Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

Nice write-up here of Langrisser I & II - https://nintendoeverything.com/review-langrisser-i-ii/

If it was releasing at £30 I think I'd dive in, but £40 feels too much for me with my backlog.

Ya Langrisser is grossly overpriced.

But NIS is releasing a special edition, and that helped me justify it. Only an extra $10 or something. But I wont buy digital until its $20 or less.

It'll go on sale in their shop eventually .....

happy mario day everyone.

@Ryu_Niiyama whats level 5

@Ninfan A company best known for the Yokai Watch, Professor Layton, Ni No Kuni and Inazuma Eleven series. Makes good games, supposedly has pretty bad management.

Ubisoft's games are on sale on the eShop yet again.

AC Rebel Collection is $25.99 and Starlink is down to $14.99 now. I'm gonna take a guess and say we'll see the Rebel Collection at $20 come E3.

@Ninfan level 5 is like the 5th stage of a game.

@gcunit
From the review
"the fresh overhaul of today’s art direction"

LOL
The redone character portraits are the most generic looking illustrations imaginable. Not everyone likes Urushihara's style (I think it's beautiful, personally, and find it to be a massive shame that 90% of his work was in service of pornography), but it's distinct. It has personality.

Anyway, I tried the demo of the first game and it felt particularly low budget to me. I think it's because of the in-game graphics, which look like something out of a cheap mobile game. I'd have preferred they just touch up the original pixel art, but whatever.

Man, Nintendo is going for the record here with Directs. And it’s not that I don’t have plenty of games to play. I’m neck deep, and just started a new playthrough of Monster Hunter on PC since DLSS boosted 4K Ultra framerates from 40 to 70 for the 2080 TI using high resolution texture pack. Before that was added in it was impossible to get 60 on those settings, even with the best graphics card on the market...

I digress.

It’s just that we don’t have any confirmed release dates after Animal Crossing. And I’m starting to get antsy wondering when Xenoblade is coming and what we have to look forward to for the rest of the year.

It’s starting to feel like...

Looks like Fire Emblem Heroes to be perfectly honest.

@JaxonH They already beat the record, the old one was 182 days (March 3rd 2016 to September 1st 2016) when Nintendo ditched an E3 Direct in favour of Treehouse only with a BotW focus. We are currently at 189 days.

Just finished Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE, having played just over 40 hours.

Although I really enjoyed this game and its colourful cast of characters...the game really does not respect your time. Everything - the battle animations, the menus, the level up screens, the fetch quests - is just so much more time consuming than it needs to be. The main meat of the game - the dungeons - were enjoyable but simplistic compared to many JRPGs. I can't help but think this was a 15 hour game needlessly stretched into a 40 hour one.

I'd perhaps recommend this to anyone who's itching for Persona on the Switch and would settle for a Persona lite. Hard to recommend to a FE fan. An enjoyable game but there are many more games that I enjoy more and waste my time less.

So Vampire: The Masquerade - Coteries of New York finally has a release date of March 24th. Ugh, talk about supremely bad timing. I assume most Switch owners (myself included) will have a laser-focus on Animal Crossing for the next month or more. I guess I'll just add Vampire to the wishlist and wait for a price drop because I doubt I'll be able to pull myself away from AC for quite a while.

They did it. I can hardly believe it, but they did it.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps actually exceeds Ori and the Blind Forest. The gameplay and music is right on par- you can’t beat perfection, so I say they are equal in that regard. But where it actually pulls ahead is in production values, graphics, audio (can hear the pitter patter of Ori’s feet as you run, and the voices of creatures speaking in some strange language, wearing headphones it’s quite the experience), and expanding the scope of the game in small ways such as buying items from creatures ala Hollow Knight.

I was blown away by Blind Forest. This time I knew what to expect, so I wouldn’t be as easily impressed. Yet somehow they managed to impress me just as much as they did with the first game. That’s amazing.

I’m so incredibly grateful we have Ori on Switch. It is hands-down one of the best video games ever made, it’s up there shoulder to shoulder with DKC Tropical Freeze, and I can’t wait to find out if we get the second game on NS down the line

@JaxonH Tropical Freeze or Ori?

Never played Ori. What's the catch? Does it have a narrative? Is it difficult? I may give it a go on Switch.

@Octane
Oooh, that’s a tough one. If ever there was a hard call to make, it would be between those two games.

