nhSnork

With Xillia installed and less than a week remaining to dive into it, the current gaming mood is predictably Tales-themed in particular, potentially leading to a bit of time spent in many or even all the other installed entries across Switch, Deck and Vita (yes, somehow I'm still resisting Abyss 3D, but for how much longer?👀). This relative focus may narrow down the rest of my usual franchise-spanning plans (with this year's respective juggernauts like Yumia, XCX and Azuma taking priority), although the weekend could still see multiple Personas and/or Castlevanias engaged.

Last weekend's foray into social deductions didn't let me down - between the recognizably emblemlicious story/cast/lore and the expectedly online-bent but appreciably concise battles (with peculiar mechanics like different skills' application area to account for because friendly fire and accidental enemy healing regardless of alignment is very much a thing), I'm still waiting for all the abysmal stuff the fanbloid sphere would have me believe about Shadows... however, my ultimate single player bias is progressively inclined to crown Gnosia as THE representative of its genre, what with the motley cast, roguelite progression and the familiar "just one more turn- I mean, loop" feeling throughout the game. And if all of the above doesn't hook me for the entirety of the allocatable hobby time, there are plenty more itches to scratch - newer Switch gains from Outward, Inscryption and Claire to Tinkertown, Nexomon and Railgrade (depending on which I can cram on either of the hybrid storage spaces, of course), older Switch playthroughs from Dead Cells, Terraria and Bioshock 2 to Wall World, Truck Driver and PowerWash, NS2 playthroughs like Cyberpunk, NMS and Chibi-Robo, stuff on the other platforms like Luigi's Mansion, Virtue's Last Reward and Fallout 3... for all I know, I might even finally get down to starting Arknights which I think I've had installed for over a year. That's what decent surplus of storage space does to backlogs, padre.😭😆

I may well look into the release if it happens, although there's plenty of stuff I'd be even more eager to see go hybrid among Microsoft's games and IPs - from Hi-Fi Rush, Evil Within and Rage to Obilvion, ESO and everything Arkane. FWIW they already have my attention with Fallout 4.

Wait, I thought today's Direct was strictly about Kirby Air Riders.😵😄 How are we getting so many juicy ports announced at the same time? I could bellyache about Bethesda seemingly skipping F3/NV (unless the latter require Oblivion's levels of dedicated reworking to resurface on modern platforms at all) or about Dishonored series still being nowhere in sight... but what I've tried of F4 earlier has got me quite interested in this game as well, and now I won't have to rely on PS+ or cram the sideload on Deck. It might just become one of the higher priorities on my eShop wishlist next year.

Both System Shocks and Soma in one year. Nightdive is cooking with gas on Switch.

@Solid_Python yeah, time will tell, but III/Liberation and BF/Rogue also came out on Switch first, leaving me to wonder about the earlier stuff until at least the Ezio games arrived (jury's still out on whether Ubisoft still remembers Altair at all, but at least I already got through AC1 on the laptop, speeding up the campaign after the side collectathons proved to be fairly nonessential). Fingers crossed (and for the sidescrolling Chronicles pack as well - it was even on Vita in the past), but I won't be looking this gift horse in the mouth either.

I certainly hope this isn't meant to break the binge streak Ubisoft lined up on Switch from Ezio Collection to BF/Rogue; IIRC the "first era" flagships only have Unity and Syndicate left, making for a nice other bundle to come. That said, I've long hoped for the series to visit Japan, so Shadows sparks the bulk of my interest among the more modern entries, to the point where I could be tempted into a binge queue break here as well.

@Shigmin

Amen to that! I was worried that Xillia 2 might share Dawn's fate, but it sounds like even the latter may not be necessarily off the table as we speak.

Wreck exploration has been a thing for ages (and one of the more challenging activities in my experience), but I take it they have further enhanced the whole routine similarly to many other aspects. No Man's Sky can feel like the mother of all live service games... without costing a cent of extra costs usually associated with the model. Even the NS2 upgrade was free.

