Narrator1

@Darthmoogle There are no explicit scenes here to be censored. The remake is not an eroge, as it was released on the PS4 and Switch in Japan. Neither of these platforms would have tolerated explicit content, and Nasu specifically did not release this game on PC.

And then once the makers of the game inevitably clamp down on this nonsense, we start hearing cries about "CENSORSHIP! FREE SPEECH!" We've all been around this block before.

@samuelvictor @JohnnyMind I wouldn't hold my breath for Pac-Man. He and Taiko only got in as easter eggs because the arcade games were developed by Namco for Nintendo.

I think if anyone wants to create something that competes with Nintendo's biggest brands (Pokemon, Smash Bros., etc.), they need to keep a tight rein on their social media. Few things poison the pot like someone, official or not, mouthing off about how "THIS IS THE 'X' KILLER! WE'VE GOT WHAT NINTENDO DOESN'T HAVE! NINTENDO FANBOYS IN SHAMBLES!" Let the product's quality speak for itself.

There's an entire class of influencers and streamers whose MO is "I fell in love with this Nintendo product from the SNES/64/Gamecube era, but then I fell out of love with it, and I will now spend two hours breaking down how each and every one of the newer entries is horrible." Trying to pander to this class is a losing bet, as games like TemTem and Nickelodeon All-Star Battle have found out the hard way. They will invariably leave once the vicarious thrill of poking the biggest dog on the block in the eye fades.

In short, Nintendo needs competition. But don't directly advertise your product as Nintendo competition, as it's counterproductive.

I predict that there are going to be a lot of jaws on the floor in the next two years. Everyone and his dog has convinced themselves that the next system is just going to be "the Switch, but more powerful". It could just as easily happen that Nintendo's R&D team could look at machines like the Ayaneo and the Steam Deck, decide "The 'Switch 2' idea isn't innovative enough", and try something else entirely different.

Actually reading the financials, they predict a further decline in total revenues (not just from dedicated hardware) in 2024. I doubt they would be this pessimistic, especially during a quarterly report meant to be distributed to investors who are interested only in the numbers, if they had any new hardware lined up. We can thus safely count out any Super Switch 2/Pro/what-have-you until Q3 2024 at the absolute earliest.

The Smash Bros.-style air dodge that Mario did to snap to the ledge during the beginning of the movie when he and Luigi were running to their first customer.

@ADV I'm normally the most skeptical of leaks, but I was pretty convinced that this was a thing once non-blurry pictures started surfacing. Also, it made far more sense that Nintendo would create another OLED model for Tears of the Kingdom, as it did with Splatoon 3 and Pokémon SV, than the other rumors of this Zelda edition being the elusive "Switch 2/Pro".

@KBuckley27 True, but that doesn't really say much. Every major hardware manufacturer has a section of their R&D dedicated to working on new hardware before even the old hardware rolls onto the retail market. Sony was researching technology for the PS5 not long after the PS4's release.

The absolutely most charitable explanation for this is that they're looking for people who can crawl through the blockchain looking for infringements and ripoffs (e.g. PokéWorld, Animoon) to crush before they can falsely claim sanction by and affiliation with TPC.

That's being charitable.

You could say the devs have egg on their faces.

If Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald come to NSO, I hope there's a way to directly upload caught creatures to Bank or Home. Something like what the Virtual Console did to the 3DS ports of the first two Gens.

@IronMan30 "Also, to echo other comments, did people really expect the Covid surge to maintain when the world opened back up?"

Apparently, these stockholders did. Many of these stockholders don't even have their fingers on the pulse of the video game industry and just assumed that the line would go up in perpetuity — the myth of infinite growth.

I still collect them. I still want to do a full Smash set, but I've "cheated" by substituting certain characters (Kirby series Meta Knight and King Dedede in place of their Smash versions). It's nice that the scalpers have moved on.

@Anti-Matter There's also the fact that people complain about the graphics, performance, and quality for every single game in the series. Whether or not those complaints are warranted is not the issue; they were certainly warranted here. But past a certain point, for the general buying public, it dilutes the effectiveness of those complaints, because they've heard it all before.

The shepherd cries wolf every single generation, and when the wolf has finally arrived (the state this game shipped in), the populace just assumes the crier is acting up again.

