Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

@Grumblevolcano
A new Switch launching day and date would be the best possible thing to happen to Monster Hunter. It would be the showcase release, and a lot of people would pick it up alongside a new system.

But ya, people seem obsessed with this whole limited release stuff. Even though everyone has plenty of time to buy if they want it. Yet another one of those, "it won't actually affect any of us, but we're gonna complain for the sake of the hypothetical stranger that might theoretically miss out" ordeals.

@Ryu_Niiyama i see so Eji Aonuma proporsely make the timeline of Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, so this game could not be overshadow by Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time?(still considered by many the definiteve Legend of Zelda) well lets hope and expect Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild 2 managed to become the best game of the franchise and finaly top Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time as the definitive Legend of Zelda, and i don't think like many people expect that Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild 2 will gonna see the definitive end of Demise Curse(people will riot if this happen)Ganondorf/Ganon is a villain to iconic and important to have it definitive end on Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild 2(this is like killing Bowser definetely for the Mario series).

@Giancarlothomaz Well more the entire 3 decades of history rather than one game. Aonuma-san has never seemed haunted by OoT by any means. I mean he started work on the series as a co director for OoT, so I don’t think and he has never stated in any interviews that I’ve seen that he needs to one up that particular game.

My own view is he wanted a bit of freedom overall but I think that he was also inspired by the game Miyamoto-dono wanted to make in LoZ but was limited by tech. The original game was a sprawling but devastated world in design if not in presentation. I am a little too young to have played LoZ when it came out but I imagine at the time it must have felt massive. I certainly remember LttP and OoT feeling that way.

OoT has hit sacred cow status. It was great but I personally enjoyed LttP, MM and TP better (not ranking BotW until I beat it again).

what style of Zelda game you like more?the more linear games like Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess/Skyward Sword or the nonlinear game like Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild?

https://www.zeldadungeon.net/do-you-prefer-more-linearity-or-...

This is so dope

@JaxonH nice you can pet the cat, Can you Pet the Dog need to see this, this is so adorable and cutie.

@Giancarlothomaz
Not just pet the cat, but do secret custom handshakes with them.

And of course you can pet the dog! As well as shake hands, put treats on their snout, everything!

@Ryu_Niiyama I'm old enough to have played the original Zelda when it was pretty new and it did indeed feel that way at the time. It was a huge, sprawling world that was just open to explore and at the time the presentation was on point, only marred by translation issues (as was common at the time). BotW was truly a callback to that for me.

@Giancarlothomaz I believe Aonuma-san is on record saying the timeline placement is a 'secret' because he likes that people interpret it in their own way. Some people make claims and show evidence from each of the timelines that it could be from (heck, I've even read theories on how the timelines have somehow merged back together by the time of BotW). This is also kind of a return to what Zelda was for a long time - a legend. While you could piece together a timeline yourself, it never always made sense (like ALttP, you could place before the original prior to the official timeline being made, but ALttP also says at the end that Ganon is completely destroyed, yet he returns and even has a part of the Triforce and invades Hyrule?). The official timeline was, in part, only put together because so many people demanded it and Nintendo had to start having this stuff make sense by adding more to the times in between games. I don't believe Nintendo really had any set plan or timeline when they made OoT for having the timeline split. Nintendo always seemed to like leaving it open as a legend for people to interpret for themselves (also coupled with Miyamoto-sans on record feeling that story matters far less than the gameplay) and it was less binding for them to be tied to a set timeline of events, free to do whatever they wanted without constraint. I can see Nintendo trying to return to the ambiguous nature of leaving Zelda games as just that - a legend, except in the case of direct sequels. Personally, I'd be fine with that. It's a legend and legends are always open to interpretation.

@Shadowthrone I suspected as much. I played LoZ after playing 3d dot heroes which pretty much lifts LoZ wholesale. And I remembered thinking that at the time when designing it LoZ must have been a massive overworld. I think some of that idea has been lost in the open world craze because some devs (ubisoft imo is notorious for this) forget that an overworld is filled with locales that play a role.

A game that is just empty space and does not function at least as a hub (hyrule field/Termina field) is a time waster. That’s why people fast travel all the time or don’t explore the whole map. I think Bethesda skirts it because the whole “you see that mountain? You can climb that mountain “ usually meant there was something on that mountain. Long time TES players know that the devs pepper the landscape with details (I remember in oblivion there was some random skeleton in a lake with a suicide note that had no bearing on the story at all and you could even play and never find it, but it was there if you did)but some openword games try to hard to mimic the real, full of uninhabitable or traversable places, world and just like me wandering the bottom of the Grand Canyon....there is little pay off.

BotW manages to keep the overworld aspect of zelda while letting the land tell the story similar to TES. Everytime I ran into a guardian, I wondered how many died trying to escape it as Hyrule’s defenses turned against it. Its that ability to use minimal scenery to spark you imagination to fill in the blanks that is a Miyamoto and Aonuma hallmark of game design. I adore Koizuma-san’s approach to storytelling, which gave us much of the rich history of Hyrule (and I think games after windwaker tried a little too hard to mimic his style and didn’t quite make it) but the almost D&D open story of 80s games allowed the gamer to fill in more of the blanks. (This coming from a woman that slept with the instruction manual to LttP under her pillow for a year because the drawings and slight story fascinated me, so I read it every night. ) BotW certainly tipped its hat to that.

