BrewsterTea

@The_Nintendo_Pedant I agree. You can really feel the difference in a game like MHRise when you have the option to turn off all music but keep on SFX. It's a very different, almost meditative experience.

I've wished for a while that the Switch 2 would allow you to control master volumes on the system side for both game music and sound effects. You could turn off sound effects when you just want to ride through Mario Kart World and listen to the tunes, or dial down the music in a game like Animal Crossing and just focus on the ambient SFX.

Darn, that reminds me I'm dying for a Switch 2 Edition of Rise/Sunbreak. Thanks NLife.

I know it takes time, but it would be really nice to pair a new game release with its respective soundtrack on Nintendo Music. I'm already itching to play Legends ZA's wonderful soundtrack on the app!

A surprise indeed, but how welcome it is! Lots of new features, finally the resolution is bumped up for the 1080p screen (although I would like 60fps as well), even more online features, and great collabs with both Zelda and LEGO!

• LEGO collab is a pleasant surprise, but my very small nag is the idea that they could have gone the whole mile and given you a uniform that transforms your villager into a full-blown LEGO mini figure! In fact, why not switch a setting in the Resident Services that transforms all your villagers into mini figures? Ah well. Just furniture it is!
• With even more players to meet up online, it would have been nice to add a few games. Tug of war? Arm wrestling? Tag? Hide and seek?
• Would have loved the ability to initiate your own fishing and bug catching contests with other players! 12-player fishing and bug-catching contests sounds like a blast! Oh and a sea creature-catching contest as well!

Is it too much to ask for an Age of Imprisonment amiibo that turns Link in TOTK into Construct-Link?

BOTW added a lot of fun interactive features with amiibo. And TOTK had the potential to add more spirits into your save file. By scanning an amiibo, like Revali, you could add their spirit into your key items tab and activate them just like the four TOTK champions. It would be really fun not only to run around with the spirits of the BOTW champions, but also scan the amiibo from Age of Imprisonment and add the spirits of the original sages into TOTK.

How long until they add Legends ZA's amazing soundtrack? 😢

Fun times for NSO icons! Thankfully they last as long as NSO does once purchased, so I'll enjoy them for a few days this year and then use them much earlier next year.

@Turbo857 I actually agree; I also would like a behind-the-shoulder Metroid Prime game. Or an option like Elder Scrolls to switch freely between first and third person.

Poor Frye was given Skeleton, obviously the least favorite pick. Ironically enough, skeletons are hugely trendy this year as Halloween ornaments in my area. Skeletons everywhere.

Regardless of anything else, Odyssey's soundtrack is simply special. Sweeping and romantic, it proudly heralded one of Nintendo's most prosperous eras. Each Mario soundtrack is unique, but Odyssey's is now an iconic jewel in Mario's crown. Fossil Falls alone defined an entire console generation, and Jump Up Superstar ushered in a new movie-quality production value and musical voiceover, paving the way for the Mario movies as well as Donkey Kong Bananza.

Wow. I was not expecting to get this game right away before this Direct, and afterward I am pre-ordering and seriously considering a couple of those amiibo! The hype is unreal. All the social and online features cater directly to me, and this game really does contain the heart and soul of a Smash series title.

Would be neat if they outfitted the figure statues with NFC readers on the bottom so that they could function as a bougie amiibo.

Very jealous of London!

Pokemon Legends ZA and Final Fantasy Tactics! I've waited all year for these two RPG's, so I'm very excited to play both at last. I'm brewing a cup of super chai for the play session! (a strong cup of royal English breakfast, extra turmeric powder with Ceylon, maple syrup and milk)

Currently booting up Legends ZA and debating which starter to pick. I really like Tepig's cute eyes, but I'm usually happiest choosing the water starter... decisions!

Also just starting out in Tactics, so I'm getting my bearings and just now pushing through the tutorial battles. I'm loving the familiar Tactics feeling and presentation after growing up with Tactics Advance. So much polish and production value lovingly devoted to this humble strategy RPG.

@Vivianeat Totally agree! Even if Monolithsoft only offered a similar level of support that they did for BOTW, Pokemon games would be infinitely the better for it. I've been saying this for years that Monolithsoft should devote a support team to Game Freak.

@ShadLink Exactly. Legends is seesawing between zero cities in Arceus to all city in ZA. I actually found it a negative that Legends Arceus had almost no proper villages or cities outside of the one hub town. Everything outside of the hub town was more like a humble encampment than a proper "village."

Granted, I still enjoyed exploring the open, wild areas in Legends Arceus. But I definitely felt like a crucial ingredient in the Pokemon recipe that was missing in Legends Arceus was that sense of discovery as you made your way from one city or town to the next.

