because there were never enough opponents from whom to choose.

Thankfully, the single-player story mode is more than enough to keep builders busy. Mech combat certainly has its appeal, and it’s all presented with the appropriate sense of awe. The game looks great, and there’s a thrill that’s carried from the characters through to the player. The challenge may be a bit slight for some, but in a game that’s more about the preparation than the execution, maybe that’s just a reward.

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