Narrator1

I know the Internet's all afire about Cyrax and Sektor being girls. But I don't care about that. I'm just annoyed that it looks like things are settling right back into the old status quo despite the massive superficial changes, making the reboot pointless.

Shang Tsung and Quan Chi have become evil and formed a Deadly Alliance™. Again.
Bi Han is going to be killed and become Noob Saibot. Again.
And it looks like they're going to revisit the whole thing of Cyrax and Kuai Liang fighting Sektor to determine the direction of the Lin Kuei. Again.

Then again, Mortal Kombat 1 is hardly alone in being guilty of this. Street Fighter and Tekken are resurrecting their iconic big bads, M. Bison and Heihachi, despite the previous games in both series making a big show of killing them off and going out of their way to make everyone believe they were out of the game for good.

I know people are probably going to be disappointed that The Thousand-Year Door isn't on track to overtake Origami King, but here's how I look at it. In just one month and a week, it has closed in on its lifetime Gamecube sales. I view that as a good thing.

It's probably mobile or non-video game related. Anyone remember that arcade battler that Pokémon showed off at Marvelous's direct stream earlier this year?

What I want is for the option to be there to change between the original chiptunes and the Sugiyama Kobo orchestral soundtrack I know they're itching to put in there. Nothing wrong with the orchestrals; they're among the best in the video game business. It's just a little straining on the ears to constantly hear them. Variety is the spice of life, and choice is always good.

@dskatter Longtime TYPE-MOON fan here. Mahoyo's localization wasn't the best. They had to give it another pass when they released the PC version, and they promised to backport the updated localization of the PC version to the existing PS4 and Switch versions. As of today, they have yet to do so.

So some skepticism of Tsukihime's localization was warranted. Thankfully, I've heard only good things about this one.

I'd hope so. The biggest game in that collection by far, and the only one that could possibly require more than a gigabyte of space, is Marvel vs. Capcom 2. If there was a forced digital download, that would mean Capcom paid for the cheapest possible cartridge, which would make me wonder what other corners they could have possibly cut.

@Kirbyo The real reason, of course, is that it barely runs on mid-spec machines like the XBOX Series S and the Steam Deck. The optimization needed to pare this game down to the Switch's specs would be too much trouble.

Nothing else. As a note to the more conspiratorial-minded, it's worth noting that neither Nintendo nor The Pokémon Company had any trouble with games like Nexomon, YO-KAI Watch, or TemTem coming to the Switch.

@KBuckley27 That's why I mentioned the in-house EPD specifically. That team mainly does Mario, Mario Kart, Splatoon, and Zelda. Everything else is up to other teams or affiliates.

In any case, no modern console as of late has really flown out of the gate frontloaded with their best IPs in the first year. Development time simply doesn't allow for that.

@KBuckley27 I'm pretty sure we're getting a lot of that. Practically everything from the June 2024 Direct for the Switch was from third-party studios or former third-party studios like Retro. It's a safe assumption that the in-house Nintendo EPD is cooking up something for the successor, but we won't know what it is until closer to the official announcement. Super Mario Bros. Wonder, for example, took only four months from announcement to release.

@Snatcher There were musings to that end, yes. At least one person even outright alleged that Nintendo never confirmed MP4 would remain on the current Switch. Despite the Switch logo at the beginning and the end. Despite Nintendo repeatedly stressing that there was going to be nothing on whatever succeeded the Switch going into the June 2024 Direct.

To protect the LIFE CYCLE...

OK, it's nice to have this game back for another go-around, but when is someone going to rescue Scarlet Dawn from the arcades?

Personally, I don't think creatures have to necessarily show their inspiration on their sleeves to be popular. One of my favorites in the modern era, Comfey, is literally just a lei with a face drawn onto one of the flowers.

I bought the game shortly after its launch, played through it, beat it 100%. It could have been made by a sweet baby or a sour grandpa, for all I care.

