marandahir

Xenoblade 2's chief accessibility problem is that it has no menu for past tutorials.

I'm a veteran Xenoblade player. Played through all of Xenoblade on Wii, 3DS, and Switch. Played Xenoblade X on Wii U. And I played most of 2, Future Connected and more recently Torna on Switch.

I love these games and would argue I'm a core audience member (100%'d XB1 on Switch, for example). I know what I'm doing.

But when I got back into XB2 a few months ago to finally finish the game? I couldn't remember HALF of the controls. Couldn't remember how to even switch between enemies. It doesn't help that the controls change their layout from entry to entry (even on the same console). But XB2 SPECIFICALLY lacks a tutorial review menu. So I literally had to look up the tutorials online to figure out how to orient myself back into the game controls again.

Once they're working, they're working great. These systems combine to make a masterful game (in most cases; gatcha is ALWAYS BAD). But the game is NOT friendly to players who have taken a leave of absence for a few years. And that's piss-poor game design. Heck, they even included the tutorial menu on the Torna DLC expansion, but didn't think to retroactively update the main game with a tutorial menu. UGH.

I'd rather pay for a first hand sale, budget line or original run or otherwise, than pay second hand just for some silly paper covering for my plastic crap that's just going to fill up space.

Mind you, this is regarding cartridge boxes. Disk boxes (NGC, Wii, Wii U) I have no real choice for disk safety but to maintain the boxes.

And I'll pay more for a steel case if I REALLY like a franchise, like Zelda or Xenoblade or Fire Emblem. But I won't get upset that I bought a game late and got a different art style that says it's budget.

And ultimately, I'd rather the creators get some percentage of my purchase rather than buying it from a scalper second hand. Like seriously, there are bigger things to worry about than what box the game came in. Mind you, I'm not a scalper planning to resell my precious collection…

This is seriously first world problems material here, yo.

@Ninfan Supposedly amazing.

I'm sad I didn't preorder before now. Mine won't come until 2023.

@dimi The issue is more people want to play their OWN switch, not some pre-loaded switch with games they may or may not want to play - but they also don't want to have to lug their dock and HDMI cord and all those plugs and dongles to make it work with whatever the hotel has…

@rex_rex You're thinking of Wulfric - he's the big black demon originally bonded to an Arachno boss in Chapter 3 but then after you get his core crystal he's not a part of the main story. He is one of the best Rare Blades given his 40 Skills (full level 5 for every skill node) and one of the most powerful attackers in the game. Also, Earth is just generally a rare element, and his Earth Mastery and Superstrength field skills are just really useful for exploration (tons of cliffs to climb, etc).

@Pho There's a Vandham in nigh about every Xeno game - including Xenogears and Xenosaga (I THINK he's missing from Xenosaga Episode III - that would be the one exception...).

It's just in Xenoblade 1 the localization team inexplicably changed his name to Vangarre. And in some titles, his name is Vanderkam (Xenogears and Xenosaga I & II).

If they can figure out how to make the game work with a single screen I'd buy it again in a heartbeat.

Literally the only way we could make Starfox Zero work was in co-op mode - one of us playing on the Gamepad as the gunner and one of us playing on the big screen as the pilot. Great for emulating the feel of an Episode V Snowspeeder or Luke in the Falcon's gun rigs, but not so good at emulating the feel of an X-Wing, which Arwings are really supposed to capture.

I don't need a remake of Xenogears. Xenoblade is already trying to go about doing a third try on Takahashi's Xeno: Perfect Works (after Xenogears never got Episodes I-IV or VI, and Xenosaga was compressed from 6 episodes into 3). Xenoblade is taking it nice and slow and building up to where Xenosaga and Xenogears were.

What I DO need is Square Enix to release a Chrono Cross-style upscaled port of Xenogears to the Switch. And for Bandai Namco to release ports of Xenosaga to the Switch as well. They can be assured that Xenoblade fans will buy these games. It's a sure market. Why wait?

