Published 24/02/2026

Through My Backlog, Slowly #2

Welcome to the newest entry in Through My Backlog, Slowly, a series of review/article thingies where I just yap about some games I want to talk about without giving them full, in-depth reviews. Whilst some of them might be as long as a normal review, I won’t be going into as much detail on how they tick or stuff like that - it’s a bit more of a stream of consciousness thing, where I’m just writing about what I want to write about, or how the game made me feel, stuff like that. Today, I’ll be speaking about LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, Survival Kids for GB, and Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. Sit back, get a drink, and I hope you enjoy reading my haphazard thoughts!

LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga

Star Wars won’t always be at the forefront of my interests, the burning obsession that it was in my childhood, but I think it’ll always be there. Every movie, every TV show, every book and above all - every game - will draw my eye, even a little bit. And outside the iconic Battlefront 2, I don’t think any Star Wars game series will ever be as beloved as LEGO Star Wars. I’ve played a LOT of these games over the years, but I think I’ve always been chasing the feeling I had as a kid, playing LEGO Star Wars: The Original Trilogy and just spending hours treating it like a digital playground. Creating stories in my head, doing my favourite levels over and over again, and just immersing myself into what I was very, very hyperfixated on. There've been a lot of the LEGO games since then, and whilst I 100% think there have been better games than the Skywalker Saga, it’s easily the closest I’ve been to recapturing those feelings of decades past.

I think the big elephant in the room is that the core levels that make up each of the nine Episodes of the Skywalker Saga are… I don’t want to say half-built, but I’m surprised how spare they can feel. At least in the initial Story Mode of these levels, where your choice of characters is locked, they’re extremely linear and frequently very short; there were waaaay too many times I hit the end of the level after only a couple of minutes and I was just kind of left feeling… that’s it? I don’t want to say they’re outright bad, because a bunch of them, especially the more gimmicky ones like the starship battles, the focus on one-on-one duels, or moments like the Gungan defense against the Trade Federation are all quite good. These levels only really show a level of depth when you replay them via Free Mode, as they’re full of optional objectives and attractives only reachable with characters outside Story Mode’s offerings.

Honestly, most of them are inherently quite good, but it’s just disappointing since pretty much every game had a higher-number of levels that were more in-depth than what we got. The main reason I feel these levels are on the shorter-side is due to the game’s heavy focus on its open world. Yes, yes, even LEGO games aren’t free from the blight of open world gaming, but at least the Skywalker Saga’s rendition is a little more engaging

In between the story-based levels, you’ll just be doing slightly more guided actions in the open-world locales, but since half of them just amount to ‘follow Luke here’ or ‘Do this simple puzzle to open a door’, they’re somehow even more forgettable than the levels themselves. They probably just exist to remind you that the open-world is there to play around with, but I’d much prefer to be actually playing the Star Wars movies! Still, at least the starship and vehicle missions are uniformly fantastic and joy to play around in… which just makes it so much more annoying when the best ones are just cut from the game! I wanted to do the Battle of Coruscant at the start of Episode 3, or the Second Death Star run at the end of Episode 6 soooo badly, but they’re just relegated to cutscenes before and after their respective levels. Booo.

It’s been debated to death, but I do pine for the days where the characters just mumbled and pantomined their way to vaguely retelling Star Wars epic tales. But I do think the cutscenes and general re-imagnings of each movie are entertaining enough, or have enough little jokes or whatever thrown in to make them worth watching. Hell, I think the LEGO versions of the Sequel Trilogy are almost just as good. So many of the jokes centered around Kylo Ren - the memes about him being shirtless, his general ineptitude in the eyes of his peers, his weird obsession with Vader and wanting to be with Rey - it all just leads to innumerable little jokes that made playing an adaptation of the worst Star Wars movie bearable.

