Fascinating that one of the beta chests in these demos (it's right at the bombing of a Dodongo Baby) is the same chest design they reused instead of big wooden chests for major items in Majora's Mask.
Some innane nostalgia glasses are being worn here.
People are ranking superior remakes lower their the deeply flawed games they're remaking just because they're remakes (other than Heart Gold and Soul Silver, which deservedly claim the #1 spot for many reasons, but REALLY are also in need of a re-remake…).
There's no reason so many of the modern games should be so far down the list compared to early titles if we're comparing one-to-one. You can't compare them on innovative merits because you're literally comparing entries within the same series. So you've got to rank them on their playability, and almost every generation has improved on its predecessors.
Steam Deck lacks Mario, Zelda, Animal Crossing, Smash Bros., Fire Emblem, and Metroid.
It's no different than any other time. Nintendo's most valuable product is its IP. There's a reason that Starfield, The Elder Scrolls VI, and Fallout V will only be on Xbox and Windows. Microsoft has learned the valuable lesson that Nintendo has always known: You want people to buy your hardware, you make sure they have to buy it to play your software.
Steam Deck will never be able to compete with Switch because, while it has an excellent library, its games are playable on various other consoles, while 90% of the Switch's popular titles are exclusive to the Switch. They can do the Switch concept "better" in terms of graphical fidelity etc, but they can't replicate the trademark Nintendo powerhouses that are their franchises.
Nintendo is operating like Disney. It's ALL about IP. if Disney+ content was on Netflix and Hulu, would you really pay separately for it? Valve is competing against an audience that can already play their Steam games on their Windows PCs, and also against Xbox AND PlayStation. Nintendo is off in their own corner doing their own thing. Microsoft is trying to become more like Nintendo by buying up IP and making them exclusive. Valve just doesn't have that in their repertoire.
After playing OT on NSO, I’m honestly looking forward to revisiting MM 64-style for the first time for real since the Wii era.
The 3DS is a near-perfect remake that improved upon the game with two glorious fishing ponds and better saving mechanics and some other key fixes, but the original has some quirk and charm to it that like with OT3D, wasn’t fully captured with the graphical and mechanical upgrades.
Honestly, if it weren’t for the issue of saving, I think I’d play MM a lot more. But the multisavestate functionality of NSO64 really fixes the fundamental issue with MM - “I can’t quit, I’ll lose all my progress if I don’t get to a save point!”
Mind you, Wii U had single save states in their emulated VC Roms, but multi opens up other time saving possibilities and just is generally more flexible and faster than the boggling slow save stating on Wii U.
@thinkhector I think the N64 pad has a bit of a different design philosophy than you give it credit for. It's sort of a predecessor to the Wii and Switch control schemata in terms of giving you various different control schemes. A bit more like the Wiimote though than the Switch - the point of the Switch's controls are to put the power of choosing how you play in your hands, while the Wiimote and N64-pad are both designed to allow the developers of various games to choose from a handful of different control schemes.
So the N64 has 3 different basic control modes: Middle & Right, Left & Right, and Left & Middle. You're never supposed to have a third hand; anything designated to the stick you're not generally holding in a given game will be something you can safely press when not in a hectic moment.
For example, Ocarina of Time's minimap is turned on and off by hitting the left shoulder button, which you can safely ignore while in a tight spot in combat etc. The game ignores the D-Pad. But DRx Mario and the various PSX ports don't care for the middle prong, so you can play it with your hands on the left and right and pretend you're holding a SNES controller (as the lack of Z & Joystick essentially turn the N64-pad into).
And Yoshi Story and a few other games let you choose between Classic grip and the "standard" grip there, letting you control either with D or Stick.
Now, left grip is by far the least common control scheme, but it's still used. It's offered as one of many options in GoldenEye, and is a secondary control scheme in most other shooters. The A & B buttons are located where they are so that other games could still access them while you were using Left & Middle controls. Ekans' Hoop Hurl from Pokémon Stadium actually enforces this grip style.
GoldenEye also makes use of dual controller single player, so that you can get dual sticks. This also requires you to reach your thumb to the A&B buttons from the joystick, but it's a predecessor choice to the Dual Shock and GameCube controllers.
I'm not saying that the GameCube controller isn't objectively better than the N64 controller - this is definitely a transitional pad. But one thing the N64 controller did was make sure you never had to worry about too many buttons at any given time. GameCube controller gives you handy access to everything and thus requires you to worry about them. There's a reason the Wiimote stripped things back down to ABCDZ+-HomeStick (with Stick and C on a separate dongle nunchuck and +-Home serving the functionality of Start & Select). Simple is usually better, especially once you start incorporating new ideas. The Joystick built into a gamepad was a new idea, and this required a controller that could accomodate simplicity as well as adapt control schemes that didn't have to rely on it.
Regarding GameCube's button shapes - that was quite innovative. N64 does this thing about button placement - it's hard to forget that Up-C is different from Down-C when they show the triangle in the circle on the screen and the Cs are arranged as such. But B & A are totally confusable, especially since different modern gamepads flip them around.
GameCube had this great idea where A was the biggest button on the control pad, so you knew that was the most important button in the game, the Action button. And then launched with Luigi's Mansion, where the A-button only makes Luigi cry for Mario's name (frankly, a stroke of genius for that game, since it implies that Luigi's go-to action is to ask for Mario's help or at least hoping by calling out his name Mario will hear him and this haunted adventure will all be over. It drives in the themes of the game). Other titles use the A-button more standardly as the most important action you can take, though Zelda as usual mapped the sword to B.
Nintendo is a wealthy company yes. But remember that you're stealing from the hardworking, middle-class employees who made these games. You are just as much a problem as late stage capitalism here.
@Jokerwolf Not all art is available to be experienced for free.
There are museums where you can go and play Ocarina of Time etc if you really want to go. But you need to pay the cost of travel to get there.
You don't have a right to steal the artist's creation because "it's art, and besides, it's worth nothing now." If it wasn't worth anything, people wouldn't buy the game over and over again in various formats. You don't get to decide when it's been enough time that the creator has made all the profits they "should" make off a game before you steal it. You don't hold the license to that work of art.
Look at Jack Kirby's Estate, and how they had to fight for decades to get recognition from Marvel for his co-creator contributions to many of its most famous properties. Look at the billions those properties make now. If the Estate had given up and said, "well, it's been 20 years since he made this comic, nobody's going to pay to read it anymore" they'd be out a lot of money that Disney would be gobbling up.
This is the cost of your train of logic. It HURTS creators. Stop doing that.
@scotty123 And the Nintendo DS had a lifespan of 9 years (and only 6 without a replacement rendering it obsolete) and sold nearly as many units. Your point?
We're coming up on 5 years now with the Switch. Will the Switch have a long enough lifespan to catch up or will it become obsolete before then? I hope not!
@Ultimapunch Ehh, Prime wasn't made to be speed-run, in any case. There's a reason that the in-game awards are for completion, not for time. Retro wanted you to sit down, scan everything, and take your time with the game. In that sense, it's really not a Metroidvania (besides being in 3D). Just because some people found exploits to Any% it faster doesn't make it a good game for speedrunning. It's like jumping from Deku Tree to Ganon's Tower in Ocarina of Time. Sure, you can do it, but few would complain for that being fixed in the mostly superior 3DS version.
In any case, beyond the small minority of Prime fans who are speedrunners of the game, the New Play Control / Trilogy version of Prime is otherwise considered the superior version, as it actually lines up in lore with the rest of the Metroid series and the controls are TIGHT.
I think it would be quite sad if Mercury Steam fixed the Pseudo-Wave Beam and other such exploits, however. 2D Metroidvanias live and die on the ability of fans to find more and more exploits to achieve ever smaller times. Built-in Sequence breaks are much appreciated - they respect the skill and intelligence of the players - but that doesn't mean that new releases of Metroid 1 should dummy out the hidden worlds exploits etc. Any% and NMG% are two different categories of play, and Metroidvanias are beautiful for accommodating both. We just have to acknowledge that Metroid as a 2D series is specifically designed around speedruns while Metroid Prime as a 3D series is not, and therefore the patching of said glitches should be understood as reflective of the intent of the game (fixing issues with an immersive world, rather than telling speedrunners badwrongfun).
Your image of Link lying in the grass, used here and in the other Zelda 2 related articles, is from A Link to the Past (GBA). It’s not the Link from Zelda 1.
@Bomberman64 I thought it was a design choice, to try to make Hyrule feel brighter and cheerier especially for Young Link's time period, to contrast with the darkness. We had had proper backlighting for years by that point - DSi had much better lighting than the original DS, for example.
I do think you could be onto something about the 3D pop and small 240p resolution though.
