Otoemetry

@AlanaHagues 💔

@GrailUK apparently the stats are delayed this week for some reason, @AlanaHagues any update at all?

@AlanaHagues thanks Alana, much appreciated 🙂

@Olliemar28 oh how frustrating! Thanks for letting me know 😊

@AlanaHagues I've just tagged Ollie so now it's your turn, I'm desperate to know how Xenoblade did in the UK charts this week... any chance you know why they're delayed?

@Olliemar28 any news on the UK charts this week? I'm desperate to know how well Xenoblade did! 😅

I will never understand the desire of people who come into an article of a game they don't like only to sh** all over it and then report people who call them out. Thanks for doing such a bang up job, mods. Great work. 😒

@johnedwin because the reviewer wanted to?

Ooo this review has got me hyped, my body is ready!

I've stopped playing, I had a couple of really unfair losses as a result of some bulls*** overtime where my team has been winning the whole round but two lots of overtime back to back meant we were eliminated. You have to balance decisions fairly in games like these and I don't think it's fair to have multiple overtime occurrences in one game swing the match so heavily.
This plus all the awful (not so micro) microtransactions in the costume department totally turned me off and I've deleted the game from my Switch

Glad the comments are as annoyed as I am that there's yet another update to Tour but we STILL have no news on the next tracks for the MK8D Booster pack, I suppose the longer we wait now the less time we'll have to wait later between updates but Nintendo are really dragging their heels!

I've just done some quick maths and from those numbers there's over 25.3 million Switch systems sold in Japan, which blows my mind

@splatxp agreed @KateGray please mention the price gouging alongside the talk of cool costumes, it's only fair.

@completo88 presumably once the European My Nintendo Store reopens you'll be able to preorder the game-less collectors edition in September along with us in the UK.

@MrGawain probably because the artbooks are really high quality and practically impossible to buy for a reasonable price by the time you've finished the game

I'm pretty annoyed about this but on the plus side £38.24 for a game of this calibre is an absolutely incredible deal

@Mushvision Nintendo run the store, they wanted a bigger slice of the pie and they thought their tiny little website shipping club Nintendo merch was adequate... how wrong they were.

@olrodlegacy it wasn't just a rename, the partnership Nintendo had with The Hut Group ended and Nintendo decided that instead of renewing the arrangement they'd give retail logistics a crack. It did not go well, as you can see from the numerous comments in this thread.
Thankfully they've fixed the issues preventing me from ordering from the store and I've had a few successful orders to through now, but it's obviously not all fixed as you can see from the aforementioned comment thread!

You can only buy show bucks in certain amounts and the lowest is 1000 bucks for almost £7. This is daylight robbery.

@Teksetter oh the voice acting in XC2 isn't as bad as people make out, all of the main cast do stellar jobs in my opinion and I think the only reason people don't like Rex is because he's not Shulk 😜
Rex's VA takes a little while to find his feet in the role, I'll admit. But I don't get don't the hate for him, if it's the writing well that's hardly the fault of the VA. I think folk just don't know how to appreciate a mildly Northern English accent haha
There's a couple of blades where the side quest cutscenes are definitely shaky, in fact there is one blade who ought to have been cut from the game entirely. Dahlia I think her name is. She was a mistake all round.

@CodyMKW how does that work?

I've been finding the monetisation in the game pretty gross tbh, despite climbing the ranks every costume is locked unless you buy the season pass and it takes forever to get crowns. Plus it's unstable as hell, crashes all the time though I must admit since the update the crashes are less frequent

I'm trying to steer clear of spoilers as much as possible but this media onslaught is making it very difficult! Here's hoping it works and XC3 is a huge success, the series is far too niche for how excellent the games are.

@Teksetter sophisticated? Hearing regional British accents is a treat for sure, but only someone not from the UK would describe them as sophisticated 😂
I suppose Melia was fairly well spoken, and Mórag's Scottish lilt is pretty classy... but Rex, Nia, and most of the other British accents are decidedly average!

@Hyrule sorry to kill your vibe but unless I'm mistaken it goes July>August>September>October making it actually over 3 months before release, unless I'm missing something?

@SteamEngenius just let people enjoy things.