No, whilst the more directed meat of the game can be a little lacking, I think that it makes up for it in spades in the rest of the experience. The Skywalker Saga succeeds in two very key, very important ways. Firstly, I think its open-world segments are delightfully fantastic in a toybox kind of way. There’s just so much stuff in every single corner - funny conversations with NPCs, minute-long puzzles for Kyber Crystals or more bespoke, complex missions for new characters and ships. The way you get these Kyber Crystals do vary heavily in quality - I think the vast majority of the platforming ones are so easy a sleepwalker could do them, but I was always down for a good-ass race (on foot, or on vehicle). It’s funny, but despite how much I lauded the starship segments in the story mode, the amount of missions that feature you travelling through hyperspace, being beset upon by waves of starships are almost yawn-inducingly boring. They’re really, really bad, and take just long enough to piss me off. But, thankfully, they’re the only consistent kind of mission that are consistently annoying, so like country girls, I will make do.

The point is, if I was a ten-year old and got my hands on the Skywalker Saga, I would’ve been set for years, much like I spent what felt like years on the original two games back on the PS2. There’s just so much to do, and unless you’re a completionist, there’s no need to devour it all - just play it until you’re satisfied, like I did. Maybe I’ll go back and get another hundred Kyber Crystals, but I’m okay with this being a game I go back to over the timescale of months and years, a marathon, not a sprint.

But the other way I think it succeeds is it really hammers home to me how damn important Star Wars is to me as a franchise. I don’t love how they’ve depicted the movies in it’s levels, but the amount of dedication and respect they’ve shown in every facet of the nine-film saga; the amazingly gigantic cast, the constant nods to fandom jokes and fixations; the detail in the worlds and just about everything… it’s a love letter on a scale you almost never see. Pretty much every single character will have some joke, some little animation or SOMETHING that made me smile or grin or even giggle… picking Bib Fortuna on a whim and hearing him mutter “I bib you good day” had me cackling just from how unexpected it was. The sheer size of the Skywalker Saga leads to the game having to focus on the bigger picture then the minutiae, which leads to the weaker story sections or the frequently sleepwalking-difficulty of the Kyber Crystals… but there so much passion baked in that I can almost forgive any real issue with the game.

I think as pure experiences, a lot of the older LEGO Star Wars games - particular the Original Trilogy, The Clone Wars, and the Complete Saga, are better video game experiences, better ways to *play* Star Wars… but there is something in The Skywalker Saga that draws me in and delights me in a way that the older games don’t. It’s the biggest celebration of Star Wars, ever, and it’s a celebration for every kind of fan there is; fans like me, who adore everything Star Wars is; old fans who obsess over every detail of the original; those nostalgic for the prequels; and the new age of fans of the sequels. The Skywalker Saga isn’t perfect, not nearly, but it makes me happy like nothing else.

Survival Kids (GBC)

Recently, I’ve been taking the time to glance through some of the GB and GBC games offered on the Nintendo Switch Online service. I’m not quite sure why I picked up Survival Kids as my second title to focus on (after Wario Land 3, which I wrote a whole review on!) but it might be the title alone that piqued my interest. A title like Survival Kids on the GBC? It just feels… wrong. It’s a collection filled with stuff like Sword of Hope or Gargoyle Quest, not this!

But I digress. With clean, simple visuals that almost resemble a cross between the original Pokemon games and the Zelda Oracle games, the core gameplay loop of Survival Kids is simple - you’re stuck on an island after a ship sinking, and you need to survive. You’ll be wandering the island for shelter, for food and drink, and for tools that’ll give you a chance against beast and nature alike. Keeping your basic needs served are pretty simple; there’s plenty of water to be found, and just munching on the various berries and fruits that are scattered throughout the forest will keep you alive, but sleep is a different story; you need to sleep in proper huts, with a light source nearby to keep wild animals away. Surviving isn’t the goal - they’re the juggling balls you need to keep in the air as you maneuver across the island and seek a way back to civilization.

If anything, I praise Survival Kids for not pulling its punches with its depiction of island survival. There’s no cop-out if your HP runs out - you’re dead, and as your hunger, thirst, and sleep needs rise, your chosen character will begin to mutter more and more nihilistic things as they move closer towards death. This darkness culminates in one of the game's bad endings, where you manage to build a raft, but don’t stock up on enough supplies for the journey home. You see your character slowly starve and dehydrate to death, ultimately closing on the note that they fell asleep and never awoke again. Yeah, uh, most games on the GB don’t go down that path, but props to it for sticking to the reality of the situation. This extends to your encounters with beasts on the island - sure, once you’ve gotten a basic weapon like a spear, you can stand your ground against some bats or even a scorpion or two. But even with the best kit a kid could find on a deserted island (read: not much), running into a tiger or a mountain lion might as well be a death sentence.

