riki_sidekicks

@AstroTheGamosian I think this must have been around for decades and intermittently reprinted, otherwise it would be based on a more recent game or mix content from different games.

The purpose of fall damage is to limit player movement. Xenoblades 1-3 have fall damage because each is a fundamentally linear game where you need to progress through the environment in a specified order at least one time. Each of them has areas where the player needs to find a path down and allowing the player to just jump down would be a major skip.

Or consider From Software’s mazes: those are often about finding a way down and removing fall damage would trivialize them.

Xenoblade X is different. It’s an open world designed for maximum traversal freedom, where literally everything you can see is accessible. Traversal challenges are mostly about starting at the bottom and finding a way up: the environments are just not designed for going down to be challenging. Instead, the ability to fall is kind of a payoff, climbing to the top of a high mountain and then free-falling all the way to the ground. WHEEEEEE!

I’m not sure about BOTW/TOTK, where fall damage exists but can always be reset to zero by pulling out the paraglider. I don’t think it would change that much if Link always pulled out his glider at the last minute.

Big fat no to putting the Zelda IP on Dark Souls. There are so many Soulslikes and Zelda is the lone holdout.

Honestly I would rather see Elden Ring by Nintendo. You have all those crazy labyrinths but instead of impossible combat challenges they contain easy monsters and imaginative puzzles that support a wide variety of solutions.

Also known as “Tears of the Kingdom if it had real dungeons.”

It's too bad, of all the games that were supposed to be "like" Breath of the Wild Fenyx was the only one that gave me anything remotely like the Breath of the Wild experience.

Genshin Impact was just the first of many “Breath of the Wild clones” that proved to be nothing of the sort.

Since I loved Breath of the Wild and really wanted more of it, this was incredibly disappointing.

This is too bad.

After March 2017, I was so excited for all the impending Breath of the Wild knockoffs, and the industry just didn’t deliver at all. Only two games provided anything remotely approaching the Breath of the Wild exploration-based experience: Fenyx and Elden Ring. And since I don’t like Soulslikes, that makes Fenyx the only one (except TOTK of course).

It definitely wasn’t as good as BOTW but “it’s not as good as one of the greatest video games ever made” isn’t much of a criticism.

I enjoyed the demo and will probably get it eventually but it sure didn’t feel like Final Fantasy. No party, twitchy reflex-based gameplay, strict Western medieval fantasy setting with no visible science fantasy elements. (Though some of the games introduce the science fantasy quite late so maybe it shows up eventually.)

@kingbk for better or worse, mobile gaming is way bigger than consoles, both by number of players and amount of revenue. Simple reason: iPhone and Android have 4 billion devices in active use, twenty times Switch, PS5, and XBSX combined.

Good article. You should take the next step and consider these issues in the main review and the review score.

Nintendo will notice if their terrible accessibility features drag down the Metacritic rating.

@Jprhino84 I’m talking about how review outlets and user reviews actually assign scores, not how they should. They way it works in practice, 10 = great, 9 = very good, 8= pretty good, 7 = mediocre, 6 = bad, and 1-5 are practically unused. To go into that range a game has to be not merely bad but also unplayably buggy. (Or the review author hates the game due to some political objection.)

You are raising a legitimate complaint that scores should be assigned differently, but that doesn’t change the fact that as scores work in practice, 66/100 is a pretty bad rating.

@Jprhino84 for better or worse, video game ratings are scaled like school grades now. 66 is a D. Technically passing, but still really bad.

This seems very strange. The game was pretty universally panned—Metacritic shows a 64/100 critic score and 6.6/10 user score for the PS4 version.

So how are they going to sell enough copies to recoup the investment in a Switch port?

@Greatluigi not having a map was literally the point, they gave you a paper map and it was your job to keep track of where you were. Or draw your own map, by hand.

@Fazley I’ve only played half an hour so far and it is packed with story spoilers for the main game, plus a bunch of stuff that wouldn’t make sense without the context of the main game.

@MarioBrickLayer the developer provides two types of video clips: typical gameplay, and the most extreme content in the game.

@AG_Awesome I played the steam releases of IV and VI and they were almost exactly the same as the OG versions. The two changes were a quicksave feature and auto battle.

Quicksave is great but I don't see the point of autobattle. If you don't want to play the game, why are you playing it?

I still can’t get over the thing where Joker can volunteer to be sexually abused by multiple adult women, including his teacher and his doctor.

I loved every other part of the game but the portrayal of statutory rape leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. If Joker was a girl and the the adult “love interests” were men we would never accept this.

(And to preempt the poorly-informed pedant who I know is going to “correct” me about the age of consent in Japan, Tokyo has a higher age of consent than the national one.)

It’s ToTK so I’m just going to pronounce it “TokTok”.

Nobody over 35 on the NL staff, I see.

Legend of Zelda for me.

@IronMan30 these internal investigations are always about preventing lawsuits and protecting senior management. If the evidence is too overwhelming to deny outright, they pin the blame on some expendable “bad apples” in middle management.

But they will always, always find that nobody in the C-suite was involved or complicit in any way.

@michellelynn0976 yeah, just sad it has GOTY locked up. XC3 totally deserves it.