As for the fog, yeah, I think that's something that was in the original game versions on N64 as a cheat to keep polygons and textures from popping in from a distance. But I also think the designers designed around that to give us a very solemn version of Hyrule that didn't get properly translated when they went more cheery in the 3DS version. I think the first thing Nintendo did when they were emulating the game onto non-CRTs was to remove the fog that played alongside with the CRT fuzziness to create that effect, seeking a crisper looking visual. They've done to for decades now with the emulation.
On the SNES and NES NSO apps, you can change to a pseudo-CRT filter. I wonder how much it would alleviate the issues if they allowed that filter to be available for N64 NSO? I know it wouldn't add the fog back in.
I do remember the game looking a lot crisper on GameCube, but I also still had a CRT back then, so I can't be sure if they removed the fog when they emulated it for GameCube or if they first removed that fog in the Wii virtual console release. It's something that was removed from a number of other N64 games, though.
Can't beat Breath of the Wild Master Mode with just bombs. Enemies heal too quickly vs the bomb app recharge.
Definitely could see someone beating the Normal Mode with just bombs though. I wouldn't want to try it, but I did take out the Hinox on Eventide Isle in my original file by bombing him from above on a cliff he couldn't get to. When I tried to do it in Master Mode he just soaked up the damage and healed it away…
In any case, I'm sure there are some games that you wouldn't need XY for. Maybe you could have fun with NES online using this control scheme, for example! Or any gameboy titles that have been ported to the system (Castlevania, Mana, etc). If Game Boy or eve Game Boy Advance games come to NSO, I'd consider playing them with the N64 controller - AB,LR,D-pad are all you need (and no LR for GB/GBC!).
@Bomberman64 These issues were present in the Wii Virtual Console and Wii U Virtual Console releases as well. I can't recall, but wouldn't be surprised if my gamecube copies of Ocarina of Time (OT+Master Quest; Collector's Edition) had the same mist removal in the translation from N64 to NGC.
This is literally a result of rom carry-over from what Nintendo has on hand. In some cases, it's been proven that their VC roms came from sources that had illegally and slightly modded the roms.
If you want a fixed rom, you'd need to re-rip the game from N64 and work out the kinks in the porting. Nintendo's not going to spend that time and energy when they already have a nice ROM available from their VC days. This is a literal ROM dump. The multiplayer games they had to do some tweaking to allow online functionality, and that's a big change from VC titles (other than Pokémon), but they're only tweaking those because it's literally through NSO. A single player experience is as easy as dumping the rom from the previous $9.99 VC releases.
If you REALLY want Ocarina of Time to recapture the magic of the N64, play it on N64 or lobby Nintendo to do an upscaled port of the 3DS version with the mist and muted colours added back in. Personally, I think the 3DS version is currently the only acceptable way for me to play Ocarina of Time - it's a near perfect replacement for the N64 version - but I would definitely quibble over the bright colours and lack of "fog of war" effects that the game seemed to make use of in a more realistically environmental sense than say something like Morrowind does unrealistically purely to keep the game running at the proper framerate.
@Wexter Oh I agree! My point was it's not too hard to imagine that in the ancient past of Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl was someone with a Camcorder, depending on the timeline shenanigans, even without time travel involved. But the game does seem to involve some form of time travel, and the user says mysterious recording device, suggesting that it's a time traveling camcorder.
Switch Pro controller is essentially the same thing as any other Pro controller from other consoles, just a slightly different button layout and has an NFC reader in the center.
SNES controller is also an industry standard; the PSX controller was a near direct rip of it, and all modern day Pro controllers thus descent from it by way of SNES -> PSX -> Dual Shock -> everyone's Classic/Pro dual-stick controllers.
N64 controller is very special and very different from everything that came before or after it.
The other thing is that SNES and NES are very old games, and Nintendo doesn't value those games nearly as high as they value N64 titles. Look at how expensive N64 titles were priced on the Wii and Wii U virtual consoles: 10 USD a pop. To even populate the initial offerings of NSO+Expansion Pack's N64 lineup, you'd be paying 3 years of expansion pass subscription fees. SNES games were 8 USD each while NES games were 5 USD each. And NES and SNES are a LOT easier to emulate effectively, and those emulators are a lot more rampant.
So pouring out legal ways to get those really old titles for cheap was a great way to get people initially invested, but N64 and onward are worth more money, and N64 in specific has such a unique control scheme that it's just hard to emulate how the game felt at the time. Playing Ocarina of Time or Majora's Mask on GameCube, even, felt weird and wrong because we had this second control stick instead of the C-buttons. To fix those titles and make them work for future consoles, you either need a controller that can reflect the realities of the console they were developed for, or you need to rebuild them from the ground up to incorporate new button layouts and other control features like gyro aiming - like the 3DS remakes did.
There's a reason this is like the first time EVER that Nintendo has released the 64 controller for another console. Even the GameCube controller is rarely resold, and usually only in special Smash promotions because Nintendo recognises the devotion to Melee and its control scheme over all other Smash entries.
Yes, there are N64-style controllers from 3rd parties on the market out there. And yes, they may even control better using them. But Nintendo has a business interest in driving you to play your N64 games on N64 consoles. So the official N64 controller they put out - that you should only be able to buy if you are already an NSO subscriber - is not going to work with your emulated N64 games on your PC. Too bad, so sad!
Honestly, hackers are going to figure out how to rework their emulator software to accept the N64 NSO controller within a year or less. This is a temporary "issue" for pirates only, and one that Nintendo has an active reason NOT to assist with.
And if you want to play non-Nintendo games with an N64 controller because it's somehow the controller you like the most? It wasn't made for those, and you should never assume that it would be compatible. But someone will likely hack it to make it so, if you're willing to wait. Otherwise, go buy a 3rd party clone of the controller. I see about a dozen different versions on Amazon just from a quick google search.
I think it's more likely evidence that they're planning to bring GBA to Expansion pack and that Golden Sun would be in the first wave (presumably alongside the 1st party mainstays).
This is coming from someone who adores Golden Sun and would eagerly eat up either a GS1+2 Remaster on Switch a la Advance Wars (or even a remaster in the style of SE's HD-2D series) OR a full-fledged GS4 on Switch. But even if it's just GS1+2 coming to Expansion pass , I'd be a happy camper. I can play them on my GBA or DS, and I can play them on my Wii U, but I'd love them on my Switch with the bells and whistles of NSO rewind and save state features.
I would never expect a Nintendo controller to work on anything but the Nintendo console it's made for. Same deal for any other company's proprietary controllers.
Waluigi was NEVER a serious contender for Ultimate's Fighter Passes, just like Isaac from Golden Sun was NEVER a serious contender. It just doesn't make sense to upgrade from Assist Trophy or Mii Costume to full Fighter in the same game.
Both are SHOE-INs for the Smash 6 roster, though. As are most of the DLC Mii Costumes - Bomberman, Doom Slayer, Dante, Lloyd Irving, Nakoruru, Dragonborn are all great examples of Smash 6 hopefuls that they can now gather data on based on how many people download and use their Mii Fighter costumes. And Heihachi is a shoe-in as an Echo Fighter of Kazuya in the next title; it just didn't make sense to bring him in this game given that they had already revived his Mii Costume in the first wave of DLC before they knew they would bring in a Tekken character as a Fighter in wave 2.
In any case, being an Assist Trophy or Mii Costume makes you 2x as likely to make it into a future title. Nintendo already is gathering data on you. And Smash 6 IS coming. I wonder if it'll be called Super Smash Bros. MEGA EVOLUTION over here?
Dialga and Celebi both have sent people forward and backwards in time, and Sammy Oak's time period seems about on-scale with the Hisuian region. It's very likely that time travel schenanigans were involved with bringing a recording device back to the 1950s or so (depending on what timeline this is set in; obviously Red & Green were set in 1995 or 1996, but Fire Red and Leaf Green were set in 2003, and Let's GO! takes place like a year or so after Red's adventure but is set in 2018. And the Red in Sun & Moon (which is not the same timeline as Emerald, at the very least) is 5-10 years older than when he had his adventure, but Sun & Moon are set in 2016, suggesting his adventure in Kanto was anywhere from 2006 to 2011. It's very likely that this is an alternate timeline to Let's GO!, Fire Red, AND Red versions, so… time is a just a TAD bit wonky…
I didn't like what they did with the Suit designs (especially the Gravity Suit).
Other than that, the game is solid. The story and dialogue get much maligned but I think in the growing context of the series, Other M is fitting in more and more. Samus is someone who's been through a lot of trauma and survived it. Honestly, Samus Returns' focus on creating a bond between Samus and the Baby really made her traumatic loss of the Baby in Super and its ripple effects upon Other M reawakening her old trauma over Ridley make so much sense.
