Anachronism

I don't have a ton of experience with Dragon Quest, but I've got to say I don't think I understand the point of the modern games. I played 11 a while back and quickly realized you can win pretty much every fight regardless of what attacks you pick, so you can more or less get through the entire game just auto battling and walking along the most obvious path.

Then I played Dragon Quest 1 and had a pretty good time with it. You actually have to manage your HP/MP and explore a bit to make progress. Since this new one was a remake, I thought it might have some more of that retro difficulty, even bumping the demo up to hard mode for good measure. But it was right back to the same problems from 11. Are the new entries just dead set on being the most accessible rpg series to the point where any interesting gameplay has been streamlined out?

@fenlix Yeah, I do love that series, and I guess it's the closest thing that's presumably still active, though it's more chibi character models on actual 2D backgrounds in towns and more generic ones elsewhere. Baten Kaitos was a step closer with more normally proportioned character models while Xenoblade 1 and the other project rainfall games, along with a couple Final Fantasies from around that time, got that color pallet just about perfect in a fully 3D environment, but the limited polygon counts mean none of them hold up great.

Are there any modern anime games that actually try to use that storybook art style for their 3D elements rather than just the menus/cutscenes? We got a decent number around the GameCube/Wii era, but I feel like most things since then have trended more towards the extremes of cartoonishness or pseudorealism.

The one silver lining of all the fake physical games is that it's making it really easy to pare down my Switch 2 wishlist.
Is it physical? That's a yes then.
Is it a 30+ GB download? That'll probably be a no.

There are still more Switch 1 games than I can ever hope to get through, so while I'll regret missing out on a few titles, I'll never have to worry about a shortage of things to play.

I almost want them to release a bundle that includes the trilogy and a microsd large enough to hold them all. Otherwise, I don't think I'll ever be able to play them. Maybe if there are enough reused assets between games, they could actually cut them down enough to squeeze into a 256 GB card.

Their 20th anniversary Super Bowl commercial was fun, but also announced nothing and wasn't even clearly about Pokemon for the first 40 seconds. I'm just gonna use that to set my expectations here.

The most exciting thing for me would be seeing some more companies really jumping on the Switch 2 bandwagon. Microsoft's the obvious one just due to the sheer quantity of stuff they own now, but there are plenty of other studios whose games would fit quite comfortably on the hardware. Aside from that, I just want more physical releases, because my gaming budget still doesn't have room for multiple terabytes of storage.

This would be a lot more exciting if it came 2-3 months after the last full Direct rather than 5 months. Considering they usually schedule full Directs for about a week after a big game release, but before they run out of release dates, that would predict a proper one either mid-February (which seems a bit too close to this one now) or early April.

Though with March 10th being Mario Day and the 40th anniversary this year, maybe we'll get some big announcements then instead.

Do they not tell voice actors what they're signing when they hand them an NDA? I feel like this happens way too often.

Anyway, I'm still working my way through Baten Kaitos Origins, and have been hoping to get some Switch 2 upgrades before starting X DE or 3's NG+. They can take their time on the next game as far as I'm concerned.

Is it weird to say a pixel art game doesn't look like pixel art even though I can clearly see all the pixels in the art? Maybe it's just that every sprite isn't locked to the same pixel grid or something like that, but whatever the disconnect is, it always makes for a sort of uncanny valley effect.

Anyway, I'm always up for another Zelda-like and I was glad to hear Jon's voice again (even if the actual wording of the narration could have used another round or two of editing) so I'll be sure to stick it on my wishlist.

Alright, now we just have to wait a couple days for a youtuber to tell us how the game has been completely changed and all the world records are now either unbeatable or already broken.

If they just want to load us up with all the AAA third person action games that didn't make it to the Switch, that'd be great. Some of the more ambitious indie games we missed would be nice, too.

I just wrapped up Bananza yesterday, but I think I'll pass on the DLC. The game just couldn't offer any challenges I was happy with. The only things that gave me a decently hard time were a few postgame sections, and having to slog through the easy parts of the gauntlets over and over again just to practice the harder ones was a pain. Given I'm still burned out from that repetition, an arcade/roguelike mode already wasn't going to do much for me, so throwing in limited time content on top of that kills whatever interest I had left.

