whitemage

Ah hah. This doesn't appear to be noted in this article (though I imagine was all out there in a forum conversations I missed?), but the US is indeed shipping the standard game separately and not shipping the special edition content until Fall, so kinda like UK but all as part of the same pre-order I guess? Not a big deal to me, just wish it had been clearer so I didn't worry that they flubbed my SE.

So... I got a pre-order in of the special edition (US).
The email receipt was correct, and indicated standard, 4-7 business day delivery.
What I got instead was the game box alone, shipped Friday, with next-day delivery. The order status page on Nintendo's site lists "Xenoblade Chronicles 3" as the package sent, and a completely blank item in the item list. And it's still "processing." Maybe they'll send the rest later? Or maybe they're totally screwing up. I'l engage customer support tomorrow (unless someone here happens to know they send the SE stuff later (for the US) and I managed to miss that).

@MatthewTaranto That's awesome! Treasures, for sure.

@MatthewTaranto Dang dude. Any cool stories behind those Nintendo Powers?

Probably Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. Bought it when it came out, now like four hundred bucks but it's one of my very favorite games, I'll own it until it breaks. Also have the expensive-but-not-nearly-as Radiant Dawn. I loved TTYD and Skies of Arcadia Legends but gave my copies to friends to enjoy.

@ReaperMelia Oh thanks a bunch for the info! Yeah, I totally agree.. though considering the pre-order process to this point, my expectations were decidedly not high; I'll be relieved if they at least ship it tomorrow. At least for me, I'm frantically trying to play through Future Connected with my partner so my excitement can survive the extra wait.

Also the email is right but the receipt on the website shows "no product image" and no actual reference to the product, which is... A bit disturbing.

Has anyone in the US who purchased the special edition from the Nintendo store had their copy ship yet?

@ReaperMelia Mine too, still "processing"

Xenoblade Definitive with my partner, Fire Emblem (Blazing Sword, for the 4th time I think?) with my cats. And maybe a smattering of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow.

Managed to get one around 4, spent maybe 20 minutes in the waiting room and then the shopping experience behaved without any issues. Sorry to hear that wasn't the case for others.

Oof, the Duke sure makes the comment section more of a swamp than usual. Eh, I kinda want to check out a trailer when one releases but I doubt I'd enjoy a feature film. As someone else said, feels like a sad parody of itself at best.

Oh man, I never looked closely enough at the NA box art until now; look, Simon is trying to whip the monsters but his whip got caught in that ring that lets him swing instead. Just like what happens in the game!

Already kinda covered by a comment or two, but I would be shocked if the situation weren't something along the lines of:
1. All maintenance for Wii shop infrastructure put on bottom of priority stack constantly
2. Ops folks warn management that this could go down at any time and they aren't prepared to bring it back up. They get sympathetic nods and no support to improve the situation.
3. Infrastructure predictably breaks, this becomes a fire drill for a few folks who can't give any estimate on recovery because of utter lack of maintenance or analysis of the systems, and there are probably a small number of grumpy folks who even remember how it's put together.

(This projection brought to you by an ops person, yes, but I have a feeling on this one)

Playing the Prologue with Japanese voices, I will say the OTT dialogue (while completely subjective) is at least to a decent extent a localization thing. Nearly every line I could understand the Japanese of, it was like the translators took it and thought "hmm, how can we take this simple statement and make it sound overwrought?" Sometimes the effect adds something fun to the dialogue, often it gives me a sense of watching actors in a Shakespeare-inspired play. Which may have been the point, but I would've preferred a more natural translation direction. Not a deal breaker for me though.

@Greatluigi If that idea interests you, if you haven't seen it already, might I direct you to BEASTARS (animated series)? It fits along those lines and is surprisingly excellent.

I don't think this is clickbait, I can understand why one might be annoyed by the title I suppose. As long as it isn't categorized as news, a funny video article can be just a funny video article, even if some have seen it before.

@Spiders Aw thank you! Your feedback brightened my day.

This was my first SMT game. I've been enjoying it a lot, systems feel very balanced and fun, world is fun to explore but not overwhelmingly large, and power progression feels rewarding and organic. It's a game that shows it means business, without being totally unapproachable. At its meanest, it angers me just enough to remind me I care, but not so much I put it down for an extended period of time. And it's one of the few RPGs where every single option is a good idea to use sometimes -item (and most items are genuinely useful), status and stat-changing abilities, guard, even pass turn, have very important uses and you will get punished for forgetting about them. It makes every system feel very balanced, meaningful and deliberate, and every battle feel a little puzzle-like without feeling too predictable.

Not to invalidate anyone for whom one Zelda or another felt Zelda-like or not, which is totally fair - I too remember when I thought a series or genre had to have a set checklist and each game had to tick all the boxes to be represented, and later realized the flaw in that mindset. As in life (like, literally, biology), changing core aspects of a game (any aspect, not just optional "non-definitive" ones, but never all or most the aspects) is how to meaningfully grow a game franchise. You don't have to grow a series to make good games in it, but doing so doesn't have to invalidate it as a member of the series. Again that's different from whether a game ultimately feels like part of the series or not as a whole. I just recommend trying not to get overly lost in the patterns and rules. I enjoyed the list and commenters' takes on it.

