Polvasti

@FishyS The game seems to be more of a visual novel than deck builder though, if that's what worries you.

Still haven't had the time to fully try this, but based on the trailer and reviews I felt it may be a bit too on the nose on touching all the subjects that've been trendy with fourth wave feminism during recent years... Tho it's not like there are many video games dealing with fourth wave feminist themes to begin with, so a bit too much is still better than nothing at all.

Been waiting for this game ever since I saw the beautiful trailer, nice to see it getting such praise. It was supposed to come out today, but for some reason it's still not available to buy at the eShop, I wonder what's up with that?

Edit: never mind, it is available now, though it wasn't earlier today. An instant day one purchase for me.

@Ryu_Niiyama Yeah, you're right, it is the Archaic Tunic. You wear it for such a short time in the beginning of the game, and there's no need to ever put it back on once you get better gear, so I'd completely forgotten it exists. 😅

That's pretty ugly, the design of the statue is too busy and action movie-ish in a way the game isnt. And Link too looks like he's posing for some action movie, with a weird toga not seen in the game and a "tough guy" facial expression that's not characteristic of him.

@Truegamer79 Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask are available on the Switch if you pay for the NSO expansion pack.

@Arawn93 The Story of Seasons remakes have added queer options to them, so it's not unreasonable to assume that this remake by the same company would do something like that too, especially since Rune Factory is closely related to Story of Seasons. It's a pretty weird for a game of this genre released in 2023 to assume all or even the majority of its players to be straight men. I'd say it's completely fair to criticise Marvelous for not taking that into account, as they have done with their other remakes.

Also, based on the trailer there doesn't seem to be any voiced dialogue in the game, there wouldn't have been any need to do any extra voice work. And they have added some new story content to this remake, so it's not like the plot wasn't updated in any way.

Given that Nintendo Life gave Hades a (deserved) 10/10 score, you'd think Cerberus from that game would be included on the list? He's a rather memorable demon dog, and one of the best things to do in the game is to pet him every time you've died.

Why doesn't Oatchi have a nose? He looks so weird.

This is great news, thanks for including this info. I personally don't need accessibility options, but in this day and age there's no reason why they shouldn't be available to make games more inclusive. Shame on Nintendo for not having some very basic options included in games like TOTK, even though they would've been easy to implement.

That's great, but why aren't they releasing Rainbow Islands on the Switch before its sequel? I haven't played either game since the early 1990s, but I definitely remember Rainbow Islands being the better of the two.

My top 10:

Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Link's Awakening (Switch remake)
Majora's Mask
Metroid Fusion
Snipperclips
Super Mario Bros. 3
Tetris (Game Boy)
Triangle Strategy
Xenoblade Chronicles
Yoshi's Island

I never had a NES as a kid, but a couple of my friends did, and you could also rent a console for the weekend from the local kiosk, so I have fond memories of playing games like Zelda, the first three Super Marios and Mega Men, Ice Climbers, Kid Icarus, Metroid, etc. with my mates. And it's been fun to revisit those childhood games via the NSO after so many years.

I'm old enough to have played the original games on the NES when I was a kid, and having replayed them a few times since then, the gameplay is still very good and the 8-bit graphics still look fine, so I've no need for graphically updated versions of them.

Is there some in-story explanation for why the main character is dressed in a bikini, or is it pure fanservice? I've always been kinda intrigued by the Atelier games, but the cheesecake character art which seems to be common in them is off-putting.

@sanderev According to the trailer, the player character is not the prince. The prince has been kidnapped, and you're playing a warrior who's trying to save him.

@JimNorman This expedition which was supposed to be available on all platforms on June 7th is still not available for Switch today, June 9th. And there's no explanation on what's happened on the official NMS website either. So you might want to update this article to reflect the situation?

It's a bit sad, between this and the common crash issues mentioned in the comments above, it seems Hello Games has dropped the ball when it comes to the Switch version of their game.