Weird timing for me. I watched someone speedrun this game yesterday and otherwise haven't thought much about it in over a decade.

I listened through the whole thing, and aside from the recurring melodies from other games, Linebeck's theme is probably my favorite.

It's about what you'd expect from a canned speech for a smaller event. Though her tone and body language felt pretty casual, which is a nice change from the stilted, corporate vibe you get from most of NoA's presentations. A lot of those feel like the people on screen have been given very specific guidelines and are trying very hard to stick to them.

I think this one deserves some bonus points for the fact that they absolutely could have taken everything from the free update and thrown it in here, raising the price and making all of it Switch 2 exclusive. It'll be a real shame if the criticism for this cancels out some of the good will they've rightly earned for adding all that content.

Looking at just the titles in the average week of eshop shovelware, I'd say Nintendo's not doing a great job. Aside from that, I wish they'd let us filter games by the specific reasons for their age ratings rather than just the ratings themselves, though that can go in the bucket with the dozens of other filtering/sorting options I wish they had.

Doesn't work for me, but I'm pretty sure my most played Switch 2 games would be Mario Kart World, Silksong, and DK Bananza. All three have some great ideas, but are held back by frustrating flaws.

World's trick mechanics are really cool, but I feel like all the courses having to fit into the same map limits their creativity. The most visually interesting areas are ones like Rainbow Road and Boo Cinema because they're the only ones not surrounded by generic landscape and that pretty but annoyingly static skybox. I don't like most of the intermission tracks either, and really don't like that there's no good way to avoid them. Plus, the lightning ruins the fun of the item system's randomness and of just trying to drive fast in a racing game by showing up at the end of nearly every race. Its odds of spawning should be even thoughout the race, and the chances of it showing up at all should be a lot lower.

Silksong would be a great successor to Hollow Knight...if every enemy wasn't a damage sponge. I can't guess how many extra deaths I racked up due to zoning out from boredom while trying to execute the same handful of precisely identical dodges and attacks over and over again.

Bananza should be a 10/10 game for me, but it has the opposite problem from Silksong. What might have been interesting challenges are skipped over entirely because I just happened to wander through a wall into the finish line, while most boss fights are practically over before they've started. I've had the same problem with the recent Zelda games. Being able to tackle a challenge in a few different ways is fun. Being able to consistently negate or circumvent challenges, sometimes even by accident, is not fun. Its visuals (along with Mario Kart's) also have that awful plasticky look that so many modern games suffer from, though I feel like that might be more an issue with the actual engines aiming for more realistic lighting and material properties. I think flatter lighting and solid, non-reflective materials just work better for a lot of art styles.

Game Freak's side projects are usually pretty cool, though I still find it odd that some of them haven't launched on Nintendo platforms. Of course, all of those have had more indie-sized ambitions, whereas this looks more like what you'd expect of a AAA game than anything from Pokemon has. Unless they've brought on some better programmers, I'm not confident in their ability to get it running well.

You've found a much more positive way of looking at it than mine. When the Switch eshop first got to a size where it was becoming difficult to look through everything, I took the time to do it anyway and added all the games that remotely interested me to my wishlist. For most of the time since then, I've gone through the week's new releases every Thursday, which for some reason was always the main indie game release day.

When I reached the eshop wishlist's original cap several years ago, I finally did the same as many others here and started using deku deals, but that didn't mean I completely abandoned my eshop wishlist. I transferred all the retail games, popular indies, and anything else I had a stronger desire to play to the new list, while I started thinking of the old one as my personal ark for interesting games, keeping them from being lost beneath the endless tides of shovelware flooding the modern eshop.

Every now and then I'll hit the eshop wishlist's cap again (though I can never remember the exact number aside from being frustratingly just short of four hundred) and take some time to transfer another hundred games to deku deals. Last I checked, that list has ballooned to somewhere around five hundred entries, eclipsing the eshop one. Both have become difficult to look through in their own right, only becoming useful again after applying all available filtering and sorting options.