It was, to turn a phrase used today, "mid". Not terrible, but not great. There were some glaring flaws that brought down the end product, and I told Nintendo as such in the survey E-mailed to me. The worst part by far was the mandatory escape sequence near the end of the game, after the penultimate boss. It was much more difficult than any of the actual fights, requiring precision platforming and usage of all the tools in the game, but a lot of the difficulty in that was due to the game eating inputs and the ridiculous rubber-banding of the lava rendering it near-impossible to gain a sufficient lead on it. There was only one checkpoint, meaning that you had to go through the brunt of it again if you made one simple mistake (or, more often, if the game refused to recognize a button press). Tweaking the difficulty made no effect on this, as the hazards were lava or spikes and thus instant death. Difficulty like this was fine with the optional platform segments that awarded you Trinkets, but it should not have been on a mandatory sequence right after a boss fight in order to finish the game.

I also objected to the main character being lauded as "selfless" when he was clearly just undergoing his odyssey for the very self-serving reason that he was unable to accept that his father had passed on. Anyone he helped on his journey was just an incidental side-effect of this. He was courageous and resourceful, certainly, but his goals were less than noble; and I felt the game took a little longer than I cared for him or the narrative to acknowledge that.

Next, the presentation. If the game zoomed out enough and you were playing on a large enough screen, Zau's outline could blur into the background and made it hard to pinpoint his presence, which made things unnecessarily hard during tense fights or platforming sequences.

Finally, and this is likely exclusive to the Switch version (hadn't played the other platforms), the frame rate was passable normally but slowed to a crawl during moments like the Spirit Dance fight gauntlets or the aforementioned escape scene.

I, for one, hope they cast their net a little wide. The next main line from Game Freak is a safe bet, but how about some offerings from Spike Chunsoft? HAL Labs? Namco-Bandai? Maybe even Capcom?

"Finally, the crown will come to me."

@Greatluigi For all the noise it makes on social media, "censorship" boycotts don't move the needle in sales either way nearly as much as one would think, especially for AAA-funded games like this.

To wit, games like Fire Emblem Fates or Xenoblade Chronicles X would have succeeded with or without their respective censorship debacles. On the other side of the coin, you have games like Tokyo Mirage Sessions, which released on the Japanese Wii U one year prior to its Western debut and still underperformed in that year well before there was a localization to take issue with.

It's entirely possible that Nintendo just decided the API fees were too high to pay for too little gain and it has nothing to do with Musk or his personal or political quirks. Sony cut Twitter/X out of its ecosystem as well.

@BrazillianCara That makes two of us. The "turn it green" variant of Shiny is my second least favorite, ranking right down there with "barely any differentiation from the original" (here's looking at you, Tandemaus).

I remember as a child playing Sonic R on a computer with a 100mhz processor at 5 seconds per frame (not frames per second) and still somehow having fun. This not having 60 is an annoyance, but I'll live.

The game could be developed, funded, and marketed by flesh-eating Jovian lizards, for all I care. Is it fun to play?

I see a decent, inexpensive Metroidvania with middling-to-good reviews from a developer who clearly poured their heart and soul into it. And it runs well on the Switch with few compromises, unlike many other of its multiplatform contemporaries. That's all I could ask for.

If Mavado has to come back, I'm glad it's just as an Assist. Seriously, does anyone actually like the Red Dragon characters (Mavado, Hsu Hao, Daegon)?

I didn't get the Mario & Luigi survey, but Nintendo sent me one of these surveys back in November of last year. The topic? Pokémon.

I kind of let them have it on how buggy and badly programmed Scarlet and Violet were in the comment section of the survey. Respectfully, of course, but forcefully. I hope others did the same.

Calling it now — this has nothing to do with the games and is another multimedia arm.

Apparently there were a handful of ideas that they wanted to do in the first game but couldn't due to time or developing constraints. Do a Lost Levels or Galaxy 2 and make a sequel out of those ideas. That and make bosses other than Bowser and Jr., and lightning strikes twice.

Looking at the text of the lawsuit, there were a handful of major things that tripped Yuzu up.

(1) Patreon. Patreon is a honey trap. They effectively monetized their emulator by locking beta builds with the newest fixes and highest compatibility behind subscription tiers to their Patreon. I imagine this, more than anything else, incurred Nintendo's wrath and opened the door to this suit, as it allowed them to successfully argue that Yuzu was raking in thousands of dollars per month off of Nintendo's IPs.

