Rosalina was a gentle, selfless, cosmic and maternal character in the Galaxy games. She was a mother figure to the Lumas. But now she's a girl-boss, effortlessly destroying bosses. Why does Mario need to be in his own movie? Rosalina needed Mario to obtain the Power Stars.
This is now the second princess they've grafted a girl-boss vibe onto. News flash, this isn't 2019. You are allowed to show real variation in female characters again. This was the only problem with the first movie, and it looks like they're doing it again with Rosalina. Flashy power displays and self-satisfied swagger - they have no concept of this character at all.
I wish they would stop doing this. The first movie was ruined for me when Peach just outright made Mario feel like crap because he couldn't easily finish the course at the beginning of the movie (like Peach apparently did, as if growing up in a place automatically makes you skilled at something - it doesn't). It's like saying, "I'm from Canada, so of course I can play in the NHL!" Logic does not work like this.
It came off like Peach flexing on him - not teaching or helping, just proving how much better she is. It undercut Mario's underdog charm and made Peach feel weirdly condescending, which doesn’t fit her personality from the games at all.
I'm pretty sick of it as a way of making male characters look bad just to unjustly elevate female characters, especially when it clearly comes at the expense of source material. Haven't we seen enough "progress" and "female empowerment" already? Where is the balance? Can we not respect source material at all? Why is everything a progress statement for?
@Zarraya When you factor in that Falcom would have to charge more for the game to put the data on the cartridge, he's probably right that it really is the best move for their customers because their customers probably don't want to spend more money for the game than they have to, and that's probably more people than the people who want the data on the cartridge, which is a smaller minority.
The RNG of acquiring skill cards is genuinely ridiculous. First, you need to RNG into the correct enemy you want the skill card for, and some of them are actually rare. Then you need to get them to spawn a chest reward. There are items that can help with this, but they cost money and only offer 70%. Even if you get the treasure chest reward at the end of the battle, you have to pick from 3 options, so you only have a 33.3% chance to get the reward you're looking for. The other 2 rewards are just random, pointless junk you could buy in the Item shop - who the heck cares!
This system is beyond frustrating. I have no idea why the main character didn't have a Pokeball/capture ability instead of this random treasure chest gimmick. The RNG is awful. It ruins the game.
The best counter to this raid is Kingambit using Shell Bell. Use Atk/HP EVs with 4 in defense. Use Stone Edge with 3 PP Up's and Swords Dance. Use Defiant Hidden ability to counter Feather Dance. Kingambit resists all grass, ghost and flying attacks, so you shouldn't really die in this raid.
There are other counters, like using Klefki or Magnezone for support mons. Reflect is going to be really good in this raid. Also, Metal Sound can be really nice if you pair these up with Miraidon.
While Iron Hands with Thunder Punch will be okay, it could be risky. Kingambit has no such defensive risks at all. Iron Hands can deal enough damage to end the raid a little faster, but will take 2x as much damage as Kingambit would.
@Shiro28 I have beaten Engage twice. There is nothing woke in it. It has dark-skinned people who live in a hot desert - not exactly what I would call unrealistic, unexplainable or forced. Seems modeled after Eqypt sort of.
It has a small number of masculine female characters and feminine male characters - something the series has had now for ages before wokeness was even a thing. In past games, feminine males were Lucius, Libra, Forest, and now Rosado. Lucius goes back to 2003. Rosado is actually a likeable character - not seeing any fan hate at all. They don't talk about being persecuted or anything. People just accept him. It's wholesome. Probably the way such characters should be represented in media to be honest.
Nothing in the game is political. There is no anti-male or anti-white messages. No race politics. There is no left-wing gender or identity agendas of any kind. Nothing of the sort. Buy with confidence.
The reviews really messed up the game. They placed so much expectation that the game was supposed to be 50% Persona that they basically gave a 5 or a 7 to one of the best tactical rpgs of the last decade just because it wasn't a waifu simulator. You know there is some bias when a game without much story or social sim in Mario Rabbids is scoring higher from the same outlets. It's obvious that these are purely protest votes. As a reviewer, you're supposed to review the game based on the goals the developers were trying to deliver and not what you would have made in their place. It's not like they were trying to make Three Houses again and failed - they deliberately chose not to and focus most of their attention on gameplay. In this, they 100% succeeded.