There are vastly more games featuring men than women as primary characters, even today; games featuring women just catch the eye more (since many folks perceive characters being women or minorities as inherently "political" or "pandering" so they stick out more). I think there's nothing wrong with this game's premise, but the string of commenters using it as an excuse to punch some political hot buttons and go "ha ha, point for us!" definitely deserves an eye roll.

Folks, read the poll rules no non-Canon Zelda games, ergo no cd-i games in the poll list.

The Zelda II discussion had been quite riveting. Personally I hold a special place in my heart for the game, but I think a lot of the shots fired at the haters here aren't necessarily fair. Definitely a game with plenty of reasons for some to legitimately love and plenty of reasons for others to legitimately hate.

Being in a development organization I entirely agree that this is a healthy way to work. Laying out a whole product plan before setting up a prototype is a much bigger risk. Of course the big temptation to resist is to then let the prototype become the product, which I've seen happen at places I've worked, ultimately to huge cost down the road.

I really enjoyed reading this piece! Sounds like interesting times, both good and bad.

Always useful to take pause before conflating technical definitions and actual ramifications (removing any text from a work is technically censorship, censorship BAD, ergo it is always and wrong evil thing to remove any text from new versions of any work for any reason). It's niche entertainment media with original versions available. Nobody is being denied access to important truths here.

Nice - they've discounted neo before but not remix, so I might jump on that.

@Daniel36 totally valid. I will readily admit my preference is likely colored by the the circumstances around when I first played the game as a kid.

@JasmineDragon Ahh I see, then I retract my own, my apologies! FFT is a completely different game from FFTA. To be honest I haven't played enough of Advance so I can't compare, but I can say Tactics' difficulty can range from satisfying to almost (but not quite) unfair, depending on the fight. with difficulty going down if you spend time leveling, as you'd expect. There's one hilarious fight in which it is quite possible to lose before you've gotten a single turn (though I wouldn't call that difficult so much as a design goof). I don't have enough experience with the remakes done so far on the game (aka War of the Lions), so I dunno if they toned it down or whatnot. It has a much darker, more nuanced and provocative story, than FFTA's narnia-esque route. I'm a huge Fire emblem fan as well, FFT has a number of differences in approach but I hope it comes out and I hope you get to play it for the first time and enjoy it as much as I did.

@JasmineDragon
Sorry, still humblebragging; the game (at least the PlayStation original) was notoriously challenging, at least in certain points. Though any FF game, Tactics included, had difficulty linked to grinding; grind enough and it's easy.

A masterpiece, and one of my favorite games. Though I still prefer the direct, if sometimes wonky (and occasionally wrong) original localization to the overly flowery prose of the War of the Lions version.

@EmmatheBest Haha you're totally right! Reminds me of a PS2 Everquest-themed Gauntlet-like, on the back it said "Slay your Way to Glory," but given the style I couldn't help reading it as "Slap your way to Glory," or as I looked at it further, "Slap pour Wap to Glorp."

@Kirby_Girl I 90% agree with you, the main disagreement is I really don't think Nintendo Life did this to drum up the hyper-reactionaries, I think they did it because from most angles this is hilarious and joyful, and NL can't help it if commentors try to ruin that. Regardless of the dictionary definition of censorship, it is a curious human condition to overgeneralize and put something this silly side by side with censorship made with completely different reasoning and motivations that actually harms people. Anyway I appreciate your responses, I just choose to use this opportunity to flex my "ignore button" muscles, life's too short to let a comment thread make me angry, no opinions will be changed here. The one thing to keep in mind is just because a lot of comments say one thing doesn't mean the majority of the folks reading the article think that. All the politics and consternation sweepingly aside, this is quite funny and I'm thrilled there are two versions, which I of course would never touch with a 10-foot pole.

Oh my heavens, that dragon in the picture is about to chomp down on that oblivious smiling girl's head!

I do not believe Mr. Elba will be the proper judge of this matter.

I do feel like the author is overly cynical in the topic of comedy video games though. Some games do in fact marry the gameplay with comedy. The purest example is quite probably Untitled Goose Game - it's funny because it's the player is the one actively doing the funny things in the gameplay. A more mixed example is the comedy adventure game, like the Monkey Island Series; more scripted, definitely, but the player still interacts with the game in funny ways and the whole affair can be quite mirthful.

"just because you didn't like it must be a con?" Um. Yes. A review is literally a presentation of what a reviewer did and didn't like about something.

To help understand about "the furry thing" - it most certainly isn't racism, but there has been for many years a very strong culture of not just not being interested in anthropomorphic animals, but mocking everything about them, and denigrating and bullying those that do like them. Is that what's happening here? Eh, not necessarily. But when faced with, as aptly put earlier, hate, for so long from so many angles, a strong reaction like this is quite understandable. These days I would much rather see an over-defense than that same tired, automatic reaction to the style.

Y'know, it's very easy to mash any game's entire storyline into 3 or 4 words and make it sound like the entire thing is one big boring cliche. It's like the gamer's version of freeze-framing an extremely unflattering still shot in a video of someone.