(2) Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. They broke street date on it, effectively allowing people to pirate a game that hadn't even been released yet. (Metroid Dread, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, and Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury also broke street date and were emulated by Yuzu on Day 0, yet the suit specifically mentioned Zelda.) This ripped apart the "preservation" angle that was successful in past emulator court cases.

(3) Their Discord, and the bragging thereon about scoring .xcis of pre-release games.

(4) Bunnei, the lead developer, outright admitted according to the court filing that according to Yuzu's own data telemetry, most people just downloaded pre-baked builds of games with the encryption keys baked in. In other words, by the devs' own admission, most of the people using Yuzu were pirates who didn't bother dumping their own games' encryption keys. That put a blowtorch to the premise of people legitimately buying their own games but just playing them on higher-spec machines for better frame rates and resolution and more modularity.

Hopefully, anyone who inherits Bunnei's work will be more circumspect and less overtly money hungry. Go underground. Don't use Kickstarter or Patreon or anything like that. Don't try to build forks of the emulator for platforms like the XBOX or Steam (here's looking at you, Dolphin). And keep a tight lid on social media — that means no one poking the IP holder in the eye every chance they get about how the unofficial product is just so much better and that everyone who uses the official hardware is a corporate bootlicker, etc. That never ends well.

Has no one learned nothing from the Smash Ultimate rumor cycle? The parade of guessing, half-truths, misinterpretations, and sometimes outright lies from "insiders" and "leakers"?

@LXP8 Female Byleth, the non-Luminary Dragon Quest Heroes, and Zombie/Enderman were the major missed opportunities.

@JayronAuron I'm of a mind that people should know better than to use exploits while playing modern Nintendo games in highly publicized venues with thousands of viewers like Games Done Quick.

To take another Mario example, Nintendo saw people Item Bagging during a series of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe tournament exhibitions throughout 2023, and that definitely contributed to their moving directly against it.

@outsider83 Really? You're going to mention Palworld on an article about Pokémon merchandise, that has nothing to do with any games?

And here I was wondering if they were going to throw us a curveball and do something like, say, try to cram Starfield onto the Switch, hoping enough of the Switch's massive potential userbase wouldn't mind buying into the inevitable porting disaster.

Probably off-topic, but I liked how Tekken 8 did it (at least during the beta and demos). They did a sneak peek of the final fight between Kazuya and Jin using in-engine rendering. Then they replaced it with a standard CGI opening for the actual release...

This is a hotfix for glitches like the TM for Metal Sound requiring drops that can't be collected in Scarlet or leveling up Inkay with candies under Level 30 locking out player input. 0.0.x Hotfixes generally don't fix performance issues; you leave that to more substantial title update patches.

I'll say the same thing here that I do to all these "X" slayers.
The people trying to use this game as a cattle prod to attempt to spite Nintendo/Game Freak/The Pokémon Company are doing the game a massive disservice. It ensures that the game gets an immediate rush of hype from influencers and streamers, sure, but that what happens when it drops out of the social media news cycle and the stream monsters have left? Discourse is poisoned, people leave the product in droves, and the thing it was meant to "kill" just lumbers on.
Remember Nickelodeon All-Stars Brawl, the game that came swinging out the gate with Melee-style combos and rollback Netcode that was supposed to show that lazy bum Sakurai how to make a REAL platform fighter?

Even if I don't like the game, I never sell, at least not when it's on the market. Just wait a few years, and cartridges start to command a premium in second-hand markets in this age of digital copies.

@Beetlebum91 There's the EXP Charm, which gives a permanent boost to experience points gained in battle. It's given to you as soon as you complete one round of Ogre Oustin' (win or lose) which is mandated by the story. Of course, that requires the DLC purchase, but you don't have to have beaten the base game for it.

On the topic of Trainers you have to search for and chat up yourself and instead of jumping you on sight, I like the idea. It encourages exploration and playing at your own pace, gives the player some agency. Do you want to go straight to the end? Or do you want to explore and hunt down enemy Trainers? The game even rewards you at Pokemon Centers if you go out of your way to crush enemy Trainers. Scarlet and Violet had a lot of flaws, but making non-crucial enemy Trainer Pokemon Battles optional was not one of them.

