BuhBuhBuhBanned

@Joriss "Kenny Omega"and "Alex" are different characters. Also: Kenny Omega's real strength is in his speaking skills/promo work and character/gimmick.

They should just put Kenny Omega in Street Fighter as his own character.

@calbeau urbandictionary dot com/define.php?term=Useful+Idiot

Nah I'm just messing with you champ, you're a winner

But on a more serious note, and this is aimed at everyone who reads this: there is such a thing as a slippery slope, you are responsible for your actions (as well as your deciding to do nothing in the face of evil), and if you sew the wind you will damn sure reap the whirlwind.

I roll my eyes at fanservice, mainly because of the stigma attached (an association with overweight geeks living in basements) and if it were to disappear from newly created anime and JRPGs tomorrow, it wouldn't have a direct effect on me.

But I'll never support the idea of it being banned, because when it comes to censorship you cannot pick and choose. Liberty and the God-given right of living on your feet instead of on your knees are not a buffet. You're either in support of all freedoms of expression, or you're irredeemably foolish enough to be against all of it - censorship (and all other forms of autocratic tyranny) are insidious; once you give them an inch of ground they'll take a mile, and then they'll take your life. As such, it must be dealt with through absolutism.

(The only exceptions to what I just said are SA - especially involving minors, animal abuse, and non-consensual violence or other forms of non-consentual abuse. And I mean nonfictional instances, FYI.)

I wonder if this will affect Magic the Gathering games, along with every other card battler game.

So what's the story content like on (the older versions of) this game? It's obviously very different from your average run-of-the-mill JRPG as far as gameplay, but while that's normally a turnoff for me, this looks like it could be just wacky and offbeat enough to be fun.

On an unrelated note, a few years ago I read an article on the trends of gacha games in Japan, and it stated that the most popular gachas over there had match-3 style gameplay. So theoretically, there have been a bunch of mobile JRPGs in the Japanese gaming scene that had gameplay like this one.

Hey guys and gals, I spologize for interrupting your flamewar but I have some questions.

I have a Switch, but I am keeping the firmware at 19.0.1 and have no plans to update to version 20. If you're wondering why: well, uh, I just want to, all right? Let's not make this about me.

Anyway, the base version of this game runs on version 18.0.0 of the firmware, but the update needs 20.2.0. And like I said, I'm keepin' it oldschool and rocking the 19.0.1 version, so I can't play it with the update.

So can anyone please tell me what the differences are between the base version and the updated version? Is the base version at least playable? Is there anything in the update that would make it far better than the base?

@LikelySatan The problem with your argument is that the cartoons your 4 year old watches (in other words, the usual American cartoon that airs on television these days), on average, tend to look less visually and aesthetically appealing than a pile of dog poop with a signed picture of Brie Larsen next to it.

There is a reason Akira is considered to be the peak of anime, and it isn't just because of the plot. Cartoons like He-Man, Thundercats, et alia were the zenith of the American animation industry as a visual artform, and the aesthetic/visual style of cartoons made in the current era (in other words, anything that looks like Steven Universe, Adventure Time, Powerpuff Girls, Fairly Oddparents, Teen Titans Go, and similar low-effort shows) is the nadir of American animation.

@AtlanteanMan A G.I. Joe version of Valkyria Chronicles might very well be the best idea I've ever heard to turn the G.I. Joe IP into an epic gaming franchise.

More games based on IPs in general need to take more inspiration from JRPGs; that genre knows how to do epic storytelling well, while at the same time weaving the plot into combat/gameplay events within the game.

If I could add one detail to your idea, it would be to add Uncharted-style cinematic content in the game. And there would need to be lots of areas where you could have conversations with NPCs, because that's one of my favorite aspects of JRPGs. Damn, now I want this game to exist...

