Anachronism

Man, themes, what a great idea. It's a shame it's impossible to do those on a console besides white and black. Anyway, I do like this app's overall design, but the main reason I'm keeping it right now is because they had a neat piece of Xenoblade art in there and I want to see more stuff like that.

Still really hoping there's some kind of free/cheap upgrade for anything that has a better Switch 2 version. If not, then it would be great if games that struggle on Switch could at least take advantage of the new hardware to hit their frame rate targets and cut back on dynamic resolution drops.

So is the platform holder strategy going forward just keeping exclusivity/timed exclusivity on their flagship games and tossing everything else wherever it can make money? I can't see Nintendo wanting to join the party, but with everyone else pushing in that direction, there must be a good reason for it.

This Direct felt like a parade of cult classics to me. I know a lot of the things in there have their avid fans, but in most cases I am not one of them. I also thought the Prime 4 segment was pretty poorly done. Scanning and puzzle mechanics are not the best showcase materials, and generic things like "psychic abilities" and "chosen one" plotlines don't give a good impression either.

But hey, at least we'll have trainers chasing us down again in Pokemon. I wasn't a fan of the fully opt-in trainer battles in Scarlet/Violet.

I'll be very surprised if this Direct is much more than Nintendo clearing out their last few delayed games and promotional obligations to third parties before moving on to the Switch 2. Then again, I'm still surprised they're even doing another Switch Direct, so what do I know?

I'll admit I didn't think it would happen. Though the timing feels almost like they couldn't make up their minds between doing one or two Directs. Hope we see a couple cross-gen games at both events so we can get an early start on the inevitable wave of comparison videos.

I definitely like having the option. I never allow subscriptions to auto renew, so I do tend to let Nintendo Online run out and sometimes go a few months before I have a reason to pay for it again. Being able to organize/bookmark/etc. any new soundtracks I can't currently listen to will help me avoid forgetting about them completely.

@HammerGalladeBro Not an expert but at a guess, I'd say it's because they can store what was pretty recently a mindblowing amount of data in something the size of your fingernail. SSDs with equivalent storage are in a similar price range, so you're pretty much just trading out faster loading times for a smaller form factor.

Think I'm currently using that 1TB one after upgrading from a 500 GB a few years ago. I wouldn't mind another 500 to give my Switch library some breathing room, but this close to the Switch 2's release, I think I'll hold on to what I have, use the old 500 GB for the first couple years of the next generation, then look into what's available when that runs out of space again.

I knew it was going to be a Pikachu pun. It's always a Pikachu pun.

Rather than HD-2D, I'd really like it if we could get more games that convincingly mimic hand drawn animation using 3D assets. A few have done it pretty well, and a lot of animated shows have been trying to sneak in 3D animation for years as a cost cutting measure, to varying degrees of success. Obviously it would be even cooler if Nintendo just put in the investment to create games with real hand drawn visuals, but that would require such a different skillset from what their current dev teams have that they'd probably either have to build a new studio from scratch or team up with one of the few existing ones that specialize in hand drawn animation.

Regardless of how they get it done, I just really want to see a Mario game that evokes old Mickey Mouse cartoons or a Zelda that looks like Peter Pan, though if they want to go for something closer to Toon Link's visual style or that beautiful anime style from the new Link's Awakening cutscenes, that'd be great too.

@Ralizah I just meant they're angling to become more of a digital platform than a physical one. Though they're also looking to get into the handheld PC space currently occupied by things like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally.

Xbox has been around for about as long as I've been playing games, so it's a bit weird to see them pulling out of the race against Nintendo and Sony and seemingly picking a fight with Valve instead. I certainly won't mind taking their games though, especially considering all the other studios they've absorbed over the last few years.

Now all that's left is to see if the Switch 2 and PS6 can keep the console wars going for another decade, though whether they're even competing more directly with each other than they are with the various PC storefronts is up for debate at this point.

@Sonicka @abbyhitter My conspiracy theory is that they put it there just to drive engagement from people asking why they put it there. Hopefully the writers are above that sort of thing, but if not then I'd say it's working pretty well.

I'm actually surprised I own most of this list. Of course, there's a couple of those I haven't even started yet. I'm also surprised Xenoblade 3 is on here since that world is literally a giant ring you have to walk around in one direction and that's heavily gated by story progression. Looking at the comments though, I'm not sure anyone on this site can agree what an open world is.