@Magician I didn’t! I gave up in frustration because it was too hard. I had reached the point where I was spending more time on the game’s incredibly slow loading screens than playing the game. I have better things to do with my life.

I’ll accept “not every game has to be accessible to everyone; if you think it’s too hard don’t play it” as a legitimate argument, but I don’t see how that design philosophy can be seriously considered the pinnacle of game design.

There’s a gay sex innuendo after virtually every battle. I love it.

This is very odd because there’s a much creepier scene later when he actually kisses her on the lips while she’s unconscious.

Really glad to see a review like this.

I bought the last one at launch and still regret it, they basically released it in early access to hit the Christmas deadline. The game you play today is way better than the release title.

But I can’t wait for Friday!

@sword_9mm the game's biggest mistake was making the icons optional rather than just getting rid of them.

I was disappointed until I stopped using them, and suddenly it was a totally different and much better game.

@dojmin I love Breath of the Wild and I want as many knockoffs and copycats as possible. That's how game genres develop!

I've been really disappointed by how few BOTW knockoffs there have been. Apparently "create a world that is interesting and readable enough that you don't need map markers" is so hard that developers don't even try. Fenyx is definitely the standout.

(I think Fenyx would have gotten better reception if they had been bold enough to follow BOTW and gotten rid of the map icons entirely, rather than just making them optional. Turning them off completely reshapes the gameplay loop into something much better, but a lot of players don't know to do that and for them it's just yet another map icon game.)

@MrGawain The Legend of Zelda gave us “go find the eight quest items and rescue the princess” and video game companies are still recycling the same plot decades later.

@AlphaElite I did exactly that. I assumed that since KH2 was fifteen years old and a lot of the KH3 target audience wasn’t even born when KH2 was released, they would have to make it accessible to new players. Nope!

Good thing I got it on sale.

@itslukec I recently bought a much bigger TV and now that I’m replaying XCX being able to read the text makes it quite a different experience.

But even with a 55” TV the text is still very small. How did this make ever get released in 2015 when the average TV was significantly smaller?

Difficulty is totally an accessibility thing. When difficulty comes in the form of physical skill, there are some people who are just physically incapable of doing it no matter how hard they try, and will still find the game challenging even on an easier setting.

Celeste did this perfectly: the easy mode settings are behind an “accessibility” menu and when you go there it says “Celeste is intended to be difficult.”

Nobody is going to be confused and think those settings are the intended way for an abled player to play.

From can do this too.

@Silly_G that makes a lot of sense to me. Real-money gambling = automatic AO.

GOTY 2022. Too bad, FromSoft.

I didn't watch but Xenoblade 3 makes it amazing.

Already GOTY for me.

@mother_brain_85 “most anticipated” has got to be the silliest award category in existence.

Why are we giving awards to video game marketing departments?

It Takes Two is brilliant and absolutely deserved GOTY.

Disappointed by no announcements from Nintendo though. I was really hoping for a BOTW2 release date or some news about Metroid Prime 2.

But what about MY favorite character?

Something for everyone—except me! Nothing on BOTW2, Pikmin 4, Metroid Prime 4, Xenoblade, or that rumored non-Xenoblade MonolithSoft RPG.

I was skeptical because it seemed like Nintendo was just flailing for a new gimmick after the last gimmick didn’t work, which may actually have been what happened.

As a gay man, I find this stuff about "inclusive" kind of weird--there's nothing wrong with having a dating game for str8 people, and tacking on an MM route would be awkward and tokenizing.

And I would have preferred if Boyfriend Dungeon was all boyfriends rather than half the romance options being characters I have no interest in.

Have they made the respawns any faster? One thing I hated about BMZ2 was that the boss fights were very difficult, but the respawns were very slow, especially because you had to keep watching the same cutscene over and over.

The instant respawns of modern platformers like Celeste and Ori have really spoiled me, and frequent but very slow respawns now seem intolerable.

Logically, to put a gaming PC in a smaller form factor without overheating and with decent battery life, it needs to be more expensive than a regular gaming PC, not less. So something is being sacrificed.

Nintendo did it by cutting back on processing power, which is why a lot of new AAA games don’t get Switch ports.

What is the catch with Valve’s version?

@Krull not the original NES version with its AI-controlled party members. Watching Cristo cast Beat on enemies that are immune to instant death instead of healing people who are one hit from death is seriously rage-inducing.

Re-releases fixed this problem, but if we’re talking about the NES version there’s no getting around this major design flaw..

Mass Effect. Never played the originals, going through Legendary Edition with Renegade Femshep.

Why no ranking? The whole point of lists like this is so the fans can post a million comments like “How can you rank X above Y? Y is so much better than X!” and then we can have flamewars about it.

Labo makes your IP list but Xenoblade and Pikmin get tossed into the “niche” trash pile? Shame, NL, shame.

The only reactions I’m interested in are the “everything announced in today’s Nintendo Direct” articles.

Any year-over-year comparison between Spring 2020 and Spring 2021 is essentially meaningless. Too many one-time shifts in consumer behavior.

Though it’s completely unsurprising that consumers are buying the new consoles rather than Switch.