Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

Cause of the old school TV I found, there isn’t much in it visually between docked and handheld for SMT V for me, but it just feels a lot choppier docked to me than in handheld. There is still some weird slowdown in handheld, but it feels worse/more frequent docked to me. But we all have different sensitivities to these things, so other mileage may vary. I never used to think I was some FPS slave and wouldn’t necessarily still identify as one, but I definitely feel like I am more aware of when a game is stable and it isn’t than I used to be.

@Ralizah oh man i can relate to P5R. Love that game but between the constant dialogue and relative ease of combat it was a chore on repeat play throughs. On more than one occasion I'd be skipping dialogue only to be shocked that after several minutes everyone was still talking.

Persona is has such bloated dialog it'll drive you crazy if you're not into it, or aren't prepared mentally. Persona 4 Dancing, despite being the only game I ever bothered getting a Platinum on, is excruciating with babbling dialog, for like an hour straight before you ever even get to gameplay!

It has the option to ultra-FF through dialog text and it still took me like 20+ minutes to get to the first dancing segment. They just go on and on and on and on and on

In P5 once they start going over the palace infiltration I'm like

@JaxonH @Losermagnet I... look, I like the characters and dialogue in Persona games. I really do. It's a lot of fun to watch them interact. But it's PAINFUL to sit through on repeat playthroughs. They need a robust fast-forwarding feature like a lot of VNs have where you can quickly skip through the talking if you just want to do something other than sit around and listen to anime people blather on for hours at a time.

SMT V is how you do it. A little bit of scene-setting at the start. Introduce the characters. Then, BOOM, you're dumped in hell. You get a few short playable tutorials once you get there, and there you're set off the leash. I love that the game is almost as eager to skip past the talking and tutorializing as the player is.

@Ralizah agreed. It's all good fun the first time, but after that it's just time consuming. It's designed in a way that every character gets a chance to say something even if what they're saying is reduntant.

I like how 999 does it, where it'll stop if there's a line of new dialogue. Not that that applies to Persona, where all the dialogue is the same (i think?) but at least you won't miss anything new by skipping. Edit - come to think of it, why aren't the Zero Escape games on the Switch!?!

Text scrolling is actually a pet peeve of mine. My only real complaint about The Great Ace Attorney is that even on the fastest setting it scrolled too slowly.

Metroid Dread sold 854,000 copies in October in the US according to Nintendo.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/12/22776640/nintendo-switch-...

I am so so happy right now.

Nearly 850k in just the US for October. Add in Mexico and Canada and it's likely close to 1m for all of North America.

Add 200k for Japan (physical + digital) and the historical Metroid norm for Europe of 50% of whatever NA does, so 500k, and we're estimating 1.7m globally for October.

Add in another 2 weeks of sales in November and we've gotta be approaching 2m globally by now. With Christmas right around the corner too? It's gonna smash.

Also factor in that from the time of its announcement 5 months ago, Metroid Dread has remained in the Amazon Top 100 Best Sellers. If it was only fans buying it, you'd expect a sharp increase at announcement, then a steep decline until release, then a sharp increase, followed by a steep decline. That's not what we see. What we see is a sustained sales trend over the last 5 months and even now, it's still Top 50 on Amazon and top 5 on the eShop. That's legs. That's how evergreen games behave in sales charts.

I believe this is convincing evidence that Metroid Dread has breached the fan bubble and is pulling in new players outside of that niche. And all evidence seems to indicate continued momentum into Black Friday and Christmas, and beyond.

I ended up turning down the difficulty down in SMT V in the end. It seems you can only save at the Layline things, not from the menu anymore (unless I am being stupid, which I may be).

I beat the meremaid mini-boss, but barely. Had about one demon left and a couple of HP myself. I kept pushing forwards waiting for one of the laylines to show up so I could restock, but I died to the attrition before I could find one.

Since there is no auto save I guess and because you can only save in specific places, the result was about an hour of lost progress. Not worth it to me. I’ll play on casual lol.

@Pizzamorg
No shame in that. I hear even Casual can be difficult. It's no pushover difficulty (that would be Safety difficulty).

Enjoy games on the difficulty right for you. I go on reddit and all I see is, "starting on Hard, starting on Normal" like nobody wants to speak up about playing on casual.

Screw that. I'm gonna try Normal but if I encounter too many problems, Casual it is.