I don't like it when fans are happy with a game but casual journalists get so much influence over the direction of the series. Journalists are not that important to gamers and haven't been for years now. If you're a fan of the series, do you really care what these journalists think? I know I don't. The last good journalists to work in the field were people like Greg Kasavin or Jeff Gerstmann back in the early 2000's. Now most of them are ex-Hollywood actors that didn't make it and have extreme leftwing agendas. I frankly don't care what they think. I pray to god that Nintendo and Intelligent Systems doesn't either.
I didn't really have a problem with Legends Arceus' graphics or framerate. People said it was bad, but I actually thought the loading times were really fast and the game still had an appealing art style. I also didn't notice many frame dips in Arceus.
So hearing about the frame rate here worries me, because if Nintendo Life is harping on it, it must be bad. If it's the same as Arceus, I am okay with it. If it's worse, it might start to ruin my enjoyment.
I do think it's important to get a palette cleanser from the Series X or the PS5 before judging a Nintendo game - have to be fair with the hardware. But if the game is not even measuring up to what the hardware can do, then that's a big developer problem.
I would buy a double pack. I own the games on wii u but don't have it connected to my tv anymore. I wish my copies were backwards compatible. I have the wolf amiibo too.
@BulbasaurusRex It doesn't matter if Sword and Shield was derivative of the past games - it is strictly a better game than the past games. It does almost everything better. The post-game is better. The quality of life is better. The freedom is better. The pacing is better. And for that reason, it should be ranked very highly. People are voting based on nostalgia instead of quality and features, which is wrong. The list isn't "the most nostalgic pokemon games", it's a list on what is the best - i.e. answering the question, "What pokemon game should I play if I never played any of them?" That's what people would use such a list. New players don't care how strongly a person felt about a game 20 years ago. It doesn't matter anymore.
And it's not just Pokemon I'd use this argument for either. I wouldn't recommend Ocarina of Time over other 3D Zelda games either. It might have got the "best game of all time" label on it at the time, but it's frankly outclassed by everything that came after it, especially Twilight Princess, which basically does everything Ocarina did but better.
I'd say the same thing about Mario 64. N64 stuff has the ugliest graphics, and the controller is pure jank. Nintendo has iterated on their game design so much, these earlier games would honestly be considered shovel ware by today's standards.
While Sword and Shield let down on the evolution of the formula and taking advantage of the console, I still think it's objectively one of the best games in the franchise (and sales don't lie). I just don't see how I can tell someone totally new to Pokemon not to play Sword/Shield first (Arceus aside). It's absolutely better than most and maybe all of the games that came before it. It does almost everything better.
I think people confuse their expectations and disappointment with Sword and Shield and their nostalgia for the older games. The older games suck even more by today's standards. The combat is slower. The controls, graphics and sound are worse. The quality of life is abysmal. The writing and stories are worse. Like I don't see how any of the original Gameboy games make it in the top 10.
Let's be honest - the old games are only high on the list because you played them as kids, not because they are actually good recommendations in 2022. A new player playing all of these games for the first time would rank them very, very differently. A tier list would probably look closer to reversed release order, if we're being honest (with BDSP and Let's Go ranking lower).
@NEStalgia If Capcom does improve the framerates to 30+ and it's locked (as in almost never dips below 30fps regardless of what you're doing in the game), I might reconsider getting it. Still, I'm pretty hopeful a Series X version will come eventually - 12 million exclusive fees for both Rise and Stories 2 can't mean more than 1 year. I fully expect this game to go to other platforms. I saw the 4k/60fps videos on YouTube, and I gotta think that's going to be the best experience for this game. I can wait - we'll probably get some leaked info even before then.
@NEStalgia I keep having these thoughts in the last few months that the Switch Pro was already supposed to be released by now. Disgaea 6 has all of these variable graphics options with unlocked frame rates, and Monster Hunter Stories 2 has the uncapped frame rate as well to take advantage of better hardware. I gotta think maybe this was done to plan ahead for it without telling anyone its release, because both games are not running well on base Switch :/ It's really frustrating because the reality is the games are unoptimized or the hardware was delayed due to covid.