Like you, I've given up the expectation of ever playing all of them, though I find that more frustrating than liberating. I'd like to give all these games the time I feel they've earned just by managing to catch my eye, but considering the backlog I've already built up picking only the best games and best deals off those lists, it's become clear there just isn't enough time in the world to get through them all. The lists have become a reminder of the constraints on my time, money, and energy, and have even made it more difficult to enjoy the games I am playing. There are always hundreds more waiting for me, and unless I manage to become fully absorbed in the current one, I can't help thinking there might be countless other games I'd enjoy more if only I'd chosen them instead.

Best of luck Felix. I've been critical of you more than once since you started here, but I do think you've shown some good progress in that time. Hope you can carry at least part of that experience forward to wherever you're going next.

My understanding is that this game is absurdly power hungry, often for no discernable reason. It sounds like it should have a lot of room for optimization if Capcom throws enough money and programmers at it, and given it's the biggest black mark on what's mostly been a stellar few years for them, maybe they'll actually put in the effort to fix it.

That said, I will be very surprised if they manage to get a Switch 2 version running with decent visuals and anything approaching a stable frame rate.

I've only become more convinced my Switch is going nowhere. If anything, I regret not buying a bigger microsd for it before those prices exploded.

I'll likely even grab a few more Switch 1 games over their digital-only Switch 2 versions just to save whatever storage space I can for indies.

Looking back at the launch lineup half a year out, it's a list of really impressive games that all had one or two drawbacks preventing me from either buying or fully enjoying them. Hopefully once I clear out my Switch 1 backlog a bit, I'll have more motivation to dig into those and other Switch 2 releases I've put off.

@ShadLink Wait a second. The starting price for FFVII Remake is $40, so assuming a bulk order of carts lets you get them a good bit cheaper per unit than an equivalent microsd express, they actually might be able to sell a proper physical version for $70...if that cart size was available. Though even then, I'm not sure the average consumer cares enough for the benefits of a fully physical game to outweigh that $30 price bump when it comes to sales numbers.

@Serpenterror I hate to be the bearer of bad news on this one, but it really is impossible to properly release FFVII Remake physically. It takes up ~90 GB, so even with the biggest Switch 2 cart, you'd still have to download a third of the game.

I was looking forward to it after the demo, but I doubt I'll ever have enough storage to sacrifice that much for one game.

Narrowing down my wishlist using the rules I made up to keep myself from spending too much money on too many games still leaves ~100 games costing ~$500 that fit the criteria. I don't think the system is working...

Luckily I have the backup contingency of staring at my backlog until I feel too guilty to buy anything.

My only question is why Nintendo would put their foot down on this with all the other degenerate garbage on the eshop. Maybe they just ignore shovelware and only police the games that are likely to grab a decent amount of attention?

Anyway, I think it's probably reasonable to not want people showing that much skin on a platform accessible to millions of kids. Tons of parents are either awful at putting up effective boundaries and safeguards for their children or just don't care.

Well now I've got the Wii soundscape AND Vengabus playing on loop in my head. Thanks for that.

Right now, all AI is buggy and poorly understood. Once it actually is competent enough to mimic professional work down to the smallest detail, that opens up a whole can of worms on the value of human labor in general, but for the moment it's an inferior substitute. I don't mind it being used internally by say a non-artistic game designer to generate concept art for an actual artist to work off of, but none of that should make it into the final product.

I still want to play most of these, though I can't say when I'll manage it. My gaming wishlist is slowly creeping towards a thousand entries. I wonder if the number of hours it would take to finish them all has already exceeded the total remaining time I'll spend on gaming.

@Dr_Awkward When I buy something, I usually want to actually keep it in my possession. If I didn't plan on keeping my games longer than it takes to finish them, I'd be better off just getting them through a subscription.

Please. I don't want to choose between skipping games because I don't have the space for them or spending more on storage than on the console over the next decade.

