Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

@link3710
That happened a lot faster than I anticipated.

@JaxonH Plus, back when Atlus was just Atlus it was a lot easier for Sony to moneyhat them and keep them on a string. Now that Atlus is Sega, they're sitting on a much bigger throne that can flip off Sony as more of an "equal", from a publishing stance, a lot more easily. It's easy for Sony to bribe smaller devs and publishers and keep them dependent. But taking on other titanic corporations the same way isn't nearly as doable, especially when that corporation has market growth goals (and a PC focus.... )

IMO Playstation was always SquareStation to me....the whole identity of PS was the Square games. I'm not sure how Square managed to get rid of Sony's investment and stranglehold over them but ever since they opened up the floodgates and put Square games everywhere, I'm not sure what identity I assign to PS anymore. HzD and Spiderman are cool and all, but it's not quite the same prestige as being "The Final Fantasy Platform."

@NEStalgia Sony has literally never kept Atlus on a string. Atlus is just a weird company

Because Nocturne is on Switch, and both Raidou and Digital Devil Saga have been put on ice for the time being, Persona is literally the only active MegaTen subseries Sony has left while Nintendo pretty much has virtually everything else excluding stuff like SMT Imagine and SMT NINE. If anything I'm really surprised people don't point out how much Atlus has supported Nintendo by comparison because Sony only ever got Persona to themselves in terms of MegaTen games after 2006 while Nintendo got every mainline and adjunct subseries under the sun minus a few Persona spinoffs like Dancing and Arena

@TheFrenchiestFry
Thing is, "Persona" encompasses a lot. From 3 dancing games to half a dozen main series entries, the count is pretty high. This was only exacerbated by games like Catherine Full Body exclusively targeting PS (even the Vita while ignoring PC and Switch).

Now, that is starting to change. Catherine Full Body released on Switch and Persona 4 Golden hit PC, but there's still Persona, two different Persona 2 games, Persona 3, Persona 5 and Royale, Persona 3 Dancing, Persona 4 Dancing and Persona 5 Dancing.

And its the most popular series people want, which is also part of it (although I suspect SMT is going to blow up alot bigger with the Switch release of SMTV).

@NEStalgia
Well, even if they didnt, the fact is Final Fantasy is only a shell of its former self now anyways. The quality of the series started declining the minute they forced Sakaguchi out (a huge mistake- yes his FF movie cost alot and tanked, but they signed off on it in the first place-the capitalist approach would be to write it off and cut their losses, but retain his unique value-added skillset for the game series, instead they took the samurai approach of falling on his own sword after losing his honor).

FF still turns alot of heads but it's always due to being a graphical showpiece, wishfully thinking it may be the one to return to greatness... and it never is. Not that they're bad games- I quite enjoyed FFXIII from what I played, and certainly FFXV, but they're not at the forefront of the genre by any means. They're B rate JRPGs with A rate production values. They best move SE has it to just re-release and remake the classics because they're incapable of returning the series to its former glory.

@JaxonH Persona encompasses a good portion but it's been super exaggerated by people in recent years in light of P5 doing well. Sony has mainline Persona, Arena and Dancing while Nintendo has all of mainline SMT now that Nocturne is coming to Switch, spinoffs like Devil Survivor, Majin Tensei, the classic Devil Summoners, Last Bible, Devil Children, Jack Bros and SMT If in addition to having access to select Persona spinoffs like both Persona Q titles and Persona 5 Scramble, which are also canon to mainline

In addition to that, Atlus also publishes non-SMT titles on Nintendo platforms like The Dark Spire & now Catherine Full Body and even went as far as developing a crossover between SMT and Fire Emblem with TMS #FE/Encore

Nintendo is heavily favored by Atlus in comparison to Sony. It's just that people prefer to publicize Persona instead and act like Sony is influencing them. It really shows how much the main series was overshadowed by a spin off

Also I personally think while XV wasn't up to snuff initially, they really cleaned it up with Royal Edition and VII Remake is probably the closest the series has come at this point to recapturing classic FF in storytelling and spectacle

As a lapsed FF fan, I was super happy with VII Remake. While I still think some of the story changes were stupid, the presentation, bosses, storytelling, and gameplay quality in general were fantastic. It has at least partially revived the magic that SE snuffed out so thoroughly with FF XIII and the Fabula Nova Crystalis crap. I was unsure about how I'd feel about the combat system, but it's probably my favorite one in the series to date. It's a great mix of spectacle and moment-to-moment decision-making.

