Topic: Nintendo Switch --OT--

@Ralizah I have to say, I never hated my Wii U the way a lot of people seem to have, but then I don't treat my Nintendo consoles the same way as a lot of people. I can imagine that if you primarily game on Nintendo hardware then sure, it was a catastrophe on basically every conceivable level.

For every post-SNES Nintendo console their hardware has been my backup console, and I actually tend to dislike their consoles and their design quite a lot. I only play first party games on there, so like my Switch, I haven't turned it on since January except for when we had a blackout and I played Mario Kart for an hour. The Wii U being comically bad wasn't really upsetting to me because I only use these things every now and again. I think I only ever got five games for it which wasn't the best, but at least thanks to Nintendo's stubborn refusal to lower their prices I got good money for it when I traded it in.

@Keith_Zissou Well, if you're going to continue playing Switch and you're gonna do it on your TV I would say that you probably won't regret a Pro. I love mine, and depending on the game, if my Pro runs out of battery I put it on charge and then just go do something else until it's done rather than use the Joy Cons.

I actually like the Switch games lineup quite a lot because it actually suits me, moreso than most consoles. People have a bit of an issue with ports and remasters and old games but I love them and I love having everything in one place so having games like Tropical Freeze and New Super Mario Deluxe move over really appeals to me.

In fact my biggest issue with Switch games is that the biggest games on the system either don't appeal to me at all - Animal Crossing, Smash - or I wet let down by - Mario Odyssey, and to a lesser extent BOTW. But it's balanced out by other games for Switch that I really liked, like Fire Emblem, Luigi's Mansion, Mario + Rabbids etc. and ports of games I either really like or missed.

@johncalmc The Wii U was my only console until I got my PS4 in about 2017. I liked the Wii U at the time but I mostly played Wii games on it other than Smash and the Lego games.

@nessisonett This is such a sad story.

@nessisonett I should have waited until 2017 to get my PS4, tbh, as it got little to nothing worth playing for me before then.

Oh well. At least I got to experience P.T. firsthand!

Wii U and 3DS sated me before 2017. Just Wii U would have been... rough, though.

@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!