This one's save states or the remake's extra features? First world choices, first world choices everywhere...🤔

So if Kotone is never coming to P3R but they have no intention of neglecting her... Persona Q3 confirmed?👀

It's coming back but more literally, and you know what you'll need for the only games to be sold there henceforth.😜

16/21. It IS 1 a.m. here but I doubt I'd have scored much better during the day as someone who grew up with different arts completely - the kind you might not even require a mouse carrying a portal gun in one hand and a crayon in the other to make cryptic. Speaking of which, anyone at NL up to collecting similar stuff for a dedicated "bootleg art quiz"?😈😁 You'd only have to obscure the titles, and hardly on every specimen at that. Although finding the wackiest stuff in fashionable (or even decent) image resolutions might be easier said than done...🤔 (The linked image doesn't testify to the latter, it just wouldn't open from here until I wiped the "/revision/blahblahblah" part)

Switch for NSO and compilation re-releases, Vita (does it already count as a "retro handheld"?🤔😅) for the rest.

This weekend promises a foray into the genre fashionably called... checks notes ..."social deduction", courtesy of not only the finally sideloaded Fire Emblem Shadows on mobile (although I've yet to launch it, so the risk of region lock traps still stands) but also the much less multiplayer-crutched Gnosia that joined my Switch library alongside a few other recruits like Trinity Fusion, Dark Devotion and Tinkertown. Time will tell if it ends up the kind of new-ish trend to enthuse me (like with mob survival games) or gradually lose me (like battle royale ones), but that's not everything I hope to spend the available gaming sessions on anyway - there are the familiar series from Xenoblade, Rune Factory and Atelier to Tales, Persona and Castlevania to keep bouncing among, there are recent and not-so-recent standalone playthroughs from Dead Cells, Railgrade and Kingsgrave to Layers of Fear 2, Deliver Us the Moon and the NS2-facilitated Cyberpunk... and then there are more possibilities on the other platforms from Gran Turismos, Final Fantasies and Pokemon to Neptunia, Starbound and Endless Frontier.

(And there's also a utopian world to fantasize about where a comment sending failure turns "Please wait" back into a functional "Reply" without having you copy the text and reload the whole page, grumble grumble...) [/firstworldrants]

I mean, pokemon themselves have been voiced pretty much since Game Boy.😛 As for the human cast voicework, it would certainly be welcome, and the more the better, but I fail to see it as a dealbreaker, perhaps because I mostly grew up without it myself.

"But, this should go without saying, If you have the newer console and you want Legends: Z-A, get it on there"

@Flangela didn't the series have its last Wii port in 2020 or so?

My Pokemon binge queue is large enough that outside it I may invest in the first new flagship release I catch (like Moon on 3DS and Sword on Switch) at most. But the Legends games are definitely bound to land in my collection at some point, both in their Gen 9 incarnations since Z-A's NS2 version doesn't seem to offer anything above par.

TIL Xbox invented gaming PCs on the go.

Something from the traditional franchise hodgepodge of blades, personas, factories and tales is expected to end up on Switch menu this weekend yet again, potentially accompanied by more sim stuff like Portia, Potion Permit or Aground and the handful of titles (Brotato, Dead Cells, Kingsgrave, Railgrade and Lovecraft's Untold Stories) that I just blasphemously shelved Astral Chain for.🙀 Other hybrid playthroughs like No Man's Sky, Little Inferno, Danganronpa, Wall World, Bastion, Layers of Fear 2, Resident Evil 0, Cyberpunk or Powerwash may well end up somewhere in the mix as well - alongside those on other platforms like Watch Dogs, Nights of Azure, Gran Turismo(s), God Eater and/or Valentia. Still, the Switch stuff is likely to prevail, especially in hopes of finishing rather than just shelving something else when I'll need another 9.5 Gb to usher Xillia onboard.

Dagnabit, I have a heartbeat rate to stabilize after momentarily reading this as "Motorstorm".💓💔 But at least the actual thing sounds promising in its own right.😄

The hybrid Gen 9 keeps on giving.🍻

@LazyDaisy more people than you imagine (it's a still cheaper and established versatile machine with a colossal library that will transfer to an eventual NS2 upgrade in its borderline entirety and even selective forward compatibility on the hardware front), but Switch is already breathing down PS2's neck regardless. Sony's recent "updates" have yet to elevate their reputation and value above meme fodder.