I'm an eighties kid, so I have to buy this or I'll lose my eighties-kids membership, ID card, and access to the treehouse. Going from the status of an eighties-related hipster/snob to a millenial/zoomer-level filthy casual that has to watch Stranger Things to imagine what that decade was like would be too embarrassing to take. What would I do with my awesome Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Neverending Story, and Goonies VHS tapes? Not that I have a VCR anymore but whatever, dude.

This game had better have an extensive storyline included, since that is what G.I. Joe was best at. The best case scenario would be for the developers to hire Larry Hama and teach him to write within the framework of a videogame script; but I know that isn't what's going to happen, and that they'll hire some rando to write the story content instead. Ah well.

On a somewhat related yet somewhat tangential note, it's always disappointing when developers make games based on eighties or nineties IP that are derived from source material which revolved around characters and stories/plots, and then the game turns out to have very little story content within it. There have been a number of games based on Aliens, and Predator, and Aliens vs. Predator, but none of them had any real story (and no games with good gameplay except for that one AVP beat em up). Same thing with Star Wars with the exception of KOTOR, and that was a Western style RPG, and in that type of RPG characters and story are tertiary whereas custom characters and randomized stats come first.

Forgot to add: I have no emotional ties to Mr. Charles Martinet's voice, but from what bits and pieces I have seen/heard/read from him, in interviews and youtube vids and the like, he has always seemed like a good dude and a genuinely kind, warm hearted guy. He seems to be a good enough person to have earned all of his success as well as his place in video game history, and so I'm glad that he got to enjoy a long career. To quote the legendary film classic Point Break: Vaya Con DIos.

@LadyCharlie "but... Mario's voice is Charles Martinet's voice. Their voices are one and the same."

Ehhh, I mean maybe to Gen Z and mid- to late-millenials. But us Xennials/eighties kids will always hear Captain Lou Albano in our minds when we think of Mario.

(At least it isn't Bob Hoskin's voice.)

I have no nostalgia for the 3DS - before I got my first Switch in 2020 I was not a "Nintendo guy", and I hadn't owned one of their handhelds since the original Gameboy with the pea-soup-green screen. I just got my very first "new" 3DS XL last year for around 130 dollars (with a nice case included), promptly jailbroke it and filled a 128gb Micro SD card with .CIAs so I could resell it for 400 dollars on ebay.

But something stopped me from selling it. I chalked it up to really wanting to play Radiant Historia Perfect Chronology, the first Bravely Default, Stella Glow, and a few other games the way they were intended to be played. I normally love emulators, but even though I've got a sweet gaming laptop, it can't replicate that glorious stereoscopic 3D. And you don't even need glasses for it!

I've still got that 128gb SD card in it, filled with games I'll never want to play (such as nearly a double digit number of Pokemon titles and some other kiddie games), games that I installed solely because they were/are popular and might convince someone to spend 400 USD on it; but I've realize that I just can't let go. My temptation to keep it has already won against the rational, logical good sense to put it on ebay; I know that soon that temptation to keep it is going to edge out the pragmatic part of my brain, juuust enough to where I delete all the extraneous games on that SD card - "temporarily, until I beat the games I'm playing now" I'll tell myself. But then I'll buy that Okami 3DS XL skin I want, and keep it forever.

On a different note - I very much want a homebrew scene for the 3DS, kind of like what the Vita has, except I want people to take games from other platforms, somehow turn them stereoscopic-style 3D, and then port them over to the 3DS. I also want a gaming laptop so I can play games with the same kind of glasses-free stereoscopic 3D, and watch movies and shows that use that effect (either filmed that way by studios, or converted to 3D by pirate groups using deep fake technology). But those are just dreams.

Does Akai Katana have a storyline with cutscenes? Because it looks like it has a storyline and cutscenes.

I really wish that Square Enix would take some of the IPs they used for mobile games - especially the ones that were never released in the West - and turn them into normal JRPGs and release them on Switch/handhelds (or PC).

