Topic: Unpopular Gaming Opinions

Veeeery unpopular opinion: Nintendo was completely in the right to cancel that smash tournament, and all the people I’ve seen whining about it and calling Nintendo stupid and evil are completely childish.

@Blooper987 How Was Nintendo in the right?

@DePurpleMonkey it was protection of their property. Nintendo did not authorize the use of the mods that they were going to use. It’s taking a product made by Nintendo and modding for an event for the public. If Nintendo doesn’t want that illegal mod to be used for an event, it’s completely fine for them to do so

Nintendo was in the right in the sense that copyright law in its current form is profoundly stupid. "oh hey we'll allow you to have copyrights from the 30s still, but if its proven you didn't relentlessly defend it, you can lose it because reasons." Both of these things are awful, but its the combination of both existing simultaneously that is fascinatingly dumb.

@Blooper987 They're legally within their right to do so. There's no question about that.

I'd think that people were just hoping for a teeny bit of flexibility on Nintendo's part though, given that we're in unusual times. Cutting enough slack, just for once, to take a tournament online where the only alternatives are cancellation or a significant risk of it turning into a COVID superspreader event doesn't necessarily entail a softening of their stance against emulation and modding in the long run.

I still think I’m on the Melee community’s side on this one. By cancelling Big House Nintendo basically killed the game.

@Shadowthrone Yeah but like, what IP damage would Nintendo be sustaining

Usually this stuff would be justified if it was damaging company image or sales of a potential new product, such as when Nintendo pulled the plug on AM2R and the Mario 64 PC conversion because new games or iterations were being worked on by them

Melee is a 19 year old GameCube game, which has since been completely replaced by not just one, not two but three considerably newer games.

Especially when you have companies like SEGA actively embracing stuff like fan projects and continued support of their older titles, this comes off as Nintendo practically being stuck in a little fantasy bubble where everything has to either be played their way, or not played at all, and it comes off as tone deaf considering they're already one of the most piss poor companies when it comes to restorations of legacy content these days

@TheFrenchiestFry what if there is an HD melee in development 😱🤣 jk jk

@Blooper987 Considering Sony announced both Final Fantasy VII Remake and a new Shenmue game in the same conference the sky's the limit this point

Nintendo should just release melee, with rollback netcode on switch. Nintendo makes a tidy profit, and makes the smash community happy. They could outsource it to another company like Code Mystics, if they really don't want to put the effort in themselves.

Emulation rulz!! Seriously I've discovered so many emulation sites, romsites, emulators, homebrew, retro games and just really cool stuff online. There are people from Russia sharing new games with people in the US. There are hackers in Brazil making some of the best SMW hacks ever. There are Super Metroid hacks, LoZ hacks, Mega Man, Contra, SM64, Mortal Kombat I-III, Doom, Sonic, SoR, Kirby, JRPGs it's really endless 👍

Emulation rulz!! Seriously I've discovered so many emulation sites, romsites, emulators, homebrew, retro games and just really cool stuff online. There are people from Russia sharing new games with people in the US. There are hackers in Brazil making some of the best SMW hacks ever. There are Super Metroid hacks, LoZ hacks, Mega Man, Contra, SM64, Mortal Kombat I-III, Doom, Sonic, SoR, Kirby, JRPGs it's really endless 👍

That poor computer of yours

See, the problem is you assume the laws they're dealing with all make sense. Basically, what Nintendo is doing is dumb but that's because they have to deal with dumb.

But it is also true that it is fairly unlikely anything negative would come from it (I assume it would require a particularly bold patent troll). So...I dunno.

