The Mario & Luigi RPG series started on the Game Boy Advance, and even many years and a few iterations later, it has always reflected a connection to those roots. The two-button Game Boy Advance was the impetus for the series' central hook: Each brother is assigned to a face button and you control them both at once. Even as the series has progressed to platforms with more face buttons, the core concept has remained defined by its initial limitations. Now brought to the Switch, Mario & Luigi: Brothership feels like a conscious effort to escape those limitations, resulting in a lengthy RPG that can't quite sustain its own weight.

In Brothership, several denizens of the Mushroom Kingdom are magically swept into the new setting of Concordia--a vast sea dotted with islands that used to be part of one contiguous land mass. A world tree of sorts, the Uni-Tree served as the tether that held all of the islands together, but it suddenly wilted and the islands drifted apart. With the help of a young researcher, you pilot a ship that houses a new Uni-Tree sapling, connecting islands and the Great Lighthouses that amplify its power to bring them all back together. So your ship comes to resemble a tugboat, with several islands tethered and pulled behind it.

It's a concept that allows for lots of different kinds of environments and stories on self-contained little islands. One might be modeled like a desert, while another is a multi-story corporate headquarters. The Great Lighthouses serve as major dungeons, so each of the acts consists of the smaller stories on each island, the larger story arc of the region, and then the Great Lighthouse dungeon as its resolution.

Third-person action game Slitterhead often presents a pretty compelling front. At first, it sounds like an out-there horror game with an inventive approach to gameplay. You play as a formless spirit that can possess humans, hunting vicious monsters capable of imitating normal people. Those creatures explode from the heads of their human bodies to reveal their true forms when discovered.

As cool as all those words clearly are, Slitterhead never reaches the promise of its premise, apart from a few gorgeous cutscenes where a human twists and mutates into a disgusting, multi-armed abomination. Instead, it's usually frustrating and repetitive, with its interesting ideas turning to gimmicks that wear themselves thin after the first few hours.

Those gimmicks feel like they have potential, at least at first. Slitterhead opens with you taking on the role of the Hyoki: a floating spirit that can zip into the brains of random humans populating the dense city of Kowlong, briefly taking control of their bodies. The Hyoki can't remember anything about itself or what it's doing, until it encounters its first slitterhead--which, after eating the brains of an unsuspecting victim, bursts from the skull of its host and chases you down alleys as you zap from one hapless soul to another to stay just ahead of it. The concept is weird, changing the way you think about characterization and physical gameplay space, and slitterheads are scary--it's a great way to start the game.

SaGa stands as one of Square Enix's longest-running series, but it's also had a rough time outside of Japan. If you pick up a random SaGa game, you'll probably understand why: SaGa games are JRPGs that don't do things in the way most overseas players would expect. SaGa tends to focus more on complex, interweaving systems of combat, character growth, and questing. And that's supplemented by narratives that tend to act more as connective tissue that link locations and objectives together instead of the sprawling, character-driven stories the genre has become known for. Wandering around blindly and piecing out what to do and how things work in a SaGa game can be incredibly compelling, but some entries in the franchise lean toward immensely frustrating. Romancing SaGa 2 is more the former than the latter, but its earlier releases were still an acquired taste.

Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven is a full-on remake of a game many fans consider the series' apex--if not among the greatest RPGs of all time. If there's any game in the series that could reach out and capture a new audience in a way no other SaGa game has before, this is the one that could do it.

Romancing SaGa 2's story begins ages prior to the modern day, when seven heroes fought to rid the land of evil forces. Their deeds have become the subject of myth and legend, and as times have grown ever more troubled, the people have yearned for their return. In the recent past, Emperor Leon and his two sons hear rumblings of the heroes' revival, but soon learn the horrible truth--the heroes have themselves become agents of evil, and they slay both Leon and his son Victor in a vicious attack. Despite this loss, there is still hope: Inheritance Magic, which allows an Emperor to pass memories, abilities, and strength down to an appointed successor, beginning with young prince Gerard.

The best part of any Call of Duty game's Zombies mode is how it facilitates panic. The longer you play the round-based horde mode, in which the undead stream toward you from all directions, the tougher it becomes, and before long, you're sprinting around the map, trying desperately to stay alive as crowds of corpses shamble after you. Your only chance is to stop and fire away to thin out the approaching wave of undeath, hoping you don't run into any huge mutated monstrosity while your back is turned. Black Ops 6 is great at these moments.

Zombies in Black Ops 6 is a return to the best-known and best-enjoyed form of the four-player cooperative mode, which developer Treyarch originated back in Call of Duty: World at War and has been iterating on ever since. Gone is the approach from last year's Modern Warfare 3, a messy take that bolted Zombies mechanics onto elements of CoD's battle royale game, Warzone. What Black Ops 6 offers feels like classic Zombies but enhanced, with a bunch of small elements old and new added together to build out the experience in fun, engaging, and challenging ways.

The most notable change, and the one that works best with Zombies, is Omni-movement, Black Ops 6's adjustment to how you get around in the game. Omni-movement lets you move at the same speed in any direction, including sprinting, diving, and sliding, so you're able to change direction on a dime without losing momentum. It's a great addition to Zombies, where you will inevitably find yourself kiting a horde around the map as you fight to stay alive, only to suddenly realize that the path you're backpedaling down isn't as clear as you thought.

There's an argument to be made that speed is what makes Call of Duty multiplayer feel so good. As a franchise, the CoD games are great about getting you into the action as quickly as possible. When you shoot opponents, they tend to go down fast; when you die, you can be back in the fight in about a second. With Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Treyarch leans into the speed of the franchise in just about every respect, starting with some meaningful adjustments to movement systems and ending with map designs that make sure you're never far from your next hail of bullets. Most of the time, those fast and intense battles are a lot of fun--but the design changes also result in Black Ops 6 feeling limited in the kinds of fights you're likely to face.

The major adjustment Black Ops 6 brings to the series is the Omni-movement system, and at least in terms of how the game feels to play, it's an excellent one. Omni-movement does away with the pesky natural limitations of a pair of human legs. You can run, sprint, slide, and dive in any direction, regardless of where you're facing or where your momentum would take you. It's kind of akin to the freedom a tank turret has from the vehicle beneath it, able to turn in any direction to address threats, but much faster and much cooler.

Omni-movement creates a really high degree of fluidity. The ability to move at full speed in any direction at any time makes it easy to quickly navigate maps and turn to address threats. The game never holds you back when it comes to movement, and paired with how fast you might gun down an enemy if you react quickly enough, or the speed with which they can shut you down, Omni-movement is an excellent improvement to your overall reactivity. This is a game that's about twitch reactions and sharp aim, and Omni-movement amplifies that twitchiness by giving you more freedom of motion in all cases.