@Rudolf What's up with your racist complaints about "Harlem's gangsters" and could a site moderator please delete that bullcrap?

@Eel Yeah, that's another explanation. But in that case too the TotK Ganondorf is not the same character as the Ganondorf from previous games.

@SwagaliciousJohnson There is debate whether Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are in the same continuity as the other Zelda games, even allowing for multiple parallel timelines. In TotK, Ganondorf has been sealed away since the first king of Hyrule was in power, and he's only released during the present day of the game. Since the other games must take place somewhere between the first king's rule and the BotW/TotK era, it's hard to make Ganondorf's appearances in them fit with the fact that he was supposedly sealed away. The easiest explanation is that BotW/TotK take place in a separate universe, so the Ganondorf seen here is not the same character as in the other games.

There actually is an NPC which will set things in motion. If you talk with the giant Bargainer Statue in the central mine before starting this sidequest, it will tell you this: "I am trapped...under the water...behind the stone gate...of the great plateau..." So it leads you where the quest begins.

@Lake999 Clearly you didn't even read the article you're complaining about, since it actually explains why system level remapping isn't as good as the game having a remapping option in itself.

Top 5:

1. Majora's Mask
2. Link's Awakening (Switch version)
3. Tears of the Kingdom
4. A Link to the Past
5. Breath of the Wild

I've seen many people comment how confident and audacious it was to open the game with "Nintendo presents" and then the title on a simple, small white font against a black background... But didn't BotW do the exact same thing in its opening? My reaction to it wasn't amazement rather than familiarity: "Ah, you can tell this is a sequel to Breath of the Wild."

I preordered a physical copy in January, will pick it up from the local video game store on Friday. Some stores here have a midnight sale on the day before, but I have work and need to sleep too, so spending the night queuing doesn't sound appealing to me. It will be enough to get to play it on Friday after work.

@Munchlax Ah, okay, I didn't know that, I thought it was published by Square Enix everywhere.

@Deviant-Dork The article quite clearly states in the introduction that what they mean by "first-party" are games published by Nintendo. Some of the games on the list may have been developed by other studios, some of which are partially or wholly owned by Nintendo, but they were all published by Nintendo, hence they are first-party.

@Munchlax Dragon Quest XI is not a first-party Nintendo game.

@BTB20 On the official Nintendo sales report page, under the sales graphs, it says: "Software sales units include both packaged and downloadable versions of software."

I'm not sure if that could be interpreted that they don't include any downloadable games which didn't also have a packaged release?

@Sisilly_G You can buy an unofficial Wolf Link amiibo card from Amazon which automatically gives you full hearts in BotW regardless of whether you've used it with Twilight Princess.

Edelgard gets my vote too, she's way more interesting and complex as a character born into royalty than anyone on this list.

@Maxz I laughed out loud.

My first Zelda game was the very first one back in 1988, though I guess the Master Sword didn't exist in that one yet, so the answer is A Link to the Past whenever it was that it came out. Couldn't have imagined as a little kid in the eighties that 35 years later I'd still be playing Zelda games and still get just as much joy out of them.

Never heard of this before, but it seems like the sort of game I might enjoy, so thanks for reviewing it. It's also great to see a game which has a non-binary protagonist. Enby human characters are still very rare in games, and even when they appear, they're usually only a minor or supporting character.

@Fizza Rise was released in 2021. That was 2 years ago, not 3.

About the mysterious character with Zelda's earrings: the previous trailer showed some wall paintings of a masked godlike figure and Zelda holding hands in some kind of a ritual... And since the theme of this game seems to be fusion, I think the mystery lady might be a fusion of Zelda and the masked god.

You mention Tulin in the text, but you failed to mention that the trailer also had a couple of shots of teenage Riju swinging some dual Gerudo swords, and she looked awesome! Clearly this game takes place a few years after BotW, since Riju was just a kid in that one.

I'm all for steaming hot Ganon, and I'm already shipping him and Urbosa as Hyrule's new, ripped power couple.

