mjhopkins81

Meh. Give me a new Pokemon for my 'Dex and I'll open the game, again.

Are we desperate? Are we?

I can't WAIT for this to flop.

Leave it to S-E to try to cut costs with unproven technology so they can pimp out their latest Gacha game.

After five years? Isn't it time for a new game, instead?

@MamaSymphonia Oh, I LOVE the catching and collecting part. Arceus made catching Pokemon truly exciting, for the first time in a decade or more, when it was released.

This game makes the whole thing a slog.

I really didn't anticipate hating this game, but the awkward mechanics (Roto-Glide, anyone?), the rabbit warren "exploration," and the unskippable blathering conversations really make it difficult to have "fun" playing this game, for me.

It's really sad, because Kalos was SUCH an engaging region that GameFreak really COULD have developed using the Arceus setup, exploring the region's distant past.

Instead, we get to run around a largely bland city with look-alike buildings, bland NPCs, and microscopic "Wild Zones."

I get that a lot of people like it. I just wish that I did. Swing and a miss, for me.

You're crazy for thinking this.

It's not creepy, so much as lazy.

I've played it all weekend, and I have to say...

Playing this game feels like running through a never-ending rabbit warren of mostly empty buildings populated with mostly mindless rabbits occasionally asking for carrots.

The music is great. The battle system is okay, even if it's little more than Xenoblade Chronicles with a Pokémon skin. The Pokémon themselves look mostly fine on the Switch 2 in TV mode and handheld.

And then, there's the rest of it:

We went from beautiful scenery and the freedom of open exploration in Arceus to...being trapped in a hamster cage.

Setting-wise, it reminds me of Ys IX, where they trapped you in a city and tried to make it seem interesting by adding a rooftop layer.

When you finally get the ability to float between buildings, the mechanic is so poorly employed (requiring a timed button press and hold) that you just end up having to climb up scaffolding and run along rooftops to get back to where you were trying to jump.

The biggest sin that the Pokémon Company continues to employ is the inability to skip entirely the worthless, slow-paced chatter from annoying NPCs trying to make the most mundane things sound like life-altering stakes.

I get it...you want people to experience the story. But, at LEAST put a fast-forward mode into the games, so those of us who don't enjoy the comfort of a nice set of thumbscrews don't have to keep mashing buttons to advance the flavor text.

It's not a BAD game, by any means, but it's not a great game.

All the complaints about giving people time to play the game...it's a gaming website. Their industry is gaming news, reviews, and polls. It's not a standardized test that you need more time to complete.

@LikelySatan I mean, yeah "for the SNES."

The game pushed the cartridges to their absolute limit, to the point that there was no room on the cart for localization. It taxed the limits of the system's media.

So, yeah. "For the SNES."

For all of the hype surrounding this game, I find it really hard to get into, and don't enjoy exploring the world as much as I did in Secret, Sword, or Legend. The Sword of Mana remake made an incredibly small game feel epic, while still incorporating class systems, functional (and useful) item drops from enemies, and an engaging story.

Trials always felt all over the place, to me, and the writing didn't really make any of the characters particularly enjoyable.

It's not a BAD game, and for the SNES, it was epic. But, I always felt like it lacked the fun and whimsy that Secret of Mana had.

Still my favorite Zelda game.

PS5 version, it is, then.

I'm hoping for new Dragon Quest information.

It would be nice to have a Pokémon game with THAT level of graphics quality.

I mean...it literally pronounced the name that way in the Pokedex 3D.

The only people who didn't agree were the people who stuck their fingers in their ears and refused to go along with it.

No. Let me send you a jiff.

That's fine. But, it would be nice to get older titles that were never localized.

I got the Anniversary Collection box set...it's nicer than Limited Run's.

I enjoy the game, and the Free Roam is fine...but it just doesn't feel like there's any REASON to Free Roam.

Yeah, there are the P Button "Missions," but to what end?