That being said I like the LoZ approach to mythos. There are certain set pieces but they are more transitory titles that allow each version of the cast to be it’s own person. OoT Zelda was a revelation to me as a little girl. She set the pieces in play without having a ton of screen time and she both subverts and plays the DID and makes herself as important as Link in the series going forward. She aids Link as Sheik (with the implication that she avoids capture for seven years while training to become a Sheikah warrior), she is the leader of the sages and the final bearer of the triforce (of Wisdom) and she both gives Link the power needed to subdue Ganon and seals Ganondorf along with her fellow sages. Then she is powerful enough to set Link’s childhood back to normal (well for him considering his backstory). This has allowed Zelda to be a strong lead as well as powerful enough that her role is a burden on some of the other Zelda’s from a character perspective (SS, WW and BotW in particular).

The storytelling in BOTW's world and the "story" of the various experiences of playing the game in which you explore it are vastly more compelling than the actual traditional narrative elements (cutscenes, dialogue, story within most sidequests etc) in BOTW.

Now granted, I still wish the game had better story in the more traditional narrative parts or had gone full Shadow of the Colossus, but I think people have a limited scope on what video game stories are or can be (read: everyone who complains about Dark Souls' story). "This did story well in a movie or tv way, that did it not as well so story bad > : ( "

@JaxonH here a GOTY coming.

check out 8 voice actor that could voice Ganondorf in Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild 2 he have dialogue in the game, what Voice actor you think is the perfect fit to voice Ganondorf in Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild 2?

@kkslider5552000 No one has ever complained about Dark Souls' story. It doesn't have one. In fact people actually praised the fact it employed minimalist storytelling but had lots of lore that the player can go out of their way to find should they want to do so.

The problem with BOTW is that the story was actually built up pre-release to be something greater in scope than it actually ended up being. It was a major focus of the final trailer before the game came out and it actually looked like Nintendo was attempting to pull off a mature, narrative driven game to compliment its obvious sense of scope and freedom in gameplay

I wasn't expecting Metal Gear levels of intricate complexity but I didn't expect it to feel like as much of an afterthought next to the gameplay as it ended up being

BotW is ingenious in the way it tethers increased character development and story cutscenes to exploration. Besides allowing the land to tell its own story, I always felt like I was on the cusp of learning something new about people in the game. Also, there's the persistent presence of environmental puzzles, being able to climb everything, shrines, etc.

Dark Souls was TOO plotless and cryptic. Bloodborne, too. Those games feel like someone designed the bare gameplay elements but shipped the game out before the music, storytelling (even almost entirely plotless games typically give the player a reason to do what they're doing), dialogue, etc. was finished.

@JaxonH The hunters in this game seem very relatably human, between the increased interactivity and the voice clips. It's... weird, but I don't dislike it.

acording to a report of Economic Daily News, the rumored Switch Pro is gonna have a mini-LED display(is this good or bad for the console?)hmmmm a mini-LED display for Switch Pro?does this means Switch Pro is gonna be a hybrid like the standard Switch?

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/10/rumour_switch_pro_c...

1. So Dark Souls doesn't have a story but it has lore and thus story...telling. what?

2. But I do agree that the marketing made the story seem far more of a major focus of BOTW than it should have. Doubly a shame since the big story trailer they brought out was one of Nintendo's best ever.

@kkslider5552000 Ok it's not like it doesn't have a story, but it's EXTREMELY basic. It's almost 80's Nintendo levels of basic. I'm pretty sure Sekiro was the first FromSoft game I can actually recall where they actually have some form of proper narrative with stuff like character dialogue and motivation, but Soulsborne games dating back to Demon's Souls have never had the deepest plots, but make up for it with the excessive amount of worldbuilding and lore that is prevalent throughout

I think it's misleading to say the Souls games "make up" for a lack of plot via worldbuilding. It's more like they ditch plot altogether to focus entirely on lore and environmental storytelling. It's still storytelling, though, in a way that videogames are uniquely equipped for. There's also a very direct throughline of mutual inspiration, from the original Zelda to Ico and Shadow of Colossus to Dark Souls and back to Zelda (with the release of Breath of the Wild). All of them are relatively light on plot and heavy on using the environment (and item descriptions, in the case of Dark Souls) to convey mood, narrative, and meaning. There are some indies that do this, too, quite effectively: Hyper Light Drifter and, especially, Hollow Knight.

I actually agree about Dark Souls. There’s nothing wrong with the lore approach, it’s just different. Metroid Prime kind of follows the same formula.

And... I actually kind of agree about Zelda being light on story. But at the same time, given the structure of the game, it makes sense they did it how they did. It could have used a little more emphasis imo, but on a scale of 1 to 10, each game has a certain balance of story that makes sense for that game. I think Zelda should be a 5, and BotW was around a 3. So ya, it could have used a little more emphasis, but only a little. It’s a gameplay focused game, after all.

And even so, it’s still one of the greatest games I’ve ever played. A bit more story, a bit more dungeons, and I dare say it would be the closest thing to a perfect video game there ever was.

I think it hit an awkward halfway point where it had not enough story (traditional narrative) to live up to previous Zelda games (especially with the increased size of the game), but too much to just be a game storyabout its world and storytelling in the environment. Not quite Twilight Princess, not quite Shadow of the Colossus.

Though I'd also be cool with the opposite approach, and make a narrative heavy Zelda (maybe not as an open world game). Some of the better Zelda games have solid enough writing and have enough to them that you could make something closer to a JRPG and other story driven games like that in terms of a focus on plot. I'm not sure they SHOULD necessarily, but it feels like they have talented enough writers (and localizers as it were) to pull it off.