swoose

This appears to barely involve Fire Emblem mechanics or characters, and is more like the IP slapped on an unrelated DeNA project they didn’t think would sell. And now dropped with no buildup whatsoever.

I’m honestly surprised they’re allowing the Fire Emblem brand to be abused like this.

I watched preview footage of the Mega Victreebel fight where 2 trainers hit it over and over for barely any damage after several straight minutes, and now I'm deeply skeptical that the gameplay is all that good. It's screaming MMORPG combat.

Robot No. 2 didn't get exploded for this.

No options, no interaction, and likely $70 USD minimum. This is the ultimate Nintendo product

Nintendo should be thanking Genki for all the free publicity before the Switch 2 launch, and priming their audience for what they would see.

A real stretch to claim this harmed the Switch 2 in any way.

For the first time I've had to think about the physical vs. digital question. Jon formerly from NintendoLife here published a video today about the Star Wars: Outlaws situation and how the game probably couldn't have run properly on Switch 2 physical media. Switch 2 cartridges read at only 400MB/s vs. 2.1GB/s internal storage. Never have I felt so much like I may actually be getting a worse experience if I buy certain games physically.

I think Nintendo really dropped the ball this gen with their physical media, it really seems to lack feature parity with digital.

One angle to this I haven’t seen, regardless of the rest of the indie market, is release pacing. Team Cherry took 6 years between announcement and release to develop a 2D metroidvania, which suggests to me they worked at a hobbyists’s pace on it (not a criticism, hobbies are noble).

They can charge what they want of course, but this pricing suggests they don’t plan to speed up their output. Maybe if you want your favorite creators to expand and finish projects more than once every 8 years, their games should cost more than this.

@Ellie-Moo Yesss there's lots of kits to try now and the online remains active, just don't sweat the wins and losses too much! Focus on learning all the things that can kill you, lol

This is really unsurprising and it makes sense when development is profit driven - once the old code no longer serves something that will make money this financial year, it can be done away with. Execs and investors won't care about preservation for some future possible rerelease 30 years down the line.

If anyone thought preservation doesn't fall to the fans, this is a good example of why it does.

None of these - a lesson was learned from ARMS where button controls were strictly better than motion and became the optimal way to play. Visually I’m still seeing all these comments that it’s “only black and blue” - you know the characters are customizable? Be hot pink and wear bunny ears if that’s your fancy. And I get wanting more environments but it’s a refreshingly budget Nintendo game, and environmental modeling is a lot of work. What’s there has a solid amount of detail, reminds me of a Splatoon plaza or map.

What would keep me coming back is a rank system. The park rings are temporary and unlocking all helmets is a good amount of challenge, but after that I’d like some way to track my skill progression. It seems they pictured it as a more casual affair where you don’t sweat wins and losses too much, and that’s fine, but a bit funny for a game this technical.

Also maybe another optional tutorial set for the subtleties of things like wheelies and bunny hops. They add a LOT to the gameplay and I imagine some people bounce off the game without getting them down. When I had trouble with certain techniques there were zero English language guides for them on the internet, so I had to do all the testing myself.

Between this and getting Switch running on a widescreen CRT, consider me engaged by Zion’s recent videos.

I don't disagree that $20 for this and particularly $80 for a new buyer on Switch 2 sounds steep. But I thought the "£17 for four hours of entertainment" line was a bit funny, have you seen the price of concert tickets lately?

There are 4 hour games that I'll think about the rest of my life, and don't underestimate our ability to goof off in a game and roll around as Gear Kirby for 30 minutes without progressing anything. Measuring games by play hours is always simplistic.

We really didn’t know how good we had it with the 3DS. Wish it had a stronger start and the 3D effect got more widely explored, because there’s nothing like it now.

I encountered this bug in XC2, heard a voice line saying “DON’T FORGET ME” over and over.