I just discovered a mobile game SE made called The Last Idea. Aside from the obligatory joke cracking about SE giving it that title because they're (supposedly) a washed up developer that's been releasing a large number of mobile games in an effort to throw anything at the wall to see what sticks - for one thing, the word "Idea" in the game's title is apparently supposed to be pronounced "Edia", and for another - I have become obsessed with this game, and I have no idea why.

I guess it may be because the thought of Japanese developers making good games and then deciding to never release them stateside and keeping them in Japan has always bothered me. It makes me feel like a second-class citizen of the gaming world, and more importantly it robs me of the opportunity to experience what could possibly be a great JRPG experience with a well crafted story and likeable characters.

SE has been doing that for a while now; that is, making mobile JRPGs and releasing them only in Japan. There is, I think, very fertile ground there for taking the defunct mobile games that never made it here, putting the IPs into a console-style JRPG shell, and releasing them on consoles and PC. I wouldn't even mind SE keeping the gacha elements, as long as they were sold as traditional non-mobile games and the gacha action didn't require a pay2win setup - ie, they could have character summons based around RNG, there would be no premium in-based currency, and they'd just sell the game for 50 or 60 dollars like usual.

But of course they will never do any of this, and just keep foisting dumpster fire games like Forspoken upon Western gamers, and putting tiktok thots in the mobile games they do release over here, like the one that's currently the face of Brave Exvius: War of The Visions.

@mereel I'm an eighties kid/nineties adolescent and teen, and I really, really can't stand the so-called "golden age of 3D gaming". The only golden age of 3D gaming for me are JRPGs on the 3DS.

Part of that is because I played Dragon's Lair when I was 4 or 5 years old, and then looked forward to the days when all video games would look like that - and then it was slowly creeping towards that with "animated looking" games like Street Fighter 2 and Guity Gear... and then the 3D polygon age hit, and it was hell for me. That's on me, I can admit that and own up to it. I still cringe when gamers online talk about how they prefer the pixelated look to smooth animated graphics (I just read the user comments for this site's article on Joe & Mac Caveman Ninja; forget cringiing, I was full-on wincing at the comments talking about how the game was a pass for them because it didn't have the pixel look) but hey, that's a personal hangup of mine, and I'll own that.

But damn, polygon graphics from the early daya are FUGLY. Everything looks so... bad, I think that "bad" is the correct choice of words here. Or maybe awful is better. Don't get me wrong, the Playstation 2 is one of my favorite consoles of all time just because of all the fantastic JRPGs it had, and all the immersive worlds I got to travel to, and all the great storylines I got to enjoy. But I love that console in spite of the graphics, and if we could port all of those to the Switch (or PC/Steam Deck) with remastered/remade cel-shaded graphics (or just realistic modern 3D graphics that aren't terrible) then that would be a vast improvement.

I think that with the Steam Deck's popularity, the Switch now has a bonafied challenger to its throne (and profits). I see the legitimate competition being recognized by Nintendo when they roll out the Switch successor, and two things coming from that:

• Nintendo will realize they have a winning formula, but;
• Nintendo will also realize that a successor which is as "vanilla" as the Switch 1.0 won't be enough to crush the Steam Deck, and they need to offer something that the Steam Deck (and steam Deck 2) can't or won't offer.

So while I think the Switch's successor will keep the basic premise of the Switch (handheld that turns into a home television console), Ninty will also put in some bells and whistles... I'm thinking a return to 3D, using the same no-glasses-needed tech the 3DS had, as well as some form of virtual reality (hopefully that would require its own headset, and won't be anything as lame as putting the Switch successor up close to your eyes).

What I'm really looking forward to someday, though, from Nintendo or anyone else, is a holographic gaming console. You know, like the game of battle chess that Chewbacca and C3PO played in the first Star Wars film - something like that, except it would project a scene and characters in front of the player, the image would be (just as an example) three feet from left to right/three feet from back to front/ two feet from bottom to top, and it would essentially be a mini-holodeck. Playing a Final Fantasy or Metal Gear game on something like that would be on a level of immersion I have trouble imagining. The cost would be prohibitive, at least at first, but we live in a society where human beings camped outside for days to spend 1000+ dollars on iphones, so I think that it could sell.