"New" as in, added to the already existing collections? Because it would be a hundred or two for me when it comes to hybrid titles.😅 Last year saw 200+ backlog additions (the MGC app counts 256, but I was too lazy to exclude a bunch of freemiums and giveaways, so let's say 230 or 240); the current year's count is already sitting at "252" (again, including a couple freemiums but no free stuff I'm recalling from this period) and pretty much guaranteed to rise some more. So if "12+ games/year" is the most this poll can think of... do you guys even dekudeals?👻 Just kidding, I'm aware not everyone is thrilled to have a backlog in the first place.

If "new" means buying a literal new release at launch, then my numbers are usually quite humble as well and I would need more time to comb through the respective averages. But this year has been pretty good (with the exception of my wallet's POV) in this regard as well - Xenoblade X, Yumia, Azuma and Xillia were all preordered, and I snatched Graces less than a week after its release as well (pretty much just waiting for the payday to do so) - plus getting Cyberpunk at the earliest I could afford and procure it (July 1) on NS2. On the other hand, I've yet to invest in the other 2025 highlights like Fuga 3 and Fantasy Life i, padre.😿😅

Insert obligatory joke about a video game publisher releasing updates even for their animated shorts.

Then again, it's not necessarily limited to video game publishers. Shaft, anyone?😄

October is a huge month for Switch with the launch of Tales of Xillia alone. Pokemon who?😎

@PikminMarioKirby perhaps they think that in the age of online controversies a fandom outcry on Reddit or Twitter can shield them from an actual lawsuit.😏

Meaning there's still hope for other missing DLC cases like Brotato (or, more recently, Persona 3 Reload😅) as well.

Unless Crossworlds has its own legitimate free roam (and not just a separate test drive thing like in Hot Pursuit 2010 either), it invites comparison to the likes of MK8, but not so much to the likes of MKW. In the end, it's a subgenre preference; I'm not remotely averse to classic cups and tracks, but I'll never not have a soft spot for open maps that let you actually drive your vehicles around at will, find stuff and learn various corners/shortcuts well in advance (one interesting approach to the latter formula is Burnout Paradise many of whose races don't even give you a strict track outline, just start/finish points and a general direction). And I wouldn't be a JRPG nerd if I had an issue with the feeling of unfinished business in open worlds.

No (I'm still three full games away in the respective binge route). Incidentally the very bundled trio that includes the first Galaxy, which means I would only need G2 by default. Having its predecessor as a separate download could be nice, although it would only save me... huh, less than a gig? I've sat on Yoshi's Island long enough to have been misremembering 3DAS size as circa 7 Gb, but it's barely 4.🤔😅

Less than a month until Xillia arrives, and it's not even the only one bell tolling for the current roster of my installed Switch games as the shamelessly stuffed memory card continues to deal with new backlog recruit temptations (from the freshest picks like Dead Cells, Project Nimbus, Kingsgrave and Brotato to the less recent ones still warming the bench like Railgrade, Arcade Paradise and Time Loader... and Akiba's Trip U&U only skips this list for now because I'm still chugging through the first game) and a flow of updates for the mainstays like Azuma or Warframe. All of this, in turn, encourages allocating some of the hobby time to stuff like Little Noah, Layers of Fear 2 or Little Inferno that I could expect to put behind me and back on the figurative shelf comparatively soon, but it does look like I'll end up benching other playthroughs (or offloading them to Switch 2, likely at the cost of benching other already offloaded stuff like House of the Dead or Astria Ascending on the latter).