The one area where Pokémon hasn’t fallen off is delivering whimsy and surprise with their designs. This goober is perfect

7 seems fair to me. Visually it’s actually quite nice and polished, and the models, music and gameplay design were reminding me a lot of Splatoon, so I was very unsurprised to find Hisashi Nogami served as Producer. The main thing I wish for is some sense of progression in your rank. I think they didn’t want players obsessing over competition - another common Nintendo move for better or worse.

As I’ve approached rolling credits I agree with this site’s review that the controls - the main selling point - are about 90% there. The bunny hop really requires you to yank both joycon straight up, not the slight lift you usually do with a mouse, which makes the 100x jump rope challenge evil. And I’m at a loss for how to wheelie straight forward as required for the ‘Tilt & Run’ trial. It seems very timing sensitive and not well explained by the game. Granted you don’t need these techniques to just hop in a match and have fun.

Hopefully by fall they mean October or so, and we get a couple expansions based on Johto in the meantime.

And I’ll always be a curmudgeon about X/Y nostalgia and megas not being new pokemon. Some of my faves like Mawile and Altaria could have used real, permanent evolutions.

Really don’t see this replacing player battles in the main games. It’s more an indication that Generation 10 won’t be out before next August.

They’ll have current-gen titles eventually and would probably rather showcase those than a mobile game.

The demo mentioned a skill-based matchmaking system so I wonder if we can progress some kind of rank points that weren’t live yet for the prerelease period. I could see that keeping me coming back.

The core gameplay is clearly the draw here, and it’s a polished package just light on content so I understand the 6s. But I wonder where all the sky-high expectations beyond that come from for a $20 game with no micro transactions. Part of what makes me amenable to this game is I’m so encouraged that Nintendo will still make smaller projects, instead of feature creeping everything into $50-$80 games. We didn’t get a single $20 Nintendo game on Switch 1.

@MarioLinkSamus You can join the same park as your friends (I did it in the demo period) so I’d say that’s not accurate.

The game then sorts you randomly into squads so you may play on the same side as your friend or against them, or a game on the other court, so it’s not perfect. But games are only 3min so you play together eventually. There’s also private lobby play which can have bots.

They didn’t want teams of 3 experts sweeping a public lobby or trolling everyone.

I’m a stickler for art direction and the game is really not THAT bland. Neon lights everywhere, you slap your favourite team’s colours on your robot and a pair of cat ears, choose between shiny and matte textures, and then get into a game with a neon yellow ball and wave your goofy mitts at your teammates to clap or high five. It has charm. Some of my friends said it looked like Halo, though I see how Nintendo fans might not take that as a compliment.

The UI is snappy as well. You can’t judge everything from screenshots.

The fun I had during the 3 test jams was probably worth $20 alone, it felt like an event. I'll be there launch weekend and curious to see how long the online stays active.

Replayed it last year on NSO and it holds up just as well as TTYD in my eyes. It was a very ambitious title that had at least 4 years of development, a long time for those days, and was meant to be on par with Square’s big rpgs on the Playstation. On top of Intelligent Systems, Iwata era HAL labs worked on the writing, and there’s a LOT of character and scenario writing with not only new areas, but a changing and growing Toad Town every chapter, and Tattle entries for every npc. Fitting as it’s called Mario Story before localization. Paper was never the point, 2D was just a refreshing art style by the time it released in 2000.

I hope we get a game that returns to these roots someday. Story and original characters as the focus, not battle gimmicks and papercraft.

Played 90 minutes of the first Jam and intend to play the next two. I definitely see the depth of skill expression in the controls, the wheelies in particular. They not only give a different turning radius but also slightly change your sweet spot while shooting. And I'm very interested in the dash+hop technique shown off in that dev video, makes grabbing rebounds look much easier.

The dash speed felt slow at first, but it's better once you're on a court. They start you on a big outer track with much longer straightaways than you'll actually play on. A basketball court isn't that big, so a single dash takes you quite far.