In any case, I just heard on a podcast for Easy Allies that Ben was complaining about the horrible performance of MHS2, so I guess that more or less confirms that the Switch version never got fixed.
@NEStalgia The demo is built off the main game - it's just forked a few weeks earlier. I doubt they had enough time to optimize it in just 2-3 weeks. When we play betas and demos for other games in the past, we have almost never seen major improvements occur on release when it comes to bugs and performance. It's incredibly rare, and there's no reason to expect it.
I mean, the RE Engine already has all of the optimizations from Rise and yet it still runs poorly. This means there's something fundamentally wrong with the asset quality or with the quality of the code written on top of the RE Engine that is very unoptimized, and it would take a long time to go back and reduce polygon counts for everything in the game and rewrite major sections of code just for the Switch version.
The biggest failure of Monster Hunter Stories 2 is they never built the game on the Switch from the ground up, unlike a game like Mario Odyssey, which is why Nintendo gets a lot more juice out of their hardware. If you just throw some modern game code onto the Switch and expect it to run well, it probably won't go well. The same thing happened to Disgaea 6 too.
I think this game is a PC purchase, or wait for Playstation and Xbox in a year or two. I see no reason to pay full price for the worst version of the game on Switch. There is a very high chance this gets ported to Xbox and Playstation later on since it is built with the RE Engine.
The framerate was too choppy and uneven, and the camera controls feel really weird to me that I'm going to pass. The framerate is mostly around 20fps, and I've seen it go as low as 14fps and higher in rare situations where there is not much to render, or in menus or the map screen. I wish it wasn't a switch console exclusive. It would probably look gorgeous on my xbox series x.
There is a PC version... but I don't PC game very much these days.
Maybe I'm just spoiled that I can play everything on my Series X in 60fps, but this game should have been a 30fps lock with a 60fps option at 720p or something. Frame rate is important to me. Why Does Mario Odyssey run so well yet this game runs so poorly? :/
The framerate was too choppy and uneven, and the camera controls feel really weird to me that I'm going to pass. The framerate is mostly around 20fps, and I've seen it go as low as 14fps and higher in rare situations where there is not much to render, or in menus or the map screen. I wish it wasn't a switch console exclusive. It would probably look gorgeous on my xbox series x.
There is a PC version... but I don't PC game very much these days.
@Bunkerneath How does this make them "money grubbing"? How does the game being sold on other platforms affect you whatsoever for? It doesn't. And why is it so wrong for a business to make more money by selling an amazing game people actually voluntarily want to buy and play? How does getting Octopath Traveler into the hands of more people suddenly become a bad thing? More money for Octopath means a better budget and a guarentee that we'll see Octopath Traveler 2
I can't believe there's so many complete socialist idiots online these days who don't think or reason about any of their beliefs. What you want is worse for you, me and the industry as a whole and I'm super glad that one of the few good games Square put out is successful - it means I get to enjoy more games like that and I won't only have the crap Final Fantasies they put out in modern years to look forward to.
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Re: Super Mario Galaxy Movie Trailer Reveals Rosalina, Bowser Jr., And More
Rosalina was a gentle, selfless, cosmic and maternal character in the Galaxy games. She was a mother figure to the Lumas. But now she's a girl-boss, effortlessly destroying bosses. Why does Mario need to be in his own movie? Rosalina needed Mario to obtain the Power Stars.
This is now the second princess they've grafted a girl-boss vibe onto. News flash, this isn't 2019. You are allowed to show real variation in female characters again. This was the only problem with the first movie, and it looks like they're doing it again with Rosalina. Flashy power displays and self-satisfied swagger - they have no concept of this character at all.
I wish they would stop doing this. The first movie was ruined for me when Peach just outright made Mario feel like crap because he couldn't easily finish the course at the beginning of the movie (like Peach apparently did, as if growing up in a place automatically makes you skilled at something - it doesn't). It's like saying, "I'm from Canada, so of course I can play in the NHL!" Logic does not work like this.