If I'm being honest, I don't really like what the advances in material properties have done to a lot of game visuals in the last couple generations. They went from a level where they were still clearly distinguishable from the real world to an odd uncanny valley where everything looks like it's made from plastic or rubber. It's neat to have this kind of option, but especially for something with intentionally stylized visuals like Minecraft, I'd usually rather just use the original textures and lighting.

@ozwally Just as a word of warning, I don't think most people have any problems with X's opening. It's more that the story falls apart bit by bit the further you go. Then again, I know nothing about the new content in this version, so maybe it manages to end on a high note rather than a decade-long cliffhanger this time.

Main story aside, I do think X has some of the coolest side quests in the series, and beyond that, the progression and exploration alone are enough to make it one of my favorite open world games.

@Princess_Lilly I'd argue a capital-G omnipotent God and lowercase "powerful but not all-powerful" gods are two very different things. Arceus has pretty much always been treated like the former in lore. Not that they've never contradicted themselves before, but I still think it's reasonable to expect a franchise to not just throw out its existing worldbuilding on a whim. As for how it functions in gameplay, that doesn't really matter. A lot of legendaries would just ruin the game if they actually had the powers they're supposed to.

@Princess_Lilly Arceus is the canonical God of the Pokemon universe. They already arguably jumped the shark just by inventing it back in gen 4. Making anything more powerful than it would be kind of insulting. Even in Legends: Arceus, it's more like you earn its respect than actually defeat it.

@Princess_Lilly I hate spoilers more than the average person, but in this case I think the title of the game spoils the ending of the game. It'd practically be false advertising if it ended any other way.

It's a pretty simple thing in retrospect, but I still don't think any final boss in Pokemon has had the same impact on me as finding Red on Mt. Silver. Arceus is up there though. That final set of challenges and Volo not being blatantly evil before then made it more memorable than your average villain/legendary fight. The one thing that spoiled it a bit is the same clunky character and enemy movement that plagues the rest of the game.

I like to imagine the entire gaming community as the seagulls from Finding Nemo screeching "Silksong!" at the slightest provocation. Not that I don't understand the hype, but I'd think people would get tired of revving themselves up after so many false starts.

I've been debating whether or not to squeeze in one more discount shopping spree before next week. Pitting the small amount of money I'd be spending to get a bunch of cool things against my complete lack of need for more games makes for a surprisingly tough decision.

Glad to see X is getting the love it deserves. It may be the black sheep of the Xenoblade series, but it's still Nintendo's best open world game as far as I'm concerned, and it deserves to reach a larger audience than it could back on the Wii U.

I'd tend to agree. The greatest benefit of the world's disparate cultures is variety. Obviously there's more cross contamination and homogenization in the modern world than there ever was in the past, but that's all the more reason for different nations and peoples to hold on to their cultural identities. Western countries already have more than enough studios making western-style games. If some japanese developers with a passion for those games want to join in, that's fine, but if all of Japan's studios start chasing western sensibilities in hopes of finding a bigger audience, the games industry at large will end up losing a lot more than it gains.

@Tetsuro Yes, I already said a higher resolution texture can still look better up to a certain point, especially with traditional rendering at a higher native resolution. But with a sub-HD native resolution filtered through an upscaler, that difference should be significantly reduced. It's like asking an artist to recreate a painting while looking at it from a distance through a telescope. No matter how much detail the original painting has up close, the artist can only accurately copy the amount of detail the telescope allows him to see, and has to fill in the rest with guesswork.

@Tetsuro What do you mean? Textures are just 2D images wrapped around a model. Every image file has a set number of pixels. If the detail from a higher quality texture is going to be lost due to a lower native image output and then overwitten with fake detail from the upscaler, then there's no point in using it over a lower quality texture. The same goes for polygon counts. If the rough edges from a lower poly model are already hidden by the lower native resolution, then there's no point in using a higher one.

@Tetsuro Sure, but normally you'd ideally want 1080p assets for a 1080p output. If you can get away with 720p assets for a 540p native image upscaled to 1080p with minimal losses in image quality, that's still a lot less data to store and a lot less work for the artists.