Unpupular opinion: Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is mich more and better in many ways than Xenoblade Chronicles.
Dunno if it was because i played it first or not, but it holds right up for me

@Quimbolas In what way? The characters, the combat, the story, the art style, the music? Personally I get how Xenoblade 2 can be compared to the first, and yes, I played XC on the Wii first, but after playing and replaying X and 2 multiple times, I still feel that Xenoblade 1 beats 2 in all the departments I listed. The characters are more likeable, and their voice acting is extremely good. The combat is not too fast or slow (in 2 it's pretty slow, because of the way Arts are charged with auto attacks), and is challenging and complex. The story is more grounded than 2's but emotionally still makes me tear up when I watch certain cutscenes! And in terms of art, I prefer XC's less anime approach. In DE it's a little cartoony but it fits very well. The chibi style in 2 is cool, but they don't use the anime effects (like in the Wanted Nia scene, with the tear drop, eye effects) as much as they could have. And some of the fan service is too blatant, like why there's so many female Blades, et cetera. And the music isn't live recorded in 1, (some of it is in DE), but it has a lot of love put in. And with processed instruments I feel electric guitars sound better, for some reason.

I've played all three Chronicles games, and Torna, in the space of four years, and it's already vaulted on top of my all time favourites list. Let me know what you love about 2.

@theJGG some of the aspects you mentioned. Both ost's are great, but i like XC2 more overall, samething about the gameplay, the world and it has better humour moments. The combat may be a little slower but for me is more satisfying as it gives me more options.
The story and characters for me it's basically on the same level for each of the games, they have strenghts and weaknesses but i like them both.

@Ralizah I'd say every single point you've brought up made me seriously think. This won't change your stance, but I can guarantee you that Definitive Edition fixes some of these issues. To me, until the Definitive Edition was released, Xenoblade Chronicles was an incredible game that fell just short of perfection, because it had some of the worst graphics for any videogame I've played. But, obviously, the hardware on Wii was not very powerful, and thus it took a mammoth effort for that game to even run on Wii to begin with. DE fixes the graphical stigma with a flourish, and while the more cartoon art style might not agree with everyone, I think the approach was to allow for more noticeable expressions. Lighting's also been fixed, and it seems to be easier on the eyes.

The cast of characters is something I could debate for a very long time. With 1's cast I feel that Sharla is a little bland in terms of her personality, but I love every party member, some more than others though. I actually started Final Fantasy X a few weeks ago, so I get the Wakka joke. But it isn't fair, ya? Same with Riki, during Chapter 12 I think, he has a really heartwarming cutscene, that made me reconsider my own view on his character.

With the whole concept and story premise of 2, I can't say that I appreciate it as much as I should, because the whole idea of humans living on the backs of ten to fifteen Titans, feels far too derivative of 1's idea (humans living on the bodies of two titans). It is because of this that I mark down 2 in the story department. And strangely, I feel the pacing is weird...the way the chapters were divided made them seem far too big. This point is weak but I might as well get it out there.

Ahh, music. I love all the games' music. Almost equally too... but 1's evokes the strongest memories for me. At first I disliked the remastered/orchestrated tracks, but almost every single one grew on me, because the instrumentation was better, tracks like Satorl Marsh, The Spiritual World, have nicer-sounding vocals (for me at least), some tracks have new backing melodies, like that synth in You Will Know Our Names, etc, making them sound fuller. I cover songs for fun, and doing songs from 2 is impossible, because the music is orchestrated in such impressive depth. X's soundtrack is a mixed bag. Some songs are incredible and are bangers, but some songs make me want to turn off the game, because of how poor they are on my ears.

The thing with Monado visions is that it's a step forward from other mechanics, which show up in cutscenes and that's it. It's a really cool idea that I feel was implemented really well. Of course there's things like the Vision music playing during a boss fight which kills the atmosphere, but in the grand scheme of things, there's other things to prattle about.

I agree with your commentary about Heart-to-Hearts, but I'd wish there was a compromise, where each pair of characters had multiple conversations to deepen their connection, but without any affinity system. Best of both worlds, no?

As for you getting DE, hope you enjoy it more than you did on Wii, or Wii U. I beat the game three times on Wii, and managed to sink three hundred hours into it on Switch. The QoL changes make it very easy to play.

@theJGG The new character models really bring everything to life in DE, from what I've seen. It's still a remaster, so environments aren't as gorgeous as XC2's, but, in general, I'd say it's a good looking game (in TV mode, at least). I've owned it since launch, but just haven't gotten around to it yet. I'm hoping to start it within the next few months, though.