It came off like Peach flexing on him - not teaching or helping, just proving how much better she is. It undercut Mario's underdog charm and made Peach feel weirdly condescending, which doesn’t fit her personality from the games at all.
I'm pretty sick of it as a way of making male characters look bad just to unjustly elevate female characters, especially when it clearly comes at the expense of source material. Haven't we seen enough "progress" and "female empowerment" already? Where is the balance? Can we not respect source material at all? Why is everything a progress statement for?
Re: Feature: "Never In My Wildest Dreams Would I Have Expected This" - Falcom President Talks 20 Years Of 'Trails' In Our Big Interview
@Zarraya When you factor in that Falcom would have to charge more for the game to put the data on the cartridge, he's probably right that it really is the best move for their customers because their customers probably don't want to spend more money for the game than they have to, and that's probably more people than the people who want the data on the cartridge, which is a smaller minority.
Re: Review: Voice Of Cards: The Beasts Of Burden (Switch) - The Ace Of The Deck In Yoko Taro's Card RPG Series
The RNG of acquiring skill cards is genuinely ridiculous. First, you need to RNG into the correct enemy you want the skill card for, and some of them are actually rare. Then you need to get them to spawn a chest reward. There are items that can help with this, but they cost money and only offer 70%. Even if you get the treasure chest reward at the end of the battle, you have to pick from 3 options, so you only have a 33.3% chance to get the reward you're looking for. The other 2 rewards are just random, pointless junk you could buy in the Item shop - who the heck cares!
This system is beyond frustrating. I have no idea why the main character didn't have a Pokeball/capture ability instead of this random treasure chest gimmick. The RNG is awful. It ruins the game.
Re: The Next Pokémon Scarlet & Violet Tera Raid Battle Event Has Been Revealed
The best counter to this raid is Kingambit using Shell Bell. Use Atk/HP EVs with 4 in defense. Use Stone Edge with 3 PP Up's and Swords Dance. Use Defiant Hidden ability to counter Feather Dance. Kingambit resists all grass, ghost and flying attacks, so you shouldn't really die in this raid.
There are other counters, like using Klefki or Magnezone for support mons. Reflect is going to be really good in this raid. Also, Metal Sound can be really nice if you pair these up with Miraidon.
While Iron Hands with Thunder Punch will be okay, it could be risky. Kingambit has no such defensive risks at all. Iron Hands can deal enough damage to end the raid a little faster, but will take 2x as much damage as Kingambit would.
Anyway, happy raiding! I hope this helped.
Re: UK Charts: Fire Emblem Engage Tumbles Down To Seventh Place
@Shiro28 I have beaten Engage twice. There is nothing woke in it. It has dark-skinned people who live in a hot desert - not exactly what I would call unrealistic, unexplainable or forced. Seems modeled after Eqypt sort of.
It has a small number of masculine female characters and feminine male characters - something the series has had now for ages before wokeness was even a thing. In past games, feminine males were Lucius, Libra, Forest, and now Rosado. Lucius goes back to 2003. Rosado is actually a likeable character - not seeing any fan hate at all. They don't talk about being persecuted or anything. People just accept him. It's wholesome. Probably the way such characters should be represented in media to be honest.
Nothing in the game is political. There is no anti-male or anti-white messages. No race politics. There is no left-wing gender or identity agendas of any kind. Nothing of the sort. Buy with confidence.
Re: UK Charts: Fire Emblem Engage Tumbles Down To Seventh Place
The reviews really messed up the game. They placed so much expectation that the game was supposed to be 50% Persona that they basically gave a 5 or a 7 to one of the best tactical rpgs of the last decade just because it wasn't a waifu simulator. You know there is some bias when a game without much story or social sim in Mario Rabbids is scoring higher from the same outlets. It's obvious that these are purely protest votes. As a reviewer, you're supposed to review the game based on the goals the developers were trying to deliver and not what you would have made in their place. It's not like they were trying to make Three Houses again and failed - they deliberately chose not to and focus most of their attention on gameplay. In this, they 100% succeeded.