@Ralizah I would hardly call the art style hideous. The pencils/line work on the characters are cartoony in a nineties-before-Cartoon-Network-happened sense of the word, but the backgrounds are well drawn, and the colors and style of shading are both beautiful.

Maybe I'm just so sick of the CalArts Steven Universe/Netflix She-Ra art (and the folks that make those gawdawful shows) and maybe my expectations are so low that the sight of anything slightly better looks good to me; and I will admit that I find it sad that the only realistically drawn/designed art in both video games and animation these days has the anime look (which I've had my fill of for the time being)... but this looks like a refreshing change to me.

@Jireland92 I have to agree with you. I was a little kid in the eighties and an adolescent and a teen in the nineties, when Nintendo were censorship happy moral prudes that censored content in localizations of Japanese games, or just refused to allow them to be sold in America. It used to make me so angry and filled with such righteous indignation that it is one of the reasons (along with all the great JRPGs) that I stopped supporting Nintendo and jumped ship to Sony when the PSX came out. And now Nintendo has games like this, and Sony is the one censoring content after moving to Commiefornia. We might be living in the darkest timeline, but it can be an entertaining one.

I'm old enough to have seen n64 and gamecube graphics when they were new; the way this one looks is chef's kissable compared to the eldritch polygon horror of the late nineties/early 2000s. That, and at least this 2d looking art has black line borders, unlike a lot of western animation from the 2000s onwards.

At the same time though, since they were going for the American comic book aesthetic, they could at least have had art that was better drawn and better colored, like the old reputation American comics had when it comes to art. This looks more like a better drawn version of an early-90s cartoon rather than something that Marc Silvestri, Mark TEX Texeira or Jim Lee would draw, and then some 2000s era coloring studio would give rich colors and gradient shading to. As it is, it feels like a cel-shaded game trying to ape the nineties comic aesthetic, getting halfway there and then failing, because the characters aren't drawn with enough realism and detail, and the colors and shading are rudimentary, Jet Set Radio levels of cheap-looking rendering.

Then again, it's eons ahead of the post-comicsgate garbage that modern-day marvel tries to pawn off on its (now nonexistant) customers.

As for the game outside of its graphics, I grew up with the Double Dragon series, Ninja Gaiden (both NES and arcade versions) and the TMNT arcade game, and Final Fight is one of my best memories playing on an emulator, and I'm always down for another beat em up. I'd definitely prefer one over yet another roguelike metroidvania or moba game. Speaking of Double Dragon, the Swiitch needs a remastered DD trilogy done in comic book-styled graphics like this game. You know except better, because this game's graphics are basic entry-level as hell.

After Final Fantasy VI, Terranigma is the second best JRPG on the SNES, and probably in the top 5 best JRPGs in history, for any console or platform. FF6 > Terranigma > FF7 > Panzer Dragoon Saga > Chrono Trigger would I guess be the top 5.

The original Illusion of Gaia (not the official SNES port, but the fan translation) is of similar greatness, and is in the top 10.

It's just extremely sad that so few JRPG fans outside of Japan and Europe have ever heard of Terranigma. The situation kind of reminds me of a Gacha mobile JRPG that I played last year and the year before that called Tales of Erin; its on the google play store, but its unfinished, and thats tragic, but whats even more of a tragedy is that so few have ever heard of it. Tales of Erin has the most emotionally moving storyline that I have ever experienced in a game, and it's easily got a story better than anything Hollywood has put out since the LOTR trilogy by tenfold, and if it had been finished it would probably have been better than Final Fantasy VI and would have become the best storyline in JRPG history... yet almost no one even knows of its existence. Its very disheartening, and what it says about society and its entertainment industries is not good.

