Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

@Fizza I think Persona 4 is very very good, but on the other hand Persona 5 could very well be one of the best JRPGs ever. I went and played 4 after beating 5 and lots of gameplay elements were in there, meaning a lot of systems you'd recognise between the two, but the improvement in quality is seismic. 5 looks better, is longer (for some that's good, others bad), and for me has a real sense of vision and direction with all the style, Personas used, colours, music direction, etc. Don't miss 5 for the world, you will regret it.

Well yes but that was more because it was all they were doing and they were getting rapidly diminishing returns on 3DS. Two of which came out after the Switch did.

@TheJGG If P5R had more well-balanced combat (it's still pretty easy even on the highest difficulty setting), it'd be a contender for one of the best JRPGs ever made, IMO. Particularly given how excellent the Royal-exclusive expansion content is.

Re-introducing SMT elements like guns, negotiations, proper dungeons, etc. was incredibly smart as well.

@kkslider5552000 Seems like the series peaked in terms of consumer interest with Bowser's Inside Story, which sold an impressive 4.5 million copies. Sales for every game released afterward kept spiraling downward.

I think the Mario & Luigi series was also victim of the 3DS. It couldn't expand beyond that user base, and due to how incredibly low powered the device was, the games couldn't really evolve in any meaningful way.

I'm of the same mind. I was kinda tempted to maybe give it a spin but then I saw Cult of Lamb. Entirely different game I know but if I'm going to spend a few dollars on a small title I'm probably going to get more out of Cult of Lamb. Especially when Hades and Animal Crossing are two of my most played games of the last few years by an unhealthy margin......

@Grumblevolcano That’s fair. I’d forgotten about Reggie leveraging his connections to make Nintendo relevant at the VGAs. Yeah I assume that Nintendo will save BOTW2 info for a blowout Direct. They have the install base now and the hype since BOTW has been tried and tested. At this point whomever is invested in Switch is invested.

@JaxonH @Grumblevolcano fair enough. I will wait on reviews.

@JaxonH 3DS was able to run Wii ports and a fully 3D Mario game, so while I acknowledge Switch would've been a better platform for M&L after 2017, I don't agree that it didn't have the space to evolve.

There's no reason that, after Dream Team, which sold respectably, the next three games needed to be a Paper Mario crossover and then two unnecessary remasters of older games in the series.

Some developers just lose the plot over time, whether it be due to key people moving on to other companies or them just having no vision for where the series should go moving forward.

@Ralizah I've seen videos of the combat on the hardest difficulty and how easy it looked. I'm personally a con artist when it comes to JRPGs, I am average at best. For that reason I turned it down to Safety by the time I got to the fourth palace lol. I think the combat's the weakest part of the game though, it's pretty basic when you work out the ins and outs.

Still, with the combat anyway I believe it's one of the best of the best. Shame it came out same year as BotW because without it it would have swept every Game of the Year nomination.

I prefer Miitopia Battle system with some goofiness depend on your relationship with other Mii, if only they are all controllable.
You will never find goofiness during battle from JRPG except from Miitopia.

Hard disagree, there's goofiness to be had in a JRPG battle system. Xenoblade games have characters belting out the same lines over and over again.

Enemy’s broken away from me!

Yeah, I got somethin’ for ya!

I'm the girl with the gall!

"And I was the MVP! You're all thinkin' it!"

"Eunie's the boss!"

"Just part of the protocol 'innit?"

@Ralizah To be fair we knew absolutely nothing about the upcoming 1st party lineup at that point outside of Animal Crossing getting updates and Smash Ultimate + Sword/Shield getting more DLC sometime in the future. I definitely think if Nintendo treated the Partner Showcases initially like they did later on, they'd have been better received.

I would say PS5 players are worse off currently than Switch players were in 2020 though. The upcoming 1st party Sony lineup is a bunch of PC ports, a remaster of a remaster that exists for PC players and a highly anticipated PS4/PS5 game which is less than 3 months away from launch that we've seen very little of.

@TheJGG The combat system itself is fine. Just modified press turn combat, like other modern Persona games. There's not much fundamentally different between P5R combat, which is easy on the hardest difficulty, and SMT IV difficulty, which can be pretty challenging on even the the normal setting. It's the damage scaling and whatnot that are out of wack. Also, Persona is more forgiving in ways that make it easy to play sloppily. Like, you won't lose turns in P5 if you use a powerful multi-target spell, and one of the enemies happens to drain it, like you would in an SMT game.

@JaxonH It's unfortunate that the game industry has turned into the movie industry for the last quarter of the year. There's always a bunch of movies that get released on Christmas even though there's no way more than a handful of them can do anything at the box office, but now we're having tons of games coming out on all platforms that there's no way to play them all until well into next year. I'm not going to list them all, but even just on PS5, you have God of War Ragnarok, Gotham Knights, Ys VIII, A Plague Tale: Requiem, another Call of Duty, The Callisto Protocol, and that's leaving out several other games that are either coming out then or early next year.