Other M was unfortunately maligned to the detriment of the series. Dread is a very different sort of game in terms of world design and gameplay, and perhaps the criticism of Other M led to the heights of Dread doing a 180º. But Other M comes from an era of Nintendo doing streamlined, railroaded experiences that are a heck of a lot of fun (Skyward Sword comes from the development same period). We're now back in that Open World genre period at Nintnedo, and that's great too. But just because Breath of the Wild and Dread are amazing and open world and value the intelligence and experimentation and exploration of the players, doesn't mean that Other M and Skyward Sword aren't intensely fun and skill-focused games. They're just honing different skills and bring joy in different ways.
If exploration is everything for you in a Metroid game, then yeah, Other M will feel like the Black Sheep. It's trying to do something different with the franchise, and really almost lives in a different genre entirely. But it's not bad by ANY MEANS.
If he could revive Takamaru's game I'd be all for it. A new installment would probably be just what Takamaru needs to get full Fighter status in Smash 6.
Golden Sun can and should be revived, but not as a reboot, and not by anyone but the Takahashi Bros. over at Camelot. Just give them time to actually make another Golden Sun RPG… Nintendo just crams up all their time with endless Mario Sports titles…
@ap0001 Metroid Dread took me 18 hours to beat on first playthrough, but I hear a lot of people said it took them 10-11 hours. I was a bit obsessive about trying to fill in those dark spots on the map though, which made the escape sequence all the more frustrating since there's not enough time to 100% the last area of the Map and still survive. I think the game will easily give me more than 30 hours, probably going to give me 60 hours before I've unlocked all the gallery rewards…
The thing is that most games don't expect me to sink 100+ hours into the game multiple times. Metroid Dread expects me to sink 4-20 hours at least 4 times. My first normal mode playthrough took 18 hours. I now know that the speedrunning reward goal is completing under 4 hours. To do that will probably mean sinking far more than 4 times as I'll need several playthroughs to get the game down cold enough to shave off my time to get that reward. Metroid games are made to expand and tighten in timeplay.
Arguing that Metroid Dread is "too short" because if you're really good you can make it short is a rather silly argument. The only people making it really short are the people who have honed the tools by playing either Metroid Dread or other Metroid games that play similarly enough time that they've poured enough hours into the game that they shouldn't be arguing it's too short for $60.
Pretty much, $ ≠ time sunk. Value of a game is not solely built on how many hours you can fill with them. The value is obtained from how much fulfillment the time you spend with it is. Metroid games are of course not tiny little microgames but somewhat larger affairs. So they should be robust enough games to accomodate more playtime. But fundamentally, making Metroid so big that you can't speed through it defeats the purpose of 2D Metroid.
There's an argument to be made that it hurts 3D Metroid too - the biggest complaint from Metroid fans towards the Prime subseries is that the games play too slowly. As someone who loves the scanning visor, I adore those games and can sink hundreds of hours into them, scanning everything and exploring every nook and cranny in a single playthrough. But in contrast to 2D Metroid, they don't have a speedrun built-in reward mechanic. They're designed to reward finding everything, but not to reward racing through. 2D Metroid games favour speed over 100% Completion, though both are important goals to strive for. That balance is what gives 2D Metroid longevity even while being a game that I can watch someone like Oatsngoats achieve record times that I could only dream of.
I just succeeded at this Sequence Break chain in my Hard Mode playthrough of Dread.
It was very interesting to see Kraid go down so easily when I got ~50 game overs on him in my Normal Mode playthrough (he felt like a steep difficulty spike in the game, and was a harbinger of the battles to come).
…But I don't think performing the break before Kraid is worthwhile for speedrunning. If you can get your jumps just right, the first half of the sequence break REALLY speeds up Burenia and a few other areas. It's nice to have Grapple before entering Burenia as it allows you to skip MOST of the water in those first runs through the zone, and at least grapple through the water that you can't skip. But after you get Varia, you're RIGHT next to Kraid, and going out of your way to get Grapple and Bombs in Dairon means major time spent in that labyrinthine area and running from that still-active E.M.M.I. when you don't have to. So I'd suggest performing the Grapple sequence break upon returning to Dairon with the Diffusion Beam, and using it to save time in Burenia specifically.
Article is ignoring the downside that Goku can't be in Smash as he doesn't originate in a video game. Sakurai has said this in the past - only video game ORIGINAL characters.
Frankly, I think the style looks a lot less cartoony than BDSP, Let's Go! P&E, and Sword & Shield. But that's just my opinion.
You don't want it, don't buy it. Move along, you've got better things to do with your life than to shout at the comments section of a game you've already decided that you're not going to play.
I hope it's a character that's personally meaningful to Masahiro Sakurai.
Like maybe Magnus (who was an Assist in Smash 4 but is missing from Ultimate), or maybe Waddle Dee?
After all these years of having to implement fighters because Nintendo execs told him so, I hope they let SAKURAI make the character he wants to play in the game as.
Unless we're getting more consoles (PSX, Sega Saturn, Dreamcast, GBA, Gamecube?) that Treasure knows we're getting but we don't. I guess it also could mean we'd get an Arcade Archives release of Radiant Silvergun, or else a separate purchase republishing of Wario World?
Wasn't in DP, only Pt and HGSS. So don't put your bets on it.
I wouldn't be surprised, though, if we got the Battle facility from Sword & Shield back in a copy paste reference to how HGSS used the Pt frontier and ORAS used the XY facility.
@Shiro28 The LN that's published in English has a complete story, but it's not the FULL story.
It's a narrative with a start-middle-&-end, based on the first campaign played by the group. But it leaves a lot of open ended questions that are answered in the later novels, manga, and anime. Unfortunately, no other LNs have yet been published in the west.
So I do recommend watching the OVA animation (13-episode series) first, then either read the LN or the first manga "The Grey Witch."
Then the second LN is adapted as a manga called "The Demon of Flame" which has been fan-translated but has no official translation.
Then the third and fourth LN are adapted solely into the first arc of the second anime "Chronicles of the Heroic Knight" (the 27-episode series).
Then the fifth, sixth, and seventh LNs are adapted into the rest of the 27-episode anime, while the sixth and seventh but without the fifth are adapted into a manga called "Chronicles of Heroic Knights" like the 2nd anime is, but it doesn't wrap up everything the same way the anime does.
Originally a D&D campaign replay, which was adapted into a Light Novel series. Only the first light novel is officially translated for western audiences. The Light Novels were adapted into several Manga and OVA and Anime and Video Games, which are only sometimes in continuity with each other.
For example, if you watch the anime series after watching the OVA, you'll probably be confused because they overlap in some of their content. The OVA adapts Novels 1, 3, 4, 6, and 7. The TV series adapts novels 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. But because the OVA condensed down the later novels and cut out content, there are a lot of inconsistencies between the two. That said, the OVA is generally considered the superior show, even if less accurate to the original D&D games and their light novel adaptations.
There are manga adaptations of novels 1, 2, 6, 7, and 2 of the sidestory light novels - the Deedlit's Tale anthology and the Lady of Pharis prequel.
There is an additional anime called Legend of Crystania that adapts the third sidestory light novel - The Black Knight.
And there's another anime and manga series called Rune Soldier Louie that is set in the same world but on a different continent.
Some of the later light novels are actually adapted from an original game system's replays - the group stopped playing D&D and created their own rules called Sword World RPG that was tailored to the setting of Lodoss.
This game seems most inspired by the 13-episode OVA in terms of art direction.
Oh side note, I said Read Deedlit Monogatari in the middle, but the Deedlit manga itself is an anthology of stories that are told out of order. While the order as written is fine on its own to unveil secrets of the past, the true timeline order goes like this:
Episode 1-3 - A Traveller From the Elf World
takes place immediately before the Shiris and Orson / Sceptre of Domination arc of Chronicles of Heroic Knights.
Episodes 5-7 - Opening the Forest
takes place between the Shiris and Orson arc and the Spark and Neese arc of Chronicles of Heroic Knights, only shortly after the events at Fire Dragon Mountain. Parn is a Free Knight fighting for the freedom of Kanon under Prince Reona/Leonard alongside Hobb and Maar, but Leaf/Leif is a young girl still.
Episode 8 - The Travelling Minstrel Sings
this one takes place immediately after the last three chapters, still during the CoHK timeskip.
Episodes 4 - Fog of Revenge
This one takes place immediately before the Spark and Neese arc of CoHK, and deal with consequences set forward by the events of Episodes 5-8. It also relies HEAVILY upon the story told in the "Demon of Flame" light novel and manga series, despite that taking place over a decade prior. The CPM Manga translated book claims there's also an Episode 5 (The End) but this is a mistake - Episode 5 is in volume 2. The End is written at the end of Episode 4.