For a LONG time, I felt the same way about that series that a lot of older Nintendo fans do about Paper Mario.

@JaxonH The problems with FF really predate the demise of Sakaguchi's tenure. And therefore predate Enix (who ironically remains the consistent half with DQ.) Sakaguchi is a genius but he is inconsistent. Odd fan reactions don't help. The NES/SNES era he was solid. Chrono Cross proved he and the other producers didn't understand, at all, what made Chrono Trigger so beloved. It was accidental perfection. They hit the high note with VII but, honestly, VII was never a fantastic game. It was a memorable game with a wonderful world and characters and a lot of interesting themes, and the overall materia system was significant upgrade from the Jobs system (why, oh why does Square insist on forcing Jobs down our throats with Bravely?!?) But the actual gameplay design was terrible and the storytelling was abysmal. But with FMV and and many Western players experiencing a JRPG for the first time it became the "we want more of this!" game. Then he hit VIII which was.....heck it's even worse than I remember it. I never made it through the first time. I just got it last week on the Switch sale for $10 because I always wanted to get back into it. I can't....oh boy I just can't..... the draw system, the excessive menu surfing of linking....it's mind numbing. It's the most overwrought, needlessly complex system I can think of all for a really weird story, and a design that is less easy to get into now even handheld than it was 15, 20 years ago tied to a wall. I wish I could get through it....but I just can't get myself to.

Then he hit the highest of high points with IX.....classic gameplay, classic storytelling, a nice storybook experience to really round out classic FF..... Then came X which I still feel was the beginning of the end.... everything that made FF FF dithered. And again, everyone praised it. Then we got the weirdly uneven XII, a great game in its own right...but hardly FF in anything but name. It felt like the game he wanted to make that wasn't FF but the company forced FF down his throat and he found a way to play both sides (much like what happened with Takahashi and the Xeno series: "Xeno's great, more FF plzkthxbai."

THEN he left and made more great games elsewhere (like Takahashi and the Xeno series......)

Poor XIII. At the time I hated it along with everyone else. Trying to play it again (part way so far) I find it's really a great game! They tried to change too much too fast and "weren't trying to make an RPG at all, but a new kind of game" (with the 13th installment of the biggest JRPG series of the time?!) But it's actually really good. One of the best battle systems in the entire series, and it forces you to play the battles like a strategy game. They did good with the XIII series, but it's only apparent in hindsight. I still haven't delved much into XV....I really need to. I liked what I saw....but it does feel....odd.

@Ralizah I may cave and pick up 7R on the sale. I wanted to wait for it on XB, but that's no sooner than next May at the earliest. I'd end up double dipping though depending on how the second installment goes. It's a shame, I think S-E muddied the waters with the ridiculous pretentiousness of the "FNC Anthology". XIII, in retrospect, really was a great game, and it's two sequels are fantastic as well, if not better. But the terrible storytelling of XIII where they assumed you understood the FNC without actually telling you about the FNC, and putting half the story in the diary killed what people wanted from an FF game. VII was a game you forced yourself to play so you can read a great story (that became a terrible story). XIII is an awesome video game that somewhere has a half a story in a menu and some pretentious cutscenes they tried to bolt onto some game universe they forgot to actually build, then built other games to attach to it. Type 0 is the oddest thing in that it tells more of the FNC than the showpiece of XIII, but it's hard to get into because the opening cutscene is literally an hour long, with 20 minutes of just watching someone painfully die...... It's the most depressing and dreary way to start an action sequence, after the anime opening of more pretentious LaFalciE'th junk.

7R so far seems to bolt actually fun gameplay for once and a more rounded story (though probably "modernized" too much) to make a complete FF for the first time since IX.