Pure curiosity made me look up some of the posts on Centro Leaks, and I have to say I'm very excited about Gen 10 now. Hoenn is perhaps my favorite region, and it sounds like an evolution of that style.

Am I alone in wanting just a ninja version of Assassin's Creed Shadows without the samurai? It could be like choosing between Pokemon versions: Assassin's Creed Ninja and Assassin's Creed Samurai 😂 Both the character and the play style don't really interest me as much based on footage. I would much rather just slip about as a ninja 24/7. Ah well. Still very interested in this! Even more so than Star Wars Outlaws.

I would also love an Assassin's Creed 1 remake! I was one of those people who loved the sci-fi aspects of playing both the future storyline and plugging into the Matrix-- er, the past. And I checked out of the franchise when ACRevelations was pretty much the last one with a playable future storyline for a while. I never found out if the later installments added it back in.

Got my physical copy preordered! Still debating between Chikorita and Totodile . . . It sounds like they'll only get Mega's instead of regional third evo's, which is a bit disappointing after Legends Arceus set a fun precedent.

Wow, that first part with Dire Dire Docks really got me. What a beautiful arrangement of that classic song. I wished it was the only song featured for that 5 minutes, continually evolving similarly to the original.

People are disagreeing over Pikmin Vs Mario. Well, to Miyamoto's credit of saying Pikmin are everywhere on earth, why not both? Why not sprinkle Pikmin into the Mario movies as a cameo appearance? It could be a teaser for Pikmin 5, or it could be a teaser for the Mario Galaxy movie with a cute nod at Pikmin existing on earth within the Mario Cinematic Universe.

@OstianOwl Somebody higher up in the comments already answered your question 😋

@SillyG I'm also pretty frustrated at Nintendo for simply dumping Japanese-language games onto NSO without a simple translation. With all the features to tweak lighting, rewinding and etc., the games already lose that "authentic" concept regardless. It would be a huge benefit for everyone who can't read Japanese, especially for the dialogue-heavy adventure games like Starfy.

Would love to live close to London right about now! As someone with English heritage, it's been a goal of mine to move to the UK someday 🍂

Great to see more Switch games added! But personally I'm hoping for more Animal Crossing soundtracks soon.

@batmanbud2 Would have been really nice if they timed a Switch 2 Edition with this Nintendo Music drop, but ah well.

It's a great collaboration, and it's very true that the engineering of enjoyable building is a completely unique skill set. Hopefully the leaked $60 Pokemon set is a Pokeball to sit alongside the LEGO Game Boy!

Ugh, I'll probably miss out on the second wave too. It's one thing to give out shiny legendaries, but it's another thing when Pokemon blocks your ability to get these shiny cover legendaries legitimately during normal gameplay. Artificial scarcity at its worst.

The novelty of the memes generated by these kind of clips will desensitize average folk to the scale of theft and destruction laid out by corporate greed. The so-called opt-out policy is nothing but a steal first and get away with it later kind of bravado. As others have said, the theft has already taken place. They will pretend to comply, but most likely they will not destroy the valuable algorithm training that has already happened.

@AmplifyMJ Oh nice, I missed that! Great to hear.

I tried out the soundtrack and there are surprisingly great jazz tunes all over! Getting me in the mood for the new season of SpyxFamily next month.

I'm just hoping that they'll port Kingdom Hearts to Switch 2 before they finally launch FFVIIR part 3. Seems like they're waiting for FFVIIRemake at the very least, so I'm hoping they're willing to continue porting Kingdom Hearts and Mana in the meanwhile.

Now if they could just apply this to Monster Hunter Wilds. . . Definitely itching for that FFXIV collab.

Gorgeous artwork, and I would love to see a Triangle Strategy collab DLC in FFTactics! Triangle Strategy clearly hasn't received any DLC, so it would be nice to see FFTactics receive some post-launch support akin to Brave Exvius.

Definitely am keen on Galaxy 2 soon down the road. A bit miffed however that Nintendo didn't include a soundtrack feature for Galaxy 2. It wouldn't have been too hard at all to copy-paste the exact same UI from 3D All-Stars. But that's why I'm content to wait for a discount while I play through Galaxy1.

@Whirlwound Look, I get it. But we know Nintendo; the unnecessarily small and arbitrarily designed proprietary cartridges are not going to change until we move on to a brand new console. I'm not thrilled about game key cards, but I don't want to wait until the Switch 3 or 4 to go back to collecting physical mementos for my favorite games.