@Axecon same, though I've noticed some of the more popular dlc fighters' amiibo have been very easy to acquire (Banjo and Joker, for instance) so I'm hoping it will be the same for Pyra and Mythra.
I am in the UK though so perhaps that helps, though I remember the horror of trying to get the first few waves of amiibo back in the Wii U days and it hasn't been like that in a long time

I enjoy the actual gameplay but my god the F2P microtransaction ecosystem (i.e. hell) is everything I loathe about modern gaming, it takes so long to earn anything through actual gameplay in order to push people into spending money on the blasted game when they could have just charged people a decent sum (that they would have gladly paid!) rather than this toxic abusive situation we got.
It's Epic's greed, they saw a popular game and thought they could pop another feather into their cap and it stinks. I dread to think how many kids and vulnerable people have been goaded into spending money they shouldn't have because of the scummy tactics at play in this game.

@Grumblevolcano it's always the first in the pair that sells more, Red/Gold/Ruby/Diamond/Black etc etc and infinitum

@WeLiveInASociety if you go to the Pokémon Sword and Shield page and scroll through the news articles from before release you could probably find the ones I mean, it was a tumultuous time in the Pokémon fanbase!

@WeLiveInASociety nah some of the Pokémon Sword and Shield articles got over 450 comments and I'm sure I've seen one with over 600 comments in the past, though I can't remember what it was about. This one's petered out a bit now so it won't reach those mighty totals 😅

@silberbauer15 Bayonetta 3 is being published by Nintendo, it's not 3rd party and it won't show up in tomorrow's direct.

@BanjoPickles Bayo and Xenoblade are not 3rd party games and Silksong is an indie, though given Hollow Knight's prominence in past directs I could see Silksong making an appearance.
Nintendo is publishing Bayo 3 and they've owned Monolith since 2007 so neither of those games are 3rd party and won't make an appearance tomorrow, especially not Xeno given the direct last week.

Sounds like clutching at straws to me!

@rjejr I have a feeling it was originally planned to announce the Pyra and Mythra amiibo in this direct, but the swapping of release dates between Xenoblade and Splatoon meant the amiibo weren't quite ready... if they come out this autumn we'll know that was the case haha

Must say I'm surprised to read so much negativity in the comments, this looks amazing and I can't wait to see how it turns out. Definitely scratching that weeb itch of mine 😅

@rjejr I've noticed Nintendo has been reissuing the sold out amiibo for upcoming games (the Kirby series were restocked in the UK before Forgotten Land released) so I bet Shulk will come out along with the Pyra and Mythra ones whenever they release, though with the NFC chip shortage and the game's early release I'm being it won't be anytime soon.

Ok I'm excited for this game but what is the point in a direct about a game coming out in a month's time? Guess this means there won't be a general direct after all

@Yosher don't worry none of that is huge spoiler territory, and it's not quite the whole story anyway. But I'll let you find that out yourself.
Just a word of warning about how you acquire blades, it's worth doing a bit of spoiler free research once you've played the first couple of hours of the story because it'll save headaches later in the game. It's a very complicated system and some folks get very aggravated by it, but my personal experience was great and I put that down to the strategies I found online and put to good use.

@Yosher I mean it's worth doing just because of how laughably bad it is, keep your ears open for a blade who talks (or at least attempts to talk) with a deep Southern American accent. That blade is particularly infamous anyway so if you've come across any discourse about the blades you're probably already aware of that particular character...
How much do you know about the blade system in XC2?

@HoverPie do you mean the tropical resort one from the first game?

@Yosher I happen to think people just don't like Rex's voice because he's got a bit of a weird regional English accent, he sounds mildly Northern and I'm not sure Americans can handle it 😆
I happen to think the voice acting for the majority of the main characters is pretty good, some of the blades' voices really tank the quality though and there's a couple of side quest cut scenes where the VA clearly couldn't do the accent they were asked to do but it was kept in regardless... now those were cringeworthy!

Ooo I wonder if there'll be any flood mechanics on this stage? Periodically washing away the ink would be a great way of leveling the playing field if one team is dominating!

@TowaHerschel7 no way is Splatoon going dormant after the release of 3, it's just too big of a series already. Last I heard Splatoon 2 had sold over 13 million copies, Nintendo would be fools to drop the franchise unless something awful happened and 3 was to completely bomb.
Xenoblade is another story, however. I don't believe Monolith will drop the series but it's always at risk given how niche it is compared to most Nintendo properties.

Hmm now that this wraps up the initially announced games it leaves a convenient gap which could be filled during a direct, say a few days after release...?

I was sceptical a direct would happen so late but this gives me a little hope