Best kids' game, indeed. If I were a kid, "AND HERE WE ARE" would've given me nightmares. How is Kirby a kid's game? Do most kids just beat Dedede, let the credits roll, and call it a day?

@Anti-Matter If you want to be nitpicky, every Paper Mario has been developed by a third party. Intelligent Systems has never been a fully-owned subsidiary of Nintendo, just a close affiliate by choice.

That having been said, I know what you meant.

Coming from someone with experience with the Shield, the Switch felt old when it rolled off the assembly line.

That having been said, I think there's going to be a lot of broken hearts and jaws dropped to the floor in the future. All of these articles just blithely assume that Nintendo's next machine is just going to be a beefier Switch with the same form factor and perfect backward compatibility with the current crop of Switch titles. It's just as likely that someone like Miyamoto will take a look at all these new handheld devices coming out, decide "the Switch but beefier" isn't innovative enough because other people are doing it, and come up with something entirely different. Also, from a purely economic standpoint, having the consumer re-buy their games under a different form factor has proven immensely profitable despite critical backlash. Conversely, the last time Nintendo did "previous hardware, but stronger and with backward compatibility and new tech baked in", we got the Wii U and we saw how well that did.

I think it's a good thing that we're seeing the Tour stages released onto Mario Kart 8. I strongly suspect that Tour's going to wind down in the near future as Nintendo is offloading its experiments with mobile gaming, and that this is a way of preserving that work. They've already largely removed the gacha elements from Tour as is.

This isn't even the most blatant one. That one goes to "Animoon", an NFT project that basically had creatures that were literal recolors of Gen 1 Pokémon like Charmander, Bulbasaur, and Pikachu, but with random spikes added. It drummed up artificial scarcity by having the first fifteen of its NFT mint be "Legendaries" that would have guaranteed a passive income of $2,500 per month for life. (This was changed from $2,500 to royalties of proceeds from the game they were making, as if the notoriously litigious Nintendo and TPC would have even allowed such a thing.) It was also shilled by the Logan brothers, Jake and Paul.

The "best" part of it was that it falsely claimed it had a "signed NDA" (whatever that means) with The Pokémon Company, and its disclaimer mentioned Niantic, TPC, and Nintendo, but not Game Freak or Creatures, Inc. It was so obvious it was a scam, and unsurprisingly, it rug-pulled soon after launch.

@Giancarlothomaz When pressed for what platforms they were aiming for in the initial reveal, they just said "consoles". For the Japanese, unless they specify, that generally means "PS4 and Switch", with a Steam port and maybe an XBOX a few months down the road purely for the benefit of overseas fans.

The big surprise from all this is that someone made a profit off of the existence of The First Soldier. It certainly wasn't Square-Enix.

Honestly, "This game didn't sell as much as FIFA in the UK during the World Cup" doesn't seem like all that much of a putdown.

@AlexanderDaniels It does seem to work better if you (1) play in handheld or tabletop mode off the dock and (2) have the game data installed on system memory as opposed to MicroSD cards. For a given value of "better", of course, as the frame pacing and the general performance are still an eyesore.

I've played exclusively in handheld mode, and the only thing I've encountered that was off was the game temporarily freezing up when it loaded a bunch of wild Pawmi on the open world.

@HeadPirate What kind of certification did they need to get and failed to obtain? From whom? Feel free to assume you're just talking to a filthy casual who just watches Smash matches on YouTube and Twitch.

@Travisemo007 People complained every bit as much about every other generation in the past, but no price drops other than temporary holiday sales. In fact, some games like HeartGold/SoulSilver and Sun/Moon have experienced price INCREASES, especially on the secondhand market.

@Otoemetry I hate to say it, but if you like games that are tightly tested and bug-free, then you were never a fan of Game Freak's Pokemon games.

The lack of texture on Rock Rock Mountain is something of an eyesore, which is weird because they nailed it (at least in my opinion) with Boo Lake, Rainbow Road 3DS, and Maple Treeway. So uneven.

@Anachronism This wasn't just another league. This was a world championship where even previous and current Gym Leaders and League Champions were contenders. (Not spoilers here, by the way. Iris was a contender after having been crowned as Unova's Champion in the anime and her qualifier match with Ash was already aired worldwide.)

