Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

@Ryu_Niiyama Well, yeah it wasn't TECHNICALLY incest for most of it, but it was implied incest-fetishism at best. The general vibe was just, to me, very transparent in what it sold. I didn't hate it explicitly because of that, but it was another feather in the cap of giant cringes in the game to add to the pile.

As for Garon, people follow "nutbag leaders" not because they care a wit about the nutbag leader, but because there's benefit to them in doing so in terms of reward, personal or cultural gain of wealth or power, etc (in essence, on some level they AGREE with the leader and his/her goals.), or because they're afraid of the ramifications of not (often justifiably.) That's not what we see in Nohr. They neither celebrate the result of his goals, nor seem particularly frightened of "father." They seem entirely oblivious that Garon is anything but pretty stern and think he's a well meaning well balanced but harsh man.

Beyond that they had two otherwise reasonable factions with no actual direct cause for conflict beyond a king they all should be able to see as not right, and a natural go-between mediator they all accept. Yet they just battle because "Hey we're FE characters, we gotta battle, and we don't have PokeGO on our magic tablets yet!" With 5 million encounters between the royals of both sides, where they stand around having conversations with the hero they all relate to standing right there....and at no point did anyone figure out they're not actually at war? Real live has lots of stupid between factions...but that was just a whole other level of sticking their fingers in their ears. IT doesn't match the characters thinking as portrayed.

Maybe it could have been saved if it didn't lean so hard on magic dragons and silenced refugees that know about magic dragons..... too much gimmickery to make a plot work.

Agreed on a lot of the other parts (ugh...Camilla....) And I get that the Stockhom Syndrome was meant to be implied....but if it was, they dropped the ball on that as well and just made them oblivious, distracted, happy go lucky nuts, except Xander (who I will always see as Audrey Drake's "Husbando" from now on...which makes me associate her with Camilla...) who seems like he SHOULD have had sense and authority, but just gave endless benefit of the doubt to Garon for no realistic reason. Not even just duty, but legit benefit of doubt.

Takumi...ohhhh, yes, Takumi. I hated him. He definitely contributed to my feeling of the game overall. I don't know why I hated him so much, but nothing says "giant [censored]" quite like Takumi.

I read the first part of that post and then just went....nah. I'm good for the day.

If Nintendo ported any Mario games, I would definitely prefer the Galaxy games to Sunshine

You know you've entered full garbage fire territory when nearly every discussion about the plot somehow lands back on the subject of "is it incest even if they're not related?" Due to this, the terrible writing, and the reliance on certain character tropes, Fates is five feet away from being some gross harem-y fantasy property. All Fates is missing is the isekai element.

Yet petting someone's head was considered beyond the pale. Can't have a cute minigame in my not-technically-incest sister-romancing sim.

Thank goodness Three Houses came along and made the series great again. I absolutely love the world-building, the ideologically-driven characters, etc. It's so good.

Shovel Knight news coming on August 28th:

@Grumblevolcano
Is that Yacht Games Direct ?

@Ralizah LOL, I nearly choked on that! It's really so true. I'm surprised so many people defend that so readily. I mean I get it, if you're an FE super fan you're going to easily look around that for the game....but since we now have an amazing one to supersede it you'd think it would be easier to say "yeah, in retrospect...that was really bad" Echoes was a remake of an NES game and, IMO, was still substantially superior.

" Fates is five feet away from being some gross harem-y fantasy property."

Really, you'd put it that far away? When I think of Fates, I think "harem fantasy" first. I think "really really really long battles that drag on and on and on" second. That's not a good combination. (And yeah, I recognize the Conquest maps were really really cool...it's such such a shame they were glued to such a horrible world and with weird difficulty to split the SKU.)

I mean the game literally opens, for male characters, locked in a bedroom with a bunch of fawning female characters who seem very interested in touching and calling you brother..... and THEN you get Camilla.....

@NEStalgia I mean, it's plot-focused enough to get away from that harem fantasy thing a bit as it goes on, but it's... yeah, it's otaku pandering for sure. I don't mind Camilla quite as much: I prefer outright fanservice over this weird imouto fetishism, and the lady is at least built like an adult.

Everybody in the game is some really common anime trope, and I never feel like they grow into much of anything as time goes on. Three Houses has some one-note characters, but they still mostly feel like people, and they have layers to them.

I think the biggest thing I hold against Fates, though, is the huge focus on weapon forging and the My Castle elements of the game overall. They were a nuisance. The monastery might get a bit thin content-wise later on, but early game it's such a huge, great base full of so many different activities that all kind of co-exist nicely.

Wasn't echoes a remake of a game boy game?

Anyway Camilla was made to make use of physics engines. Have you played Fire Emblem Warriors? They are more dynamic than her hair.

@StableInvadeel Gaiden is NES.

I'm honestly surprised Japan NES Online hasn't got Gaiden yet but if that rumour about SNES being a more expensive tier of NSO ends up being true it seems very likely that NES will continue for plenty of months after SNES goes live.

Oh interesting, I somehow was under the impression it was a GB title.

Guess the “Gaiden” threw me off.

@Ralizah The issue is the front-heavy pacing of the game and the plot balance. The beginning of the game is loaded with the story, and it's all the "incest but not" stuff. As time goes on you spend hours in drawn out battles with relatively brief story interludes between. So while things get heavier (and pretty dark) later on, the story parts of that kind of breeze by while all you remember the characters for is the special together time you spend with your siblings..... even without petting them.

I almost 100% ignore forging (in most games for that matter) - it never interests me. But I do recall hating My Castle and all the resource management being a drag. I tried to ignore it best I could. I didn't really pay much attention to the base. The more "narrative" base of the Monastery definitely makes for a more inviting, realized world than the heavy resource management of the My Castle thing.