Yeah, there are Princess Peach Medallions, but do they do anything?

Sure, you can unlock costumes, but that's just by eating food.

And Question Mark panels that don't...unlock anything?

It all seems half-baked, at best. A very cool way to explore the World, but one of the points of an open world game is unlockables that make you feel like you're accomplishing something. Just collecting things without any real reward seems...empty.

I'd have LOVED for you to be able to unlock characters by completing missions, or by finding and hitting every Question Mark block.

EDIT: Oh! I forgot that you get "Stickers" for your kart.

Why?

Because they're stickers...that you don't really see.

@Divide_and_Wander I distinctly remember purchasing Final Fantasy II (IV) for the SNES for $79.99 at K-Mart on December 30th, 1991, and paying the same price for Chrono Trigger in 1995.

That said, as much as I love Nintendo, the company consistently does...odd things with games and product pricing, in no small part because they know they have the branding that people want.

The Best Technology of 2005 on display:

Lagging, low FPS video conferencing
Voice chat
Peripheral plug-in cameras
256 GB of storage
Download play
Gyroscopic mouse tech
Magsafe Tech

@LastFootnote It's for any Switches ON the account, including child accounts (so, say you have Switches for your two kids). Saves are tied to the user account which...sure...the kids can have their own, but there are times when they want to play my save, because I'm further along. And yet...they can't.

I GET why they're doing it, but FFS—if Microsoft and Sony can't let the same user be active on multiple separate consoles using the same account AND manage to be able to seamlessly share save data between the two (though not playing the same game, necessarily), Nintendo could AT LEAST get a clue.

More of this, "Only two systems per account" bullsh*t.

This kind of nonsense, like blocking a second Switch from playing downloaded games and content (including Child accounts) when the other Switch is playing them is f*cking ridiculous and antediluvian.

Leave it to Nintendo to be 10 years behind the modern technology game.

I love Nintendo with all my heart, and genuinely enjoy their games and systems, but for f*ck's sake: it's 2025, and we're still getting systems with virtually no internal storage, mediocre online functionality, 15-year-old device shop UX/UI, and locks on the number of systems you can have playing games?!

Sorry.

</rant>

If that was running on Switch 2, that is NOT impressive.

I would like a Castlevania game with music that is memorable in the way that the first four games' music was memorable. Music that you want to whistle or have as a ringtone, rather than atmospheric music that doesn't really fit the Gothic setting, and has way too much reverb on it.

Meh. I don't really care. The number of racers never really occurred to me as something I noticed.

Screw that noise.

I think the bigger desire—at least from me—is to make the older titles playable, again, and not on some streaming service or on mobile phones.

Collections of games work well—the Pixel Remasters, the Saga Collection, and other collections have shown us that it doesn't require full 3D remakes to make games accessible, again.

I've spent several days with it, and still can't get used to not being able to attack enemies directly without first summoning an echo or transforming into Link (the button for which is too awkwardly placed, for me, as I keep hitting it instead of the Echo screen).

As others have mentioned, it's incredibly tedious to sort through 200 Echoes in a single line with a font that's too small.

I DO wish Nintendo would have let us reassign controls, change text speed, and skip the long expositional scenes with NPCs.

Overall, between the mechanics and the framerate issues, it feels like a largely average game, to me.

So, I know this might seem nitpicky, but would it be possible for you guys to start including the name of the game for your header images? Several times, over the past few months, I've been interested in the image, but I have no idea what game it's for because it's not obvious from the games in the top section.

Please consider it!

For $500, it had better have a MINIMUM of 1TB of internal storage.

If I can buy a 2TB MicroSDXC, Nintendo can easily include a sufficient amount of internal storage for that kind of price.

@Classic603 Tales of Graces f is still my favorite game in the series. Loved the art style; loved the voice acting; loved the Title system, that actually gave those stupid titles you earned a purpose; loved the battle system.

If you have the opportunity to pick it up, check it out.