Episode 9 - The Elves of the Forest of No Return
flashbacks take place before The Grey Witch. Framing device, however, takes place after Parn becomes the Knight of Lodoss, putting this at the very end. Thematically too, it fits to be the final tale, telling us how Deedlit became interested in the human world.
As you can see, the more complex way of consuming the series, then would be:
The Lady of Pharis (manga)
Lodoss War SFC parts I & II (video game)
The Grey Witch (LN, manga, & Lodoss War SFC part III)
Demon of Flame (manga)
Deedlit's Tale Episodes 1-3 (manga)
Chronicles of Heroic Knights episodes 1-8 (anime)
Deedlit's Tale Episodes 5-8 (manga)
Deedlit's Tale Episodes 4 (manga)
Chronicles of Heroic Knights episodes 9-27 (anime)
Legend of Crystania (anime)
Deedlit's Tale Episode 9
With "Rune Soldier Louie" anywhere in between, as it relies on your familiarity with Lodoss' mythology but is otherwise unrelated, taking place in Alecrast. Though I still think Lady of Pharis makes more sense if you read it AFTER Grey Witch. Maybe the best way is to watch the OVA first and get a sense of who Beld and Fahn are?
I also recommend Record of Grancrest War as it's by the same author & original DM of the Lodoss group. It's a completely different universe that feels more like a Fire Emblem game, though.
Just stay away from the completely unrelated Record of Agarest War…
@Themagusx1 I do too! I just wish they would do the same for the rest of the LNs. What I wouldn't give for translations…
@Teksetter Why thank you! Though I may have to call you and @Ralizah sempai in this regards; I vaguely recall stumbling onto Lodoss in the 90s, but I didn't rediscover it until the mid-00s, so my earliest copy is a bootlegged DVD of the OVA that my folks got me for a birthday since I had found the show online and was obsessed and wanted to support it and own it. Didn't know it was bootlegged until booting it up and discovering that the menu options, next episode credits, and menu options were all messed up.
The OVA is truly beautiful, mind you. I didn't include it above because it frankly doesn't fit canon as it's trying to condense down the story of all the main Parn-involved novels into 13 episodes. But if someone could only invest their time in ONE piece of the Lodoss franchise, I'd direct them to the OVA.
And I still think the OVA is the place to start with the franchise, in the same way that I'd suggest folks watch the unaltered original Star Wars trilogy if they can find it before going back to Episode I and watching the entire series in chronological order (using the special editions once they finish Rogue One, etc). I STILL find reviews of Chronicles of Heroic Knights where the reviewers are driven out of their mind why they "retconned" the OVA, as if the OVA was the canon and everything else had to fit it. The OVA is gorgeous and thematically captures the "feel" of Lodoss more than the TV series. It just makes choices in the name of streamlining the plot that make sequels that actually adapt the novels and manga in a much closer fashion to be very difficult to put out.
By the way, this game is a Low Fit for the Metroidvania genre, at least according to the Metroidvania Review. It's very classically a Team Ladybug style "Metroidvania" - they've sort of built their own style of game that is Metroidvania-adjacent.
Record of Lodoss War is top tier fantasy. I'll happily support anything they put out for Switch. So glad it's coming to Nintendo.
Is this the first Lodoss game on Nintendo since the Super Famicom CRPG? That one was very difficult but interesting as it featured elements of the Lady of Pharis prequel series, The Grey Witch original novel/manga/anime, and a new storyline that bridged the two tales.
Btw, if you want to get the most coherent storyline from Lodoss, this is what I recommend:
1. Read "The Grey Witch" manga or LN (novel was recently republished and in English for the first time). 2. Read "The Demon of Flame" manga (never officially published in the west, but it's a critical story link that is referenced later on. 3. Watch the first arc of the "Chronicles of Heroic Knights" anime, ending with the Scepter of Domination conflict. 4. Read "Deedlit's Tale" manga. 5. Watch the anime or read the manga of "Rune Soldier Louie." 6. Read "Lady of Pharis" manga. 7. Watch the latter arc of "Chronicles of Heroic Knights" anime, the one about Spark and Little Neese. 8. Watch "Legend of Crystania."
You could read the manga of CoHK instead of the latter arc of the anime, and it's probably slightly more canonical, but it doesn't connect up with Crystania to my understanding, and it doesn't resolve the conflict with Karla and it leaves Parn's group as second-tier characters to focus on Spark and Neese. I THINK the most recent light novels focused on Spark as the Duke of Marmo build more so on the story told in the manga, though, but those are impossibly hard to find, let alone to find a translation thereof.
I think they could come back next year and announce Game Boy & Game Boy Color games for the standard tier and Game Boy Advance & PC-Engine games for the Expansion Pack tier.
It's a glitch because Nintendo didn't intend Link to be able to fly awkwardly like this while smuggling his bow. It's not supposed to happen, just like flying halfway across the plateau because you shield bopped a Bokoblin on the head isn't supposed to happen, just like getting into a shrine from the side by spinjumping with an axe isn't supposed to happen.
They're not hacks, but they're definitely Any% territory of gameplay - exploiting glitches in the game that were never ironed out.
If you're familiar with Pokémon, it's like getting over 100 Master Balls or Rare Candies from fighting MissingNo. on Cinnabar Island, or catching Mew just outside of Lavender Town because you flew away from a Slowpoke trainer with the exact right stats. It's not supposed to be in the game, but it is because of the programming of the game and loopholes that were never closed. It's a cool thing you can do but it's more than an unintended cool thing you can do with the physics of the game, it's a cool thing you can do that breaks the physics of the game and functions contrary to the intended laws. If Nintendo had known about it during development, they would have bugged it out.
I still know nothing about the plot of game, after all these years, just that you can be good or bad and it affects the ending, I think?
I am so glad I can play the original game ported to Switch because I really don't want to get another console at this time with the remaster coming - I just don't need that. Maybe when TES VI comes out I'll consider a gaming PC. But I don't need an XBSX or PS5. So it's really nice that we can get ports of original games at the same time as other people are getting remasters.
On the converse, I love that Zelda Ocarina of Time & Majora's Mask are coming in their N64 forms to NSO, but can we still have HD versions of the 3DS remakes, by the same logic as these two separate KOTOR releases?
@Don I imagine they were just showing Day 1 and the first few waves of updates. There will be more. They won't leave the app lacking DK64, even if it's the inferior DKC game.
Comments 800
Re: Fans Have Created A Playable Ocarina of Time - Space World '97 Experience
Fascinating that one of the beta chests in these demos (it's right at the bombing of a Dodongo Baby) is the same chest design they reused instead of big wooden chests for major items in Majora's Mask.
Re: Best Pokémon Games Of All Time
Some innane nostalgia glasses are being worn here.
People are ranking superior remakes lower their the deeply flawed games they're remaking just because they're remakes (other than Heart Gold and Soul Silver, which deservedly claim the #1 spot for many reasons, but REALLY are also in need of a re-remake…).
There's no reason so many of the modern games should be so far down the list compared to early titles if we're comparing one-to-one. You can't compare them on innovative merits because you're literally comparing entries within the same series. So you've got to rank them on their playability, and almost every generation has improved on its predecessors.
Re: Talking Point: Is There A Better-Looking 20-Year-Old Game Than Star Wars: Rogue Squadron II?
Metroid Prime will be finer vintage next year, as will The Wind Waker.
Until then? No.
Re: Nintendo Reminds Us Of Switch's Upcoming Releases, And 2022's Looking Pretty Mighty
@Mauzuri I've been taking to calling it Breath of the Sky in absence of an official title.
Re: Steam Deck, Valve's Switch-Like Handheld PC, Gets Pushed Back To 2022
@victordamazio
Steam Deck lacks Mario, Zelda, Animal Crossing, Smash Bros., Fire Emblem, and Metroid.
It's no different than any other time. Nintendo's most valuable product is its IP. There's a reason that Starfield, The Elder Scrolls VI, and Fallout V will only be on Xbox and Windows. Microsoft has learned the valuable lesson that Nintendo has always known: You want people to buy your hardware, you make sure they have to buy it to play your software.
Steam Deck will never be able to compete with Switch because, while it has an excellent library, its games are playable on various other consoles, while 90% of the Switch's popular titles are exclusive to the Switch. They can do the Switch concept "better" in terms of graphical fidelity etc, but they can't replicate the trademark Nintendo powerhouses that are their franchises.
Nintendo is operating like Disney. It's ALL about IP. if Disney+ content was on Netflix and Hulu, would you really pay separately for it? Valve is competing against an audience that can already play their Steam games on their Windows PCs, and also against Xbox AND PlayStation. Nintendo is off in their own corner doing their own thing. Microsoft is trying to become more like Nintendo by buying up IP and making them exclusive. Valve just doesn't have that in their repertoire.