And mind your ergonomics - I came out of it with a bit of pain in one wrist already, which I think is correctible. 90 degree angles for your elbow are supposed to be best for handling mice.

Great example of why testing is a huge part of development and shouldn’t just be shipped off somewhere to disposable contractors.

I'll be interested in seeing more of this. The inspirations are cool and isometric grids turn my brain on.

Seems really straightforward actually that the main DK games happen in chronological order i.e. arcade -> country -> returns -> bananza. Bananza happens after Odyssey and spinoffs don't matter.

That wraps it up and it doesn't take a corkboard diagram.

I normally don’t tell people how to navigate their Nintendo fandom in these times but some of the excuses I’m seeing here are the lowest of the low, even casting aspersions at this long-running charity event and invoking groomers and scammers. Seriously give your head a shake.

Anyone with half a heart or brain at Nintendo could have 1. fast-tracked permission for this event, 2. gave notice further in advance, 3. waived permission this time with an understanding of what to do in the future, 4. ignored it entirely as with every year before. Assuming none of these happened, Nintendo deserves all the negativity that will come to them for this.

@HeadPirate Yes, and selling through existing stock is exactly the phase they should be in with the Switch 1. It has been in mass production for 8 years with all the economics of scale in that time and no price drop, which feeds into the biggest margins Nintendo has enjoyed in company history. You could argue Switch 1 is more equipped to eat the tariff hike than any other consumer good on Earth.

This would be like Apple announcing they're raising prices on the iPhone 8 (2017), that is the model contemporary with the Switch 1. Switch Online is younger than the Switch 1, they could just as well double the price of subscriptions.

This is transparently a company going "well we HAVE to raise prices SOMEwhere" and picking a product arbitrarily instead of charging proportional to what things cost. And I know the incentive structure that makes them do that, but people are right to criticize it.

I’m not in a rush to defend a company raising prices on an 8 year old console that’s approaching obsolete. If “market conditions” justify this, what can’t they justify

The point where “HD-2D” overstayed its welcome was already about 3 games ago. They’re completely mailing in art direction and trying nothing new.

Sounds like an honest mistake all around and being handled appropriately. The placeholder images are pretty funny though, when these are the day 1 chase cards for everyone opening the new packs.

This overview trailer did a lot to sell me on it. Love that there are different properties for guards, forwards and centers to offer different playstyles, and that you can jump without the use of half pipes, on offense and defense.

The Switch 2 direct could’ve slipped any of that in.

People want more 3 lap tracks, so they increase their availability a minuscule amount.

People want p-switch and medallion tracking, so they… change the color of your number if you already succeeded in collecting them all.

Then the one thing you’d hope they dig their heels on, the game’s difficulty, gets nerfed because why? People didn’t place 1st on every track on the first try?

This has been one of the most perplexing post-launch support periods I’ve ever seen from Nintendo. Mario Kart 8, Arms, Smash Bros, none were like this.

I'm firmly on the side that VAs should be given more respect and retained if they can still perform the characters... except in the case of Toad. Someone doing Toad voice for years of their life can't be good for their health.

Based on math the community has done about VP costs in the trailer, it will only take about 10 battles to earn enough points to completely re-stat a pokemon. Less if the mon already has some stats you want. So maybe not the instant gratification of pokemon showdown’s simulator, but not bad at all for an official platform that wants to have a gameplay loop.

I do agree it looks ugly though, not sure what they were thinking with the mostly black playing field.

I too was surprised to see mid 30s being "average" for series like Animal Crossing and Pokemon. But then I remember it's a survey of Japan and those series took off there almost a full generation before hitting the west. Their first Animal Crossing was way back on the N64, and the Gameboy Color didn't even exist when they got Pokemon.

Also worth noting 15yo and under weren't surveyed. Fire Emblem wasn't on the survey (sad) but I bet the average age there is almost geriatric.