@PessitheMystic @Tober The Tetris theme is an old Russian folk song which has been quite popular in many parts of Europe long before it was used in the game, so it doesn't really count as video game music first and foremost.

I'd be way more interested in a Zelda movie than a Mario one, since most Zelda games have a proper, interesting story and fleshed out characters. Mario games are great fun to play, but nothing in them says "this would work well as a movie" to me.

@OstianOwl Or you could watch the BBC documentary "Tetris: From Russia with Love" from 2004, which is an excellent telling of the whole story, and includes interviews of Pajitnov, Rogers, and most of the other key people involved.

Gotta love all the people in the comment section saying "but it's not April 1st yet", as if they'd never heard of time zones. 😀

It's really hard to understand a mindset where something as tangible, widespread, and deeply ingrained as racism can be called "imaginary".

@gcunit Just because you believe in such narrowly defined social Darwinist ideas of attractiveness doesn't mean the same applies to everyone. I can tell you for a fact that there are tons of people for whom physical attractiveness is something much wider than your "evolutionary" stereotypes; there are people who find big ears, wonky eyes, wibbly bellies, hairy backs etc. attractive. Also, it's quite condescending to say that having a wider range of physical types (especially for women) depicted in fiction "will not make us feel better about ourselves", when a lot of people have said it absolutely does.

@nhSnork The idea that fiction is somehow a separate realm from "society itself" doesn't make much sense... Even if some stereotypes and beauty standards don't originate from fiction, fiction has done a lot to perpetuate them. Especially in the age of mass media, where the most popular pieces of fiction can reach millions or even billions of people. So if you want to have a discussion about the harmful effects of gender stereotypes and beauty ideals, you can't just leave fiction out as if isn't complicit in keeping those stereotypes/ideals alive.

Also, the idea that some characters can't be a part of this if "they're not human to begin with" is just semantics and not really relevant. If you create a human-looking character that enforces stereotypical beauty ideals, you are taking part in the larger process of defining those ideals, even if the characters aren't technically human. Vampires and Marvel comics mutants aren't technically human, yet characters like Vampirella or Psylocke of X-Men have become sex symbols in the past. If your character looks mostly human you can make her adhere to human stereotypes of attractiveness, so comparing those characters to Area 52 "grey aliens" doesn't really work.

None of this means that gender stereotypes should be censored or policed, but there since they can do real harm, there should be a serious critical discussion of them in video games too. Sexism doesn't just magically disappear if you pretend it's not there.

@steely_pete It's an issue because objectification of bodies and impossible beauty standards negatively affect real women every day. Popular culture stereotypes such as this do real damage to people's self-esteem; they also affect how real women are still evaluated based on their attractiveness, and which qualities (such as big breasts) are commonly considered attractive, and which are not. And it's not just about the psychological damage, stereotypical ideas of attractiveness also affect things like job recruitment, with women whose appearance and bodies conform to the stereotype being more likely to get hired than those women who are not considered attractive. Video games are a big part of popular culture, so it's perfectly valid to criticize them for perpetuating harmful stereotypes.

Sounds right up my alley, this game. Thanks for reviewing it, otherwise I might have missed it.

If you want to track the quality of your sleep, there are activity wristlets and smartphone apps to do that. I fail to see what extra would the Pokémon brand bring into this, except for the extra cash you'll probably have to pay compared to similar non-Pokémon products.

@The-Chosen-one @JONOFTHEJONS

Yes, all of the Champions are playable in Age of Calamity. Playing as Urbosa was so awesome, I wish they'd had that option in the main game as well. Also, AoC did way more to flesh them out as characters, since in BotW they were mostly broad stereotypes. As was Zelda, who is also much more interesting in AoC.

And now, some internal stuff...

• The built-in browser was updated.

It would be nice if we could use the built-in browser for other things than logging in to guest wi-fi networks. Since it's already there, why not allow people to use it for, you know, browsing the internet?