Re: Every Nintendo Switch Online N64 Game Ranked
After playing OT on NSO, I’m honestly looking forward to revisiting MM 64-style for the first time for real since the Wii era.
The 3DS is a near-perfect remake that improved upon the game with two glorious fishing ponds and better saving mechanics and some other key fixes, but the original has some quirk and charm to it that like with OT3D, wasn’t fully captured with the graphical and mechanical upgrades.
Honestly, if it weren’t for the issue of saving, I think I’d play MM a lot more. But the multisavestate functionality of NSO64 really fixes the fundamental issue with MM - “I can’t quit, I’ll lose all my progress if I don’t get to a save point!”
Mind you, Wii U had single save states in their emulated VC Roms, but multi opens up other time saving possibilities and just is generally more flexible and faster than the boggling slow save stating on Wii U.
Re: Rumour: The Original Final Fantasy Tactics Might Be Getting A Remaster
Can they please finally bring it to Switch?
The game has had multiple sequels on Nintendo handhelds but only ever released on PlayStation and its derivatives…
Re: The Switch N64 Controller Doesn't Play Nice With Everything, For Now
@thinkhector I think the N64 pad has a bit of a different design philosophy than you give it credit for. It's sort of a predecessor to the Wii and Switch control schemata in terms of giving you various different control schemes. A bit more like the Wiimote though than the Switch - the point of the Switch's controls are to put the power of choosing how you play in your hands, while the Wiimote and N64-pad are both designed to allow the developers of various games to choose from a handful of different control schemes.
So the N64 has 3 different basic control modes: Middle & Right, Left & Right, and Left & Middle. You're never supposed to have a third hand; anything designated to the stick you're not generally holding in a given game will be something you can safely press when not in a hectic moment.
For example, Ocarina of Time's minimap is turned on and off by hitting the left shoulder button, which you can safely ignore while in a tight spot in combat etc. The game ignores the D-Pad. But DRx Mario and the various PSX ports don't care for the middle prong, so you can play it with your hands on the left and right and pretend you're holding a SNES controller (as the lack of Z & Joystick essentially turn the N64-pad into).
And Yoshi Story and a few other games let you choose between Classic grip and the "standard" grip there, letting you control either with D or Stick.
Now, left grip is by far the least common control scheme, but it's still used. It's offered as one of many options in GoldenEye, and is a secondary control scheme in most other shooters. The A & B buttons are located where they are so that other games could still access them while you were using Left & Middle controls. Ekans' Hoop Hurl from Pokémon Stadium actually enforces this grip style.
GoldenEye also makes use of dual controller single player, so that you can get dual sticks. This also requires you to reach your thumb to the A&B buttons from the joystick, but it's a predecessor choice to the Dual Shock and GameCube controllers.
I'm not saying that the GameCube controller isn't objectively better than the N64 controller - this is definitely a transitional pad. But one thing the N64 controller did was make sure you never had to worry about too many buttons at any given time. GameCube controller gives you handy access to everything and thus requires you to worry about them. There's a reason the Wiimote stripped things back down to ABCDZ+-HomeStick (with Stick and C on a separate dongle nunchuck and +-Home serving the functionality of Start & Select). Simple is usually better, especially once you start incorporating new ideas. The Joystick built into a gamepad was a new idea, and this required a controller that could accomodate simplicity as well as adapt control schemes that didn't have to rely on it.
Regarding GameCube's button shapes - that was quite innovative. N64 does this thing about button placement - it's hard to forget that Up-C is different from Down-C when they show the triangle in the circle on the screen and the Cs are arranged as such. But B & A are totally confusable, especially since different modern gamepads flip them around.
GameCube had this great idea where A was the biggest button on the control pad, so you knew that was the most important button in the game, the Action button. And then launched with Luigi's Mansion, where the A-button only makes Luigi cry for Mario's name (frankly, a stroke of genius for that game, since it implies that Luigi's go-to action is to ask for Mario's help or at least hoping by calling out his name Mario will hear him and this haunted adventure will all be over. It drives in the themes of the game). Other titles use the A-button more standardly as the most important action you can take, though Zelda as usual mapped the sword to B.
Re: The Switch N64 Controller Doesn't Play Nice With Everything, For Now
@Jokerwolf Who's filthy rich?
Nintendo is a wealthy company yes. But remember that you're stealing from the hardworking, middle-class employees who made these games. You are just as much a problem as late stage capitalism here.
Re: The Switch N64 Controller Doesn't Play Nice With Everything, For Now
@Jokerwolf Not all art is available to be experienced for free.
There are museums where you can go and play Ocarina of Time etc if you really want to go. But you need to pay the cost of travel to get there.
You don't have a right to steal the artist's creation because "it's art, and besides, it's worth nothing now." If it wasn't worth anything, people wouldn't buy the game over and over again in various formats. You don't get to decide when it's been enough time that the creator has made all the profits they "should" make off a game before you steal it. You don't hold the license to that work of art.
Look at Jack Kirby's Estate, and how they had to fight for decades to get recognition from Marvel for his co-creator contributions to many of its most famous properties. Look at the billions those properties make now. If the Estate had given up and said, "well, it's been 20 years since he made this comic, nobody's going to pay to read it anymore" they'd be out a lot of money that Disney would be gobbling up.
This is the cost of your train of logic. It HURTS creators. Stop doing that.
Re: Nintendo Switch Has Now Sold 92.87 Million Units, And It's Catching The Wii
@scotty123 And the Nintendo DS had a lifespan of 9 years (and only 6 without a replacement rendering it obsolete) and sold nearly as many units. Your point?
We're coming up on 5 years now with the Switch. Will the Switch have a long enough lifespan to catch up or will it become obsolete before then? I hope not!
Re: Nintendo Switch Has Now Sold 92.87 Million Units, And It's Catching The Wii
I just wonder if Switch will ever outsell the DS and PS2. I feel like those are the yardsticks Nintendo REALLY wants to measure it by.
Re: Metroid Dread Version 1.0.2 Is Now Available, Here Are The Full Patch Notes
@Ultimapunch Ehh, Prime wasn't made to be speed-run, in any case. There's a reason that the in-game awards are for completion, not for time. Retro wanted you to sit down, scan everything, and take your time with the game. In that sense, it's really not a Metroidvania (besides being in 3D). Just because some people found exploits to Any% it faster doesn't make it a good game for speedrunning. It's like jumping from Deku Tree to Ganon's Tower in Ocarina of Time. Sure, you can do it, but few would complain for that being fixed in the mostly superior 3DS version.
In any case, beyond the small minority of Prime fans who are speedrunners of the game, the New Play Control / Trilogy version of Prime is otherwise considered the superior version, as it actually lines up in lore with the rest of the Metroid series and the controls are TIGHT.
I think it would be quite sad if Mercury Steam fixed the Pseudo-Wave Beam and other such exploits, however. 2D Metroidvanias live and die on the ability of fans to find more and more exploits to achieve ever smaller times. Built-in Sequence breaks are much appreciated - they respect the skill and intelligence of the players - but that doesn't mean that new releases of Metroid 1 should dummy out the hidden worlds exploits etc. Any% and NMG% are two different categories of play, and Metroidvanias are beautiful for accommodating both. We just have to acknowledge that Metroid as a 2D series is specifically designed around speedruns while Metroid Prime as a 3D series is not, and therefore the patching of said glitches should be understood as reflective of the intent of the game (fixing issues with an immersive world, rather than telling speedrunners badwrongfun).
Re: Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
Your image of Link lying in the grass, used here and in the other Zelda 2 related articles, is from A Link to the Past (GBA). It’s not the Link from Zelda 1.
Re: Bloodstained Is Getting A Special Character Collab In The Next Update
Highly doubt it would be someone from Castlevania, given that Konami is probably still irked that Iga went and made an Igavania without them.
Re: Soapbox: Nintendo's N64 Emulation Is Serviceable, But Treasured Memories Deserve Better
@Bomberman64 I thought it was a design choice, to try to make Hyrule feel brighter and cheerier especially for Young Link's time period, to contrast with the darkness. We had had proper backlighting for years by that point - DSi had much better lighting than the original DS, for example.
I do think you could be onto something about the 3D pop and small 240p resolution though.
As for the fog, yeah, I think that's something that was in the original game versions on N64 as a cheat to keep polygons and textures from popping in from a distance. But I also think the designers designed around that to give us a very solemn version of Hyrule that didn't get properly translated when they went more cheery in the 3DS version. I think the first thing Nintendo did when they were emulating the game onto non-CRTs was to remove the fog that played alongside with the CRT fuzziness to create that effect, seeking a crisper looking visual. They've done to for decades now with the emulation.
