Topic: Nintendo Switch --OT--

@Ralizah I neglected to mention my 3DS, I’ve had that since 2012! Home consoles and handhelds are played at different times for me though.

Somehow it's even weirder seeing ALttP items in Super Metroid than the other way round.

@nessisonett I spend 90% of my time on handhelds at home anyway. I just find it more comfortable not being tethered to a television, so I often opt for those more intimate handheld experiences.

@Keith_Zissou I tried DOOM 93 on Switch, but I've discovered it's thoroughly miserable trying to aim with analog sticks in first-person shooters, and gyro doesn't help much in a game without free aim. The game is highly enjoyable on PC, though.

@Ralizah The 3DS and Vita are perfect for lying in bed but the Switch is just bulky enough to not really be as enjoyable in that regard. I’ve been playing the first Persona’s PSP remake in bed instead!

@Kidfried The only real similarity is in the monsters you collect and skills you're able to utilize. In terms of the feel and flow of the gameplay, they're entirely different.

So the real question is: do you want to immediately move from one big JRPG to another?

If not, the game will still be there when you're ready to play it.

So I've been playing Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones the past couple of days and yesterday the game finally clicked with me. Before it was simply fun but now it's actually very addicting to play. The reason why it happened to me yesterday is because I kept losing a unit on a certain chapter and had to restart multiple times. It was the map where they introduced fog and before that, the maps were fairly straightforward so I had no issues with them. But now I had to actually be careful about sending units to the frontline. Because there was fog, I tried to keep everyone together and that led to my weaker units getting wrecked, specifically my Pegasus Knight Vanessa. Once I realised that I needed to keep my weaker units behind and push my stronger ones forward, the gameplay clicked with me. This is obvious stuff, but the thing is that because this is an RPG, I want all my units to gain EXP. That's why I've been pushing all of them forward equally, which was a mistake.

However, now that I've finished chapter 8 and unlocked Tower of Valni, I've just been leveling up all my weaker units. Units like Ross and Vanessa are now actually really good and Ross has become one of my best units now that he's reached Pirate class. He's seriously a beast now. So while most people think this game is too easy for having an area where you can grind, I think it's actually necessary in order to improve your weaker units. Because there are just way too many units and the weaker ones never get enough EXP during the story maps now that I'm focusing mostly on my stronger units after that fog map incident. So now that I've improved all my weaker units, I feel much more confident when tackling the story maps. I literally sent out Ross on his own in the recent chapter I played and he destroyed everything in his path.

I'm seriously loving this game now that I don't need to think about allocating EXP equally among my units in the story maps. I can think more strategically with my strongest units and grind in between chapters to improve my weaker ones. It's just so much fun now and it's crazy to me that I've been playing for 12 hours already, lol. I'm on chapter 10 now so I'm quite far into the campaign. I just can't stop playing it!

So, hard mode in SMT V isn't cartoonishly difficult like in Nocturne, but it's still kicking my butt. Three game overs in less than three hours, and so many close shaves as well.

It's refreshing, though, after practically sleepwalking my way through most of P5 Royal on the hardest difficulty. The edge is back. It's nice.

@Ralizah It’s kinda mad just how much the difficulty has been sucked out of the Persona games. The first one is brutal even on easy. It’s probably why so many people bounced off SMT IV when it came out as that’s really hard at the start of the game.

@nessisonett SMT IV's difficulty balancing isn't great. Throws the entire kitchen at you in the beginning when you have access to almost no resources, including an insane first boss who crits so often that defeating him feels like it's at least partially up to RNG. And then the difficulty drops off after that first dungeon. It's still a great game, and is what got me into SMT in the first place, but I can definitely see how it'd put people off at the start.

IV: Apocalypse fixed that, thankfully. Very approachable at the start, but, by mid-to-late-game, it's hitting you with (on War difficulty, at least, which is just one step down from the Apocalypse difficulty setting) some really satisfyingly challenging bosses.

But yeah, it's unfortunate, because P5R is a really, really good game in a lot of ways. Easily my favorite Persona to date. Except for the way the mechanics are balanced. Royal is even worse, because of the way it multiplies damage taken from hitting weaknesses on the hardest difficulty, and it adds in randomly triggered super attacks on top of all-out attacks, which were already broken.

