soupwoman

@Navi there’s a good deal of genuine artistry in the teams that make these games. the character designers at game freak are excellent and bring so much historical inspiration into the pokémon designs and lore. that and it’s just a fun gameplay loop that’s grown so expansive. recent games, while unpolished, have offered the best gameplay experience of the series to date, with Legends Arceus being genuinely terrific and Scarlet and Violet (specifically the switch 2 update, as it’s actually plays smoothly) is incredibly fun with some high highs. the games aren’t innovative or groundbreaking, but they’re typically a pretty good time if you find yourself connecting to the general vibe

@ImpromptuR there is no such thing as an objective review, it’s smart for them to make clear where they stand so you can compare your taste with their’s and gauge how useful the review will be for you

Prices are completely insane. This got me to join the crowd of people who are really frustrated with Nintendo’s greed. I straight up dont know what Nintendo’s internal development teams are working on right now. 2025 has been an incredible year for Switch 2, and I guess it’s a blessing that 2026 only really has Rhythm Heaven for me so that I have time to play everything from this year. But wow these are scummy practices. $20 DLC for a game from two months ago with seemingly little content, $30 DLC for a game that isn’t even out yet, $40 for Mario Galaxy, I just don’t know. This finally crossed that threshold for me

difficulty feels about right, there are a few unfair moments, but on the whole it’s brutal but not unfair. I have to disagree with the idea that there should be an easy mode, so much of the point is overcoming an unbearable challenge. would feel like a horror movie where you could turn off the scary scenes, or a drama where you fast forward through any sad moments.

Never understood what problem people had with the review. Ever since the original Ruby and Sapphire came out people joked about how much water there was. It’s an entirely legitimate complaint that mechanically impacts that game in a negative way. But as soon as a woman on IGN made the same observation that everyone had been making for over a decade, it suddenly wasn’t a legitimate complaint anymore

Morgan Davis as Link, Hunter Schaffer as Zelda, Keith David as Ganondorf.

the Mario movie was really bad so i’m just not optimistic about nintendo movie adaptations. being live action just adds to that hesitation

the only bad part about it is the face. Raikou’s face has always looked pretty ugly so I wish that had been tweaked, because the rest of the design is a pretty nice improvement over how rough standard Raikou is

@Martijn87 there’s no such thing as objectivity in a game review. the best reviews will consider the objective facts of a game but will focus on the personal experience had by a reviewer. that’s what games are about and that’s what reviews should reflect

@Switch_Pro that’s still a problem though, the movie relies exclusively on people already loving mario, it doesn’t provide anything by itself. If this movie was exactly the same but switched out the mario characters for original characters, the people giving it 8s and 9s would be calling it a standard bland kids movie. A great adaptation shouldn’t have to rely exclusively on iconography and references, it should be able to stand on its own

@Switch_Pro I guess my point is that if someone went in without prior knowledge of mario, I don’t think they’d find anything to enjoy about the movie. it’s an extremely standard kids adventure movie with poor pacing and a lack of world building. The characters aren’t given any time to develop and we don’t get to learn anything about them besides surface-level traits, and we almost never get to slow down and watch the characters genuinely interact, the movie is too focused on throwing constant stimulation at the audience. Feels like everything else Illumination has done, where they know they don’t have to put any effort into the storytelling because they don’t think kids deserve high quality entertainment. Just a bummer cause a Mario movie could’ve been so much more. But yeah oh well I hope Nintendo can eventually release a genuinely really great movie, plenty of their properties would be terrific films, i doubt that’ll happen as long as they’re working with Illumination

@Switch_Pro I already did watch it and I didn’t like it. It relied entirely on references instead of actually developing any characters or storylines, and the pacing was surprisingly kind of awful. music was great and some of the cast was good, but I thought it was like a 5/10 movie.

really wish they had collaborated with literally any other animation studio. I have yet to enjoy a single Illumination movie besides the first Despicable Me