On the SNES and NES NSO apps, you can change to a pseudo-CRT filter. I wonder how much it would alleviate the issues if they allowed that filter to be available for N64 NSO? I know it wouldn't add the fog back in.
I do remember the game looking a lot crisper on GameCube, but I also still had a CRT back then, so I can't be sure if they removed the fog when they emulated it for GameCube or if they first removed that fog in the Wii virtual console release. It's something that was removed from a number of other N64 games, though.
Re: Video: The Nintendo 64 Controller Works With Any Switch Game (Kinda)
Can't beat Breath of the Wild Master Mode with just bombs. Enemies heal too quickly vs the bomb app recharge.
Definitely could see someone beating the Normal Mode with just bombs though. I wouldn't want to try it, but I did take out the Hinox on Eventide Isle in my original file by bombing him from above on a cliff he couldn't get to. When I tried to do it in Master Mode he just soaked up the damage and healed it away…
In any case, I'm sure there are some games that you wouldn't need XY for. Maybe you could have fun with NES online using this control scheme, for example! Or any gameboy titles that have been ported to the system (Castlevania, Mana, etc). If Game Boy or eve Game Boy Advance games come to NSO, I'd consider playing them with the N64 controller - AB,LR,D-pad are all you need (and no LR for GB/GBC!).
Re: Soapbox: Nintendo's N64 Emulation Is Serviceable, But Treasured Memories Deserve Better
@Bomberman64 These issues were present in the Wii Virtual Console and Wii U Virtual Console releases as well. I can't recall, but wouldn't be surprised if my gamecube copies of Ocarina of Time (OT+Master Quest; Collector's Edition) had the same mist removal in the translation from N64 to NGC.
This is literally a result of rom carry-over from what Nintendo has on hand. In some cases, it's been proven that their VC roms came from sources that had illegally and slightly modded the roms.
If you want a fixed rom, you'd need to re-rip the game from N64 and work out the kinks in the porting. Nintendo's not going to spend that time and energy when they already have a nice ROM available from their VC days. This is a literal ROM dump. The multiplayer games they had to do some tweaking to allow online functionality, and that's a big change from VC titles (other than Pokémon), but they're only tweaking those because it's literally through NSO. A single player experience is as easy as dumping the rom from the previous $9.99 VC releases.
If you REALLY want Ocarina of Time to recapture the magic of the N64, play it on N64 or lobby Nintendo to do an upscaled port of the 3DS version with the mist and muted colours added back in. Personally, I think the 3DS version is currently the only acceptable way for me to play Ocarina of Time - it's a near perfect replacement for the N64 version - but I would definitely quibble over the bright colours and lack of "fog of war" effects that the game seemed to make use of in a more realistically environmental sense than say something like Morrowind does unrealistically purely to keep the game running at the proper framerate.
Re: Hisuian Zorua And Zoroark Revealed In Mysterious Pokémon Legends: Arceus Video
@Wexter Oh I agree! My point was it's not too hard to imagine that in the ancient past of Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl was someone with a Camcorder, depending on the timeline shenanigans, even without time travel involved. But the game does seem to involve some form of time travel, and the user says mysterious recording device, suggesting that it's a time traveling camcorder.
Re: The Switch N64 Controller Doesn't Play Nice With Everything, For Now
@electrolite77 This isn't odd.
Switch Pro controller is essentially the same thing as any other Pro controller from other consoles, just a slightly different button layout and has an NFC reader in the center.
SNES controller is also an industry standard; the PSX controller was a near direct rip of it, and all modern day Pro controllers thus descent from it by way of SNES -> PSX -> Dual Shock -> everyone's Classic/Pro dual-stick controllers.
N64 controller is very special and very different from everything that came before or after it.
The other thing is that SNES and NES are very old games, and Nintendo doesn't value those games nearly as high as they value N64 titles. Look at how expensive N64 titles were priced on the Wii and Wii U virtual consoles: 10 USD a pop. To even populate the initial offerings of NSO+Expansion Pack's N64 lineup, you'd be paying 3 years of expansion pass subscription fees. SNES games were 8 USD each while NES games were 5 USD each. And NES and SNES are a LOT easier to emulate effectively, and those emulators are a lot more rampant.
So pouring out legal ways to get those really old titles for cheap was a great way to get people initially invested, but N64 and onward are worth more money, and N64 in specific has such a unique control scheme that it's just hard to emulate how the game felt at the time. Playing Ocarina of Time or Majora's Mask on GameCube, even, felt weird and wrong because we had this second control stick instead of the C-buttons. To fix those titles and make them work for future consoles, you either need a controller that can reflect the realities of the console they were developed for, or you need to rebuild them from the ground up to incorporate new button layouts and other control features like gyro aiming - like the 3DS remakes did.
There's a reason this is like the first time EVER that Nintendo has released the 64 controller for another console. Even the GameCube controller is rarely resold, and usually only in special Smash promotions because Nintendo recognises the devotion to Melee and its control scheme over all other Smash entries.
Yes, there are N64-style controllers from 3rd parties on the market out there. And yes, they may even control better using them. But Nintendo has a business interest in driving you to play your N64 games on N64 consoles. So the official N64 controller they put out - that you should only be able to buy if you are already an NSO subscriber - is not going to work with your emulated N64 games on your PC. Too bad, so sad!
Honestly, hackers are going to figure out how to rework their emulator software to accept the N64 NSO controller within a year or less. This is a temporary "issue" for pirates only, and one that Nintendo has an active reason NOT to assist with.
And if you want to play non-Nintendo games with an N64 controller because it's somehow the controller you like the most? It wasn't made for those, and you should never assume that it would be compatible. But someone will likely hack it to make it so, if you're willing to wait. Otherwise, go buy a 3rd party clone of the controller. I see about a dozen different versions on Amazon just from a quick google search.
Re: Random: Hey, A Switch Online N64 Game Description Mentions Golden Sun
I think it's more likely evidence that they're planning to bring GBA to Expansion pack and that Golden Sun would be in the first wave (presumably alongside the 1st party mainstays).
This is coming from someone who adores Golden Sun and would eagerly eat up either a GS1+2 Remaster on Switch a la Advance Wars (or even a remaster in the style of SE's HD-2D series) OR a full-fledged GS4 on Switch. But even if it's just GS1+2 coming to Expansion pass , I'd be a happy camper. I can play them on my GBA or DS, and I can play them on my Wii U, but I'd love them on my Switch with the bells and whistles of NSO rewind and save state features.
Re: Random: Forget Dread, It's All About Metroid: Other M On Twitter Right Now
@bound4earth That's pretty close-minded. In any case, if you're not willing to engage, then don't engage. Simple as that.
Re: The Switch N64 Controller Doesn't Play Nice With Everything, For Now
I would never expect a Nintendo controller to work on anything but the Nintendo console it's made for. Same deal for any other company's proprietary controllers.
You want more flexibility? Buy third party.
Doh.
Re: Sakurai Reveals How A Chance Encounter Led To Sora In Smash Bros. Ultimate
@buggysdad
Waluigi was NEVER a serious contender for Ultimate's Fighter Passes, just like Isaac from Golden Sun was NEVER a serious contender. It just doesn't make sense to upgrade from Assist Trophy or Mii Costume to full Fighter in the same game.
Both are SHOE-INs for the Smash 6 roster, though. As are most of the DLC Mii Costumes - Bomberman, Doom Slayer, Dante, Lloyd Irving, Nakoruru, Dragonborn are all great examples of Smash 6 hopefuls that they can now gather data on based on how many people download and use their Mii Fighter costumes. And Heihachi is a shoe-in as an Echo Fighter of Kazuya in the next title; it just didn't make sense to bring him in this game given that they had already revived his Mii Costume in the first wave of DLC before they knew they would bring in a Tekken character as a Fighter in wave 2.
In any case, being an Assist Trophy or Mii Costume makes you 2x as likely to make it into a future title. Nintendo already is gathering data on you. And Smash 6 IS coming. I wonder if it'll be called Super Smash Bros. MEGA EVOLUTION over here?
Re: Hisuian Zorua And Zoroark Revealed In Mysterious Pokémon Legends: Arceus Video
@mariomaster96 It's a strange device.
Dialga and Celebi both have sent people forward and backwards in time, and Sammy Oak's time period seems about on-scale with the Hisuian region. It's very likely that time travel schenanigans were involved with bringing a recording device back to the 1950s or so (depending on what timeline this is set in; obviously Red & Green were set in 1995 or 1996, but Fire Red and Leaf Green were set in 2003, and Let's GO! takes place like a year or so after Red's adventure but is set in 2018. And the Red in Sun & Moon (which is not the same timeline as Emerald, at the very least) is 5-10 years older than when he had his adventure, but Sun & Moon are set in 2016, suggesting his adventure in Kanto was anywhere from 2006 to 2011. It's very likely that this is an alternate timeline to Let's GO!, Fire Red, AND Red versions, so… time is a just a TAD bit wonky…
Re: Random: Forget Dread, It's All About Metroid: Other M On Twitter Right Now
I didn't like what they did with the Suit designs (especially the Gravity Suit).