I feel like most free merch is just an excuse to turn customers into walking billboards. I guess you shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, but the opportunity to wear or carry around the name of a company or product in big bold letters is never going to motivate me to buy that product.

I watched someone play through it recently. The animation is pretty cool, but it feels like the story was written specifically for teenagers. It has its moments, but watching a bunch of dysfunctional people repeatedly screw up their relationships while jumping on every possible opportunity to make a dirty joke gets old pretty quick.

@AussieMcBucket I think stability usually has to do with preventing crashes, glitches, etc. Basically the difference is between improving something that's functional but inefficient and fixing something that's flat out broken.

I have some confused feelings about Monolith Soft. They worked on what might be my two absolute favorite games, Xenoblade 1 and Skyward Sword, but while they've never made an outright bad game, nothing that's come after those two has gotten close to them for me. Zelda dropped the semi-open metroidvania design that no one else gets quite right and Xenoblade became a lot more dependent on all the worst anime tropes. BotW/TotK are still technical marvels and Xenoblade 3 was my favorite game that year despite its flaws, but it's frustrating knowing someone can give you exactly what you want and simply has no interest in doing so.

I hope it's separate from the main game. I already got my 100% completion and having it get decompleted would sort of feel like having someone open the back of a book I just closed and shove a bunch of extra pages in it. The only reason I even bought Silksong at launch is because I assumed they couldn't have anything else they wanted to add after spending all that time on it.

@Luigia Oh it's definitely a cool game. Shinen's just known for doing magic with Nintendo's hardware, so it's a shame Fusion feels like it had to make some compromises.

I wonder how Fast Fusion would look with the standard DLSS model. I know it already has like five graphics settings, but considering four of them seem to use the light DLSS model that breaks down when things move quickly and the last one cuts back a bunch of effects, I still wouldn't mind another option or two.

@Pillowpants @Smithicus I think they've achieved an iconic status by sheer virtue of their visuals and world design, at least if the number of people still watching them is anything to go by. Even with the first one, I always felt like the story was mostly just an excuse to create a bunch of gorgeous CGI set pieces.

We see a similar attitude with a lot of video games, especially Nintendo's, and even some popular book series are held up more by clever writing and moment to moment events than a good overarching narrative, so I'd say you don't always need a great story to make a great piece of media.

I'd like to give about twenty of these a go. Can't wait to finally get around to one or two of them some time in the 2030s.

@rvcolem1 Good news, they're both getting released on Switch 2 the same day as RE9. There's even a $90 three-pack. All key cards of course, but I guess that's technically a step up from cloud.

@Smithicus The games have almost no story, so you can start pretty much anywhere. As others have said, Rise is one of the best and probably the most friendly to new players.

Your other option on Switch is Generations Ultimate. It's the last entry that could really be called old school Monster Hunter, and is basically a greatest hits collection with nearly all the coolest monsters from the games before it.

Rise + Sunbreak for $10 is ridiculous. I finally gave in and bought just Sunbreak for more than that a year ago. I'd be really looking forward to the next game if only I had the storage space it's guaranteed to demand.

I love the look of this game. Can't think of anything else that emulates that classic anime style quite as well. With how many cool co-op focused titles we've been seeing lately, I'm really starting to regret my solo gaming habits.

@Solid_Python I'll wait to see some video before really setting any expectations, though even in those shots it looks likely the hair has suffered similarly to what we've seen from RE9's Switch 2 version. It might be that the game's already running at the lowest framerate/resolution most people would consider acceptable, but if not, I'd rather they drop those further before dumbing down the visual effects if at all possible.

It's always cool to see a modern visual showcase making it to Switch 2, though I can't help but wonder what condition it'll be in when it gets there.

Love this game's art style, though I've heard the gameplay is a bit lacking. I still might give it a go just to get something a bit different from the endless tide of realistic action games, cartoony platformers, and anime rpgs.

Still a few sets back pulling for the 3* Lugia. I'll get it any day now, I'm sure.