@Staatz Ironically, the base game's Gym challenge was the least engaging part of the game for me. Arven and Clavell were much more intense and memorable fights than any of the Gym leaders, while Geeta wasn't very scary as a League Champion.

Put that team to work on more Pokémon titles (loved Pokken and New Snap). Show Game Freak how it's done.

The people tracking sales numbers for Scarlet and Violet versus other generations are missing the forest for the trees. The games are now just one part of a massive multimedia empire, and the bulk of the income comes not from the games, but from the marketing and merchandise. Some games can underperform or even outright flop (like Pokémon Conquest) and the big mass media franchise that is Pokémon just keeps churning on.

Why is Game Freak still just a relatively small outfit that leases office space in Nintendo's headquarters despite being at the helm of the largest multimedia franchise in the world? Because most of that multimedia franchise money ends up in the hands of The Pokémon Company.

I feel sorry for anyone who draws Scream Tail/Iron Hands. Those are the most common Paradox Pokémon in Area Zero.

You don't strictly need both Jalapeños to win Crispin's trial. One set will do as long as they're placed onto the sandwich correctly — the one from trading is just an out in case you don't want to pay/fight for the other. But if you place both Jalapeño sets onto the sandwich and get all of the other ingredients right, you get special dialogue from him congratulating you for making it REALLY spicy. Doesn't influence anything else though — just a nice Easter egg.

Another group Embraced™.

They were really counting on that $2 billion from the Saudi PIF to keep funding their otherwise unsustainable buying spree.

I see Sega ran the numbers and found out that too many people got filtered by the story DLC. Unfortunate, but not entirely unexpected. That was a lot harder than most anything in the base game.

@Pod I'd agree with the general sentiment, but this particular boxed release ran just fine in 1.0.0. This update only really affects you if you were attempting to speedrun or artificially inflate your online Heart Point score.

@Rykdrew Since when did a 2D Mario platformer have a hard mode? I mean, besides the SMB2 for Super/Lost Levels?

I wouldn't mind a remake, but not in that CryZEN-style Unreal thing everyone seems to love. "Uncanny Valley" is too tame a word for that; it's an uncanny crater. I'd personally like a softer cel-shading style similar to what Kirby did when giving Return to Dreamland the HD treatment. It's easier on both the eyes and system specs and ages much better than trying to attempt realism.

Though if I absolutely had to choose, I'd always pick a new game over a remake.

It's entirely possible to spoil. During the Wii U Era, leakers were drip-feeding spoilers that Super Mario 3D World would have extra playable characters aside from the four shown. Biggest candidates were Yoshi, Wario and Rosalina.

Then Mario 3D World was leaked early onto the Internet and pirated, as all Nintendo first-party games are nowadays, and Rosalina being playable turned out to be true. Rosalina was not in any official advertisements until well after launch, so she was meant to be a surprise. But the cat had long since fled the bag.

@johnnyvibrant Sure, in the general sense of "they've been working on the next machine ever since the Switch's release". We knew from the beginning that the Booster Pass was going to dole out content for MK8D throughout 2022 and 2023, and that everything would be out before 2023 ended.

I'd have been in for a third pass. Not necessarily because of characters, but also because of further active development of the core game (balance changes and bugfixes). Steve is far too overtuned for the game.

It took some doing to get Pyra and Mythra.

Well after its initial Sunday restock, Amazon was periodically reopening slots on account of thwarted bots and canceled orders. I had to camp my phone for an hour and keep hitting the "Buy Now" button before I finally got one. I've been collecting the Smash line since the beginning, from Smash 4 well into Ultimate, and this is the first time since 2016 that I had to actively fight scalpers and bots to get an Amiibo.

Probably outside of the purview of the review, but I'm happy Nintendo is puncturing the "Yoshis and Shy Guys on teddy bears" meta that was developing in the wake of WaluWiggler getting nerfed. Even if some other combination will come to the forefront in its place.

@norwichred I think we're well past the point where a boycott would do anything to this game's bottom line.