Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

My brother said SMT IV was one of the best games he’d played on 3DS, up there with Fire Emblem Awakening and Zelda Link Between Worlds. I played it too but was less well versed in JRPGs at the time, and the difficulty was brutal for me.

Now I handle hardcore JRPGs pretty well (playing Trails of Cold Steel, the first one, and it’s definitely hardcore, much harder than Trails III that just released on Switch- no wonder I couldn’t get into the series on the Vita), but it took years of practice. I’m eager to see what SMTV has in store.

So, to be clear:
1) Atlus prefers developing for older, more established hardware. Their games were releasing on the system as late as last year. I don't think it's a coincidence that, the first year they've clearly dropped all further support for the 3DS, they release two games on the Switch. I think we'll be getting at least one or two games from them per year from now on.
2) Atlus has a bad habit of announcing their games too far ahead of time. Several years elapsed between P5 being announced and its eventual release as well.
3) PS3 got jack-all from Atlus, and PS4 has mainly gotten a ton of Persona-related games. Vita got a port of a Persona game. DS and 3DS have gotten literally everything else from them (except Catherine and TMS, which both also ended up on Nintendo hardware). There's no Sony preferentialism.

@Ralizah I mean, isn't it 3? We have P5 Scramble, TMS#FE, and Catherine: Full Body, and that's only the first half of the year. I wouldn't be surprised if at least one more shows up in the second half of the year. Presumably either Etrian Odyssey, Persona Q/Q2/ one of the dancing games, or... yeah I don't know what else.

Atlus itself doesn't have a Sony bias, but they do publish all of Vanillaware's releases, which are exclusively on Sony consoles. That might be part of where the perception comes from.

@Heavyarms55 If they lost money or time or felt run through hoops by a fussy publisher I'm not sure it's petty. Sometimes se contracts are either too costly, or cause too much time to be spent on them to be worth it and you just move on. That may not be it but it's business plausible.

Especially with an ownership transfer in that time. The new bean counters come in, the same bean counters that thought dropping everything and throwing every yen behind Sonic was a good idea, and wonder wtf all that time and effort is going ...into...

It's not necessarily about petty high school politics, but money, and opportunity cost... Every week spent jumping through a fussy publishers hoops is a week not designing Chie lockboxes and Teddy Beary Blast candies

I don't think the censorship itself was that big overall.... But they put the work on the studio to redo stuff... That's unusual and probably an annoyance and expense and a time suck.

Plus sega hasn't been too involved with nintendo overall beyond sonic, Olympic collab, and retro games. I'm sure that factors in. Maybe pretty high school politics are involved in that, though sega is otherwise more closely linked to MS than Sony, so the ps obsession is still just atlus.

@JaxonH Beware SMT.... It's designed to be brutal. Always has been. It was Souls before there was Souls. Not sure experience with other JRPGs will lessen the blow of any SMT game. You're supposed to get your rear end handed to you.

So TcS1 is that hard, huh? 3 seemed hard, only because it seems to assume you know how to play before you start. Is the battle system easier to understand starting out in 1? And 3 has easier modes... Does 1?

Yeah & there's plenty of options that can make it almost ludicrously easy, anyway, @NEStalgia .... I had no great difficulty with that game the 1st time I played For some reason, the games wait until after the prologue to tell you how to play, which is weird, especially when that was the demo for III

@link3710 I keep forgetting Persona 5 Scramble already released in Japan.

So yeah, Atlus came out big on Switch this year.

@BruceCM That's good to know. I'd rather play it "normally" but before getting vested and committing....$140+ into a series that's main selling point is the story, I'd like to make sure it has options that ensure I can see all of that story if I can't figure out the battles.

My experience with the battles so far is the intro of 3.....and I can't tell if it is supposed to be "impossibly hard" at that point, or not. I was fighting the robot things in that prologue and getting destroyed....a few random encounters brought me to near zero and I had no explanation as to how the battle system actually worked or what the two d-pad's worth of option menus were all about....and got wiped out once by just a random trash battle that went waaay over my party's seeming ability. So I avoided enemies after that and hoped to get to something meaningful.....and got a boss battle which I started figuring out the battles a little bit more for, or so I thought, I was holding my own better and for a long time while still not REALLY having a handle on what I was actually doing or on what charges most of the abilities, and then I finally got worn down through attrition after using tons of healing items.....only to find out it was one of those story battles you're SUPPOSED to lose. So I can't really figure out if everything I did was supposed to be too difficult or not.

