Topic: Nintendo Switch --OT--

@Knuckles-Fajita How? I just beat the third gym, played around 20 hours, and I'm keeping a team of 18 Pokemon, because I'm constantly over-leveled.

@Octane Well if he beat the entire game in 18 hours and you're only on the 3rd gym in 20 it would suggest he didn't spend any time grinding out levels?

@kyleforrester87 I'm don't grind, I avoid wild Pokemon battles. I only catch the Pokemon I haven't seen before.

@Octane you do grind. My gears.

@Octane What happened? You usually speedrun Pokemon games in 20-something hours, don't you?

@Ralizah I'm getting old.

@Octane I went through the game, caught what I wanted for my teams, fought every trainer, got most items and saw every area.

I didn't spend much time in the Wild Area, and I didn't grind, because I didn't need to.

I wasn't overlevelled, in fact most trainers and at points wild Pokemon were higher levels, and the Champion Tournament outlevelled me too.

But I didn't need to be on par with, or ahead of them, to win.

So I just went through, caught my team of 6 as and when I found something I fancied, and went on my merry way, grabbing items, so on so forth.

Also helps I'm a fast reader I suppose.

So anyway, the Witcher 3 on Switch has gotten its hooks into me. This was my second go at playing after trying and falling out of the PS4 version but having it in handheld has made all the difference. I think the game really opens up and out after the 10 hour mark and I had a very nice evening sat in bed playing as Geralt while my wife got angry with the election debate downstairs.

I have said it before but for large games like this, the Switch really does make them more accessible for me rather than being sat in front of the telly. At first I was really feeling the drop in graphical fidelity but to be honest, now I have just got used to it and progressed. The only issue is that now I have got stuck in, I'm ignoring The Outer Worlds playthrough.

@Rudy_Manchego I think there is a market for a Wife Getting Angry At Election Simulator. Go make it with someone in Dreams!

With my recent promotion at work coming with a hour and half travel time I will be getting alot of use out of my Switch

@Rudy_Manchego In general, unless something genuinely looks horrible, it usually doesn't take long to adjust to a change in graphical fidelity. It would be a deal-breaker on a home console, but on a handheld? I still can't believe the Witcher 3 is so well optimized on Switch. The game genuinely looks really good on Switch Lite. That's AMAZING to me.

I figure I'll finish out my main story + relevant side-quests playthrough on PC and then, at some point in the future, do a 100% run on Switch.

@JohnnyShoulder Ha I may just film her and make it an FMV game.

@Ralizah Graphics quality takes a hit but gameplay is smooth, no massive performance hits and it is completely playable. Sound and audio quality is also top notch. I have to keep reminding myself I am playing a 100 hour cinematic game in portable mode.

My experience online has been negative, too. The removal of GTS means you can't easily go online and find someone to trade with, instead just having to trade with randoms and pray they like what you're offering. Max raid battles are... I dunno, they seem kind of like weird, pointless set-pieces to me. And the lagginess in the Wild Area when you're online is horrendous.

Mixed feelings about the game's sp content, although, like I said over in the NL thread, I think they really nailed it when it comes to having wild Pokemon running around in the grass in different routes. They skitter around in the grass, react in surprising ways depending on what you do, follow you... it's great.

Despite the Wingulls looking kind of terrible in the Wild Area, a lot of the flying animations in the wild... actually look pretty good, too.

I know people meme about the developers saying they wanted to focus on producing high quality animations because some of the attack animations look terrible, but in the wild, and in the camp (Pokemon will actually chase and retrieve toys you throw; pointless, but cute), you can really see a bump up in animation quality for various Pokemon.

@KratosMD

Thought you'd be interested in some officially confirmed new features for TMS on Switch. I knew there was a new dungeon, but it sounds like there's a decent amount of additional story content as well.

https://personacentral.com/tokyo-mirage-sessions-fe-encore-ne...

• New songs and music videos have been added
• All songs, including the new songs by Kiria Kurono and Tsubasa Oribe, are produced by the Japanese production company Avex.
• New costumes have been added.
• Players can choose to keep or remove Tsubasa’s glasses.
• The president of Fortuna Entertainment Maiko Shimazaki (voiced by Ami Koshimizu) participates in battle in the form of Sessions (and not as a whole new playable character) with a new costume.
• Tiki (voiced by Sumire Morohoshi) also participates in battle via Sessions, with additional story elements.
• Encore features a new adventure for the protagonists, with an additional dungeon.

Haven't encountered this myself, but seems pretty cool. Might need to keep my camp sites set up longer than I have been.

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Well, that would explain why the online functionality in this game sucks so badly. It's not like GF doesn't know how to design a competent trading system, after all.

RE: Tokyo Mirage Sessions, I'm not expecting it to sell amazingly well. A few hundred thousands copies at most. That still might go a long way toward helping the game be profitable for Nintendo and Atlus, and it gives Nintendo some nice release padding. I just wish it wasn't the censored version of the game. But yeah, it's the most anyone could possibly expect from a Switch port of a Wii U game.

Well, Pokemon Sword/Shield had an amazing launch and sold, like, 6 million copies in its first week, which is double what LGPE did. Fastest selling Switch game to date thus far. 2 million of those sales came just from Japan (around 1.4m physical and 700k digital).

Holiday sales are going to be insane.

@KratosMD however good you think SwSh are, and I don’t doubt it’s good enough, it’s pretty clear to me they could have done a lot better still.

Still, as you say, they look good enough - maybe even great - so no shame in buying it. I’ll get it soon.

@KratosMD yeah like you say, great by their standards, but it could have been the equivalent of BOTW and I just can’t ignore that...

Thinking about downloading it tonight though 👍🏻

@KratosMD can they do a GREAT open world though..?! Much easier said than done!

@KratosMD shield is downloading now, it better not suck

I really think GF needs a longer development cycle for future main series games, as the workload of creating detailed 3D environments with hundreds of monsters to capture and interact with is going to be light years beyond what the relatively basic 2D handheld games required. Which I think is probably why the game is a bit short and light on content: they're so focused on the animations and presentation that the actual game part of the experience gets shafted a bit in the process.

Hmm. I keep hearing that phrase online ("the games could have been better"), which is certainly true, but it also seems kind of pointless to say. Almost every single game I've ever played could have been better in some way: even the ones that blew me away.