Oracles_fanboi

@Astropez Eh, as a fellow heavy critic of the series, I have to disagree. It starts off just like the others, but once the world opens up and you have access to Affinity Missions, it just feels like a completely different game. The side stories feel very engaging and the world is very immersive. The dialogue quality is much improved over the other entries (whenever Tatsu isn't present); the characters sound the most natural and human that they ever have. Part of that has to do with better voice overs, part of that has to do with it being more grounded in reality instead of trying to be a cliche shonen. It feels a lot more like the JRPGs that I typically enjoy, albeit with some recurring Xenoblade issues that are drastically fewer in number in this entry when compared to other Xenoblades. I'm willing to overlook these issues this time however since the gameplay loop feels very satisfying to me with intricate combat systems, well-written side stories, and fun exploration activities. If they ever make another Xenoblade, I hope it's a follow-up to X.

This game would have been a 10/10 if the first half of the story's pacing was better, and if the game didn't force you to endure the excruciatingly obnoxious Tatsu. It's otherwise the best Xenoblade game by a country mile imho. My first time playing and it's actually crazy how much better the gameplay is than the other entries; it feels so polished and exploring the world is a magical experience. I don't typically like Xenoblade, but this one's definitely up there as one of my favorite JRPGs.

So Furukawa lied about taking precautions to make sure demand is met this time around?

@Anachronism There was actually a lot of drama surrounding that game in Japan, because it misrepresents Japanese culture very blatantly to the point that the government started an investigation into cultural appropriation. Also, the Japanese accents in the English voice over are very exaggerated to the point that it's racist sounding. There's also no reason to get the game over Ghost of Tsushima, which Japan celebrates as one of the greatest western video games ever made.

@Vyacheslav333 In fairness, look at the sheer amount of work that this remaster has undergone. The original game has completely prerendered environments that aren't 3D, yet in the trailer, every single environment is 3D. That's a massive undertaking for just a remaster, so it's practically a remake at this point.

@GinMiguel Nah it's a new telekinesis power.

@johnvboy Genuinely, what is wrong with people who think like this? It looks amazing for a Switch game. It's got PS4 level graphics and it runs at a steady 60. Name one other game on Switch that looks this good and runs this well. Why is Metroid of all games being targeted for graphics when exactly none of the other games in the presentation look even half as good, let alone anything else in the entire Switch library?

You people should really reassess your life if you think MP4 looks graphically bad. It's a laughably bad take and I'm frankly tired of seeing it. If you want to call out bad graphics, Game Freak is right there.

@RBRTMNZ Yup, people were expecting Zelda and Mario in a Direct that's not even the main one. Nintendo fans are notorious for having unreasonable expectations. The fact that we got an MP4 trailer should be having people over the moon, because I wasn't even fully expecting that much from a Direct this close to the Switch 2 unveiling.

Raidou and Metroid automatically make this above average for me. 9/10 for those two alone.

Also scoffing at anyone who genuinely thought Silksong would be there. Xbox has a marketing deal with TC, so the earliest we see that game again would be in Xbox's June presentation. Pretty sure Phil even teased it.

My wishlist (would be okay even with a few of them):

-Prime 4 and Prime 2+3 HD (they probably won't have remade visuals)
-Something Atlus related
-Ports of Wii U Zelda remasters
-At least one cool looking indie game
-(The cope) Zelda Oracles remake
-(Not happening) Silksong

Uhh I can't really think of much else.

@ChromaticDracula It is also available on Steam

@Anakin I don't understand SE's aversion to capitalizing on this game. It's one of their most requested IPs, yet they seem very allergic to the idea. They've been going for Mana instead, which is... fine, I guess, but I'd much rather they revisit the Chrono series since it's much better and more popular.

@RaTheGrey It's clearly meant to be a patch and not a new game lol. It's probably a free upgrade. I don't think even Nintendo would be that scummy. PR is important to them, especially in a new system launch.

@abbyhitter Minor issues are often not listed in the summaries of game reviews and are sometimes left in the review proper, depending on the website. However, one issue I frequently see brought up for Xenoblade X in particular is the story pacing, which is noticeably not mentioned at all in NL's review.