I'm playing bravely default 2 on casual and even so, I'm getting my rear kicked quite often.

I played Ni No Kuni on easy because I wanted the combat to be over as soon as possible. I think difficulty options are important in JRPGs especially because it really determines the pacing for the player. Whether it's through challenge or tediosness nobody wants the game to be boring.

It is just those mini-bosses. Even on casual, they are pretty brutal.

I'm playing it on casual, too, @Pizzamorg .... I generally play games on easy, tbh or even very easy I'm happy there's options for the lunatics who want to play on hard or whatever, of course

Man, basically every enemy in SMT V who isn’t something you can catch in the wild, is brutal and has heaps and heaps of health. I appreciate it probably isn’t in the spirit of things, but I am having to keep using the safety difficulty as a crutch. Whenever I face these enemies, I do try on Normal, when I fail I then try on Casual and if I fail again, I then drop down to Safety. I managed to get the Mermaid down on normal, but it cost me everything. Everything else has been on Safety.

I know that the way the game is meant to be played is for you to grind it out, keep making new fusions all the rest but I just ain’t got time to grind for hours on end to try and counteract the difficulty pacing. I’m sure people will tell me SMT then isn’t for me if I don’t want to do that and maybe? But I’m just glad the game can give me a way of keeping the progression going, so I can organically move through the game and keep experiencing new things, rather than being forced to stay in one place to overcome artificial humps.

Ok, I’m officially in love with SMT.

I loved SMTIV and the others I played like Strange Journey, but their dated design made them a bit harder to get into. THIS is what I needed. It’s modern, it’s fresh, it’s got excellent movement and jumping mechanics, it looks amazing graphically on the Switch OLED… and the music. Wow.

This is the SMT game that’s going to make me a diehard fan. No doubt about it. SMTV is seriously dope.

@Slowdive
That… doesn’t seem like a problem? Certainly not for me anyways.

I mean, who doesn’t have a Nintendo Account? I’m not worried about games that require that. Anyone who has a Switch has a Nintendo Account linked to it, so it’s not an issue.

I know ppl think up hypothetical scenarios in which it may theoretically not be possible to play a game, but from my perspective these are hypothetical scenarios that just aren’t very realistic or probable.

Man, all this SMT talk makes me want to pick it up 😬 it's out right when I'm in between other games, maybe I should take that as a sign lol.

@Slowdive do you have to sign on once and then you're good after that? Or is an online only deal?

Good helper video for SMTV

@Slowdive
Ya but it is still playable offline in the future. As long as you have a Nintendo account which again, who doesn’t have one? Once you have one you never need to go online with it. That gives you 20 to 30 years to sign up for a Nintendo account if you don’t have one, and everyone has one anyways.

Also, LRG didn’t make the game or the decision, so I’m not sure how they’re a “scam company” due to one game from one developer who put a restriction in that doesn’t even prevent offline play- unless you’re living under a rock for the next 30 years, and then wake up one day and just suddenly decide to start playing video games by purchasing a 30 year old copy of a 60 year old game for a 30 year old system, in which case, sure, you might run into a problem. For everyone else, there really won’t be an issue.

@Slowdive
Ya, I agree single player games shouldn’t require online, but I think there’s a far cry from needing online “at the time of playing“ and simply “having an account” everyone already has anyways and you have the next three decades to get if needed. And even if you did need online “at the time of playing”, there’s a far cry from needing online one time and needing it every time.

It just strikes me as one of those, “mountain out of a mole hill” situations. If the game required you to be online the entire time you played it then I would not buy the game. If the game required me to check in once the first time I play, I wouldn’t care. But the game doesn’t even bother to do that. All it asks is that you have a Nintendo account, which anyone with a switch would’ve signed up for when they set their switch up.

If people want to get a refund over such a benign issue, I mean, that’s their decision to make I guess..

@Slowdive
It’s not that I don’t agree in principle, because I do.

But even so, sometimes there are things in life that just don’t make a difference and aren’t a big deal, even if you disagree with it in principle. It’s like, pick your battles, ya know? Not everything has to be a catastrophe or flawless. There’s a lot of gray area in between, and if something genuinely isn’t going to affect me (and it isn’t, because I have a Nintendo account) why act like it’s some catastrophe for my experience? Anyone complaining about this who has a Nintendo account (and I’m willing to bet that’s virtually everyone) is literally complaining about something that won’t even affect them.