So if 1 is harder....that's menacing. But as long as it has options to make it easy....and as long as they explain after the prologue how to actually play....I'm sure I'll be good

Right now I have such overload on Switch. ACNH...honestly....I just can't get into it, I might table it.....and that's sad to me. I was looking forward to that game for so long...but it's just so obnoxiously tedious this time. Every time I play it I'm just trying to get it "done" to get to the fun games. I finally opened DQXI which I've been waiting for since the PS launch. And on the sale I bought Dragon's Dogma (had it on X1 but getting it on Switch is much better), Saint's Row 3 & 4 (fun, silly series...like the GTA GTA wanted to be but isn't), Ori, DxM (really good game, which is surprising to me...I'm hooked!), probably will get Mystery Dungeon?, Maaaaaybe Catherine...not sure yet. Oh and Darksiders 1 which is still the only Darksiders I haven't completed. 2 remains my fav. So a lot of big RPGs and I'll probably push DD back to the back catalogue a bit. That's a massive one, and that doesn't play well with DQXI. Same for TcS but I have to do that on PS if I want to start it at the beginning....

Well, if you really want, I can give some rundown of how it all works, @NEStalgia .... But the 'prologue' is kind of the 'end' of the game, except by the time you get there after everything, you're probably levelled more, have better stuff &, of course, know what you're doing Saints Row 3 was great but I haven't got onto 4 yet, it sounds like it should be! Dragon's Dogma is good but I never fancied Catherine or DXM

@Ralizah I still say Scramble is mostly a Warriors game. It's not like Atlus wasn't involved heavily in the story aspect and various aspects, but it's not an Atlus game in terms of a game that took Atlus development resources heavily. It's not their game. I get that "it's an Atlus game" in tone and feel, but it doesn't earn them a pass on Switch any more than SMT#FE was a "Nintendo game" - no it's not it's an Atlus game with some Nintendo connection.

Switch still gets Scramble which is a third party game built as a joint effort. (And what Warriors game ever skips Nintendo? ) but the only internal Atlus projects Switch gets are a port of a deluxe port of a puzzle game in Catherine, and a port of a WiiU game jointly developed with Nintendo.

And SMTV being "years out" is silly. Remember when Nintendo had it on the TBA infographic in year 1? That didn't sound like "TBA, sometime in the next 7 years. See also: Deep Down." That's Year of Dreams level stuff. XCX and SF0 turned around faster.

It's not that I think Atlus is "abandoning Nintendo" so much as what I think the reality is: Atlus was never really on-board with Nintendo to begin with. Suddenly in the 3DS era we were inundated with Atlus games. But lets think about that: They were mostly remakes of their back catalogue plus some great new entries. 3DS was the cheapest (by far) system to develop for, could run that back catalogue well, and was the most sold system worldwide and especially Japan. And they had a franchise or two designed around the 3DS's input methods that the clock was probably running out on because the second screen wasn't going to stick around, so if they were going to release those ever, it was then or never. Atlus was more or less a different company at the time. And what we know now that we didn't know then: Atlus was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy the whole time and was scavenging and bottom feeding with limited resources to find fast and cheap routes to profitability. The cheap development on 3DS and the audience they found for old games there made it the easiest and fastest track to try to pump out some content on the cheap and stay afloat. Then they went down anyway and Sega bought them. So we're really dealing with Sega, not Atlus, now, and now they have their budgets they need to do the games they wanted to make rather than treading water with cheapest-route-remakes. And new overlords who, like Squeenix and FF (and like...well....Sega and Sonic...) likely push on pumping out endless iterations of the most famous brand. That means Persona, and that means Sony (for whatever reason.) I still don't think PC means much for Switch. Sega highlighted a focus on PC as one of it's strategies long ago.

I think the Atlus-heavy era was a 3DS specific era due to the hardware and the company's financial position at the time. Now that they're Sega, and now that they have bigger budgets available, they're not cranking that stuff out like they were in general. And their focus on Persona means a focus on Playstation for some internal reason we know nothing about.