Switch gave us many franchise’s best games. BotW (i’d still consider this more of a Switch game than a Wii U game), Mario Odyssey, Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Metroid Dread, Smash Ultimate, Pokémon Legends Arceus, all the best games in their respective series. Plus I haven’t played a lot of Fire Emblem, but 3 Houses is my favorite of the ones i’ve tried. Not to mention ports of the best Mario Kart, Donkey Kong, and Metroid Prime. GameCube took more risks that paid off and N64 was more revolutionary, but Switch’s library perfected so many ideas and franchises from the company’s history

@Otoemetry 100% agree with you, really sad to see that people continue to put simple entertainment, not even a necessity, above the actual harm done by the people who make said entertainment. Good luck saying that in a NL comments section though, these places get absurdly transphobic very quickly

honestly a shockingly weak direct. Katamari and GBA games were the only announcements that were exciting at all for me, almost everything else was just more info on stuff we already know about and re-releases of old games. feels like the switch is really winding down at this point

Rabsca, Fuecoco, and Clodsire are my favorites so far

judging the team at gamefreak and calling them lazy isn’t it, it just shows a lack of understanding about how game development works. pressed for time, probably yes. but definitely not lazy.

It only makes sense for the Mario movie to be a musical. The franchise’s music is one of the most integral parts of its identity, the movie should reflect that. If the songs are good, I don’t see an issue here. Now given that it’s Illumination, I really doubt the songs will be good, but who knows

The issue is largely that Chris Pratt is not a voice actor. he’s done voice work for Lego Movie and Onward, but in Lego Movie he does a regular voice and services the very plain character; and in Onward he gives a messy, forced performance that prevents me from connecting with the character. I don’t think he can play characters that are different from his own personality in live action even, so he really struggles to create a character in voice work. He doesn’t need to sound like he does in the games, I don’t want that, but the voice looks so wrong coming out of the character’s mouth. Mario is so expressive and chris pratt has an extremely inexpressive voice. The accent he does only makes it worse, it just sounds so unnatural and forced. You need a voice actor in this role, and chris pratt isn’t one.

Completely baffling to see people calling Arlo a super negative whiny baby when his videos are so incredibly tame. Like he’s constantly tip-toeing and qualifying everything he says to avoid people getting angry at him over nothing and yet they do anyways. I’ve seen all of his videos and the one and only time i’ve seen him be unfair in his content was his video about the game awards this last year. Other than that, he’s generally pretty positive and genuine.

would be very surprised if June doesn’t give us a general direct with a big spotlight for BotW2

I am very glad James Turner is so well known now. He’s always been one of the best designers they have and he’s really worked magic since becoming art director and ensures that pokémon designs don’t get stuck in the past and keep moving forward with creative ideas. That said, all of these designers deserve to be just as well known, im really happy somebody is trying to put together a comprehensive list. A lot of the best pokémon of every generation arent designed by the main art directors.

the EMMI were one of the best parts of the game when I started only hiding as a last resort. It’s much more fun to try and out maneuver them rather than rely on stealth all the time, and feels more true to how Samus the character would actually act in the situation. Felt like a much better and more well-realized version of the cool but bland SA-X encounters from fusion

PLA made me kinda optimistic for pokémon, seeing as it’s the best game in the series by a pretty wide margin. The starters also left a great first impression. Gen 8 has some of the best designs of any generation but the starters were pretty underwhelming and their final evolutions were awful. Overall, the design philosophy for pokémon designs has really improved recently, with gen 7 and 8 being the ones with the highest quality designs imo. Hopefully James Turner is still art director but either way, this is probably the best batch of starters we’ve had in a really long time, maybe the best ever. I didn’t really want gen 9 yet, but they got me to change my mind pretty quickly with these designs and the fact that it’s open world

@NinjaGuy69 you’re throwing insults around at people because they like or are excited about a game you didn’t like. Maybe evaluate why you feel the need to try and put other people down for no reason

@Mikmoomamimocki they sue people for obscene amounts of money for putting roms of their games online before release

First trailer made me excited about a 3D Kirby game, latest trailer makes it look like a flat out great game, regardless of it being Kirby or not. Extremely excited

@Magician what do those things have to do with each other

it’s so wild to me that it’s taken this long. It reuses assets and the map from the original, projects like this generally don’t take nearly this long to develop. I’m still waiting for the huge thing that makes it make sense, cause as of right now, I have no idea how the game didn’t come out in like 2020.