Progression is measured essentially in two ways - how much of the island you have access to, and what tools you’ve unlocked to help facilitate further exploration of said island. A lot of paths throughout the island lead to dead ends with a particular material that can be crafted into a permanent upgrade, like a unique rock that can be combined with a branch into a hammer, which can then break apart rocks to access new sections of the island. Crafting is the name of the game, but outside of a few hints thrown in here and there, working out what is used to craft what key item can be a bit too much trial and error.

To make matters worse, sometimes you’ll make items, but despite them seemingly being key to surviving on the island, they’re just… useless. A baseball bat seems pretty useful to fend off wild animals, but nah, not used for fighting. A flint would be amazing to get through the dark caves, but due to a Japanese superstition, you can’t even use the damn thing. At the very least, most crafting materials respawn in the same spot after a night’s sleep, so even if you waste something on a baseball bat, you’re not totally out of luck. It’s just kind of a pain when all the item sprites kind of look the same.

And so, with a few glances at a walkthrough, I managed to make my way through the first half of the game, and if that was the whole thing, I would’ve been pretty happy about my time spent with Survival Kids. Sure, it’d be short, but it would’ve been a concise, interesting, and above all unique experience throughout. The culmination of your efforts wandering the island - finding the tools, the skills, and the resolve to build a raft to escape an island seemingly shaking itself to oblivion - is a really solid foundation for a game. But after that - well, assuming you stocked well for the voyage - the game decides to continue, much to its detriment. Yeah, escaping a deserted island as a pre-pubescent child is a lot easier said than done, no?

The game’s final section where you have to do a scavenger hunt for magic crystal keys just felt way too ‘gamey’ in comparison to the rest of Survival Kids. Sure, having full reign over the island is fun at all, but with how annoying it can be to navigate at times, realizing you need a particular material or key item from one side of the island for the other side can be ridiculously annoying - something which is even worse when you realise just how small your inventory is, once you factor in always needing your canteen, axe, food, and any other necessities. There’s way more actual puzzles, all with their own obscure solutions and whatnot, and it’s at this point it feels the survival elements of the game are just holding you back from finishing the damn game. Hell, the final, dungeon-like, area of the game is just big enough and far enough from your home base that just navigating it without dying from hunger, thirst, or just the beasts inhabiting the palace is a huge pain in the ass, and that’s before dealing with the cascading puzzles that make it up.

Look, I just wanted to be a kid again and survive for a while, not play a janky Zelda game. At least there’s no weird bosses to fight or anything… but then again, this game finding a way to justify a boss fight would be pretty funny, I’m not gonna lie.

I give Survival Kids credit for being something fairly unique on the Game Boy, and it’d probably be something I adored as a kid with a lot less to do in my life and a lot more patience for aggressively rough game design. It’s 100% not a bad game, not by a longshot, but I think it’s just been ravaged by age just a little too much. Its first half, despite crafting foibles, is a genuinely decent survival game with kids in mind, but I think the second half's more ‘gamey’ philosophy just didn’t click with me, and that’s okay. Even if I had to use a guide, I’m glad I played through it to the end - it’s just a really unique game in a time when there really wasn’t anything else like it.

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate

Within the last decade or so, Monster Hunter has become one of my most treasured, most obsessed-over franchises of all time. World, Wilds, Rise, Generations Ultimate and, of course, 4 Ultimate are all games I’ve put at *least* a hundred hours into apiece. I’m keep my thoughts relatively brief, as I think when I’m eventually done with my time in 4U, I’ll be writing a full review, so look forward to that!

4U very much feels like the perfected form of the old-school Monster Hunter. Everything that was tried in the proceeding half-dozen games has either been perfected to a mirror-sheen, like its vault of movesets, level design or suite of monsters, or discarded like the much maligned underwater humps of Tri. Compared to even the games from a few years before, 4U feels smoother, weightier, just more… I dunno, more than the previous games. The biggest mechanical change in your moment-to-moment hunts is that of the more vertical hunting environments throughout; there’s a lot more climbing, jumping, and breakable terrain brought into play this time around, which leads to a focus of being able to leap upon your opponent and knock them down. Every level is designed around this, and 4U probably has some of my favourite maps in the series. It’s initial locale, the Ancestral Steppe, is probably my falt out favourite.