And Sega's weird with their platform selections in general. Look at Yakuza. They tried it on WiiU, then declared Nintendo fans don't want Yakuza. They dipped their toe into XBox...but left it dangling there and then continued releasing on PS. They have a lot of things that are PS-only, a few things that are Nintendo Only, and then a mismatch of what goes on what platform. Nobody can accuse them of loving Sony, the company that put their consoles out of business. So they have some internal decision making that...makes decisions. Not good ones, mind you, these are the same decision makers that gave us Sonic Boom. But there are decisions, and they make them!

@NEStalgia I'd argue Yakuza is still sticking with Xbox. Like a Dragon was in the May Inside Xbox, Yakuza 0 and Kiwami 1 are still on Game Pass with Kiwami 2 coming to XB1 and Game Pass later this year. I'd guess sometime after Kiwami 2 is released, we get Yakuza 3-6 announced for XB1 and Game Pass.

@NEStalgia Most musou crossovers feel like Warriors game with different themes. Having played the Japanese demo, Persona 5 Scramble feels like a Persona game with action combat (honestly, the combat itself only partially feels like something out of a musou; there's a LOT to it). It's at least 75% an Atlus game, IMO, in terms of the feel and design aspects. It's also, let's not forget, a sequel to the original. Your comparison to TMS, an original story with light FE references and repurposed characters from that series, couldn't be more off.

Also, you're going to have to explain to me how 'Atlus ONLY developed remakes AND brand new games by the dozens for 3DS, so they were really never with Nintendo' makes ANY sense. Designing 3DS games might be cheaper, but it's not like they were shoveling low-effort ports onto the system. SMT IV and Apocalypse, in particular, are some of the best looking games on the system. Atlus has a long history of supporting older and less resource-demanding hardware over newer stuff.

Let's not forget that they heavily supported the NDS as well.

The vast majority of Atlus' modern IPs are also either on Nintendo or Nintendo-exclusive.

They're more a Nintendo developer than they are anything else.

And Yakuza isn't dipping its toe in the Xbox lake, it's jumping in headfirst. All the games will be on that ecosystem soon.

We'll have to see about 3-6 but they've been insisting 7 will be a perfectly good starting point ..... So, maybe not?

@BruceCM We'll see when I get into how it really plays if I need any pointers. If, as you say, they explain play AFTER the prologue, then I might be ok. After the prologue I got into that hour long cutscene I couldn't pause, or save during (THAT is frustrating if stuck on Playstation), and then I was wondering based on some folks here if I should be playing 1 & 2 first....so I shelved it for the time being. So I never got to any explanation, I left it off at the start of that test building after you get introduced to the school and figured I'd halt before any spoilers for 1.

I'm not sure about Catherine. A puzzle game with a VN bolted on didn't appeal to me at all...but it could be a fun pick up and play kind of game if the puzzling is fun....I'm not a big puzzle game fan but it might be fun in quick bursts. Undecided so far. Someone compared it to Q*Bert....and I did used to love Q*Bert in the arcade/NES days. Got Q*Bert the same day I got LoZ......and they both got similar playtime in the beginning.

DxM is surprisingly great. Now, I used to be a big mech fan. The golden age of the FASA-made games published by Activision. Those are untouchable. The graphics were DOS era, but they were deep, deep, deeeeep simulators. Like a flight simulator. Thermal management, individual parts of the mech could fail or be shot off, etc. You had to manage all your resources, jump jet fuel burns, heat management (ammo magazines would start exploding if you overheated too much...and you could override emergency shutdown...at a risk, etc.) ammo supplies were very tight, etc. etc. The graphics are BAD today, but the gameplay, I wish we could see a modernized version of MW2...with modern graphics that would be amazing.

MW3 was made by a different company and published by Microprose. it was also very good...but not quite as good as the originals. A lot less tactical. Far less weighty. But good.

Then FASA was bought by Microsoft, and they destroyed the studio and the brand in a few years and then sacked everyone during the dark days of the early OG X-BOX launch. Halo was in, everything else was out. MS's MW4 was......bad....

I also liked Starseige at the time (the game is long forgotten, replaced by Starseige Tribes, the online shooter that had nothing to do with mechs, but if nothing else the game was notable as one of the, if not the, first example of Mark Hammil as a voice actor!)

