tl;dr, not a fan of "green stars" hacks so im biased, very meh experience that was drawn out more by extra content being really tedious and annoying. add toggles for hud and green tint, also the star proximity noises were a nice touch
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i wasn't expecting much going into this, just that it'd be a very okay experience that's only worth taking my time to finish since it was in coop. and honestly it was kinda worse? i enjoyed my time with the base content, what with the generic collectathon of stars that are now green and produce lovely sparkling sounds, which did make the process more enjoyable now that i didn't have to pray that i positioned my camera in the correct area to reveal a star hiding in some unconventional place. kinda weird that it has some of the same star positions as another hack i've played, Luigi's Mansion 64.5, which is either coincidence or someone did a funny.
also for some reason, a lot of the added features have no toggle, like the hug elements and the green tint. maybe i'm just used to most other romhacks having a custom hud toggle, but there really should be one for this romhack specifically since the changes that i would expect to have a toggle are all additions created by the porter. just a simple mod menu toggle for the hud and tint would go a long way, since a lot of the people i was playing with weren't a fan of the green tint and would've liked a toggle.
***spoilers for the extra content ahead if you care about that***
honestly the base content was fine, fun even. but the extra content kinda bogged down the experience for me. having to go back through the entire game to collect every obtainable coin was not very fun. if it were coupled with the first run instead of being locked to endgame content, i could excuse it since you could go through the game and along the way, grab all coin stars, even if it were tedious. it felt like going through a second run with an unnecessary amount of padding and i think there were better ways extra content could've been tackled.
overall, i think extra content made the overall experience worse for completionists like myself, but if youre just going for any%, then youll have a fun time.
accurate rating: 2.8/5