Chrono Trigger I'm certain is coming as an HD-2D game from Squeenix. It's too valuable a title for them to just port or to sit on for too long.

Golden Sun is the only other game here that I REALLY need on Switch, though I own both english and japanese GBA and DS carts of the all three entries in the series, AND I own both the first two games on Wii U. But given the recent leaks, I expect we'll be playing GS soon enough on NSO…

@ModdedInkling Good point - I’d argue it looked better than the Wii version, despite being locked to the smaller screen size!

Nintendo also made Xenoblade 1 look next gen on Wii, and Xenoblade X look even more so on the rapidly aging Wii U.

Just to be clear, I expect another Switch revision before we get a full on replacement. I just don’t expect it next Spring.

And I will buy it, begrudgingly if I have to, because I’ve wanted a 4K Switch for a while. But I don’t think they need it yet and can wait a few more years until they’ve milked all they can put of the OG, lite, and OLED.

I JUST got an OLED last year at launch, and I love it.

But I was REALLY stressed out prior to buying it because of exactly this fear: that the OLED would become obsolete within a year or so.

If 4k Super Switch or whatever comes out in 2024 I'd be okay with upgrading then. Heck, if it comes out in fall 2023 it'll have been two years - similar to the length of time I had my new 3DS before the launch of the Switch. But there it wasn't a strict 1-to-1 replacement device.

Let the OLED carry us a few more years. If it's only 1.5 years between OLED and its replacement… I'd be a tad bit worried about Nintendo's business. Rushing upgrade after upgrade onto consumers and not giving them fair warning ahead of time that what they are buying will be obsolete in little more than a year is what happens when a console company is struggling, not when it's at the top of the world.

On the contrary, OLED came 2 years after Switch lite, which was 2 years after the original Switch. Give us the new Nintendo Super Switch 4K Pro Max for holiday 2023 AT THE VERY EARLIEST, and I'd say the console is probably pretty healthy. That's a full 6 years. But Zelda isn't aiming for holiday 2023; it was aiming for holiday 2022 and now bumped back to spring 2023. I would guess unless its bumped back again, it's launching prior to the new console.

I get that people want the Switch to be able to compete on a graphical and powerhouse level with the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X, but it doesn't have to to be successful. A lot of the rough edges of the original Switch was cleaned up by the OLED. It doesn't need the umph in power to run games like these.

How many times have we heard it was cancelled and said end of an era, now?

You see, this is what I've wanted those folks making stuff like Pokémon Uranium to do. If they love the genre so much and can spend the time and effort crafting a great game, why not make their OWN world in the genre, with their OWN monsters and their OWN assets?

I might not play this - my backlog of Switch games is nigh-insurmountable at this point - but I want to see this thrive.

@Funneefox Thanks for the heads up!

@Wexter

WUT. How did I not know this?

My only issues with this implementations are 3:

1. It's not immediately available on the Home Screen. I still have to scroll all the way right to get to All Software before then clicking the right shoulder to get to Groups. There should be a quicker way to get to groups.

2. Since I have a lot of software, it's arduous to spend the time to sort through the mess of titles to find what should go where. And because they're not folders but groups, It's hard to remember if I got the game in a group yet or not.

3. Because I have games on multiple SD cards based on space availabilities, it's impossible to create groups with all the software I want in the group at any given time.

I just ordered this set on ebay for like a dollar over that price listed on meccha-Japan (I assume someone bought it up off that website or somewhere they could find it cheaper).

I know I'm part of the problem here, but the real problem is GameStop only selling ONE of the three new amiibo. I have a copy of every single amiibo made save the amiibo cards, Super Mario Tasty Amiibo Cereal, and the gold and silver Monster Hunter amiibo variations that were only given as prizes to a handful of individuals and thus aren't widely available. I even have most Japanese-exclusive amiibo, like BoxBoy! and the Monster Hunter Stories 1 amiibo. I'm not going to stop buying them now.