Is that the end of offtopic FWPs to bellyache here about? Well, this and belatedly finding that all three Red Colony titles DID go poof some fortnight ago despite the respective Delisted Games report having only seen the Steam announcement. NOW I can move on to the trademark gleeful gluttony of my general weekend hopes ranging from the frequented JRPG franchises like Xenoblade, Atelier, Tales, RF and Persona to various other hybrid-facilitated whims like Cyberpunk, NMS, Tallowmere 2, Danganronpa and My Hero One's Justice - plus the other portable possibilities like Horizon, Starbound, Gran Turismo(s), Luigi's Mansion or Endless Frontier.😄

@Thirteen1355 I sure do, as with the relative majority of Japanese fiction visuals 25+ years apart. Although I have a feeling you're trying to insinuate "aesthetic" inferiority rather than difference here.😏 As would befit someone unironically labeling Muramasa "a cheap flash game", I suppose. As for ZX, it's often lumped with Zero because it hails from the very same period you tried to pitch against the notion of "cute anime girls saving the world" even though that's exactly what's going on in both games (if depending on the character selection), too.

@Thirteen1355 they also made legends like ZX/Advent dilogy you conveniently omitted while their very first game also featured a female robot and their second one was literally this:

I don't think they are remotely as "embarrassed" by cute anime girl power as you seem to be on their behalf.

@LEGEND_MARIOID for some games (ironically including pixel indies like Starbound which was officially ruled out because it did enough under the hood to necessitate higher clock speeds), perhaps, but there's still a multitude of older works yet to benefit from portability (or reappear beyond original hardware at all, like Xillia until its frabjous advent later this month) and less frixel-fluffed contemporaries that wouldn't make much sense to limit to Gen 10, especially given the nonpareil userbase they'd be leaving behind. This isn't even Wii whose 101 million sales translated to many game libraries never expanding past Wii Fit, and not 3DS whose crossgens required working with twice the number of screens.

I'm sticking to P3P anyway, but when a UE4-based remake of a PS2 game challenges a Gen 8 hybrid with enough juice to optimize the likes of Witcher 3, Kingdom Come Deliverance and No Man's Sky for, it does tempt one to wonder how much of this challenge hails from the usual 100%-TV-industry-approved suspects that permeated even the [formerly?] much less photorealism-obsessed Japanese games. And the release delay concerns can come across as somewhat ironic, considering how long it took Persona 5, the subfranchise's biggest hit to date, to grace a borderline national institution of a console in Japan to the point where both its musou sequel AND the protagonist's arrival in Smash Bros happened here first.🤔😅

@Vyacheslav333 FES didn't have Kotone and P3P's other content/improvements either, but it can indeed feel like a bummer that the game passed on what was likely its one last opportunity to gather all of its eggs into one basket. Oh well, at least I don't need the PSP undub anymore.

@LEGEND_MARIOID my experience with Gen 9 third-party stuff on Switch begs to differ to this day - even though crunch and bloat, the only serious obstacles in the way of portable ports, remain variably synonymous with the modern industry's bigger fish.

Seems like some storage shuffling will be in order sooner than I estimated. And I already pried almost 700 Mb from the two recently finished games only for a Guardian Tales update to gobble it all up.😆

"Expect improved FPS, load times and more" of the game to have installed?👀 After five times the previous size of No Man's Sky on NS2, I'm almost scared to imagine how much Waframe would weigh despite the devs' recurrently demonstrated compression sorcery, and even the comparatively useful faster load times can struggle to justify that increase by themselves, not to mention the glorified extra frames per second.

@BLD frankly, FEH has never bothered me with its "PvP" or "meta" aspects, partly because, like you said, most of the multiplayer remains asynchronous and partly because there's nothing at stake but various resources you can eventually get elsewhere. My own PvP activity is pretty much just Grand Battles (one battle per day for the event duration), Aether Raids (same until gathering all five "participation" rewards per week) and a weekly 5-win streak at the Arena to farm the summon tickets (plus a few placement rewards as I keep bouncing between tiers 17-18). The bulk of the game is the single player story content from the main campaigns to the fun crossover interactions in the likes of Forging Bonds and Tempest Trials; those are mainly responsible for this game still ranking high among my freemium routines since I installed it in early 2020. I'm hoping for more stuff like that in Shadows as well, even though its crossover cast appears to be native counterparts rather than isekai'd originals - not that games like Tales of Crestoria (RIP) haven't had a field day with the latter approach as well.