@Joker1234 Metroid is about to get its third this year when including MP1 Remaster, Fire Emblem technically has 4 if you count the Warriors games, which is more than Kirby iirc.

@BlackenedHalo Yeah. It's basically an experimental standalone entry in Xenoblade, with a custom protag and an actual, seamless open world (one of the most impressive ones out there). There's also mech gameplay that's not normally a part of Xenoblade. I've never played this one, but it looks a lot more fun to me than the other Xenoblades.

@Olliemar28 Sorry, but that's not good justification to me. You're practically tattling on them, you people do this for even the smallest of projects, which does nothing for Nintendo communities but everything for Nintendo's legal teams. It's probably my least favorite part of this site and others like it, because you lot are very much so aware of the fact that Nintendo has a trigger finger when it comes to these sorts of things; soon after reporting on literally anything that Nintendo deems untoward, it gets taken down. Yet, you still take no issue painting a giant target on the backs of these harmless projects instead of leaving well enough alone, at this point presumably because you're being paid by Nintendo to in order to make it easier for them to track down, especially since articles like these generate buzz in communities which makes the process even easier. "Public blog" or not, reporting on stuff like this serves no purpose for your readers, it only makes it easier for Nintendo to send C&Ds. It's eyeroll worthy.

@Edwirichuu I can never get enough P5 lol I'm addicted to the cast of that game, but I definitely want P6 as well as other Persona spin-offs too. The more the merrier. Metaphor spin-offs would also be greatly appreciated.

Atlus kicks so much a*s. Probably the current best all-around RPG maker in the biz.

Sega/Atlus utterly dominated 2024, with 6 critically acclaimed games, one of which won several awards (Metaphor). I don't think there's been a publisher line-up this good since Nintendo's in 2017. They even released an amazing Sonic game!

@nhSnork It "sang" with multiple optimization patches that got it barely up and running. They were massive download sizes, too.

They've gotten better at optimization since then, but let's not pretend that X was some sort of technical masterpiece. The world is very impressive and it's doubly impressive that it ran on such old hardware, but there are definitely asterisks that need to be put in there.

@OctolingKing13 Better find something to distract yourself until then lol

@VoidofLight Nintendo does not listen to feedback when it comes to designing their games, especially not button configurations. They have a very narrow-minded thought process where they believe that a game's control should be left exclusively to the discretion of the developers, which is extremely ableist, and it's obnoxious for abled people as well.

Any developer that doesn't allow a function as basic as remapping controls due to zealous pride loses a fair amount of my respect. Keybindings are an extremely basic feature in most games, but Nintendo for whatever dumb reason decides to double down on keeping the controls the way they want you to use them.

@Ralizah Indie games do not typically take this long to develop. This game has far exceeded the development time of the original Hollow Knight and the worrisome lack of communication from the devs paints a negative picture of how this game's development is faring. This game, in the summer of 2022, was promised to be released within a year, only for it to be a no-show and delayed indefinitely soon after. To say that this is "normal" for indie games is about as farfetched and ignorant a claim as one can make.

The game has been in development for 7+ years with several complications and deafening silence from the devs. Things cannot be going well, much less according to plan.

Metaphor continuing to win RPG of the Year in these awards makes me happy.

@Ultimapunch We could also complain about both and hold Nintendo, the richest company in Japan, to a higher standard.

Sega/Atlus really killed it last year. All of the games they released, including Persona 3 Reload, Unicorn Overlord, SMT V: Vengeance, Sonic x Shadow, Metaphor: ReFantazio (those last two in particular are truly stellar). If any of you still need things to play I strongly recommend looking into those games.

Edit: Forgot LaD Infinite Wealth released last year too. Too many games from them!

@Anon69 That's a great way to owe money to Nintendo for the rest of your life once you get your face sued off. I wouldn't recommend it.

If you're gonna announce a fan-made anything based on a Nintendo IP, you better make sure it's already finished when you do. I don't know why people continue to think they will be the ones who will earn Nintendo's mercy when the company has never once hesitated to shut down hundreds of projects like these. It's shocking how idiotic some people can be, it's like pattern recognition is an impossibility for them.