I've noticed on the eshop the release windows for the Cadence of Hyrule DLC:

• Melody pack - August
• Story Content - September

@Slowdive I'm still trying to get into that game.....I can tell there's greatness just beneath the surface by I'm having a hard time getting a feel for how exactly the gameplay systems work.

On the surface it's kind of a cross between a much darker Skyrim, Monster Hunter, and a hack and slash. But it is a little slow to start out and I find I keep feeling like I'm supposed to be wandering into areas that are clearly much too hard for my party, but I'm not sure what else to do to get their levels prepared or how to really build out a kit/team/etc.

I can tell it's really cool once you get into it, but I can't quite get a "hook" into it just yet. (I own it on X1 and Switch, though, for what it's worth...I was hoping handheld gives me more chances to dig into it, though it's quite pretty on X1X....)

@TheFrenchiestFry
I don't think being a spinoff or overshadowing another series is particularly relevant. Most people dont care if it technically "spun off". It's its own series now. And of course as a general rule, more popular games overshadow less popular games regardless of how one categorizes them. It just so happens to have had roots in SMT 20 years ago, but classifying it as a "spinoff" doesnt really capture the entire story, as Persona is every bit as much a core JRPG as SMT is. It just has a certain appeal as the market for social high school elements is more broad than apocalyptic doomsday JRPGs.

I think more than anything it simply shows people want great games that have appeal. And Persona is a great game that has appeal. And I think that's true irrespective of SMT.

I also don't think the argument has been that they don't give Nintendo any support at all, they certainly do- great support on 3DS in fact, but the issue has been their bigger budget and more popular Persona games have been withheld at the behest of Sony exclusivity. People want Persona on Switch and PC.

@Slowdive It's sort of a Japanese take on Western RPGs....albeit, uncharacteristically the story and such is thin, but without the strong personalities that make Elder Scrolls games stand out so much. It's more about world and gameplay than about any particular story (it has one, but it's generally narrative light outside major developments, mostly acting as a framework to facilitate exploration.)

I don't believe you can remap any of the buttons, though, so run is always on left stick click. It's a huge world, though. The dungeons aren't always strictly a dungeon in the Elder Scrolls sense, more like a Baldur's Gate sense (if you've played that) where outdoor areas are "dungeons" too in terms of content, but yes, there's a lot of story areas and not-specifically-story areas off the beaten trail that are definitely dungeon-y and challenging. It's a true open world, for better or worse, that does make it a bit too easy to go places you can easily tell you aren't prepared for, but with insufficient warning until you get wiped out.

The game does have a reputation for being punishing, though (thus the Monster Hunter comparison.) So far I haven't found it exceptionally grueling, but I do feel like I should have been leveling up and upgrading before trying to go where I think it's trying to point me. I consistently feel very underpowered when even random wolves are taking my party down in short order. And I can tell that some of the bigger bosses later are going to be real menaces that take a while to take down. ( Boss battles even in the beginning are pretty MonHon-esque....big, big monsters that act as their own setpiece and take some serious punishment.) But there's no shortage of combat and exportable area, and the Arisen version also has a large postgame dungeon (which I doubt I'll play, but I did check it out a bit!)

@JaxonH I do definitely think Atlus did a disservice to SMT after the 2000s because going into the 2010s they just didn't make as much games from other MegaTen franchises compared to Persona. I am definitely not part of the "Persona is its own thing" crowd because if it was, it wouldn't be canonically connected to other MegaTen titles like Devil Summoner and it would have to ditch the dungeon crawling gameplay as well as all of the demons seeing as how Persona uses all the demons that SMT does as well. It's definitely as much MegaTen as any other title in that franchise and taking the moniker off of Persona 4 Golden onwards doesn't change that.