Just angry that this is the way GameStop is operating. They're literally throwing away money to scalpers.

No such thing

Xenoblade 2, to try to finally finish it up (DLC and rare gatchas and all) before Xenoblade 3.

My launch day switch won't react to wireless controllers anymore.

It works with a wired Hori-pad when in docked mode, or fine in handheld mode, but separate joy cons or pro controllers just fail their persuasion checks every time. My two original sets of joy cons are drifting but all other sets I have are fine.

The OLED is glorious, though.

@jsty3105

See, that's the thing. We can all agree that Nintendo has power and money that this guy would never dream of. And certainly, Nintendo's lawyers can use that power to attack targets that arguably are fair use, on the basis of protecting their brand image or profit margins.

But it's very important that the law protects the property of small scale musicians and giant corporations equally under the law. Otherwise, the power of big corporate interests will always be able to find wiggle room for themselves and crush the small artists. We need to close those loopholes.

As a consequence, though, that means ALSO enforcing it against people like this guy who steal Nintendo's property and create derivative work.

OR, we need to decide that derivative works are fundamentally protected, and stop enforcing DMCA over songs that sounds somewhat alike (and honestly, the history of music is a history of borrowing).

IP law is wack! Figuring out the balance is important, and I'm not saying we need to get rid of IP law entirely or enforce it like a authoritarian state, just that we need to treat creators and their IP equally.

@iLikeUrAttitude

It's not fair use in this case, though. He's got no right to modding the game. He doesn't own the game. He owns a copy of the game software on proprietary Nintendo software (eshop download) or flashcards, and has chosen to break the terms and conditions associated with acquiring the game by pulling it apart and changing it from what it was.

There's a big difference between that and presenting portions of the game cut into segments in a let's play or review with reactions, etc. Those are fair use. What he's doing is not. It's a very fine line to walk.

He's free to mod the game all he wants, it's a free world, after all, but he should expect the banhammer and the weight of law when it comes to distributing derivative works of Nintendo's property or earning $ on youtube showing off said derivative works.

Yeah, really would have prefered a Beles amiibo over a Beleth amiibo.

Not going to spend more than $40 on a figurine, amiibo or otherwise. And I collect all the amiibo!

As long as "innovative" ≠ NFTs, I think we're good here

Nintendo hasn't given you license to mod the game and promote your mods.

This isn't like Bethesda including the Construction Kit with copies of Morrowind. When you buy Breath of the Wild, you have no right to anything but the game as presented by Nintendo running on Wii U and Switch.

Nintendo has every right to shut you down, and I'm surprised they didn't shut you down months or years ago.

I attended the hands-on event in NYC.

It was fantastic, and convinced me to get 1-2-Switch (everyone was laughing hysterically as we wore hats and milked the cows), Fast RMX, Snipperclips, and Sonic Mania, in addition to Breath of the Wild of course.

Fas RMX's production team even gave me a business card to remind me to buy it. So honoured to have gotten the chance there.

I was so freakin' hyped.

Didn't get to play Zelda that day because in-event lines were insane, but I had gotten my hands on BotW a few months earlier when they showed it off on Wii U at Nintendo NY and let us run around the Great Plateau.

Where was A Link to the Past's Ocarina (or "Flute" in the bowdlerized translation?).

Different music, but functionally identical to the Ocarina of Winds.

Also, the Bell from A Link Between Worlds is missing! Again, functionally identical to the Ocarina of Winds, but extra points for summoning either a cute little witch or just her broom to carry you to the destination.

Cymraeg now, please.

@EmmatheBest Give Sakurai some time to rest. He’ll announce it alongside like the final spirit event or something. There’s always a big gap…

Sounds like a game that isn't Monopoly but thinks that people will buy it just because it has the IP of Monopoly and its Mr Moneybags, Community Chest, etc.