@Eagly It moved slightly fewer units than last month and got outsold by the PS5 in the Eurozone, a historically weak market. Obviously it's one foot in the grave and needs to hit the retirement home.

It's just as well. With virtually every single crossover 2B has in, from SoulCalibur VI to countless mobile games, the tools at her disposal break the game over her knee. If she made it into 4 or Ultimate, she'd just be an even nastier Bayonetta.

@BreathingMiit "bad news for GF"
Not quite as much as you'd think. People have complaining (and rightly so) about the graphics and performance of Game Freak's Pokémon games since the 3DS era, and that hasn't stopped each and every one of these things from busting the bank wide open upon release.

@Arawn93 Falcom is drowning its audience in Trails. Each game in that series requires a lot of investment to get into, and releasing so many of them back-to-back is bound to cause some burnout.

I was able to walk into my local Gamestop yesterday and pick these up without problems.

@somnambulance LVL5 Comcept should let Beck stay in this series.

I don't see the problem here. You have an open world, and then you have focused instances like the cyberspace stages. Kind of like Breath of the Wild's shrines.

Japanese PC gamers have historically been slow to warm up to Steam (or the idea of a PC as a replacement for console or handhelds, as opposed to its own unique ecosystem) in general. To take a non-Nintendo example, the biggest Steam launch in Japan in the past has been Monster Hunter World; yet its sales on Steam in Japan pale in comparison to the PS4 version.

I don't see why "predictable" is necessarily a bad thing. Unpredictability can be just as bad. Just look at all of those fans of the first two Paper Mario games bummed out that Nintendo and Intelligent Systems decided to get experimental with the combat system and the writing after the second game.

I firmly believe that there should be a moratorium on adding non-professional reviews to Metacritic's aggregate until one week after launch. That way, people get the whining/console warring/developer backlash out of their system and games are more fairly judged on their merits and flaws.

The only real surprise is how quickly and badly this flopped. I knew this title wasn't going anywhere as soon as they coupled a full-price buy-in with "live service". Only big hits like Final Fantasy and Destiny can get away with that. What I didn't expect was for it to flame out right at the starting line.

I saw one of these and threw my newly caught Mime Jr. at it just to see if it would do anything. I was surprised to see it actually worked.

@AW1Long It's the last update insofar as balance adjustments and Spirit Events. They're still going to be squashing bugs in the near future.

Magikarp. Its own lore keeps suggesting that it was much stronger in the past than Its current wimpy self.

Market correction. Pokémon and Animal Crossing were driving abnormally high income streams last year, and obviously those boom times were never going to last in perpetuity.

@RhiannonRune Paper Mario getting in would piss off more people than it would make happy. Knowing Nintendo, his moveset would be a cross-section of all six of his games instead of just the first two with the most vocal fans.

Also, sometimes a reference is just a reference. Honestly, Sakurai could retweet a cute cat pic and people would immediately start dissecting it looking for clues for the next fighter. I think he even complained about this at Harada's Bar.

These articles are so predictable. An ordinary market correction after an unseasonably huge profit boom, and everyone starts predicting the Apocalypse has come. This isn't even limited to Nintendo.

@Azuris It's not just editing code. He'd have just gotten an IP ban or an account lock. He was selling the hacks. Nintendo doesn't like it when people are making money off of their stuff, and will go after anyone who does so unless the law states unambiguously that they cannot do so.

@UltimateOtaku91 Took the words out of my mouth.

I will say that I expected the Switch version to be a nonstarter in terms of graphics and performance, so I was wondering more whether the PC version would be a dumpster fire as with VIII. Thankfully, that's not the case, with Durante working with this one from the beginning.

I once used the Switch in tabletop mode outside of a Starbucks. Had earphones so as to not disturb the populace. Then some kid started trying to pull the earphones off and played Mario sounds loudly using his own smartphone, and that was the least of how obnoxious he became. A polite word to the staff later and he was asked to leave.

Only later did I realize what he was getting at. Incidentally, the game I was playing at the time? Steins;Gate Elite.

The market determines whether or not the game is worth it. If enough people are buying it at its base price that it becomes successful, then yes, it is worth $60.