Other than that, the game is solid. The story and dialogue get much maligned but I think in the growing context of the series, Other M is fitting in more and more. Samus is someone who's been through a lot of trauma and survived it. Honestly, Samus Returns' focus on creating a bond between Samus and the Baby really made her traumatic loss of the Baby in Super and its ripple effects upon Other M reawakening her old trauma over Ridley make so much sense.
Other M was unfortunately maligned to the detriment of the series. Dread is a very different sort of game in terms of world design and gameplay, and perhaps the criticism of Other M led to the heights of Dread doing a 180º. But Other M comes from an era of Nintendo doing streamlined, railroaded experiences that are a heck of a lot of fun (Skyward Sword comes from the development same period). We're now back in that Open World genre period at Nintnedo, and that's great too. But just because Breath of the Wild and Dread are amazing and open world and value the intelligence and experimentation and exploration of the players, doesn't mean that Other M and Skyward Sword aren't intensely fun and skill-focused games. They're just honing different skills and bring joy in different ways.
If exploration is everything for you in a Metroid game, then yeah, Other M will feel like the Black Sheep. It's trying to do something different with the franchise, and really almost lives in a different genre entirely. But it's not bad by ANY MEANS.
Re: Suda51 Says It Would Be "Really Cool" To Reboot Or Remake Nintendo's Older IP
If he could revive Takamaru's game I'd be all for it. A new installment would probably be just what Takamaru needs to get full Fighter status in Smash 6.
Golden Sun can and should be revived, but not as a reboot, and not by anyone but the Takahashi Bros. over at Camelot. Just give them time to actually make another Golden Sun RPG… Nintendo just crams up all their time with endless Mario Sports titles…
Re: Talking Point: How Many Hours Is A 'Short' Game For You?
@ap0001 Metroid Dread took me 18 hours to beat on first playthrough, but I hear a lot of people said it took them 10-11 hours. I was a bit obsessive about trying to fill in those dark spots on the map though, which made the escape sequence all the more frustrating since there's not enough time to 100% the last area of the Map and still survive. I think the game will easily give me more than 30 hours, probably going to give me 60 hours before I've unlocked all the gallery rewards…
Re: Talking Point: How Many Hours Is A 'Short' Game For You?
Yeah it really depends on the game.
The thing is that most games don't expect me to sink 100+ hours into the game multiple times. Metroid Dread expects me to sink 4-20 hours at least 4 times. My first normal mode playthrough took 18 hours. I now know that the speedrunning reward goal is completing under 4 hours. To do that will probably mean sinking far more than 4 times as I'll need several playthroughs to get the game down cold enough to shave off my time to get that reward. Metroid games are made to expand and tighten in timeplay.
Arguing that Metroid Dread is "too short" because if you're really good you can make it short is a rather silly argument. The only people making it really short are the people who have honed the tools by playing either Metroid Dread or other Metroid games that play similarly enough time that they've poured enough hours into the game that they shouldn't be arguing it's too short for $60.
Pretty much, $ ≠ time sunk. Value of a game is not solely built on how many hours you can fill with them. The value is obtained from how much fulfillment the time you spend with it is. Metroid games are of course not tiny little microgames but somewhat larger affairs. So they should be robust enough games to accomodate more playtime. But fundamentally, making Metroid so big that you can't speed through it defeats the purpose of 2D Metroid.
There's an argument to be made that it hurts 3D Metroid too - the biggest complaint from Metroid fans towards the Prime subseries is that the games play too slowly. As someone who loves the scanning visor, I adore those games and can sink hundreds of hours into them, scanning everything and exploring every nook and cranny in a single playthrough. But in contrast to 2D Metroid, they don't have a speedrun built-in reward mechanic. They're designed to reward finding everything, but not to reward racing through. 2D Metroid games favour speed over 100% Completion, though both are important goals to strive for. That balance is what gives 2D Metroid longevity even while being a game that I can watch someone like Oatsngoats achieve record times that I could only dream of.
Re: Metroid Dread: How To Get The Grapple Beam And Morph Ball Bomb Early
I just succeeded at this Sequence Break chain in my Hard Mode playthrough of Dread.
It was very interesting to see Kraid go down so easily when I got ~50 game overs on him in my Normal Mode playthrough (he felt like a steep difficulty spike in the game, and was a harbinger of the battles to come).
…But I don't think performing the break before Kraid is worthwhile for speedrunning. If you can get your jumps just right, the first half of the sequence break REALLY speeds up Burenia and a few other areas. It's nice to have Grapple before entering Burenia as it allows you to skip MOST of the water in those first runs through the zone, and at least grapple through the water that you can't skip. But after you get Varia, you're RIGHT next to Kraid, and going out of your way to get Grapple and Bombs in Dairon means major time spent in that labyrinthine area and running from that still-active E.M.M.I. when you don't have to. So I'd suggest performing the Grapple sequence break upon returning to Dairon with the Diffusion Beam, and using it to save time in Burenia specifically.
Re: Review: Metroid Dread - Quite Possibly The Best Metroid Game Ever Made
YUS! getting my copy 8am on Friday at Nintendo NY. Got a reserved Warp Pass place in line.
Re: Dragon Quest X Offline Has Been Confirmed For Switch, Launches In Japan Next February
Great. MMO without the MO?
Re: Feature: So, Who Will Be The Final Fighter In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate?
Article is ignoring the downside that Goku can't be in Smash as he doesn't originate in a video game. Sakurai has said this in the past - only video game ORIGINAL characters.
Re: New Pokémon Legends: Arceus Trailer Reveals Brand New Pokémon, Kleavor
@Aruvein haters gonna hate
Frankly, I think the style looks a lot less cartoony than BDSP, Let's Go! P&E, and Sword & Shield. But that's just my opinion.
You don't want it, don't buy it. Move along, you've got better things to do with your life than to shout at the comments section of a game you've already decided that you're not going to play.
Re: Gallery: Nintendo Reflects On Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Ahead Of The Final Fighter Reveal
I hope it's a character that's personally meaningful to Masahiro Sakurai.
Like maybe Magnus (who was an Assist in Smash 4 but is missing from Ultimate), or maybe Waddle Dee?
After all these years of having to implement fighters because Nintendo execs told him so, I hope they let SAKURAI make the character he wants to play in the game as.
Re: Japanese Developer Treasure Teases Future Releases For Switch Online
This literally means one or more of:
Alien Soldier
Light Crusader
Mischief Maker
Bangai-O
Unless we're getting more consoles (PSX, Sega Saturn, Dreamcast, GBA, Gamecube?) that Treasure knows we're getting but we don't. I guess it also could mean we'd get an Arcade Archives release of Radiant Silvergun, or else a separate purchase republishing of Wario World?
Re: Random: The New Trailer For Pokémon Diamond & Pearl Confirms What We All Knew About Bidoof
They also confirmed that this isn't YOUR Bibarel that needs to know the HMs but a wild one. So RIP double Bibarel teams…
Re: Pokémon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl Trailer Shows New Pokétch HM App, Poffins And More
@NinjaWaddleDee
Wasn't in DP, only Pt and HGSS. So don't put your bets on it.
I wouldn't be surprised, though, if we got the Battle facility from Sword & Shield back in a copy paste reference to how HGSS used the Pt frontier and ORAS used the XY facility.
Re: Record Of Lodoss War: Deedlit In Wonder Labyrinth Is Coming To Switch This Year
@Shiro28 The LN that's published in English has a complete story, but it's not the FULL story.
It's a narrative with a start-middle-&-end, based on the first campaign played by the group. But it leaves a lot of open ended questions that are answered in the later novels, manga, and anime. Unfortunately, no other LNs have yet been published in the west.
So I do recommend watching the OVA animation (13-episode series) first, then either read the LN or the first manga "The Grey Witch."
Then the second LN is adapted as a manga called "The Demon of Flame" which has been fan-translated but has no official translation.
Then the third and fourth LN are adapted solely into the first arc of the second anime "Chronicles of the Heroic Knight" (the 27-episode series).
Then the fifth, sixth, and seventh LNs are adapted into the rest of the 27-episode anime, while the sixth and seventh but without the fifth are adapted into a manga called "Chronicles of Heroic Knights" like the 2nd anime is, but it doesn't wrap up everything the same way the anime does.
