topsekret

@Davestator I'm sure it'll eventually come to PS5. It's the same thing NISA did with Disgaea 6 where it's just a timed exclusive. Best to hold out for PS5 for that real physical disc.

@Dr_Awkward Still a major downgrade from real physical. No data on the cartridge. Wastes your storage space, and you lose access to the game when Nintendo's servers shut down.

It seems like this company announces a new controller every week lol

Game-Key Card physical + no upgrade path for existing owners = SKIP. 3rd parties continue to suck on Switch 2.

@Ulysses Agreed, I can't believe Nintendo didn't think of this, especially considering they had a pixel-perfect presentation option for both playing Game Boy games on GBA as well as playing DS games on 3DS.

@Dr_Awkward Don't be that guy, the one who is defending game key cards. Game key cards suck.

@CANOEberry I just think Nintendo Life should do more to help their readers who can't read good (and who wanna learn to do other stuff good too).

Wish there was a proper Switch 2 Edition on a cartridge like Rune Factory. Or a free upgrade like FFT. But I guess $1 upgrade is bearable.

I guess it's better than what they're doing for Trails Beyond the Horizon (Switch 2 Game-Key Card, no upgrade path, and $10 more than all the other versions).

Why the dramatically different handling of the two games despite being in the same franchise from the same dev? Is it just a case of NISA being extremely greedy and GungHo being less greedy? If so, I really hope NISA loses the Falcom licenses (as Xseed did before them) and GungHo takes it over from here.

Man, it can't even hold 30 FPS?

And as we've seen time and time again on Switch 2, basically no games seem to know how to actually implement VRR correctly with LFC. I think the only game confirmed to use it correctly is Welcome Tour for the little VRR demo? What's the point of the feature if devs don't use it?

I guess on the bright side, if it's a crappy port, I'll feel less bad if it does end up being on a Game-Key Card. Cause I absolutely won't pick it up if it's on a GKC, so if the port's bad, then it would feel less like I'm missing out.

Switch 2 is looking to be pretty bad for 3rd parties... If this is the kinda support we're getting fresh out of the gate, imagine what it'll look like once PS6 hits and devs start chasing even higher spec targets.

I don't know why the article included the generic description of what a T-rated game could have, when in the embedded image from Reddit you can see what Metroid Prime 4 actually has ("Animated Blood" and "Violence"). Now the poor readers are confused thinking the game has swearing and gambling lol.

To clarify, is the Network Test only for the Switch 1 version or also the Switch 2 version?

Oh boy, more Game-Key Cards

If Bandai Namco can't be bothered to add a 60 FPS toggle for Switch 2 players, I can't be bothered to pay full price.

@OrtadragoonX Obviously PS2 couldn't handle the raw output resolution nor the high poly character models. But the environmental detail feels way below a high-quality PS2 game like FF XII. For god's sake, the buildings in Z-A are just cubes with tiling textures!

Look at it the other way: the HD remaster of the PS2 game FF XII looks way better than this.

Game Freak is totally incompetent when it comes to designing a 3D world.

810p and 30 FPS on Switch 2? Yikes, game doesn't even look that intensive.

First set of comparison images is pretty interesting, the city looks completely different between the two. I'm assuming the Switch 2 version is closer to the other versions and they basically remade the whole environment for the Switch 1 version?

Seems like they put more effort into optimizing the Switch 1 version than the Switch 2 version.

I don't get why Nintendo doesn't just make it so you always have the option to select at least 1 traditional track when voting in online lobbies.

This will be my 2nd 3rd party Switch 2 game (after Rune Factory) thanks to it being on a real cartridge.

Would be nice to know the breakdown between platform and by physical vs. digital. Hopefully Marvelous met or exceeded their expectations for the Switch 2 physical version to justify continuing to release their games on real cartridges!

Paid version better just let you build whatever team you want without grinding for in-game currency to fix the stats of the Pokemon they give you.

This is one of the reasons I quit playing Pokemon (the other being the garbage production values of the modern games). I just don't have the time to waste anymore doing tedious grinding before I can get to the "real" game that is the competitive battling.