Finally got the return shipping email for all my joycons 20 days later. Hope theyve fixed the drifting issues.

@Ralizah LOL. Note to self. Don't drink when reading Ralizah's thoughts on Fates. Although plus one to the Camilia at least not looking like a 10 year old. I will never understand the obsession with sleeping with little girls that the media portrays males to have.

@Ryu_Niiyama lol I had a bet of sorts going with a friend of mine when details of TH first came out. Essentially, I said something to the effect of: "I hope they don't let you date your teenage students." Her response: "They totally will. You know they will." I was mostly right. You can date your students... at the end, I guess, when they're in their mid-twenties or so.

I've never been one of the "ZOMG get this dating crap out of my strategy game!" types RE: Fire Emblem, but I am glad they scaled back the dating elements in this latest entry. It was fine in Awakening when the matchmaking element had a clear and organic connection to the broader time travel story, but it was totally out-of-place in Fates, where they shoe-horned it in out of terror of straying too far from the Awakening playbook. I've always liked the increase social focus of Awakening/Fates, though, and TH doubles down on this in exactly the ways I'd like: by making the vast, vast majority of support convos non-romantic, there's a greater diversity of characterizations and relationships built between different characters. Some of the characters, even at their highest support levels, just seem to barely be able to tolerate eachother, which is great, because it's more realistic and adds more character to the game.

Putting aside the otaku crowd whose imouto fetishism this game is clearly targeting, I do think there is probably some truth to that (the 'media portraying men as wanting to sleep with little girls' thing you mentioned) insofar as it's not uncommon worldwide to see adult men either marry young girls or show an attraction toward youthful features in women. I'm sure there's a reason American smut producers boast about how the actresses in their features are "BARELY LEGAL." It'd be easy to concoct some pop evo. psy. just-so story to explain this, but, as with most things, I'm sure the actual explanation is more complex.

Granted, an "attraction to youthful features" is not the same thing as wanting to sleep with your 14 year old sister, and I certainly don't think that most, or even many, heterosexual men are billions of dollars and a few IQ points away from being little Jeffrey Epsteins. Also, and people really seem to miss this: just as there's a vast spectrum of gender expression, so is there a huge amount of diversity to the sort of things heterosexual men find attractive. Unfortunately, the media we consume only seems to acknowledge this by framing it in a sort of gross, fetishistic way, while doubling down on the portrayal of men as being predatory and preferring a few universal features in the women they court.

@NEStalgia Man, you can forge some absolutely insane +7 weapons in that game, though. And it unbalances things. All FE games (all modern ones, at least) have some sort of forging element to them, but they also cap it so that you aren't expected to build some uber-powerful weapons to stay alive during gimmicky, brutally difficult maps (yes, I'm still whining about Conquest).

I don’t recall any maps in Conquest being “gimmicky”. At least not in a negative sense.

People always complain about getting the same “route the enemy” maps with nothing special about them. No fog, no defend, no escape, etc, and the Conquest maps addressed that in wonderful fashion. I don’t mind criticisms of the story because the story deserves criticism. I don’t mind criticism of the whole incest thing (even though I think it’s overblown given you choose your own actions- if you’re not into incest don’t S rank your sibling, simple as that). And I definitely don’t mind criticism of the shoehorned time travel mechanic.

But I don’t have a single complaint about the maps in Conquest. To this day, that game proudly stands as the shining example of Fire Emblem maps done right, and that’s a hill I’ll die on. I was hoping Three Houses would have maps in the vein of Conquest, unfortunately the best we got was a single fog map. Maybe there’s one other in one of the other routes that I haven’t played yet, but I doubt it. Call it gimmicks, but I call it interesting maps that offer the kinds of unique challenges people are always saying they want in FE maps. Maybe hard mode was just unbalanced in general. I don’t think that’s the fault of the maps. Because the maps in Conquest Normal mode were the perfect difficulty for me. Unlike Three Houses, where the maps I struggled the most on were because I would get one shotted by the Death Knight in a counter, the maps I struggled the most with in Conquest were all due to unit positioning and choosing the right attack vectors in response.

Fair enough. Personally, I hope to never see pots full of poison, winds that constantly blow you around, or kitsune illusions ever again. I do, however, enjoy levels that are challenging due to their complex designs as opposed to one-off level gimmicks designed to apologize for the mediocrity of all the maps in the other game. Like Chapter 10, which I believe is the one where you have to hold off enemy units for a certain number of turns, and the level changes in subtle but also devastating ways as it goes on.

There's a middle-ground between wide-open fields and the Fire Emblem equivalent of Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels' annoying mechanics.

I'm glad DQXI S got a long demo, 4 hours in and liking it a lot (I wouldn't have even tried the demo and found out it was good if it wasn't for the exclusive Smash spirit, gameplay in Directs and Treehouse wasn't enough to convince me). That said, it's likely not a day 1 purchase because of how insane September's lineup is.

Yes im finaly 100% done with bloodstained.
Got all weapons armor, rings spells cheasures hp up mp up.
Food everything.
Only nightmire mode to go

2 things.

1 Tetris 99 is really freaking fun. I can’t believe I wrote this game off when it first came out. It just looked so cheap and the whole battle royale things seemed like a gimmick. But after playing it to obtain the Fire Emblem Theme, I’m duly impressed. Duly. Impressed. (Btw the FE theme totally rocks, the music even has Beneath The Banner when you win, I couldn’t be happier!!!)

2 Fangamer is now accepting returns for Hollow Knight purchases before June 8th. Ship your game to them and they will replace it with copy from the new print run which contains the Godmaster DLC on the cartridge. Shipping came to $2.94 for me. That’s well worth it to upgrade to having all the DLC on the cart.