I have no clue if it will, but I'd like it to. What we've seen of it looks very similar to Metroid Prime Remastered. That style looked great for that game, but it's a bit more plasticky than what I'd like to see from a new entry in the series. Nintendo's never been big on using cross-gen games to showcase the capabilities of their new hardware, but as far as I remember, Retro's never had a cross-gen game before. If the power boost would give them them the opportunity to throw a few more graphical upgrades and rendering tricks into the Switch 2 version, then I hope they take it.

@Tetsuro From my understanding, using textures that are higher quality than your output resolution can look better than using lower resolution ones, but you'll still be missing out on some detail. Then an AI upscaler works by more or less dreaming up what it thinks a more detailed version of a lower resolution image would look like, but it does that by working off what would normally be the final output image rather than taking any missing detail from the assets into account. So is it still worth using higher quality assets when their finer details are going to be degraded by the low native image resolution and then covered up with fake detail by the upscaler?

Now I'm curious exactly how many corners they can cut while relying on AI to fill in the gaps. Does starting with a lower native resolution also mean they can get away with lower resolution textures? What about lower polygon counts? Exactly how much and what kind of detail can they take away before the upscaler has no clue what it's supposed to be doing anymore? I don't want or expect Nintendo to leave all their games' finer details to some program, but it should still be interesting to see how they make use of it.

I was actually surprised by how little I could find from that playtest. There was one social media account with a few clips, but other than that, all I saw was the same handful of screenshots reposted everywhere. Still, from what I did see of the gameplay and art style, I'm not at all surprised that it has some crossover with Splatoon.

@LeGrosMartin Huh, wonder if they're really that neck and neck or if someone's just review bombing 3.

3 is a great game, so I guess I can't complain too much about it edging out 1. Well, besides wondering how it "won" when it's marked at third on the list and DE is marked at second. Does it get a bonus for Future Redeemed? Regardless, 1 is and will likely always be the best as far as I'm concerned. It's still the only game in the series where the villains' motivations actually make any sense, and the only one that manages subtle foreshadowing.

And despite 2 being my least favorite entry in the series, I would actually put Torna above Future Redeemed. That partly comes down to Torna beating 2 by every metric besides quantity, but a big part of it comes back to 1 again. As far as I'm concerned, 1's story had a perfect ending, and it should have been left that way. It's not a happily ever after; the world is a mess and everyone in it has suffered and lost a great deal, but it's a world that finally has hope for the future. Everything that's tried to build on that ending, from 2, to Future Connected, to 3 and Future Redeemed, has not only contradicted it, but failed to match it in quality, and so only succeeded in cheapening it. I would legitimately like all of them more if they'd just been self-contained stories, rather than forcing me to compare them to a standard they can't reach.

@Wisestfool I tend to do the opposite, going back to lower ranks to farm weapon materials after I'm well into the higher ones. Being able to shrug off attacks and tear through monsters that used to be major threats really satisfies the part of my brain that craves progress and efficiency. More power to you, though. If you're gonna pick a game to sink all your time into, Monster Hunter's one of the best options out there.

Monster Hunter might have actually helped me break that habit. To collect every weapon, you'd have to farm one of those 3% drops for every one or two upgrade tiers for every available weapon type, which every monster has several of. I've spent the last week grinding in Rise, partly to expand my collection of charge blades, but mostly just so I can confidently take on the final ultra hard version of the Sunbreak cover boss. I'm now at the point I always hit with this series, where I can spend another hundred hours trying to unlock and collect everything I'd like to and maybe get a tiny boost to my stats and skills in the process, or I can just bash my head against the game's last big challenge until I break through and call it a day. In a game with a less absurd amount of content, where I had at least half a good reason to collect every item or complete every quest, I might feel tempted to spend that hundred hours. But Monster Hunter is so pointlessly overloaded that I know I'm never going to reach 100% completion, and so I feel free to stop playing whenever I want to.

Seems like positive changes overall. I am wondering whether or not I'm going to regret my habit of buying every single flare I can, though.

I think $400 is the sweet spot. At the very least, if it's more than that and doesn't launch with a few must-play games, then I'll be waiting to buy one until I run out of Switch games to play. That'll probably still take a good couple years.