Grinding is such a stupid concept for a competitive PVP game. Imagine if in Street Fighter your Ryu's attacks just did a little less damage than your opponent's because your opponent grinded their Ryu longer than you.

I will also continue to complain about Game-Key Cards. Nintendo and the 3rd parties hope that we'll just shut up and accept them, but I refuse.

@OrtadragoonX FFXII on the PS2 looks leagues better than this game.

@sfb Cool, thanks for testing. It can be a bit hard to tell for sure just by feel. There could definitely be some placebo at play, but if you are playing better in the new version, it could be due to maybe like 1 frame less of lag.

At the very least, it sounds like it isn't worse than the Saturn Tribute, which is supposed to be around 6 frames lag. 6 frames is about when I start to notice input lag, especially coming off of a really responsive game like Mushihimesama (3 frames of lag on Switch).

I find Batsugun Saturn Tribute to be playable, but not ideal. I find myself having to anticipate bullets more than usual and be a bit more pre-emptive with my positioning to compensate for the slightly longer input delay.

And congrats on being number 3 on the leaderboard! Always fun to rush to the top in the early days of a game's release. Unfortunately, I won't be able to join in on the fun till my physical copies from LRG arrive in a few weeks.

@Expa0 @everynowandben Thanks for the recommendations! I've never heard of Symphony of War, so I'll keep an eye on it.

I am familiar with Kaga's post-FE games, though I haven't played any of them yet. A shame Vestaria Saga will likely never get a Switch port due to the bad blood between him and Nintendo.

@sfb Would you happen to have Batsugun Saturn Tribute Boosted on the Switch? Curious if the Batsugun port in the Toaplan collection has less input lag.

I only want 1st party games on Switch 2 since 3rd party games are all on Game-Key Cards.

@jojobar Yep, they did that for the 3DS Fire Emblem games. Pixel art characters on the map, but high-resolution illustrations for the character portraits. And 3D graphics for the battle sequences. Despite the mix of art styles, it felt very coherent in those games.

I've heard this is supposed to be better than the first. Probably not up to Fire Emblem's level still, but I'm interested.

@Expa0 Curious what your recommendations are for Fire Emblem-likes? Most SRPGs I see tend to be Final Fantasy Tactics-likes.

"Addressed low FPS issues on the NX platform across several levels."

Nintendo Switch: "Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time."

This looks drastically inferior to the new Digimon game. Sad how Pokemon makes way more money than Digimon, but refuses to put any of it into the budget of the actual games.

My heart sank when I saw the title of this article. I assumed it was gonna be about the ports having horrible input lag or something.

Now I'm relieved it's just about a minor typo on the box art, Resident Evil Revelaitons-style!

Calling it now: 30 FPS on Switch 1. Game-Key Card on Switch 2. No upgrade path.

So let me get this straight:

*Game-Key Card
*"Mostly" 30 FPS (meaning drops are expected)
*No split-screen
*Releases a month late
*$70

Sounds like an excellent value proposition! /s

I'm honestly fine with them not releasing the game on Switch 2, as we all know it would be doomed to be on a Game-Key Card if it were released in the current climate. For me, a game being on a Game-Key Card is the same as the game not existing.

Maybe if they wait a few years before considering a port, cartridge prices will go down enough for them to put it on a real cartridge. And more DLC would be released by then that could be included on the cartridge. That would be the best-case scenario.

Maybe the X account is run by some boomer at Sony that thinks every game console is a "PlayStation?" lol

@SuperBro64 Yeah...they really should start looking into a way to let you pick which games to download from within the app or something.

Unfortunately, I didn't really have a lot of free time this weekend, so I only got to play for about 30 minutes. I had fun, but I think if I wanted to get into the game properly, I'd need to invest in some ergonomic mouse mode shells for the Joy-Cons. They're just way too thin to hold like a mouse comfortably for prolonged periods of time.

Speaking of which, anyone have recommendations for mouse mode shells?

@BenAV Seriously. And 12 nearly back-to-back posts in the span of 15 minutes? I know Pokemon fanboys can be annoying, but this Palword fanboy takes it to another level. 😂

@Nintendum And here's the alt 🤣🤣🤣

@Nintendumb Bro actually made 2 accounts today to troll. You must be really triggered 🤣🤣🤣

@TheExile285 Top 30 is out: Ys X: Proud Nordics was number 15 with 3,436.