Even if Nintendo tried to backpedal from game key cards in some way within the Switch 2's life cycle, there's one thing we know for certain: the size of the cartridges are not going to change, and there's not much they can do to shrink the technology down to such a tiny form factor. Not within the next few years. Maybe in 5-10 years there will be more engineering advancements to shrink the kind of things like MB/s, storage, etc into the size of a Switch cartridge. But that's a ways off, and Nintendo should have foreseen these issues when they bottlenecked the form factor.

Great to hear, but I'm already committed to a day-one physical purchase! Love that reversible cover art that will make the game case look beautiful on my shelf.

Might be a fun follow-up to FFTactics, albeit in a totally different way!

Ah, that Greninja is beautiful! Will have to jump back in for this booster pack.

There is a third option. Nintendo needs to go back to longer, wider cartridges that can accommodate better technology. Both Switch 1 and Switch 2 cartridges were made far too small, which severely limits its ability to cram adequate technology inside. It will take many years to shrink today's MB/s standards down to such a tiny form factor.

Nintendo wrote themselves into a corner, unnecessarily so. A solution is possible, but not with Nintendo's stubborn adherence to overly small cartridges.

Seeing all those old comments from 2014 makes me nostalgic for the old 3DS/Wii U era. It's fun to see a game like Klonoa feel timeless comparing people's excitement back then to now.

Playing through it now, and I'm really enjoying it. Simple gameplay so far while I clear through Adventures in Ghazzaland, but I find it a great example of tightly designed mechanics revolving around quick, breezy portable play sessions. Lots of old GBA and DS games contained this satisfying type of "portable gaming" game design that I feel like is missing in a lot of modern games.

If I had to buy just one, that Rathalos clad in knightly armor is a must-own for any Monster Hunter fan!

@charliecarrot Fully agree. But I will add, for all we know, it might have been Doug Bowser's personal prerogative not to be involved in the same manner. Perhaps it was the context of directly following up Reggie, who was such an influential and personal force within the Nintendo community, that made him shy away from competing with his legacy.

I for one would enjoy seeing more personal involvement from our next NOA president. Iwata was right; in the end, Nintendo sells a form of joy and lighthearted fun more than anything else. And seeing even the executives commit to that went a long way, back in the day.

Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon remake?!

monkey paw curls

Every shadow game with the name shadow must be shadow dropped, clearly!

@charliecarrot Tactics Advance has incredible music! Extremely catchy tunes, with iconic melodies for the nostalgic. The sound design also was superb, with bubbly and distinct SFX. I'm still salty that I missed the boat on Tactics A2 on NDS back in the day.

@CJD87 That's great to hear! Let us know what you think in the forums after you get a chance to play it. And if this game ends up floating your boat, I would recommend following up with Unicorn Overlord for the epic food or Triangle Strategy for the warring houses.

Other than the graphics of course looking impressive, I'm not enthusiastic about the Toy Story-esque setting. Like @Ogbert said, the art design is leaning too far into bubble-gum cutesy compared to the balanced and earthy design that Animal Crossing achieves. Another personal quibble are the human characters depicted as kids instead of chibi, again leaning too hard into the cutesy aesthetic without any unique identity to its art design.

Kind of seems like a bad omen of the direction many developers are heading into. When a company cuts too many corners with art design, it can leave many newer games appearing superficial and soulless.

@DTFaux Exactly! A Jukebox menu like Odyssey's would be superb.

This really makes me ache for Radiant Historia to receive this quality of a port.

Regardless, as a big fan of every spinoff franchise of Mega Man, I will be picking this up as soon as possible!

As long as the performance is clean and the art design is pleasing (which it is), then I do not mind dated graphical corner cutting, like flat textures. Everyone needs to remember that this is a Switch 1 game first and foremost.

@CJD87 With multiple difficulty options that you can switch between on the fly, the latest QoL enhancements, plus a brand new State of the Realm encyclopedia mechanic brought over from FFXVI, this is easily the best game to dip your toes into the SRPG genre! Not to mention the game itself stands as one of the finest RPG stories of all time. Highly recommended!

I also love deck-building games, and they added FFTactics Advance's addicting ability management into this game's pre-battle phase as one of the QoL enhancements.

@charliecarrot Didn't he also compose Tactics Advance, or am I misremembering?

@rawzeku Yeah it's really strange, I can only find a Japanese copy of the physical SW2 version on PlayAsia. Thankfully the Western Switch 1 version offers a free Switch 2 Edition download!

Back in my day, special distribution Pokemon actually included special moves that they normally couldn't learn. Now the best we get is a cherish ball and maybe a shiny.

Never underestimate Nintendo! They sure know their audience, and there seem to be enough old-school collectors in our midst to make this a success.