@Arcsol Very much so wishful thinking. The on-the-go feature will probably be a staple of Nintendo consoles moving forward because it's practically the only incentive it has over PC hardware as a game system. They wouldn't make a different and more grounded system, nobody would buy it. Playstation and Xbox are already struggling to create enough incentives for people to continuously support new console generations while Nintendo already has their winning formula figured out. Nintendo has no reason to make an entirely different series of consoles when their current model already struck gold.

@MS7000 Jr. has a t-shirt and you can see DK's signature tie in this preview. Unfortunately Miyamoto doesn't seem to care for Rare's contributions to Mario-verse and it seems they're sticking with this redesign for good, at least in Mario games.

It was hardly a reveal. We already knew we were getting a successor to the Switch, it looks almost 1:1 like the Switch 1, it didn't show any games besides the obligatory Mario Kart, it didn't detail the power of the system or show examples, it didn't show system features or incentives besides the additional USB port and a kickstand that wasn't absolute trash.

It was a very middling reveal, dare I say even bad. I'm thinking Nintendo should thank their lucky stars that the thing has a very blunt name "Switch 2", otherwise the casual consumer might have thought it was just another Switch model.

5/10, and that's being generous. I'll be waiting for the proper reveal in April because they might as well have not shown anything today at all.

@MasterGraveheart I believe this has more to do with the treatment of certain Dawntrail localization staff and/or voice actors. The story was critically panned by fans and a good deal of those fans decided to take matters into their own hands and attack certain people who worked on the game on social media.

@WheresWaveRace If I'm being blunt, none of those added areas impressed me except a few of the sky island portions. Pretty much every cave, well, and the underground area as a whole quickly lost their novelty when their repetitive nature was made apparent. It's not "daunting" to me, it was just tedious and boring.

Going from the Light World in LttP to the Dark World and suddenly seeing 7 whole new dungeons that I needed to complete when I originally thought I was halfway done after 3 dungeons? Now that's daunting. TotK by comparison just felt pointlessly long and overstayed its welcome, on top of a map that we'd already thoroughly explored in a previous game. Supremely overrated game.

I mean yeah, that much was apparent if you played LttP or LBW. You can literally visit the Eastern and Desert Palaces and they've either eroded or changed. There's still some significant changes made to existing areas though, such as the location of Kakariko Village, and Death Mountain changing to the Hebra Mountains. A lot of it is 1:1 though, and you can easily pinpoint where the LttP map begins and ends.

@PikaPhantom I see, my mistake.

I don't know why the EoW review gave glowing praise and claimed it stood tall among the series' best 2D entries like LA and LttP, but then the placement on this list puts it behind most of the 2D games and even near the bottom...

Never understood why MM3D was rated so highly on this list. It's not a good remake and removes a lot of the good stuff from the original.

@sanderev I really don't agree. Elden Ring is a perfect example to counter this. Elden Ring's exploration feels very good, and it doesn't neglect its dungeons in the process. They are huge, intricate, full of secrets and secret paths. The secret paths in particular complement the open nature of the game, because it gives incentive to explore them, which ties into Open World's theme of exploration. BotW/TotK's dungeons are laughably bad in comparison because they are super basic objective-wise and they even just tell you where to go on their maps. They are structurally extremely linear, even though you have a "choice" of pushing the 4 buttons required in any order.

I want to give Nintendo the benefit of the doubt and say that this is due to Switch limitations, but to be honest Elden Ring set the standard for excellent dungeon design in the open world genre, and Zelda has yet to live up to them when utilizing the same formula.

@Strumpan Nah, they weren't lacking at all. I play through the series pretty regularly and these dungeons aren't quite up to the standard of the series' most challenging dungeons, but they are very close. If you think they're not challenging, then it's because you play these games a lot so you're used to the puzzle logic tendencies that these games frequently use. This game requires significantly more brain cells to complete than Seasons but not quite as much as Ages.

Overall, it's a massive improvement over BotW/TotK's dungeons and I hope these kinds of dungeons are here to stay.