Personally, I'm glad to see it selling poorly since it's a Game-Key Card release.

Another 3rd party game to skip due to being on a Game-Key Card.

@SabreLevant Even physical games use digital storage space for save data, updates, and DLC. And though I vastly prefer physical and will always choose that over digital when it's an option, I do have a fair amount of digital games on Switch 1. I got like 600+ physical games and 200+ digital games. So I easily filled up a 1 TB micro SD card on Switch 1. But if those 600+ physical games were digital instead, I'd probably easily need more than 4 TB.

After transferring to Switch 2, I don't have enough space to fit everything on the internal storage. And a 1 TB micro sd express is way more expensive than a 1 TB normal micro sd card. And even if I got one, I'd basically just have enough room for all my old Switch 1 stuff and nothing for Switch 2. I don't like having to delete and redownload to all the time depending on what I wanna play.

With Switch 1 my rule for buying digital was basically the same as it is for Switch 2: I'll only consider buying digital if the game satisfies three conditions:
1. Must be very cheap (around $10 or less).
2. Must be small in file size (ideally 1 GB or less).
3. No existing physical version.

Which basically means only indies. For AA and AAA publishers, I expect them to put their games on a cartridge. If they don't, I refuse to support them.

Regarding the concern about digital ownership, you are right, despite removin the ability to purchase digital games on the Wii, DSi, Wii U, and 3DS, Nintendo does still provide users the ability to redownload games they've already purchased...for now.

But if you read the FAQs that they release when they shut down their stores, you'll see that they say you'll still be able to redownload games "for the foreseeable future." That's very vague and non-committal, they are leaving themselves an out to shut that down too in the future.

Think about it like this: Nintendo is a business. They exist to make money. Those old digital stores no longer make money for them. Yet Nintendo still has to pay operational/maintenance costs for those servers to support redownloading. This means they are a net-negative for Nintendo. Do you really think Nintendo will continue to pay the costs to keep the servers running indefinitely out of the goodness of their hearts?

@Max_the_German Let's walk through an example. You mentioned 1536x1080, so let's use that.

We both agree that if you render to 1536x1080 and then scale that to fit a 1920x1080, it will be stretched horizontally, right?

I've never heard of the term "anamorphic" till today, but I think I know what you're saying after reading about it a bit.

The 1536x1080 would look as if you took a 1920x1080 image and then scaled it to 1536x1080. Essentially, it would look squashed. But then if you take that 1536x1080 and scale it back to 1920x1080 it would have the correct proportions?

Of course, for it to be a performance win, the game would have to render directly to a 1536x1080 render target. I do believe you could do some tricky stuff with the transformation matrices to achieve this effect, however, there would still be a loss of quality since you are losing information on the horizontal axis.

Essentially, you are forcing ALL the information loss to be on the horizontal axis, whereas if you render to a proportionally smaller render target, the information loss is distributed evenly between both axes. To me, the latter seems more desirable, though, academically, I am a bit curious to do a side-by-side comparison with both techniques.

@Yalloo I'll admit, it's a massive cope, but it does in fact take time to manufacture cartridges. Especially if they need to wait till they have a good enough build to put on the cartridge (as opposed to just a license key).

Why do you think the physical version specifically of Sonic Racing on Switch 2 is coming out much later than the digital version?

@SabreLevant Nah digital sucks too:

1. Wastes my storage space.
2. Depends on Nintendo maintaining access to their servers to download in the future. You don't actually own it, you're just renting long-term for an unspecified period.

@Greenspark Bro, how much is Nintendo paying you to necro old news stories and individually respond to people with a copy-pasta to justify GKCs?

Another exciting release ruined by Game-Key Cards and lack of upgrade path. WTF are 3rd parties doing?!

@Sylamp Oh yikes, I'll hold off on purchasing this then. Let me know if they ever properly fix it.

Copium: What if two of the missing games were Elden Ring and FFVIIR and they pulled them from the show cause they're getting delayed to put them on real cartridges instead of Game-Key Cards?! A man can dream...

Skip until they patch in 60 FPS, at the very least for Switch 2.