I can safely say (and brag) that I have never heard a single song of Soulja Boy's that i can recognize. Then again i don't listen to the radio and I have never sought out his music on a video site or streaming service. In hindsight, MTV no longer playing music (and playing gawdawful music before they stopped) was a huge blessing for those who don't like crappy post-90s/early-2000s music.

I can respect his carnival worker/scammer like hustle, though.

This game looks like it has a lot of charm, and was probably made with love.

That said, I grew up in the 80s (and 90s), but I was all about Dragon's Lair and Neo Geo games; and I was into them because they looked like well drawn cartoons. And on that note: why do all these Switch games *(and Vita games, and PC games similar to this) with retro nostalgia as their selling point have to be such overly pixelated works of 8-bit vomit? I mean hell, many Flash games that I played in the 90s and early 2000s looked fantastic, with graphics resembling well-drawn, beautifully colored cartoons and very little to no pixelation. Just like with the calarts style in American animation, it seems that intentionally making creative works look ugly is in style. Western entertainment has regressed in many ways, and Atari-style graphics are one of them.

Totalitarianism should be fought against, and the fact that freedom of expression exists does not mean that cultural marxists and neo-bolsheviks that wish to subvert and destroy the West and replace it with Soviet Union 2.0 should not be called out, taken to task, insulted, mocked, ridiculed, verbally/textually pimpslapped and "murdered by words". As your ilk often take delight in pointing out, freedom of speech does not equal freedom from consequences, and if communists wish to subvert, undermine and destroy from within the values of individual liberties that American society has traditionally held sacred on their downtime from posting to twitter about how white people should be put in cages and that anyone who doesn't agree with Kamala the Ugandan VP should be sent to a re-education camp, they need to taste their own cancel culture. If you want to put forth disingenuous trash and attempt to argue that those who aren't on the far left should stand idly by as cultural marxists work to dismantle the Constitution, you can suck it.

Of course Nintendo is a different story, as they (to my knowledge) have never declared themselves to be a platform instead of a publisher to maneuver around certain laws, so my comment is off-topic to this news article, and in large part so was yours. My preceding statements weren't aimed at Nintendo, they were just a response to (and refutation of) your disingenuous assclownery.

To steer this on topic: this is a bad faith move by Nintendo, and they risk losing both credibility and good will from fans and customers who either admired Nintendo's gesturing and posturing toward being open instead of censor happy (and were under the impression that it meant Nintendo had integrity), or sought refuge in Nintendo from Sony's recent censorship of Japanese games (which likely was the result of Sony moving their headquarters to Commiefornia). As Disney is currently finding out, "Get Woke, Go Broke" is a saying for a good reason. Between Sony joining the Church of Woke and the recent huge middle finger they gave to their fans/supporters and customer/consumer base with regards to the Vita and PS3 stores being shut down, along with the discovery that the PS4 has a built-in time bomb with its CMOS, they have given Nintendo and Microsoft a window of opportunity to steal their business; but if Nintendo is going to behave like this, they're going to have trouble poaching potential customers. Gamers are traditionally a based, politically incorrect crowd, which is why the kotaku/polygon style faux-gaming media still uses Gamergate as a boogeyman to this day, and Nintendo has an opportunity at a somewhat untapped market of these gamers, as well as an opportunity to help turn Sony's game division into the next Sega or Atari, but when Nintendo makes decisions like this they screw up that opportunity.

@meeto_1 "The comments read like a hot mess of contradictions and false equivalences.

On one hand we have the typical freedom of expression, no to censorship argument advocates. So many of them typically follow this up with a declaration demanding people stop complaining and criticising the game based on any moral or political narrative. So basically don’t express yourself."

That isn't a false equivalence at all. But speaking of them...