Looks REAAAAAAAALY overpriced

The amiibo look great.

Be prepared for them to be only at GameStop in the US and sold out within 2 minutes of their random preorders-go-live moment.

Looks like it'll either be a good Breath of the Wild Clone or a horrible Breath of the Wild Clone.

Looks pretty empty right now for a Sonic game, even for a BotW clone game…

I mean, if this was able to take the record from Duke, then certainly Metroid Dread should have taken it from Duke earlier this year, too. This would still take the record over Dread, but my point is both of them were start and stop, unlike Duke Nukem which was actively ongoing.

@diwdiws Straw argument, and you're missing the point I'm making entirely.

I'm not critical about this guy, and not judging your choice or anyone else's. Electricity and where it's sourced is a much bigger issue than any one person's responsibility.

I'm just saying that I don't see the benefit to having a more powerful Switch that could make the 1st party Nintendo games play more similarly to PS5 or XBSX titles: the games are great enough as they are, and "good enough" on mature, less energy-intensive hardware, may actually be more beneficial for the environment just in energy savings per device than the benefits of investing in a company that has a more robust "green" policy like Microsoft. I think that may be a reasonable way to judge platforms and game specs. I don't see where your criticism is coming from. You sound very offended by my musings.

I think they could just do Smash Bros. Ultimate DX on the Switch 2 or whatever, and port the game over with all DLC included, and do another Fighter's Pass or two.

I could see Ultimate as a living game that makes the jump from console to console. There's really NO benefit in cutting the roster down, you're only going to upset players who main the characters that get cut.

And then, yeah, you want a smaller fighting game, you need to start making it different and distinguish it more.

@diwdiws I'm not complaining about whoever this "his" is's electricity bill. I'm saying that the environmental cost of burning the extra fossil fuels to power a more energy intensive system isn't worth the minor increase in processing power, graphics, etc. Nintendo can stick with last gen tech and it's still "good-enough" without consuming as much.

The game and watch games ZELDA and Vermin (Zelda edition) are missing, as are the CD-i triforce of evil games. And so is the Zelda game watch. And also missing is Nintendoland's The Legend of Zelda: Battle Quest. Not to mention, Hyrule Warriors, Cadence of Hyrule, and Age of Calamity.

While Vermin is legit fun, and so are those last three spin-offs I mentioned, all the others are worse than everything on this list.

@MrHonest Your profile picture is from Metroid Dread. Was that a let down? I though it was fantastic.

Nintendo has consistently turned out quality first party games these last 4 years. They've also had tons of ports from classics of the last few generations to the console, which were never portable games previously. And they've had a lot of really quality cross-platform AAA titles, which admittedly aren't as good as they are on other, more powerful platforms, but they're portable.

I'd say the Switch has had plenty to offer you and everyone else.

Interestingly, a character death does not reset certain other parts of the game - if you encountered a boss but died fighting them, the map will indicate the boss's name on the map without saying you cleared it, and the map will retain its boss room update. Presumably the game autosaves right when you encounter a boss but with a reload flag to send you back to before the point of no return in one of the room(s) prior so that you don't get stuck and have to repeat a boss without any way of reloading energy and missile tanks, gathering more upgrades, etc.

I don't see the difference from these images alone.

And if I can't tell the difference immediately, it's not worth the power and processing consumed to make this "upgrade" happen. It's literally just burning coal to make a marginal difference.

There's an argument for going Switch over PS5 and XBSX on account of energy consumption alone - the console is "good enough" and getting current releases while consuming far less electricity to run the games. Still guzzling coal until we get off fossil fuels, but every bit helps.

FYI, Nintendo's environmental track record is not that great otherwise - and Microsoft is one of the most environmentally conscious big tech companies. But there's a very reasonable argument to be made here in Nintendo's favour by sheer accident of their business model of utilising mature tech to it's fullest rather than trying to be on the cusp of "stronger and better" hardware.

