Here's where you'll find my brief game reviews. There's a loose schedule, I'll try to post a review a week, but no guarantees.
It's difficult to talk about Kid Icarus: Uprising without looking at it in the context of both it's own franchise, Kid Icarus, and also Super Smash Bros. For it's place within the Kid Icarus series, it revived a long-dead, short-lived franchise with flair and style, bringing the series that had been stranded in 1991 into the modern day. For Super Smash Bros., the influence between the two is a bit more opaque. Uprising itself takes from Sakurai's other works, with the idol system of collectible statues being not too different to the trophies system in Smash. A more interesting thing to bring up would be the influence that this game would go on to have on Smash itself, creating a new system where you can scale the difficulty across various levels to increase or decrease your reward for completion, based on that difficulty. This system would then go on to become a staple of the Smash single-player campaigns, showing Sakurai's creative influence across the two series. On to the actual game however, you can see that great care has been put into every part. The gameplay is polished to a shine, with each level starting with an arial combat section, then moving to a ground-based section, with exceptions in some later parts of the game. Also worth noting is that the ground-based movement feels a bit clunky and imprecise, and the game as a whole could stand to benefit from supporting the circle pad pro or c-stick with a patch. The story starts off with the return of Medusa from the previous games, but quickly spirals from there, with so many turns that it had me thinking the game was about to end on multiple occasions. Within that story is great dialogue between all the characters, along with great characters in their own right throughout the 25 missions. Overall, the game stands out as a great point in the 3DS's library, and stands as a testament to the fact that Sakurai needs to be allowed to make non-Smash games so we can see his creativity.
An incredibly charming game! This hidden gem of the eShop (either get it now or mod your 3DS, like I did) is a creative blend of horse racing and solitaire. The game has a surprising amount of complexity for what it is, but just the right amount to make solitaire exciting and tense. Overall, a great game, and I believe it to be the better of the two minor game freak 3DS games (though I can't say that I've played too much Harmo Knight). 8/10