When I say SMT is being overshadowed by Persona, I mean that from the perspective of Atlus themselves because after Persona 4, they just started producing less and less titles from other MT series as well as mainline, in favor of more Persona stuff like spinoffs and Persona 5. In the 2000s it felt like there was a healthy amount of output from every sub series as well as mainline, but the last thing to come out of any non-Persona MegaTen series prior to Nocturne HD and not counting Tokyo Mirage Sessions was Strange Journey Redux in 2018, and then before that all we had were Devil Survivor 2 Record Breaker and SMT IV Apocalypse. Meanwhile Persona got a new title like once every year. There was P4G and Arena in 2012, Persona 4 Arena Ultimax in 2013, Persona Q in 2014, Persona 4 Dancing in 2015, Persona 5 in 2016 for Japan and 2017 in the West, Persona 3/5 Dancing in 2018, Joker in Smash in 2019 as well as P5R in Japan, and then P5S, P5R's worldwide release and P4G on PC in 2020. Meanwhile all SMT in that period of time were two re-releases and a quasi-crossover with Fire Emblem, as well as a cryptic teaser for SMT V.

So yes. Persona did absolutely take higher priority than SMT. It's not even a matter of fans preferring the social sim aspect of Persona. It doesn't even have to do with them being higher budgeted because SMT IV sold pretty decently on 3DS despite not being a home console title. It absolutely had to do with Atlus just not putting enough effort into pushing other series in the West as hard as they did with that series. Of course people wouldn't really care as much about SMT but that's because Atlus just doesn't market it nearly as hard enough. They just take the safe route and market the more popular series when they could easily put that effort into pushing the literal flagship series of their entire company out in the open so people would care. Maybe if SMT V actually does well they'll realize that Persona and SMT can actually co-exist without one obviously living in the shadow of the other.

@TheFrenchiestFry
I agree they absolutely did give Persona priority, but the reason for that is because of its popularity, and its popularity came down to it having more marketable aspects in higher demand from the gamership, including (but not limited to) the social sim aspects and higher budget. SMTIV did great on 3DS, but it did far, far less than Persona typically does. And that is directly attributable to having less marketable aspects in lower demand.

Regardless of effort, not all games are created equal, and no matter how much they try, SMT will never reach the heights of Persona, because it is fundamentally different and, while critically it can certainly match, if not exceed, Persona, it will never reach the same level of popularity. That doesn't mean there's no correlation between effort and sales. That is certainly the case. But even with the benefit of that correlation, SMT doesn't have the same market cap potential as Persona, and likely never will unless the series undergoes drastic transformation, which is exactly what the Persona subseries was created to be in the first place.

@JaxonH I'm personally hoping SMTV can be the one that actually makes mainline popular for once. It practically has everything going for it with people coming into mainline from playing Persona, SMT III Nocturne being remastered to hold people over and stir up interest in mainline again, it being on easily the most popular of the three consoles at present and it also being the first simultaneous worldwide launch for Atlus. I don't expect it to reach Persona 5 numbers but I hope it gets really close because the odds are definitely in their favor

https://www.play-asia.com/zoids-wild-blast-unleashed/13/70dnt3

Zoid Wild Blast Unleashed pre order has been announced from playasia.

@TheFrenchiestFry
I hope it does well too. Unfortunately, unless it hits 4-5m it has no hopes of coming close to Persona, and that's definitely beyond its grasp, even if the stars align. My expectations are set at around 1m copies sold. That would make it the best selling entry in the series and usher SMT into the million seller club, which is a crucial psychological threshold for future budgets and support.

@JaxonH I'm expecting 1-2 million worldwide personally which is honestly still going to be really freaking good for mainline considering how much lower it used to sell compared to Persona. I do think the simultaneous worldwide launch and the choice of platform are going to definitely help it however, especially with a lot of Persona players having their interests piqued in mainline either because of Persona 5 or because of Nocturne's remaster, especially since that is coming to PS4 alongside Switch.

I think we'll get rest of Persona come to PC and PS4, the Persona spinoffs like the dancing games for PC and Switch, SMT Nine localized and a bunch of Atlus' DS/3DS games ported to Switch (e.g. SMT4).

Trails of Cold Steel 3

Just a friendly reminder in this backlog era news drought, that theres a great JRPG on the Xenoblade Chronicles level awaiting your discovery.

So many great games I could recommend, but I'll try to limit to one being spotlighted per day.

Which of these do you guys think I should get first

Waku Waku 7
Fatal Fury Special
Samurai Shodown 2
Real Bout Fatal Fury 2
Garou: Mark Of The Wolves

I would love to hear everyone’s thoughts and recommendations