I don't like it when fans are happy with a game but casual journalists get so much influence over the direction of the series. Journalists are not that important to gamers and haven't been for years now. If you're a fan of the series, do you really care what these journalists think? I know I don't. The last good journalists to work in the field were people like Greg Kasavin or Jeff Gerstmann back in the early 2000's. Now most of them are ex-Hollywood actors that didn't make it and have extreme leftwing agendas. I frankly don't care what they think. I pray to god that Nintendo and Intelligent Systems doesn't either.
Re: Review: Pokémon Scarlet And Violet - An Open-World Poké Playground Full Of Promise (And Tech Issues)
I didn't really have a problem with Legends Arceus' graphics or framerate. People said it was bad, but I actually thought the loading times were really fast and the game still had an appealing art style. I also didn't notice many frame dips in Arceus.
So hearing about the frame rate here worries me, because if Nintendo Life is harping on it, it must be bad. If it's the same as Arceus, I am okay with it. If it's worse, it might start to ruin my enjoyment.
I do think it's important to get a palette cleanser from the Series X or the PS5 before judging a Nintendo game - have to be fair with the hardware. But if the game is not even measuring up to what the hardware can do, then that's a big developer problem.
Re: Rumour: Could Switch Get Zelda: Wind Waker And Twilight Princess This Year?
I would buy a double pack. I own the games on wii u but don't have it connected to my tv anymore. I wish my copies were backwards compatible. I have the wolf amiibo too.
Re: Best Pokémon Games Of All Time
@BulbasaurusRex It doesn't matter if Sword and Shield was derivative of the past games - it is strictly a better game than the past games. It does almost everything better. The post-game is better. The quality of life is better. The freedom is better. The pacing is better. And for that reason, it should be ranked very highly. People are voting based on nostalgia instead of quality and features, which is wrong. The list isn't "the most nostalgic pokemon games", it's a list on what is the best - i.e. answering the question, "What pokemon game should I play if I never played any of them?" That's what people would use such a list. New players don't care how strongly a person felt about a game 20 years ago. It doesn't matter anymore.
And it's not just Pokemon I'd use this argument for either. I wouldn't recommend Ocarina of Time over other 3D Zelda games either. It might have got the "best game of all time" label on it at the time, but it's frankly outclassed by everything that came after it, especially Twilight Princess, which basically does everything Ocarina did but better.
I'd say the same thing about Mario 64. N64 stuff has the ugliest graphics, and the controller is pure jank. Nintendo has iterated on their game design so much, these earlier games would honestly be considered shovel ware by today's standards.
This is no different for Pokemon.
Re: Best Pokémon Games Of All Time
While Sword and Shield let down on the evolution of the formula and taking advantage of the console, I still think it's objectively one of the best games in the franchise (and sales don't lie). I just don't see how I can tell someone totally new to Pokemon not to play Sword/Shield first (Arceus aside). It's absolutely better than most and maybe all of the games that came before it. It does almost everything better.
I think people confuse their expectations and disappointment with Sword and Shield and their nostalgia for the older games. The older games suck even more by today's standards. The combat is slower. The controls, graphics and sound are worse. The quality of life is abysmal. The writing and stories are worse. Like I don't see how any of the original Gameboy games make it in the top 10.
Let's be honest - the old games are only high on the list because you played them as kids, not because they are actually good recommendations in 2022. A new player playing all of these games for the first time would rank them very, very differently. A tier list would probably look closer to reversed release order, if we're being honest (with BDSP and Let's Go ranking lower).
Re: First Impressions: Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin Is An RPG Of Monstrous Potential
@NEStalgia If Capcom does improve the framerates to 30+ and it's locked (as in almost never dips below 30fps regardless of what you're doing in the game), I might reconsider getting it. Still, I'm pretty hopeful a Series X version will come eventually - 12 million exclusive fees for both Rise and Stories 2 can't mean more than 1 year. I fully expect this game to go to other platforms. I saw the 4k/60fps videos on YouTube, and I gotta think that's going to be the best experience for this game. I can wait - we'll probably get some leaked info even before then.