The new weapons are equally fantastic, especially the Insect Glaive, which became my weapon of choice in Generations Ultimate and Rise, though it’s clear they were perhaps a tad - or a little more than a tad - overtuned for 4U. Seriously, the sheer damage output the Insect Glaive is capable of in the right hands is fucking awe-inspiring. If I had to nitpick, Monster Hunter has never felt amazing to play on the 3DS, especially if you don’t have a New Nintendo 3DS, but the game’s quality is so damn high I can push past the physical limitations. Just gotta not overdo it to keep away from the specter of carpal tunnel always looming over me. The game also looks fantastic on the little handheld that could, with a very bright, eye-popping aesthetic that drenches everything in a cartoonish beauty that has really been lacking in the more modern entries of Monster Hunter.

But I think the thing that 4U succeeds over anything other entry in the franchise is having a *damn* good story. The games have almost never really had a story at all - more ‘justifications’ for what and why you’re hunting. 4U’s story is simplistic, to be fair, but it’s perhaps one of the best examples of ‘less is more’. It’s the most adventurous of the older style of games, with a core group of characters you actively follow as they travel the land hunting the secrets of an ancient artefact. But for the first time, Monster Hunter gives you a consistent, persistent rival monster that constantly returns to haunt you, constantly attacking you and what you hold dear, and creating what is one of the beloved monsters of all time. The rivalry between your hunter and their Caravan crew, and the fledgling Elder Dragon Gore Magala has become legendary among fans, and the quartet of battles you have are all some of the best in the entire franchise. It’s rare to see a monster feel like it has a character in these games, and Gore

But ultimately, I think what keeps me coming back to Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate is the fact that it was the last fully new Monster Hunter game that feels like the old style of games. Sure, there was Generations, and Generations Ultimate, but much of that game's content is just re-used and re-tooled assets from older games. Nothing is handed to you in these games; sometimes, you’ll need to hunt a monster a dozen times to get a rare drop, and you’ll spend those dozens bouts learning everything about your foe, making you hunt more and more efficiently and turning it into precise, surgical devastation. To some, it’s probably just a waste of time hoping RNG will favour you, but when a game feels as good as 4U does - and how high the level of satisfaction can be when you hit the big one - it’s hard to feel the same way about the New World of Monster Hunter games.

In the last month, I’ve put around 40 hours into 4U - largely on buses or at night when my fiance is asleep - and I haven’t even touched High Rank (the mid-level difficulty of the game’s progression). I’m floored by the amount of content in Low Rank that I never even saw - hilarious requests that reveal fantastic pearls of characterisation, and monsters encounters I thought only existed in later moments of the game. Going through the game in a more thorough, surgical patterns had been a delight, seeing things I didn’t even realise were in the game and things I doubt a lot of players ever touch, as obsessive as the goal of hitting High, or G, Rank can be.

It’s clear why they won’t go back to the old style of Monster Hunter. World, Rise, and Wilds have all been runaway wins for Capcom, with tens of millions of sales between them. The lower difficulty curve, the simplified hunting mechanics and the general ease at which you can get to grips with its myriad of systems is, ultimately, a good thing. I mean, World is what really got me into the series. But ever since World, I think one of the sparks that made Monster Hunter really special - even if I couldn’t appreciate it before World - has gone out. Monster Hunter was always weird and wonderful, and whilst it continues to be as wonderful as ever… the weirdness that I think is best condensed and showcased in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate is sadly a thing of the franchise’s past. With it being trapped on the 3DS might limit the ability to play it, I still implore you to try it out no matter what. Pound for pound, I think this is the very best the series has to offer - the best story, the best suite of monsters, the best ‘feel’... but even if it’s not, it’s easily my favourite, and that’s gotta count for something, no?

-

And that’s it for February’s entry in Through My Backlog, Slowly! I’d like the get these out once a month on things I feel like yapping a bit about, but the number of reviews will vary heavily. I almost had four in here, but I felt the addition of Forza Horizon made things a little overlong, so expect that next month! For now, have a good one everyone, and I’ll see you in my next review - whatever that might be!