It has light narrative. More than DKC, enough to pull on your heartstrings and enough to justify what you’re doing and why you’re there, but it’s not like an RPG or anything. It’s not that kind of story. But what’s there is done incredibly, incredibly well.

And yes, it’s hard. Probably on par with Tropical Freeze, but not as hard as say, Hollow Knight. For one, you get instant retries when you die. Like, instant instant. INSTANT. It’s like Trials Rising in that regard- that’s a big part of why the game is so addictive to play. Mess up and die, and before you even realize you’re dead you’re already back in the game at the last save point. And then the first game that’s on Switch, you can literally save wherever you want, but you’re limited by how many energy crystals you have. So every time you save it takes an energy crystal. You can replenish them throughout the world, but if you just spam saves you’ll run out of crystals. It’s a good system that provides flexibility to the player, but also prevents total abuse. And it brings a little bit of risk and reward because if you’re running a tough gauntlet of obstacles and you get past, let’s say, 3 of them, and you only have one energy crystal left at the moment, do you make a save point right there so that you don’t have to redo those 3 obstacles, or do you roll the dice and see if you can make it a little farther just in case? And if you do burn your saves up, and it turns out there’s 5 more obstacles ahead, it could just make it that much harder to get through it. It’s a brilliant system.

Will of the Wisps changes that system. It only auto saves, but it immediately puts you back right before where you died. So it’s a game where you never have to really worry about redoing large portions, but the game isn’t going to do it for you, either. You’re going to have to keep trying until you succeed.

Honestly, Ori is so freaking amazing, I would put it on my top 10 games of all time list. Not top 50, not even top 20... it’s a top tenner.

I’ll say this. I love Hollow Knight. I backed the game at Kickstarter back before anyone even knew what it was, as just some niche Wii U indie. The game is incredible, and I very much look forward to Silksong. But... and I say this with all due respect to Hollow Knight, Ori makes the game look like amateur hour. Practically every aspect of Ori is better, be it graphics, story, precision platforming mechanics, skills and upgrades, music, difficulty curve, perhaps even combat, though that one may be debatable (and there are some who feel the combat in the original Ori is decent but nothing to write home about, but is typically given a pass because the game is more platforming and exploration with just a bit of enemies to spice things up). Combat in the new sequel is way I improved though. The more I play and unlock, the more I realize just how much they improved on what I felt was already near perfect.

And it should be said, the game is a stunner, both visually and with respect to music. Like DKC: TF, it has one of the best soundtracks I have ever heard. Its a game where I say, don’t even think about it. Just buy it. Games like Ori don’t come around often. And that’s not hyperbole either. It’s been 5 years between the original Ori and the sequel, and 7 years since Tropical Freeze. And nothing else out there even comes close to those games.

Also, it’s a metroidvania lite, not just platforming. It’s the kind of metroidvania that doesn’t frustrate you because you have no idea where you are and you’ve been lost for three hours. It shows items you’ve found but can’t access yet on the map so that you can come back and get them later. And it shows where you are on the map (unlike Hollow Knight), your objective, and you can purchase maps of different areas optionally... well, at least in the second game. In the original Ori I think you just find those map unlocks in the world. It shows the map as you explore but if you find the map for that region, it’s kind of like Metroid where now it shows everything in the region, even if you haven’t explored there yet.

@JaxonH @Octane Ori's got a narrative, it's incredibly emotional considering there's no voicework or text. It's not particularly difficult, unless you're like me and try to pull Super Metroid style sequence breaks.

The big catch in the game is it's kind of short, and doesn't have that many optional areas to explore. That's about it.

That said, it's probably 'only' my fourth favorite platformer on Switch behind DK:TF, Hollow Knight, and Yooka Laylee & The Impossible Lair. Which is more a sign of the high quality of platformers on Switch than anything negative about the game.

@Octane tl;dr () Try the Ori demo on the eshop for a taster.

So why did Nintendo stop doing special pro controllers? The last one was Smash Bros. It's been a long time. We could have had a FE3H one, or Luigi's Mansion or Animal Crossing. Do you think Nintendo stopped making them because of the Switch Lite (stupidly in my opinion) not supporting TV play? Or because people we releasing mod kits to take existing controllers and swap out the shells?

Seems weird. I am glad I got the ones I have when I had the chance. I loved all the different color N64 and Gamecube controllers back in the day and I was glad that we were seeing that again for a short time with Switch... and then they just stopped.

I have more controllers than I could even need for my Switch... but I kinda love that. Standard black, Splatoon 2, Xenoblade and Smash.