@Kidfried Woke up at 3AM to play it, lol, which was when the preload went live. Not really a morning person, but it was worth it.

SMT games are shorter than modern Persona games in general. For a lot of reasons:

• There's minimal dialogue, so you won't spend hours listening to conversations, reading text messages, etc.
• No calendar system.
• A lot of the content is optional.
• SMT games have multiple routes, so all of the in-game content isn't centered in one playthrough.

If you're not going for a 100% playthrough, you're probably looking at 50+ hours to beat SMT V. You can almost double that length if you try to do all of the optional stuff, from what I hear.

And I agree. At the start, Persona 5 works well, mechanically, but it's way too easy to break the combat once you have access to a variety of Personas and have access to all of the mechanics. I was beating enemy encounters in less than ten seconds late in the game!

Thank goodness for Morgana's ability to just instantly kill underpowered enemies in Mementos if you ram them with the van!

My bigger problem is the bosses, though. SMT bosses are satisfying because you can build teams around taking advantage of their weaknesses and minimizing the damage done by their abilities, but all of the battles with bosses in P5R are wars of attrition. Almost no strategy is needed to topple them most of the time. So you wind up with obnoxiously long and sometimes gimmick-driven encounters.

Where are you in the third semester, btw?

Played for just over 1:40 minutes today in SMTV.(according to in game counter). Still at the first proper save point (I'd go out & explore, come back, go out again, etc.) and have a full team now (Nahobino, Pixie, Slime, & Petra) with the MC at level 7 & everyone else level 5 I believe.

Aesthetically it looks interesting, though everything feels just a bit constantly choppy roaming around the overworld (probably because I just finished playing a couple games on my laptop at a pretty consistent 60FPS, so I'll have to get used to mostly hitting 30), though of course this isn't a problem in combat. Definitely more tense than your typical JRPG (magic seems to be your biggest path to success, though that MP drains quickly).

I've been playing Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones for 25 hours now and it's steadily becoming my favourite FE title so far. It's just such a satisfying game, like grinding your units is satisfying, promoting them is satisfying and then seeing how powerful they are in the story chapters is even more satisfying. I upgraded three units and these ones literally wiped out the majority of the enemies in one of the recent maps I played. Right now I'm on chapter 15 and it's looking to be the toughest one so far as you're completely surrounded and there's one boss on either side of the map. This game is honestly quite challenging if you don't grind, so I don't see it as significantly easier than the other FE titles I've played. If it weren't for the tower where you can grind, it would probably be next to impossible to progress through the story. There just aren't that many story chapters to help you level up naturally and the game keeps throwing tough enemies at you. I honestly think that's the reason for why the developer decided to include a grinding area to begin with.

But yeah, Sacred Stones is absolutely phenomenal so far and I'm learning so much about how to play more strategically. I'm actually excited to play more FE games in the future thanks to this game.

I just finished Great Ace Attorney Chronicles and I'm in absolute awe. I'll have to let it settle, but second great ace attorney is almost certainly my favourite ace attorney game now. Not a single weak case throughout the entire game. Everything about it, from the visual and animations, the music, the cast of characters, and the mysteries, are all just ace attorney at its absolute peak. I'm less of a fan of the first great ace attorney - it's a good game that suffers from only being the first half of a story, and thus is mostly exposition and introduction. But the second game just soars because of it. My mind might change, but currently my ranking of the ace attorney games:
1. The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve
2. Trials and Tribulations
3. Spirit of Justice
4. Ace Attorney
5. The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures
6. Dual Destinies
7. Justice for All
8. Apollo Justice
9. Miles Edgeworth: Investigations

Need to play the second investigation game when I get the chance!

@BranJ0 I finished the third case of GAA2 recently and was rather impressed with it. With that said, I really liked the change of pace the first game represented, so the last two cases will need to really impress me to jump it. Sometimes the last case makes or breaks a game for me (SoJ and T&T, in particular, would be much lesser experiences without incredible final cases), so I can't quite say how I feel about it yet.