It's a shame that he doesn't want to release Blue Dragon on a console with wider reacher than the 360. It was such a great game.

@Serpenterror Absolutely. I really WANTED to like Final Fantasy XV, because the gameplay was there...the battle system was there...the graphics were there...but the open world? Not there.

I remember competing in this, back in 1990. Made it to the stage in Pittsburgh. Rad Racer was the bane of my existence.

This serves as a reminder: as gamers, we should be trying to let gaming companies know that locking DLC content behind server-based walls is a terrible practice, particularly if that content is actually stored in the game's data.

I get the idea of limited-time distributions, but both DQ IX and VII 3DS did this nonsense.

1.) Dragon Quest VII
2.) Dragon Quest VIII
3.) Dragon Quest Monsters: Terry's Wonderland
4.) Dragon Quest Monsters: Iru and Luca's Marvelous Mysterious Key

@larryisaman Japan spends more money per capita than any other country, with market penetration of 58%.

You are confusing revenues with the number of gamers:

https://www.statista.com/chart/28244/countries-with-the-highest-estimated-user-penetration-in-the-video-game-segment/

In sheer revenues, yes—U.S. and China lead. But, in terms of per capita spending, Japan leads the world, followed by the UK.

Moreover, their console sales are horrific. They haven't had a console crack 20m units in the U.S. since the XBOX One (which sold 120k units in Japan).

But, pretending that they've had crackerjack sales with their consoles since the 360 (their only truly successful console, largely because of U.S. sales), is insane.

I'm just waiting for Microsoft to give up the ghost on the XBOX. Seriously. It's lost every console generation since its inception. It cannot compete at ALL in the largest video game market (Japan), and really only enjoys moderate success in the U.S.

At SOME point, they have to realize that series loyalty won't necessarily turn into a switch to their consoles.

I ended up loving the Ys games after not playing them for decades. Ys III: Wanderers from Ys on the SNES was the last game I'd played in the series before finally going back and playing through the entire catalog (excluding the Japanese exclusives), and fell in love with the series, all over again.

According to the Gematsu article, the Switch version will have English and Japanese audio support and English and French text support. I can deal with that.

That said, I'd do ANYTHING to not have to endure another screeching Japanese audio experience. I've been playing the Dragon Quest games in Japanese for a decade, now, and maybe it's just me, but does everything have to be screamed?

I mean, I'm a collector...

I absolutely bought the Pac-Man table top machine that they sell in stores, but that's something you can physically sit down at an play.

But, a 17.5"-tall arcade replica?

HARD pass.

I can't WAIT to get more mobile shovelware from Square-Enix!

Why NOT another Gacha game?

What do you mean games shouldn't take a decade to make?

That's REALLY fantastic.

I would LOVE a Zelda II game.

Then players need to get comfortable with bankrupting companies that force that upon them and putting them out of business.

Let's start with Ubisoft.

Shovelware, again.

The game DEFINITELY has some bad performance hiccups if you're playing in handheld mode (the primary draw of the Switch, for a lot of people) that really DO detract from the player experience.

That said, it's really been fun to revisit the series. I imported the other DQM games (including the remakes of the first two games and Joker 3), and they were truly enjoyable, as well.

I wish there were a more in-depth Monster Manual, but if you've played the 3DS games, it's essentially more of the same.

@Shade_Koopa The reality is that the only gamers "writing off" the game are Western gamers.

This game was absolutely going to be a mega-hit in Japan, like virtually every other Dragon Quest game. They literally have entire stores dedicated to the franchise (Lawson's Dragon Quest stores are amazing).

The EU is generally pretty strict about requiring media sold as a physical copy to contain a physical copy. It's time for governments to make that a requirement.

@fbnaulin I remember beating it for the first time before I went to school on a Winter morning. I was 8, and jumped up and down and cried, I was so happy.

@Xyphon22 Nope! It's still in my Top 5, and was for a long time my favorite Zelda game.