I guess, for me, XC1's setting feels very mythical and, thus, detached from reality. A lot more was done to integrate the titans in XC2 into the worldbuilding of that universe, so it felt more 'real.' I can swallow people building civilizations on the backs of these giant animals due to the surface of their planet being uninhabitable, and I love how the need for people to reside on them, like parasites, fuels conflicts related to resources and land. It's absolutely derivative of XC1, of course, but I felt like it was an improvement on the concept of the original.

LOL XCX's music was always going to be controversial. I really like Sawano's work in various anime I've watched, but the style is often over-the-top and extremely distinct from the sort of music employed in XC1 and XC2.

XC1 has some good tracks, and, like I said, the reorchestration of various tracks really gives them the pop I felt like they were missing in the original. But XC2 has one of my favorite video game OSTs of all time. I love almost every track in the game. As you kind of allude to, the music is so good that there's no need to alter or change any of the tracks.

As for Heart-to-Hearts... yeah, that sounds great. In general, I feel like the affinity system adds nothing of value to Xenoblade Chronicles.

I did play a few hours of the original on the Wii, but it looked so bad on my HDTV (and, IMO, the Wii classic controller is really uncomfortable) I stopped and bought the 3DS version instead. Which... is still ugly, but less noticeably so on a smaller screen. I'll be playing the Switch version primarily on the TV, so I'll be able to get a fuller appreciation of the striking landscapes this go around.

Oh, and to be fully candid: while it's not as 'full' an experience as the retail games, I think, pound-for-pound, Torna: The Golden Country is the closest to perfection the series has gotten. It's sublime in almost every regard. It even has excellent sidequests, which sucked in XC1+2.

@Shadowthrone Thanks! I almost didn't download it at launch, but XC2 ended up really resonating with me in an unexpected way. I was disappointed by XC1 and mixed on XCX, but, some issues aside, I think they hit XC2 out of the park in many respects.

I didn't complete most of XC2's blade quests, though, so I really want to go back one day and fully dig into it. There's hundreds of hours of meaningful content available after the credits roll.

@Ralizah It's an interesting strategy, to buy a game and not play it for six months. I'm pretty poor at holding off like that, so when I buy a game I'll sink my time into it until I beat it. The only time I didn't play a game immediately after purchase was FFX/X2 for Switch. Reason being... Persona 5 Royal!

Thing with XCDE is that it runs on Xenoblade 2's engine, and because of that both look appalling on handheld when it comes to draw distance and when you're looking at screenshots of it on a computer, but I've spent some time playing both games on handheld and it isn't too bad. Torna uses an updated graphics engine so it's no surprise to hear me say that it looked better than 2.

I didn't realise that about the worldbuilding there. Thanks for that, it'll allow me to think more about the very premise of the game when I start my eleventh play through the game.

Regardless of Sawano's poor work I'll still play his songs from the game whenever the mood allows. Some of his songs are incoherent soups of electronic sounds and some aren't... But because of Xenoblade's strike rate, it's safe to say that awesome music that combines orchestral elements, electronic elements, and rock elements, is a calling card of the franchise.

Christmas is coming up, so it's a good time to knuckle down and rediscover the original Titans! Even if to you they aren't the best.

PS: It still shocks me as to how much love MonolithSoft put into Torna, and making it free to Expansion Pass owners, which already had new quests, Blades, and game mechanics.

@Shadowthrone I really embrace that feeling whenever it strikes me, and usually only Japanese Role-Playing games manage to pull it off so consistently. They have awesome, quirky characters, insane scopes, addicting combat and detailed, hand-crafted worlds. Examples; (speak of the devil) all three Xenoblade titles, FE: Three Houses, Persona 5 [and the Royal story], Persona 4 (just started but I'm in love), Final Fantasy VII Remake, Final Fantasy X. All of these fill these criteria, and these games are just sublime. They've stolen my heart over and over.

@TheFrenchistFry Just when I capped off a huge post on Japanese Roleplaying games! Atlus has made some neat stuff so I might end up coming to some kind of verdict myself about those two games. But do you mean the vanilla versions, or Full Body and Royal?