It's all about stability

I will buy this and play it because I adore .Hack//SIGN, but what I REALLY want them to do is give us the .Hack//original games in HD on Switch. Those games are next to impossible to get on the second-hand market for PS2, and are essential for understanding the backstory of .Hack//G.U.

If you only care about the backstory of Haseo, though, at least watch .Hack//SIGN and then .Hack//ROOTS as he's a main character in both of those anime.

OH so this is like OpenMW? Where you need to own an actual copy of the game to be able to actually play the game, but its code has been replicated from the ground up so that modern tools can break the game and improve it (like OpenMW allows for new heightmaps so that mods could actually make Red Mountain the height it should be - around the same height as the Throat of the World in Skyrim). Of course, Bethesda/Microsoft has a friendly relationship with Mods, and the game came with a creation tool kit for modding the game. There's a reason that Tamriel Rebuilt and OpenMW still exist. But there was a hot water moment when Bethesda thought OpenMW was distributing their IP for free and tried to shut OpenMW down. They're "good" now because the projects explained their actual purpose. You can even play OpenMW on Mac!

I imagine Nintendo would have a more antagonistic approach with these projects just because their code is just as important to them as the narratives and game play and IP of their games. But I doubt they can shut it down directly.

There IS a legal conundrum about what you can do with a rom you own a copy of. Nintendo's lawyers HAVE argued in court that you can dump it only for the sake of reloading it back onto a new N64 cart, not that you can play it in a 3rd-party app. To my knowledge, the law in this particular grey area isn't entirely settled yet, but be aware that you're playing with fire even if you own a copy of the ROM.

Pinsir's counterpart may have originally been Scyther, but it's long since switched to Heracross in all games that have both creatures. There's no need to evolve Pinsir, just as there's no need to evolve Heracross.

As others have said, Eevee only evolves into one of the 9 Special Types (well, 8 special types plus the obviously would-have-been-special Fairy type). It doesn't evolve into Physical types, so Fighting is as off the table as Poison and Ghost are. Plus, we already have a martial arts cute little thing evolved into a martial arts master - they're call Kubfu and Urshifu.

Girafarig is a good choice for an evolution. I'd prefer one that makes it more palindromatic, maybe the tail takes over and now we have the chainchomp like face on both sides. Or else lean the other way and make an Okapi-based evolution… Okapako?

Got very confused when you said Columbus Circle was launching a new Japanese-only version, since Columbus Circle is a real place here in NYC.

I think the tag-line here is confusing, since it's not explained until the second paragraph of the article and I CAN'T be the only one not familiar with this retro-focused Japanese company.

@SmaggTheSmug Worth noting that the 13-episode anime OVA had fair-skinned, fair-haired Dark Elves (they're dark because they're aligned with Marmo, not because of any physical differences from the other Elf tribes). It was the 27-episode anime TV series that made them brown skinned and made it very unclear whether an enemy was a Goblin, Ogre, or Dark Elf (all long-eared, brown-skinned baddies). Pirotess was a shade darker than other Dark Elves in the OVA, but still had whitish hair and was still within the same skin tone bands as Deedlit and the other Elves shown. But in the TV series, she's full on Ganguro girl with tanning-booth brown skin and bleach-blond hair. Not saying that's bad - I think it's supposed to be natural for Dark Elves in that continuity - just that it definitely leans into that Japanese trope.

@DaTrashMan I ordered the PEGI version. Should be fine on a NA (ESRB) version, if you're willing to pay shipping. Was still cheaper than buying either version of Pokémon from a local store and walking to it, though that might just mean the game itself is not consider a AAA title…

@Mirania YUSS! Thanks!

YUSSSSSSS.

Just ordered the Switch western version!!!

The OVA is NOT terrible.

@Mirania Thank you! Seems like the discord invite on reddit has expired, but i joined the reddit at least!