Thank you for specifying it’s a movie twice in the first sentence, genuinely. Because youtube recommended me this trailer for “Mortal Kombat II” and I had no idea which it was, given how games look and use actors now and how we’re coming off the game “Mortal Kombat 1”.

Makes me understand why Nintendo says “The ___ Game” before and after every game title.

We know Nintendo games won’t come on game-key cards because we eat up Nintendo news every day. How is the average person supposed to know? Where is Nintendo’s statement about it, they’re not plastering it on billboards.

Nintendo thought these were a good look for the console and “good enough” for 3rd party games, so not a stretch to think their games would also come on them.

8 frames of input lag in games like F-Zero is unplayable. I can't imagine having even a mildly positive time with this release, if the game doesn't respond when you press a button. That is the #1 thing a game needs to do.

I would take low res, visual artifacts, audio glitches all over this much latency.

Something about seeing movie Donkey Kong doing Illumination née Dreamworks face, with all its high-res and generic house style, makes me less eager to be a Nintendo fan here in the 2020s.

Throat cancer is such a cruel thing for a voice actor to get. Reminds me of Mitsuo Terada and Rhythm Heaven.

Still a long life well lived, RIP

Has anyone actually needed a replacement pro controller battery? Their batteries are ludicrously long-lived so I’m really not fussed about this. The adhesive faceplate seems like a solution for having no seams on the grips or sides of the controller, which makes it smoother to hold and picks up less dirt. There are obvious benefits to this design that you’d think a review would acknowledge, and drift is completely TBD - they’re not the exact same potentiometers and wipers.

There IS a major flaw to the controller and it’s that the Dpad still registers wrong directions constantly, making it useless for many games. That doesn’t get talked about enough and even this article calls it “strong”, it’s anything but.

This is the kind of high-falutin conception of art that you mostly get from going to art university, as Miyamoto did, where it’s defined in opposition to other kinds of creation, and purpose and authorial intent drives the definition.

To a layperson, it’s plain to see art all around them including in products, ads, comic books, cereal boxes, wherever.

You’d think this track would be a great fit for World’s wall-riding mechanics, with you racing mostly on the inside of pipes much like some 3d F-Zero tracks.

I hope they’ve considered a way to fit more tracks in World. I’ve fallen off playing it since the devs nerfed the online random option. New tracks would provide some reason to come back, until I get sick again of driving them for only 1 lap per race.

This reminds me of Nintendo packaging the Switch 2 screen directly under the box cardboard so people open it up and go “ooo, shiny”

You’re not supposed to fiddle with additional downloads, you’re supposed to seamlessly open up each GameCube game and go “ooo, my Switch Online Expansion Pass sure is valuable!” It’s presentation over function, and I’d be shocked if they compromise their precious artisan vision in changing it.

What incentive could there be for EA to act any differently? Shame? Lol

This is the logical conclusion of late… well, you know the name of the system we’re under.

Normally I’m not sympathetic to “Nintendo hates their players” grousing but oh my goodness, they must hate their players in this case. It’s such a targeted strike at the playstyle VS lobby players were choosing freely, and a change no-one asked for.

The sad thing is we can’t even hope player feedback could influence Nintendo to revert the change. The feedback was already loud and clear, both online and through play data, that we want 3 lap races. They took that feedback and gave the opposite.

The single biggest blemish on this game was how hard they made it to race 3 laps on most tracks, which caused everyone to select Random in lobbies. And now they’re saying woops, we didn’t make it hard enough.

I don’t even mind the intermissions that much, but only 1 lap on the actual track removes all sense of progression and improvement from one lap to the next, passing a shortcut then taking it later, driving with different items etc. And forget the music speeding up on lap 3 - the original music for all the nitro tracks might not even finish 1 loop before the race is over. It’s a strict downgrade in so many ways.

I’m honestly taken aback how spiteful this change is.

This is such a natural addition it's surprising they didn't have an art gallery already. Maybe some artwork originals were more dispersed before and now they're getting more staging?