Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

@Knuckles-Fajita The Last Guardian was a different best. The game was forever delayed, but Japan Studio was highly active with several releases per year. Last Guardian was a victim of the studio being focused on Vita and PSVR efforts, PLUS some staple PS4 titles sprinkled in. Retro OTOH has done nothing that released since Tropical Freeze almost 5 years ago (plus some work on the Switch port of the same.) No studio goes dark for half a decade unless things are pretty bad. Well, I mean, other than Lionhead....and that didn't work out well either.

@ReaderRagfish But this game was like so totally 6 months ago, c'mon get with the times! Follow youtube trends, loser!

Prime 3's Hypermode was a pain in the ass though. Dark Samus and Aurora Unit 313 can be pretty dang tough.

It's not GameCube Prime 2's annoying Spider Guardian though.

@Grumblevolcano I thought the Wii u game was received well. It was the best platformer on the system, it’s actually my best platformer on the switch too

Also in regards to Monolith, we've known that they've been working on Xenoblade X since 2013. Remember the teaser trailer for X? That turned into Xenoblade X in 2014. So that's also a bad example.

I'm still optimistic for Retro to pull through, but Nintendo did have a history of selling off a studio after it outlived its usefulness like Rare did. It's been years since then though. And Retro was also in trouble during its first years before Metroid Prime 1 came out, so it's not like being in trouble automatically means the game will be bad.

Yeah I think we need to remember is that Retro Studios had NO GAMES released before Metroid Prime, and before that was approved was working on 4 separate things, all canned or modified into Prime.

And then Prime was made by a rather small team.

Whatever Retro is doing, it will be fine.

Truth be told I'd rather know nothing and have them speak when something relevant is afoot that we should know about, or near completion.

Otherwise we end up with SquareEnix.

Honestly people should be more mad that Nintendo has the Fatal Frame IP but refuses to really go all-out on it as their go-to horror game. Although I would avoid making games just to tick genre boxes off an arbitrary list if the game itself sucks.

@EvilLucario Not porting 5 would be a missed opportunity.

I'm not sure what Retro is up to, but I do feel that the longer it takes, the higher the expectations are. And after Metroid Prime and the DKC series, expectations are already quite high I think. Even if it's not a 2019 or 2020 game (though at that point I would start to question what they're up to), a small teaser wouldn't be out of place. I don't think Ninty is going to give up on them, yet. But from what we've heard, they're definitely the most expensive studio to keep up and running, so they have to release something at some point I'd presume.

@NEStalgia Monolith Soft is actually two different 'teams'. One based on Tokyo (the Xenoblade team), and one in Kyoto, that's the one that's always credited when you see their name in the credits; Their Kyoto team is more of a support team for the Nintendo games made at their Kyoto HQ. They also opened a second studio in Tokyo this year: https://nintendoeverything.com/monolith-soft-opens-new-studio...

I'm also pretty sure TLG was indefinitely delayed because the PS3 couldn't handle the AI.

@Octane said : "Monolith Soft is actually two different 'teams'"

Nop, THREE ! The new one is in Iidabashi !

@Cobalt I was under the impression there were four? Tokyo, Kyoto, Nakameguro GS Studio and Iidabashi Studio?

@Octane Yeah, Monolith just keeps expanding like crazy which is amazing. Nintendo invests nothing into their core studios and keeps growing Monolith to a larger scale Still they have released a number of games between XC, XCX, XC2, Torna, plus the other games they assist on, plus PxZ, etc. Japan Studio released tons of games, never missing a year while TLG was in development. Retro? 5 years since a platformer, and only a port of said platformer since. An entire studio going dark for half a decade is very not normal. Even for Nintendo. "What's Retro working on" was a meme at first. Now it's genuinely confusing. Maybe they're working on Animal Crossing?

As for Retro, if that rumoured Star Fox Grand Prix game is real I'd guess it got delayed including announcement to allow a more normal Star Fox experience (Starlink) to come before preventing a Federation Force type situation.

@NEStalgia Too bad I don't really care for Xenoblade! They better start expanding their Pikmin team

@Grumblevolcano I'd argue that neither sounds like a 'Star Fox experience'. But that also applies to Adventures. The franchise is a big mess

@Octane From the gameplay I've seen, Starlink feels like an open world Star Fox Assault.

@Grumblevolcano Plus the whole Starfox racer thing sounded ill fated from the start. "Turn it into a racing game" is pretty much the final death throes of any franchise, isn't it?

@NEStalgia
I still confused how did Nintendo get Tetsuya Nomura included in Xenoblade 2 project, considering he was from SquareEnix.
And speaking about SquareEnix, who is the team behind Dragon Quest Builders ?
And to consider about Animal Crossing on Switch, if Animal Crossing Switch got some teams behind Dragon Quest Builders, could it be we will got Animal Crossing World Builders since Dragon Quest Builders has some Animal Crossing vibes ?

@NEStalgia Crash, DK and Mario all survived their racing games. Sonic too... arguably. The only thing I can think of otherwise is Jak & Daxter, but that game was meant to to be the final game in the franchise when it was made.

Whatever Retro are working on my expectations are now so high that unless it is one genre defining (or two or three smaller titles) I am going to be (unjustifiably) disappointed.

@Grumblevolcano Minus all the walking I guess, there was a lot of that in Assault. Scratch that, it doesn't feel like any Star Fox game at all; it's just an open world space shooter with Fox tacked onto it

@NEStalgia After Zero? Definitely yes lol. I mean, people have been asking for a new F-Zero game since the GameCube game; and they decide to turn Star Fox of all things into a racing game? Logic got lost somewhere along the way I believe.

@Anti-Matter You don't need the people behind one game working on another to implement certain features of the first game into the other one.

@Anti-Matter Monolith was founded by former Squaresoft staff. Nomura and Takahashi worked together on FFVI, Chronotrigger, etc. back in the day at Square and were friends, so it was sort of a special guest to have him fill in and do some work with Xenoblade. The relationship between Square and Monolith is pretty good, as Monolith spun off due to the desire of the team to have better focus on support for their own projects after Square wasn't giving them leeway on the Xenosaga games and making them do constant FF rehashes. So Square had actually hired Monolith/Monolith staff to help with work on FFVII, FFVIII, FFIX back in the day, and I suppose were willing to return the favor and Nomura do a little work with Monolighth.

DQB, strangely is direct by the creator of Etrian Odyssey (another weird company crossover.) But it feels fully Enix.

Crash and DK went dormant for a looong time, though they did bounce back. I don't think Kart can be included, it's not a "racing game" conventionally speaking. Sonic died long before the racing games.