Re: Record Of Lodoss War: Deedlit In Wonder Labyrinth Is Coming To Switch This Year
@Shiro28
13 episode OVA, 27 episode TV series.
Originally a D&D campaign replay, which was adapted into a Light Novel series. Only the first light novel is officially translated for western audiences. The Light Novels were adapted into several Manga and OVA and Anime and Video Games, which are only sometimes in continuity with each other.
For example, if you watch the anime series after watching the OVA, you'll probably be confused because they overlap in some of their content. The OVA adapts Novels 1, 3, 4, 6, and 7. The TV series adapts novels 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. But because the OVA condensed down the later novels and cut out content, there are a lot of inconsistencies between the two. That said, the OVA is generally considered the superior show, even if less accurate to the original D&D games and their light novel adaptations.
There are manga adaptations of novels 1, 2, 6, 7, and 2 of the sidestory light novels - the Deedlit's Tale anthology and the Lady of Pharis prequel.
There is an additional anime called Legend of Crystania that adapts the third sidestory light novel - The Black Knight.
And there's another anime and manga series called Rune Soldier Louie that is set in the same world but on a different continent.
Some of the later light novels are actually adapted from an original game system's replays - the group stopped playing D&D and created their own rules called Sword World RPG that was tailored to the setting of Lodoss.
This game seems most inspired by the 13-episode OVA in terms of art direction.
Re: Rumour: Game Boy And Game Boy Color Games Still Expected For Switch Online
Yeah, this is what I expect, with GBA games specific for the Expansion Pack.
Re: Record Of Lodoss War: Deedlit In Wonder Labyrinth Is Coming To Switch This Year
@Teksetter
Oh side note, I said Read Deedlit Monogatari in the middle, but the Deedlit manga itself is an anthology of stories that are told out of order. While the order as written is fine on its own to unveil secrets of the past, the true timeline order goes like this:
Episode 1-3 - A Traveller From the Elf World
Episodes 5-7 - Opening the Forest
Episode 8 - The Travelling Minstrel Sings
Episodes 4 - Fog of Revenge
Episode 9 - The Elves of the Forest of No Return
As you can see, the more complex way of consuming the series, then would be:
With "Rune Soldier Louie" anywhere in between, as it relies on your familiarity with Lodoss' mythology but is otherwise unrelated, taking place in Alecrast. Though I still think Lady of Pharis makes more sense if you read it AFTER Grey Witch. Maybe the best way is to watch the OVA first and get a sense of who Beld and Fahn are?
I also recommend Record of Grancrest War as it's by the same author & original DM of the Lodoss group. It's a completely different universe that feels more like a Fire Emblem game, though.
Just stay away from the completely unrelated Record of Agarest War…
Re: Record Of Lodoss War: Deedlit In Wonder Labyrinth Is Coming To Switch This Year
@Themagusx1
I do too! I just wish they would do the same for the rest of the LNs. What I wouldn't give for translations…
@Teksetter
Why thank you! Though I may have to call you and @Ralizah sempai in this regards; I vaguely recall stumbling onto Lodoss in the 90s, but I didn't rediscover it until the mid-00s, so my earliest copy is a bootlegged DVD of the OVA that my folks got me for a birthday since I had found the show online and was obsessed and wanted to support it and own it. Didn't know it was bootlegged until booting it up and discovering that the menu options, next episode credits, and menu options were all messed up.
The OVA is truly beautiful, mind you. I didn't include it above because it frankly doesn't fit canon as it's trying to condense down the story of all the main Parn-involved novels into 13 episodes. But if someone could only invest their time in ONE piece of the Lodoss franchise, I'd direct them to the OVA.
And I still think the OVA is the place to start with the franchise, in the same way that I'd suggest folks watch the unaltered original Star Wars trilogy if they can find it before going back to Episode I and watching the entire series in chronological order (using the special editions once they finish Rogue One, etc). I STILL find reviews of Chronicles of Heroic Knights where the reviewers are driven out of their mind why they "retconned" the OVA, as if the OVA was the canon and everything else had to fit it. The OVA is gorgeous and thematically captures the "feel" of Lodoss more than the TV series. It just makes choices in the name of streamlining the plot that make sequels that actually adapt the novels and manga in a much closer fashion to be very difficult to put out.
Re: Record Of Lodoss War: Deedlit In Wonder Labyrinth Is Coming To Switch This Year
@Teksetter Gods, would I buy the crap out of an officially translated port of that SFC game.
There's also a PlayStation game that came later, but the SFC game is a real classic.
Re: Record Of Lodoss War: Deedlit In Wonder Labyrinth Is Coming To Switch This Year
YUS!!!!!
By the way, this game is a Low Fit for the Metroidvania genre, at least according to the Metroidvania Review. It's very classically a Team Ladybug style "Metroidvania" - they've sort of built their own style of game that is Metroidvania-adjacent.
Record of Lodoss War is top tier fantasy. I'll happily support anything they put out for Switch. So glad it's coming to Nintendo.
Is this the first Lodoss game on Nintendo since the Super Famicom CRPG? That one was very difficult but interesting as it featured elements of the Lady of Pharis prequel series, The Grey Witch original novel/manga/anime, and a new storyline that bridged the two tales.
Btw, if you want to get the most coherent storyline from Lodoss, this is what I recommend:
1. Read "The Grey Witch" manga or LN (novel was recently republished and in English for the first time).
2. Read "The Demon of Flame" manga (never officially published in the west, but it's a critical story link that is referenced later on.
3. Watch the first arc of the "Chronicles of Heroic Knights" anime, ending with the Scepter of Domination conflict.
4. Read "Deedlit's Tale" manga.
5. Watch the anime or read the manga of "Rune Soldier Louie."
6. Read "Lady of Pharis" manga.
7. Watch the latter arc of "Chronicles of Heroic Knights" anime, the one about Spark and Little Neese.
8. Watch "Legend of Crystania."
You could read the manga of CoHK instead of the latter arc of the anime, and it's probably slightly more canonical, but it doesn't connect up with Crystania to my understanding, and it doesn't resolve the conflict with Karla and it leaves Parn's group as second-tier characters to focus on Spark and Neese. I THINK the most recent light novels focused on Spark as the Duke of Marmo build more so on the story told in the manga, though, but those are impossibly hard to find, let alone to find a translation thereof.
Re: Don't Worry, Nintendo Isn't Abandoning Switch Online's SNES And NES Libraries
I think they could come back next year and announce Game Boy & Game Boy Color games for the standard tier and Game Boy Advance & PC-Engine games for the Expansion Pack tier.
Re: Random: Zelda: Breath Of The Wild Player Snipes Hyrule Castle Guardian With Incredible 2.6km Arrow Shot
@Cia
It's a glitch because Nintendo didn't intend Link to be able to fly awkwardly like this while smuggling his bow. It's not supposed to happen, just like flying halfway across the plateau because you shield bopped a Bokoblin on the head isn't supposed to happen, just like getting into a shrine from the side by spinjumping with an axe isn't supposed to happen.
They're not hacks, but they're definitely Any% territory of gameplay - exploiting glitches in the game that were never ironed out.
If you're familiar with Pokémon, it's like getting over 100 Master Balls or Rare Candies from fighting MissingNo. on Cinnabar Island, or catching Mew just outside of Lavender Town because you flew away from a Slowpoke trainer with the exact right stats. It's not supposed to be in the game, but it is because of the programming of the game and loopholes that were never closed. It's a cool thing you can do but it's more than an unintended cool thing you can do with the physics of the game, it's a cool thing you can do that breaks the physics of the game and functions contrary to the intended laws. If Nintendo had known about it during development, they would have bugged it out.
Re: Aspyr Is Bringing The Classic BioWare RPG Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic To Switch
I still know nothing about the plot of game, after all these years, just that you can be good or bad and it affects the ending, I think?
I am so glad I can play the original game ported to Switch because I really don't want to get another console at this time with the remaster coming - I just don't need that. Maybe when TES VI comes out I'll consider a gaming PC. But I don't need an XBSX or PS5. So it's really nice that we can get ports of original games at the same time as other people are getting remasters.
On the converse, I love that Zelda Ocarina of Time & Majora's Mask are coming in their N64 forms to NSO, but can we still have HD versions of the 3DS remakes, by the same logic as these two separate KOTOR releases?
Re: Switch Exclusive Chocobo GP Sure Wants To Be Mario Kart, Doesn't It?
If that's Vivi and not just a generic Black Mage I'm sold.
Re: Banjo-Kazooie Is 'Coming Home' To A Nintendo Console Via Switch Online
@Don I imagine they were just showing Day 1 and the first few waves of updates. There will be more. They won't leave the app lacking DK64, even if it's the inferior DKC game.