So my basis for mech games is all in the Battletech type games. Heavy, lumbering mechs. More like tanks that jump than the Japanese/Gundam mech idea of jets that walk. So I went into DxM with mixed hopes....heard a lot of backlash, and tried the demo and was very disappointed. I bought one of my vouchers specifically to buy DxM then played the demo, went "meh" and never bought it. Finally did with a lack of other things to buy with them, and I'm glad I did. Once I got into it, it started clicking....and nothing will ever match MW2 and its expansions for amazingness as a mech game, but once I accepted this is different and these mechs are walking jets not jumping tanks, I started really getting hooked. And the more I played the more I realized how much of it IS an homage to Battletech more than Gundam. The whole plot of the factions and mercenaries is reminiscent of the Clan Wars, and that explained why there's so many characters and factions in this game....it's very intentionally an homage to the clans of Battletech (but Battletech is a huge story universe with pen and paper games spanning back into the 70's so it had a lot of lore to work with), it has gameplay elements a lot like MW with it's weapon hardpoints and such, and money management like MW2: Mercenaries. Orbital, Sky Union factions etc = Inner Sphere and Starleague.

The whole thing is very much made by someone who's a big Battletech fan....but a lot more Japanese, I think So this moves faster, more arcade, you spend most of the game in air (Gundam style....(you just read that as Gangnam Style, didn't you ) ), but it has a lot in common, too.....it's not a slow tactical game...but it's really good, and lots of fun.....the first time the demo lost me. The second time I got much more hooked.

@BruceCM I think that's more a case of release timing, if you need the previous games and the new game comes out before the previous games have been released (which is extremely likely in Yakuza's case given Like a Dragon launches in 2020 and we haven't got Kiwami 2 yet), sales will be poor. It's like if 343 said you needed to play Halo 5's campaign for Halo Infinite to make any sense (Halo 5 isn't on PC).

@NEStalgia
Please, Persona 5 Scramble isn’t “mostly a Warriors” game. If you want to say “mostly a Koei Tecmo“ game, that’s fine. But it’s not a Warriors game (me and Ralizah have played it). That was the perception and expectation when announced, but that perception and expectation turned out to me misguided. It borrows some aspects but, it’s really not anything like a Warriors game.

And I say they absolutely get credit for that. It’s still their baby. If they didn’t bring the game, who would people blame? Koei Tecmo? No. KT doesn’t decide who gets the game. They’re just the foot soldiers making what Atlus wants to see. People would blame Atlus. Because Atlus is the one in charge of seeing that game be made. It’s their IP, their story, their game. KT is just handling development like FE. And if they are worthy enough to be blamed they are worthy enough to be given credit. And yes, Nintendo gets credit for TMS#FE. It’s Nintendo’s game, made at Nintendo’s direction, for Nintendo systems. And the fact it exists is all thanks to Nintendo negotiating it with the footsoldiers who made it. If the quality of the game isn’t good that would be Atlas because they gave them free reign after a dispute, but the game exists because Nintendo wanted it to exist. They get credit.

Anyways, as for SMT, other games can lessen the blow. When you’re new to the genre I couldn’t even play Final Fantasy X without struggling, I couldn’t grasp Trails. Now I’m able to hang with the hardest JRPG’s and that comes with experience and practice over the years.

As for Trails, the Normal mode is probably the same as Trails III hard mode. I’m managing but coming SOOOO close to death in some boss fights. You don’t have to worry because if you die on a boss you can retry at a lower difficulty. It’s all good. But it’s been a while since I played a JRPG that made me strategize so much. I think what makes it harder too is, you have a large group of people and it’s constantly changing up the combinations of your fighting members. and in chapter 3 I don’t have nearly enough money to unlock all the slots and get good quartz for everyone. And you can unequip from others but, a lot of times their slots are locked to a certain element, so a certain build for one person doesn’t work for another person, not to mention they might not have the same amount of slots unlocked. You’ll be fine though. Again, you can retry bosses with a lower difficulty if needed.

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Yeah, it's certainly possible they'd bring the others across, as well, @Grumblevolcano but we'll have to see, they do some weird things Well, they don't exactly explain EVERYTHING, @NEStalgia but you'll probably be surprised how quickly you pick it all up once you're getting into it They do cover the basics & after that, there's so many different ways you could try things, it'd take a lot of going over, so they leave you to it a bit.