There is something called freedom of expression. This is a thing that exists. American society is built around (among other things) the placement of a high value upon it and other individual liberties, to the extent that freedom of expression is considered a basic fundamental right, whereas in other countries that lean more collectivist/police state (Britain, Canada, Germany/the rest of the EU, China, et al) it is considered to be neither a basic nor fundamental right, and in its place in, say, Britain, would be the concept that protecting non-Europeans from mean words or criticism is a basic, fundamental right. Such countries have hate speech laws (which are wildly imbalanced and favor darker-hued or more kosher minorities over native Brits, as "equal protection under the law" is also not a right that a place like Britain values), and in turn America has freedom of expression.

If cultural marxist twitter admirers desire to enact policies or take actions (either de facto or de jure) which would violate the Constitution, or any rights/liberties/freedoms that the Constitution officially recognizes to be God-given and provides guarantee that they shall not be infringed upon, it is important to stop these cultural marxists. And before the "government versus private companies" defense is trotted out: Big Tech, Hollywood, and the 6 corporations that control the entire mainstream news industry effectively operate a cartel (not a monopoly as many believe, but a cartel where most members, be it Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. have a monopoly in each of the fields they operate over, and they do not compete with each other, but rather actively collude with one another) that effectively acts as a collection of de facto government agencies - in true cyberpunk dystopian fashion, naturally. As such, the argument commonly made by certain right-leaning individuals that Twitter, youtube, etc. effectively are the modern version of a town square (especially since they enjoy special privileges and perks because they declare themselves to be platforms instead of publishers), and thus they must not be allowed to censor their userbase, holds a great deal of merit. That this cartel colludes to unfairly eliminate competitors such as Parler or Bitchute in a highly coordinated manner (with google removing them from the play store and refusing to display advertisements from adsense on these sites, the news media smearing them as istaphobes, and Amazon refusing to host Parler on their servers) is proof that the threat this cartel poses to the people and the liberties they enjoy is worse than any monopoly in America's history.

I just want to say that Captain Lou Albano will forever be THE voice of Mario.

I grew up playing NES and SNES. Technically the NES wasn't my first console, as an older family member gave me an Atari when I was two or three years old, but the NES was the first console that I really fell in love with and the SNES solidified it.

As I became a teenager in the nineties I learned of Nintendo's penchant for censorship, which turned me off, and I had wandering eyes which gained me an interest in Sega and stuff like the Atari Lynx and the Turbo Graphics 16 and Neo Geo (I wanted a Neo Geo so bad... unfortunately it cost $400 in, like, 1992 dollars). I even wanted that weird Phillips CD-I console (and I'm still fascinated with Burn Cycle).

Then in late 96 I got the Playstation and became a Playstation guy. I was always attracted to two different game genres the most: JRPGs and action games like beat em ups or hack and slash games, as long as they had at least some storylines (Ninja Gaiden, Double Dragon, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI and the like in the NES/SNES days), and Xbox/PC gaming was all about FPS games and military themed stuff, and by the late nineties Nintendo was... well, how should I put this... it was a kiddie game company. Sony was more Japanese-oreiented with their lineup, which meant more narrative storytelling than Xbox fare, and Nintendo had a rep for childish games aimed at an audience of little kids. It would have been too much to go from Devil May Cry and Final Fantasy X back to Kirby and Mario.

Then I discovered the Switch, and despite the bad technical specs, I have to say that its great. I always loved portable/handheld gaming - the last console that I bought before my Switch was a PS Vita, and after really liking the Switch I bought a 3DS just to see what I missed and check out the stereoscopic 3D - and with the Switch, Nintendo has succeeded in bringing handheld gaming back to the forefront of gaming culture, as well as turning their own declining company around, both of which are amazing feats. They have also somewhat succeeded in throwing off their Disney-style kiddy games image, which is an even more impressive feat.

So are we just going to ignore the fact that Zelda and Link already had voice actors in the eighties because they were in the cartoon segment ever Friday morning on Super Mario Brothers Super Show? We are? Okay then