I hope it's possible for people to financially support Pocketpair's case. I don't know how Japanese laws work but Pocketpair needs all the help they can get against these monsters. Nintendo has completely lost it and has brought the ire of the entire community against them. Truly narcissistic, petty, greedy, and psychotic behavior from them. Iwata must be rolling in his grave at this point; this isn't the Nintendo he and Reggie envisioned.

@BenAV The problem with that is when it comes to giga corps like Nintendo, the proof is in the money, not the evidence. They somehow won against a class action lawsuit pertaining to Joycon drift, which almost certainly means that fair play isn't involved with Nintendo's rulings.

I only hope that since Pocketpair earned a ton of money from their game that they can possibly stand a fighting chance against Nintendo. I'm actively against Nintendo winning because they're liars and cheats, even if they're "in the right" pertaining to this case.

Capcom will do everything with this character except make a new game for him.

@EarthboundBenjy Yeah I agree. This article really didn't need to be made because the accusations of going too far are made by a very small minority of fanboys and I'd think this site was wiser than to give those sorts of people attention, because otherwise they will start to think that their words hold some amount of legitimacy. This is borderline a ragebait article and these sorts of discussions don't really have a place here.

Unless a game is literally, blatantly plagiarizing the mechanics and levels of something 1:1 then these articles really do not need to be made. They're useless, they don't add to discussions, but they most certainly invite discourse in a site that has strict guidelines to be civil to one another.

Comments are showing more proof that you can't talk about Persona 5 without people claiming it isn't as good as it's perceived.

"Am I the only one who dislikes this game?"
I am so tired of seeing this pathetic attempt at validation. I'm sure you people know that there are others like you, there's an entire community that constantly goes to war over the public perception of this game. If you didn't like it you didn't like it, but there is no need to pretend like your stance is somehow one that's never been had before every time this game gets brought up lol.

The game is 8 years old for goodness sake. Please move on already if you can't deal with people liking Persona 5.

@Nancyboy It can be fun to theorize, but at the same time Nintendo's attitude and treatment of this concept makes it a lot harder for me to get into it personally. To me it was better when it was still a possibility that Nintendo was in on it too, but their more recent comments on it make me lean towards the stance that they never were and it's kind of a bummer to think about, so I've since lost interest.

But hey, more power to you if you can still enjoy the idea. Wish I could.

Didn't Nintendo basically already confirm that the timeline is whatever they want it to be when it's convenient for them, and that having a continuity isn't really a priority of theirs?

@Hyrulewarrior Bro, I've been reading your constant stream of attacks on this game and I find it extremely hilarious that you, a Nintendo fan, who is talking about a Nintendo game that's coming out on extremely dated hardware, is crapping all over this game for the graphics while somehow completely missing the irony of your thought process, nevermind the fact that it will probably run better than any other game at the showcase because Retro has a track record for being extremely good at optimization. Just wanted to point that out to someone who has a TotK pfp, which is a game that is also dated looking but can't even hit 30 fps consistently.

Keep the graphics talk on Push Square, because it most certainly doesn't belong here. You are practically baiting arguments with this crap.

@Not_Soos Well I agree with everything you had to say save for one point: I didn't even like the story. Specifically, the ending soured the experience for me. They say that an ending can ruin an entire experience and it rings true here. The reason why I hated the ending was because of Zelda being too afraid of having consequences, when in the past it had no issues with killing off characters like in WW.
In TotK they set up these rules for its story and the way it resolves itself in its ending just doesn't make sense and is such a massive cop out. It's like they established those rules for the Secret Stones only for it to not matter in the end. They even fix the issue that Link had for no reason lolol. It's just terrible writing.
The story was actually interesting until that part. The setting was darker and more serious, only for it to have the happiest ending in the series in ways that betrays its own rules rofl. Just doesn't make sense. Probably the worst story in the series if I'm being frank.

@FlashmanHarry It definitely makes the setting less interesting. BotW's setting revolved around that already happening, but over 10,000 years ago from an extinct civilization. I adore that kind of setting. But TotK normalized it and now it's everywhere, losing the original concept and vibe.

@Tchunga Yeah I share this sentiment. The Depths is a place for the devs to recycle content. There's virtually nothing interesting to find down there outside of a handful of costumes and Ultrahand utilities.