If movement in a 3D platformer feels bad, the entire game is doomed. That was the case here, it felt awful to control and very few of the costumes were fun to use. The comparison to Kirby also doesn’t work in this article because context matters. Just because a mechanic works well in one game doesn’t automatically mean it’ll work well in other games. Rarely are there any instances of being a power up from a different level in Kirby, it’s usually keeping a power up that you get once earlier in a level. The differences here are that in Kirby after getting hit, there’s a grace period where you can get the power back, letting good playing make up for mistakes. Second, kirby levels are fun to go through and the power ups are fun to use. In Balan, the power ups just aren’t fun to use. why would I want to go through multiple levels to bring the right costume to the right area when the costumes aren’t fun to control and generally only make me feel limited. The mechanic doesn’t work at all here and saying that Kirby does it too isn’t really a defense of the mechanic, it’s just an attempt to deflect criticism without addressing where the criticism comes from, which is basically how this article felt. It’s cool if you like the game, but I assumed this article would help me see why someone would like it. Instead, it seems like the writer thinks that everyone who dislikes it is just being unreasonable or jumping on a bandwagon, because almost none of the actual criticisms were addressed.

@nocdaes true yeah, I don’t think a totally new console is anywhere in the future, but I agree that the OLED was probably supposed to be a more powerful revision. I guess it’s still possible that they release an upgraded switch soon, but that chip shortage is really doing a number on them.

@nocdaes there was never going to be a new console in 2022, thats way too early. They just said last year that the switch was halfway through its life, i’d be surprised if we get a new console any time before 2024

Just looking for even one NL article to go by without that one guy in the comments using it as an excuse to act self-important about his extremely unpopular thoughts on Metroid Dread

my big 3 were Hades, Metroid Dread, and Hollow Knight. All three probably crack my top 10 games of all time, or at the very least Hades and Hollow Knight do. Having a lot of fun with my switch this year while emulating my huge back catalogue of older games on my Xbox and all the terrific stuff added to game pass all the time. Can’t wait for next year! Looks like Nintendo is genuinely pulling out all the stops for 2022, plus we get Sonic Frontiers and Elden Ring. Can’t wait

@Samwise7 It’s on the shorter side, sure, but I also think it’s paced so perfectly. More content would be great, but I feel like they wanted to keep that tight design and quick pace. Would love some DLC that adds some extra post-game areas with unique puzzles and super hard bosses

If Dread had a good soundtrack, it would be a perfect video game. That’s the only real flaw I can find in it, it’s the kind of game that rarely comes around. i’ll be revisiting it and playing it over and over for years to come.

@FlashmanHarry just feels way too soon for their next console. They said this year that the Switch was just about halfway through its life. So they’ll probably just release new models but no new console until 2024 at the absolute earliest

@FlashmanHarry I can’t imagine we’ll see the next nintendo console anytime soon, certainly not in 2022 or 2023. I feel like late 2024 is the earliest that it would come, probably with another switch revision coming before that

Killer year for the Switch and Nintendo. Easily stands toe-to-toe with the Switch’s terrific 2019, maybe even better. And next year looks to be on the level of 2017 even

2020 <<< 2018 <<<<<<<<<< 2021 < 2019 << 2017

This year had multiple 10/10 games in Bowser’s Fury and Metroid Dread, with tons of great stuff like Pokémon Snap, Mario Party, FDC, and WarioWare thrown in. Really great year, leagues better than 2020 and 2018 and roughly the same quality as 2019. If im rating each year I’d say
2017: 10/10
2018: 6/10
2019: 8/10
2020: 3/10
2021: 8/10

Switch has built up an absolutely insane library by this point. We’ve reached a point where several of my favorite games of all time came from the last 5 years