Re: First Impressions: Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin Is An RPG Of Monstrous Potential
@NEStalgia I keep having these thoughts in the last few months that the Switch Pro was already supposed to be released by now. Disgaea 6 has all of these variable graphics options with unlocked frame rates, and Monster Hunter Stories 2 has the uncapped frame rate as well to take advantage of better hardware. I gotta think maybe this was done to plan ahead for it without telling anyone its release, because both games are not running well on base Switch :/ It's really frustrating because the reality is the games are unoptimized or the hardware was delayed due to covid.
In any case, I just heard on a podcast for Easy Allies that Ben was complaining about the horrible performance of MHS2, so I guess that more or less confirms that the Switch version never got fixed.
Re: First Impressions: Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin Is An RPG Of Monstrous Potential
@NEStalgia The demo is built off the main game - it's just forked a few weeks earlier. I doubt they had enough time to optimize it in just 2-3 weeks. When we play betas and demos for other games in the past, we have almost never seen major improvements occur on release when it comes to bugs and performance. It's incredibly rare, and there's no reason to expect it.
I mean, the RE Engine already has all of the optimizations from Rise and yet it still runs poorly. This means there's something fundamentally wrong with the asset quality or with the quality of the code written on top of the RE Engine that is very unoptimized, and it would take a long time to go back and reduce polygon counts for everything in the game and rewrite major sections of code just for the Switch version.
The biggest failure of Monster Hunter Stories 2 is they never built the game on the Switch from the ground up, unlike a game like Mario Odyssey, which is why Nintendo gets a lot more juice out of their hardware. If you just throw some modern game code onto the Switch and expect it to run well, it probably won't go well. The same thing happened to Disgaea 6 too.
I think this game is a PC purchase, or wait for Playstation and Xbox in a year or two. I see no reason to pay full price for the worst version of the game on Switch. There is a very high chance this gets ported to Xbox and Playstation later on since it is built with the RE Engine.
Re: Review: Disgaea 6: Defiance of Destiny - A Series High Point, Just Not For Performance
Just so people are aware... this is coming to PS4 eventually. If you can wait and want a better 1080p / 60fps experience, then I suggest you do so.
Re: Reminder: Trial Version Of Monster Hunter Stories 2 Available On Switch
The framerate was too choppy and uneven, and the camera controls feel really weird to me that I'm going to pass. The framerate is mostly around 20fps, and I've seen it go as low as 14fps and higher in rare situations where there is not much to render, or in menus or the map screen. I wish it wasn't a switch console exclusive. It would probably look gorgeous on my xbox series x.
There is a PC version... but I don't PC game very much these days.
Maybe I'm just spoiled that I can play everything on my Series X in 60fps, but this game should have been a 30fps lock with a 60fps option at 720p or something. Frame rate is important to me. Why Does Mario Odyssey run so well yet this game runs so poorly? :/
Re: First Impressions: Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin Is An RPG Of Monstrous Potential
The framerate was too choppy and uneven, and the camera controls feel really weird to me that I'm going to pass. The framerate is mostly around 20fps, and I've seen it go as low as 14fps and higher in rare situations where there is not much to render, or in menus or the map screen. I wish it wasn't a switch console exclusive. It would probably look gorgeous on my xbox series x.
There is a PC version... but I don't PC game very much these days.
Re: Official Board Game, Pokémon Trading Card Game Battle Academy, Launches Today Worldwide
Where can you just get the playmat/board? I don't care much for the decks, but having a board to play on would make the game easier to teach.
Re: Octopath Traveler's Switch Exclusivity Might Be Coming To An End
@Bunkerneath How does this make them "money grubbing"? How does the game being sold on other platforms affect you whatsoever for? It doesn't. And why is it so wrong for a business to make more money by selling an amazing game people actually voluntarily want to buy and play? How does getting Octopath Traveler into the hands of more people suddenly become a bad thing? More money for Octopath means a better budget and a guarentee that we'll see Octopath Traveler 2
I can't believe there's so many complete socialist idiots online these days who don't think or reason about any of their beliefs. What you want is worse for you, me and the industry as a whole and I'm super glad that one of the few good games Square put out is successful - it means I get to enjoy more games like that and I won't only have the crap Final Fantasies they put out in modern years to look forward to.