As for Nintendo, I have an impression that they've only cared so much for the mobile front even after reluctantly expanding there. They officially said more than once that such games' main purpose is to drum up extra attention towards the respective console franchises, which is likely why Dragalia Lost (itself a Cygames collab at the end of the day) remains their only original IP in this medium and, AFAIK, never really expanded beyond it (compare Fire Emblem where Engage DLC got Veronica from FEH and Echoes had previously received a couple DLC characters from some spinoff card game).

@BLD I expect so little from tutorials and such that I barely even touch demos these days - looking up a gameplay video from a later point in the game tends to paint a fuller picture, especially as it's the mid-journey routine loops that can sometimes make or break lasting engagement with a playthrough. Like I added above, my own doubts about the game largely stem from my highly on-and-off history with online multiplayer games (which has shortened my experience with a lot of mobile titles including otherwise amusing bingo sims - honestly, how hard would it be to simply "bot" those? - and the recent trend of real time strategies that all come to focus on synchronous guild raids), but depending on how this one is structured and what it may offer down the road, it could end up being an exception.

...although in any case, I still have to sideload the game first. Something tells me QooApp is not touching this one after all.

The longevity of Bamco freemiums is becoming a bit memetic...

EDIT: shows what I know/remember, it's actually a retail game. Granted, if a $20 game outright promises to become unplayable where its NSO-originating predecessor at least offered a leftover mode or two (albeit with the latter's own pricetag), then this correction may not necessarily make the news sound any nicer.😅

@Simu001 I'm 38, gaming since 9 or so and don't seem to be growing out of anything, so it may be more about personal burnout or somesuch. And I make use of customization features on the platforms that have them but have never found them indispensable - perhaps because I never even owned a console with any semblance of home menu (as opposed to just requiring you to turn it on with a cartridge inserted) until NDS (purchased in 2010), so like with many other Gen 5-8 things comparatively younger gamers have had time to grow bored stiff of, the novelty of even the most "barebones" stuff has yet to wear off on me.

As for themes and such, I already said it above - Nintendo likely just decided to trim things all the way down at launch and then never had a reason to expand back (shockingly enough, fandom buzz on social media doesn't reliably amount to one). Even folders have seemed like an update padder, unless they had statistics of psycho accounts like mine with a four-digit eShop receipt history and figured the feature might finally come in handy after all.👀😆 Themes and music peaked during Gen 8 when Nintendo found their hardware, especially 3DS, to be in competition with smart devices which also begot cameras (already tried on NDSi), menu stickers and even a social network of a sort (Miiverse). But none of that helped 3DS replicate the predecessor's runaway success regardless, and Ninty apparently lost interest.

Belarusians:

@Simu001 Nintendo omitted customization in favour of a snappier home menu on Switch and the latter is one foot on the console bestseller podium top, so they're evidently lacking an incentive to bring said customization back. As for the folders, they were added ages ago.

Besides the traditional JRPG salad (Xenoblade, Atelier, Persona, Tales, Rune Factory and Castlevania with a few other odds like Crisis Core, Fuga and Star Ocean on top) and a range of roguelites (Little Noah, Tallowmere 2, Skul, Riddled Corpses, Zombie Rollerz and Children of Morta), the hybrid pool is expected to include stuff like Carto, Doom 3, Cyberpunk, Layers of Fear 2, Deliver Us the Moon, Skyrim, Bastion and No Man's Sky, plus perhaps some subscribed retro in the form of Mr Driller 2, Chibi-Robo, Metroid Zero Mission or Super Mario Kart. Deck may join the fray with more Tales and Final Fantasies as well as Watch Dogs, Fallout 3, Nights of Azure or Nioh, while the handheld consoles are beckoning with more Gran Turismo, Gravity Rush and God Eater in the dual screen company of Chase Begins, Etrian Odyssey Untold and Shadows of Valentia. Speaking of shadows, I also consider trying the new freemium (screenshots showing battle passes and such suggest that the initial "free-to-start" format a la SMR was misreported), but I'll have to dig up a functional installer first.

@nessisonett well, I also know her for Raya and the Last Dragon which is also damn good.😉

@Hinade along with the rest of the Eternals in my case. One of MCU's best, don't @ me.