Battery Life Reported for Trails of Cold Steel III by Reviews 2 Go:

Switch Lite
Max Brightness + WiFi: 3 hrs 18 min
Max Brightness + No WiFi: 3 hrs 54 min (+ 36 min)
Min Brightness + WiFi: 4 hrs 49 min (+ 91 min)
Min Brightness + No WiFi: 5 hrs 23 min (+ 125 min)
+ 35 minutes turning off Wifi
+ 90 minutes turning brightness down from Max to Min
+ 15 minutes turning brightness down to align with photo edge

Switch v1
Max Brightness + WiFi: 3 hrs 3 min
Max Brightness + No WiFi: 3 hrs 16 min (+ 13 min)
Min Brightness + WiFi: 3 hrs 54 min (+ 51 min)
Min Brightness + No WiFi: 4 hrs 5 min (+ 62 min)
+ 12 minutes turning off Wifi
+ 48 minutes by turning brightness down from Max to Min
+8 minutes by turning brightness down to align with photo edge

Switch v2
Max Brightness + WiFi: 5 hrs 3 min
Max Brightness + No WiFi: 5 hrs 16 min (+ 13 min)
Min Brightness + WiFi: 6 hrs 41 min (+ 98 min)
Min Brightness + No WiFi: 6 hrs 53 min (+ 110 min)
+ 12 minutes turning off Wifi
+ 97 minutes turning brightness down from Max to Min
+ 15 minutes turning brightness down to align with photo edge

Conclusions:

• Turning off WiFi gets 3x as much bang for buck on Switch Lite as the other 2 models
• Turning down brightness gets 2x as much bang for buck on Switch Lite and v2 Switch as the v1 model

I used a caliper to measure the brightness bar length on both Switch Lite and normal sized Switch. Then set the circle slider so that the right edge lined up PERFECTLY with the right edge of your photos in the system photo album. On Switch Lite it was a 17.3% reduction and on normal sized Switch it was a 16.1% reduction.

Performing the calculations for both WiFi on comparisons and WiFi off comparisons, I got the same results, which confirms the accuracy of the readings.

Turning Brightness Down To Align With Right Edge of Photo In Album

And here’s results for Borderlands Legendary Collection (which btw, was priced at $90 on PS, compared to $50 on Switch, just thought that was interesting given they launched the same day)

Borderlands Legendary Collection

Switch Lite
Max Brightness + WiFi: 3 hrs 43 min
Max Brightness + No WiFi: 4 hrs 1 min (+ 18 min)
Min Brightness + WiFi: 4 hrs 39 min (+ 56 min)
Min Brightness + No WiFi: 4 hrs 55 min (+ 72 min)
+ 17 minutes turning off Wifi
+ 55 minutes turning brightness down from Max to Min
+ 9 minutes turning brightness down to align with photo edge

Switch v1
Max Brightness + WiFi: 3 hrs 7 min
Max Brightness + No WiFi: 3 hrs 13 min (+ 6 min)
Min Brightness + WiFi: 3 hrs 54 min (+ 47 min)
Min Brightness + No WiFi: 4 hrs 3 min (+ 56 min)
+ 7 minutes turning off Wifi
+ 48 minutes by turning brightness down from Max to Min
+ 8 minutes by turning brightness down to align with photo edge

Switch v2
Max Brightness + WiFi: 4 hrs 45 min
Max Brightness + No WiFi: 5 hrs 13 min (+ 28 min)
Min Brightness + WiFi: 6 hrs 24 min (+ 99 min)
Min Brightness + No WiFi: 6 hrs 41 min (+ 116 min)
+ 22 minutes turning off Wifi
+ 93 minutes turning brightness down from Max to Min
+ 15 minutes turning brightness down to align with photo edge

It seems like, as long as you turn WiFi off while playing handheld, and turn the brightness down just a smidge, you’re going to get a SOLID 4 hrs for Switch Lite with almost full brightness and 5.5 hrs on v2 Switch with almost full brightness. And SOLID 3 hrs on the original model.

@JaxonH Hmm, that does make me feel better. Typically whenever I try to grab a hot special edition or something similar, it sells out (or times out) faster than I can order it. It's a shame there's no true system that can sort out the scalpers from those who genuinely want a game.

Interesting!