Obviously it's happening also with the Switch, especially given that there's plenty of ports to go along with new releases. It is what it is, and honestly in the end it might be a good thing because some of them might go on sale by the time you're ready to play them (3rd party titles more likely as 1st party ones can take forever to go on sale), but it is still strange to release so many games all at once basically.

@KilloWertz
It's a natural part of the capitalism cycle: saturation. Then things get over-saturated, and they have to find ways to rescue their IPs, and the cycle renews all over again.

@Grumblevolcano I ALWAYS hear complaining about partner showcases. A certain subset of people just refuse to play anything on the system that's not a core first-party title, and resent anyone who is happy with Switch announcements from third parties. Anyway, that stream you mentioned was just as beloved by some people as it was "infamous" with the Mario and Zelda only crowd, since it not only re-revealed SMT V, but also revealed Nocturne HD.

2022 hasn't been a bad year for fans of Playstation properties. There's giant gaps in the release schedule, of course, but that's ALWAYS the case with Sony now. Horizon, Gran Turismo, and God of War are some of the biggest properties Sony has, and those are all releasing this year. Spider-Man 2 was also dated for next year.

You know who is just perpetually suffering? Anyone waiting for Microsoft to develop a solid first-party release schedule. I've never seen a company suffer such painfully long first-party droughts!

@Ralizah personally I have always believed that xbox functions best as a multiplat system. If you aren’t into Sony for whatever reason (me, I hate their controller) the xbox is essentially a low grade PC (technically under the hood they both are but that wasn’t always the case) especially now that MS has locked down much of the major western devs under their banner. Xbox between gamepass and its dev situation it is the best sand box.

Nothing major from an exclusive side but just about everything else goes there. They are like the opposite of wii/wwiu Nintendo. You go to Sony and Nintendo for exclusives, but everything else is usually on the Microsoft ecosystem (especially if you fold windows back into that). As such I don’t think xbox fans are hurting.

While they have exclusives it has never been the range of Sony or Nintendo so I think fans know what they have. I just bought a PS5 because right now that is cheaper than upgrading my PC (plus no new TES) but honestly I think a person with a switch and pc with a gamepass sub could play just about everything. Especially now that Sony is dumping first party games on PC. And xbox gets like 60-70 percent of what PC gets so a fair amount of overlap.

@Ralizah It's not normally this long for Sony droughts though poor communication makes it a lot worse than usual. Like the last 1st party PS game drought (before the current one) had multiple State of Plays, a Playstation Showcase and presence at multiple Geoff Keighley events. This time there was some info in June but mostly PS news nowadays seems to just be Jim Ryan talking about PC, live service and subscriptions. There's not even anything Sony at Gamescom Opening Night Live.

As for Microsoft, they've had 1st party problems since Game Pass started in 2017. Sure MCC was a mess for awhile and Halo 5's campaign was poorly received but apart from those, Xbox had a solid lineup from September 2014 to February 2017 both in terms of quantity and quality. After Halo Wars 2 there were big problems in the lineup which Game Pass kind of acts to hide those problems. With Game Pass being rough since April, I get the feeling Microsoft are heavily relying on the Activision acquisition going through sooner rather than later.

I've given up on Xbox ever having a compelling exclusive lineup. The best they'll offer is one decent exclusive per year, on average. Some years we see none, other years we might see two.

Maybe one day, with all those studios they bought, they'll start seeing the fruit of their acquisitions and MS will start to release at a more regular cadence. I thought that would be this gen, but it's looking more and more like, if it is this gen, it'll be the tail end.

PS has plenty of exclusives. They don't have the issues Xbox has. Though they have lost a mega ton of previous exclusives these past few years for a variety of reasons- some 3rd parties who just want to expand to other platforms, some 3rd parties who are tired of taking Sony's bribe money and bork their brand's growth long term, some are 1st party forced to go multiplat like The Show, and part of it is Sony's own decision to release on PC. Even despite all that, they still have a far more compelling lineup than Xbox. Which speaks volumes, really.

Switch is in a unique position though. They have their exclusives, most definitely, but what gives them the edge is any multiplat on the system offers something you can't get anywhere else- every game is exclusively hybrid. Ya, you might be able to play it on another system, but you won't be able to play it in 3 different formats with gyro aiming. Not to say exclusives don't matter most- they do. But it helps make Switch a viable platform for 3rd parties because enough ppl want to play those games on Switch, and having vibrant 3rd party support is partly what's made Switch so attractive. Even if all the top selling games are 1st party- the hype and buzz and word of mouth is often from 3rd parties, as my coworker bought for hybrid Skyrim and another bought for hybrid Diablo 3. These ppl exist.

1st Party Game Sale, Physical and Digital for $39.99 on Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/s?rh=n%3A24185921011

Wave Race 64 will come to Switch Online Expansion Pack in august 19th

Game had the most realistic looking water of any game ever released up to that point.

I remember being blown away at how good the water looked in that game back in the mid-late 90's, whenever it was it released.