Otherwise, your game rankings are pretty close to where I'd put them (except I'd have Investigations above AJ and JFA above DD)

Not played the Layton crossover yet, or just not including it in your ranking?

@Ralizah I'm a big big fan of the third case, all of the witnesses in particular are just such a delight. I'd be very intrigued to hear your thoughts on the last two cases, and then on the game as a whole! I evidently loved the last two cases, but there are definitely elements there I can understand people would be less receptive to. Definitely agree on the last case making or breaking a game though, and I think this one knocked it out of the park.

What specifically about the change of pace did you like in the first game? I think it definitely takes its time, which enables the second game to take advantage of all the set up it did, but as a game by itself I can imagine it being quite disappointing. I'm glad I played both games back to back: if I played the first game in 2015 and had to wait two years for the next one I would probably look a lot less favourably on the first game. It just feels very strongly like half a game, and whilst its final case is great, even then it feels a lot more like a typical "third case" than a final one.

The ones you'd switch around on my ranking are also the ones that are very close for me, and it really just depends how I'm feeling that day. Justice for All has my favourite final case in the entire series, and Dual Destinies never reaches those heights for me, but overall is just a lot more consistent I think.

I've played the Layton crossover but it's a really weird one for me. I'm also a massive Layton fan, and I played the game at the peak of my hype of both series, and I'm still not sure what I think about it. I think that mainly stems from the fact that it definitely feels more like a Layton game than an Ace Attorney one. In an AA game I'm expecting every single mystery to be solved and meticulously explained and unravelled, whereas in Layton it tends to rely a lot more on a broad "sci-fi esque" explanation that requires a lot more of your imagination to make work, and not everything does make sense but you're not meant to think about that too hard. Both of these approaches work excellently in their respective games, but I'm not so sure how well they mesh, and I really struggle to rank it in comparison to other AA games.

Played Pokémon Shining Pearl for an hour now and I'm surprised at how much I'm enjoying this game. I've forgotten how much I missed this gen, it's been over ten years since I last played D/P/Pt. The music is still so good and I'm starting to like the art style. It's also nice to be playing a chill RPG where everyone gets EXP as opposed to recent ones I've played where you have to put in more effort. It's just a relaxing time playing this game and a nice blast to the past in all honesty. Can't wait to play more!

@BranJ0 The first Great Ace Attorney felt unique from other games in the series. It had a heavily serialized quality to it, firstly, which causes it to diverge heavily from the structure of most of these games, which are mostly episodic (even the interwoven ones like SoJ and T&T). The writing was extremely down-to-earth and naturalistic compared to other games in the series, and even the sequel: there's still fun dialogue, of course, but it felt like it didn't have a lot of the really wacky and strange defendants and witnesses that characterize this series. I enjoyed the stronger focus on legal process, political intrigue, and relatively mundane mysteries over wild, over-the-top conspiracies that dominate in these games. I also found the strong xenophobic reaction of many these characters to our Japanese protagonists to be grounding in a way that I found really fascinating. The game, over all, felt very much like a deconstructive take on the Ace Attorney IP. And, so far, GAA2 feels structurally and thematically much more like an ordinary Ace Attorney game. That's not a bad thing at all, but it does give it a very different feel from the original.

Also, Case 3 in the first game is close to being my favorite case in the entire series, despite it being a bit abbreviated. One of my issues with Justice for All was how the final case whiffed when it came to the fascinating prospect of being forced to defend a guilty witness. It's a good potboiler, I agree, but it never really morally challenged either Phoenix or the player due to the whole 'DeKiller holding Maya hostage' thing. Always felt like a missed opportunity to me, so I was delighted when this case pulled the same stunt with McGilded, only it actually did a really good job of addressing it this time. I particularly love the moment with McGilded asks you to lie about what you saw beneath the seat in the carriage. There's no "right" answer in that moment, and the distressing ambiguity of it put me right into Ryunosuke's head in that moment. Also, the way he goes out in the end is an amazing introduction to the "Reaper" subplot of these games.

For me, PL v AA was a disappointment because I wanted the two universes to fully intertangle. I wanted to see side characters from both series meet and solve mysteries together, but it turned into some weird fantasy thing that wasn't really like anything I'd seen in either IP.