I'm not sure anything will ever beat the original Xenoblade Chronicles for me. The world design is excellent throughout the whole series. The music is top notch through all the mainline games. The gameplay always has some interesting new twists, though 2 and 3 honestly feel like they play themselves most of the time. The visuals are always impressive, even if I prefer the older games' color palettes and character designs.

But Xenoblade 1's story is what really puts it leagues ahead of the rest of the series in my mind. It's complicated and unpredictable while still making sense. It's dark and serious while still finding room for hope and humor, managing to consistently avoid being overly gritty, saccharine, or dry. It has a maturity and a thoughtfulness to it that no video game I've played has ever matched, and that even other mediums usually fail to achieve. All of this comes together to create a true epic, a story that stands fully on its own merits even before considering the equally exceptional game attached to it.

I saw this on the eshop having never heard of it, and knew at a glance it was from the Dadish dev. Glad this guy just keeps plunking away at his silly little platformers. As long as he keeps making them, I'll keep buying them.

@StewdaMegaManNerd Hey, 3D Land, Mario Maker, Yoshi's Woolly World, and Mario Kart 7/8 are all awesome. Smash Bros. for 3DS/Wii U and Luigi's Mansion 2 are solid too, and I even liked Sticker Star. Admittedly I wasn't big on 3D World, and standard 2D Mario has never done much for me, but I'd hardly say the IP was stagnant during that generation.

Anyway, what I meant is that Kamiya was one of the guys in charge of Platinum. If the company wasn't operating in a way he likes, it'd normally be his job to fix it, so I'm curious if there's someone in particular among the other higher-ups pushing for things he disagrees with, driving him and a few other big names out in the process.

@JohnnyMind I'll be honest, that just sounds like what I'd expect a company founded by a couple of stereotypical gamers to be like. Sure, they seem a lot more crude and immature than what I'd want from a boss, but assuming they were genuine about wanting everyone to speak freely and willing to take as much criticism as they dished out, I'd gladly take that over the domineering middle manager you're likely to get at most jobs.

Wait, Niantic has non-gaming divisions? I thought they were basically just a branch of Alphabet that makes location-based games to gather data and make tons of money while they're at it. What are they even doing now that they've sold that off?

Well that didn't clarify much. If the guy just wanted to work on Okami 2, that's fine, but if something's actually happening at Platinum that's driving people off, I'd like to know what it is. He's one of Platinum's founders, so it's odd that the company would stray so far from his creative vision that he felt the need to abandon it.

Glad to see a couple of the games I mentioned the last time I saw this list have since made it on. Of course, I've played plenty more since then and have a lot more I could recommend now, though many of the games I'd like to bring up are technically disqualified. Those all spend around half their time on sale for less than 20 and often less than 10 dollars, but still have an official full price that knocks them out of the running.

Though if there's one thing I've played recently that should absolutely be on here, it's FEZ. That game's simply brilliant by every metric I can think of.

If I had to pick one game off the top of my head, it'd be Mario Kart 8. With most of the major first party titles, I've either played them to death or would be just as/even more happy to go back to earlier entries in their series, but few of the previous Mario Karts match 8 Deluxe in quality and none come anywhere close in sheer quantity. Plus, I actually like a lot of the DLC tracks and haven't played any of them more than a dozen times yet.

"Run on Windows" is honestly the most concerning thing there. I guess that'll mean good compatibility with PC games, but the last few versions have become so bloated and invasive that I just avoid using computers entirely at this point.

I'm surpised they haven't done these events for more games. It's a great way to show off a game's visuals and music to people who might not even know it exists.

@Rozetta Those are fighting words. Skyward Sword's my favorite game in the series. It's got at least the best story, characters, and soundtrack, along with some of my favorite dungeons, bosses, items, and general combat. I've been horribly disappointed with the direction the games have taken since then.

@SwitchplayerJohn Both of those are insane options. Taking control of Pokemon would mean cutting off or taking control of Game Freak and Creatures Inc, which neither of those companies want. Meanwhile, cutting off Pokemon entirely would mean giving up console exclusivity for one of their biggest system sellers, along with their cut of revenue from the most profitable IP in the world. Besides, while there's obviously something going wrong with the mainline games, TPC is just flat out better than Nintendo when it comes to expanding their brand. They've been a multimedia juggernaut for decades while Nintendo has only started to see major success from expanding outside of console games in the last few years.