Quick Critique: NES Remix 2/NES Remix Pack (Patreon)

NES Remix's biggest sin is that the challenges are so boring. The normal levels are either just extremely basic tutorials, "don't get hit", or "do this thing quickly". The "remix" stages are barely more interesting. In a Kirby one, you have to beat Whispy Woods while looking to the left most of the time or a Mario one where the airship level scrolls slightly faster than normal. That hardly fits my definition of a remix. Even the challenges where you have to play as one character in another game's situations just aren't set up well. One makes you play as the Mario 2 Princess in a snippet of a Mario 3 level but the mission is just to collect some coins, not actually play the game as her. Another has you play as Mario 2 Toad and throw some blocks at Kirby enemies. There was the potential to make something super creative here, but it feels more like somebody at Nintendo saw that Super Mario Bros Crossover game and wondered what it would be like to suck all the fun out of it. The scoring system feels so random. There were stages I felt I did poorly on or even died on and I'd still get the rainbow 3-star ranking on them, but then there were stages I thought I did near perfectly on and get a lesser ranking. Since I didn't know what I did wrong on the non-rainbow stages, I had nothing to strive for or care about. The UI is clunky on top of it. Every time you beat a challenge, it dumps you back to the main menu and every time you unlock a new challenge, you have to watch an animation that's a few seconds too long and every time you score high enough, you have to watch an animation unlock a stupid Miiverse stamp. I beat all the Mario 3 stages, tried a few Punch Out and Kid Icarus stages, and beat all the Remix levels that unlocked, then called it quits. For Nintendo to take somebody that grew up with a NES and has an unhealthy amount of nostalgia for the 8 and 16 bit eras and make it unhappy about playing those games is a really bad sign. And seriously, screw Mario 2 Toad. Anybody that voluntarily plays Mario 2 as Toad is probably a bad human being.