@Kidfried SMT V, easily. But I'm also very biased. It was going to have to be a real swing-and-a-miss not to be my favorite release this year. As it stands, it succeeds in the ways I needed it to succeed to be incredibly happy with it.

MH Rise is awesome, but I'm not a huge fan of action games in general, and the pacing and mechanical changes (both the ones inherited from World and introduced in this entry) make it far more of a pure action game than Monster Hunter has ever been before. Part of what made Monster Hunter unique was that your character was kind of an awkward, squishy human going up against massive monsters, so a lot of planning was needed before hunts to make sure they were a success. It was survival-action, and actually triumphing against monsters you have no business being able to kill was incredibly rewarding.

MH Rise is rewarding as well, but it's... different. It's like you're playing as Spider-Man, since you have so much freedom of mobility. It's a lot of fun, but the planning/survival element is gone almost completely.

Ultimately, this was the direction the series was always going to go with the worldwide success of MH World. And I am fine with that. Rise is a gorgeous, multifaceted action game that looks and performs way better than most other games on the system (it seems to hug 30fps very closely, which is a change from the sort of janky performance of World on last-gen consoles, which makes sense, because 4U, which was the World team's previous game, was also all over the place with its performance, whereas Generations/Generations Ultimate, the last game from the Rise dev, prioritized smooth performance it knew it could consistently hit).

The only real issue I have with it is that, in an increasing industry trend, it launched in an unfinished state. What was there was polished to a sheen, but they actually had to patch in the game's final story mission months after release, in addition to a bunch of late-game monsters. Call me a traditionalist, but I like my games to be feature-complete on day one. Granted, that's never going to happen with MonHun again. Even the Stories games have had monsters patched into them post-release.

@Kidfried tbh, I still haven't returned to Rise to complete all of the stuff in the endgame, since I played it and subsequently moved on after 70 hours or so. Although I'll probably play the endgame content in that leading up to the release of the expansion next year.

I think it's probably a generational thing with us. We're used to experiencing games as complete, one-and-done products, but a lot of developers are riding the wave of the popularity of GaaS titles with younger players by making even their single-player story games something you continuously return to months or even years afterward. Even some Nintendo developers are leaning into this style of game design (the same team creates Splatoon and Animal Crossing, and it shows in terms of how reliant those releases are on constant patches, content updates, etc. to keep interest in them alive for long periods of time).

RE: Monster Hunter, it really just depends on what you're looking for. If you like the tactical elements (the "clunky" aspects so many people decried), Rise is probably the worst game in the series. You don't even have to locate the monster when you load into a map: the game just tells you where it is! If you like the action elements and just want to fight big monsters and minimize the time between hunts, then it's unquestionably the best entry yet, as the new mobility options actually add a lot to the combat in that game in terms of making it fast and ferocious. I find myself caught somewhere between those two camps, personally. For my money, MH4U is still the best entry in the series to date, although the recent games are obviously very pretty, fun, and popular.

SMT V is almost like the complete opposite of P5 in many respects, so it actually compliments it nicely! Between the two, you get tight combat, fun exploration, challenging bosses, memorable characters, and an epic, lengthy plot. Just... not all in the same game.

NSO mega drive controllers are up for pre order UK

@Kidfried I love the speed of an SSD, but I did have some very weird things happen with Spyro Reignited on my PC because of an SSD.

Having played it on PS5, the SSD doesn't really matter. It still acts like a PS4 game.

However on my PC, on HDD, everything is fine. Or even on my slower SSD in my older, weaker PC. No issues.

On my new build, with it's 3439mb/s m.2 drive, which is slower than the PS5's 5500mb/s, Spyro had some weird glitches.

So there are enemies in one level that when the level is loaded (or you die) they always start in the same state. They then are meant to change an object in the level, then wait a bit and change it back.

What happened is as soon as the level loaded, or after death, they did the first animation too fast, and then never did the animation again to change the state of the object.

Basically, my SSD was so fast, and the game wasn't made for it, that it broke the game, making an entire level unbeatable. I don't know how, or why, but it was equally and hilarious, and an example of running things on stuff they weren't intended to.

My point, sometimes you need to be thankful for load times, because if you remove them, things go wrong 🤣