Topic: Nintendo Switch --OT--

@Ralizah
Btw, why some peoples call themselves non binary when they still have body by physically still based on their actual gender ?
Like the case when Ayumi Hamasaki wanted to be called non binary so peoples will not call her Ms or Mrs.
Is non binary a statement from individual to be not called as either male or female despite they still have male or female body ?
I still don't understand this.

@Anti-Matter It's sort of an umbrella term to encompass people across a range of non-traditional gender identities. A lot of people act like it's 21st century silliness created by bored millennials and zoomers (and, to be fair, there is a lot of that, especially on social media), but the reality is that many major civilizations across the span of world history have had social categories for people who didn't fit into the traditional gender binary for whatever reason, so it's clearly a recurring human phenomenon.

It's difficult for a lot of people without these feelings to understand, and that's perfectly OK.

@LtSarge Signalis does sound interesting!

@Ralizah I really should have got round to Gnosia before now, I was going to grab the Vita patch before it got a release on Switch.

@JohnnyShoulder Axiom Verge 1 was a game that took me ages to appreciate but I did like it on Vita so I’ll probably give the second one a go through PS Plus!

@nessisonett Also consider ElecHead. It's a short, creative little puzzle-platformer where you manipulate electricity to progress through levels.

@Ralizah I've got Monster Boy lined up as a palate cleanser in the not too distant future, seeing as was one of this months additions to PS Plus Extra.

@JohnnyShoulder Nice. It's WAY better than I expected. One of the best 2D games I've played in recent years.

Finally got around to playing around with the tracks from the last 2 waves of MK8D DLC.

Maybe it's just because I haven't played it in awhile, but man it seems like I'm getting slammed with items more often than I'd remembered. Especially on Rock, Rock, Mountain (it seems like I get double or triple dunked on every lap right before or after the gliding section at the end, like it doesn't want me taking the gliding shortcut over the pipes at the start of the track). Last go around I got double slammed by blue & red shells back to back every single lap at that point. Even on other tracks, getting hit with 3 blue shells during the race is annoyingly pretty common, at least on 50cc.

LOL I don't think I've played MK8D since the first DLC drop. By the time I get back to it, I'll finally have a brand new Mario Kart game to dig into!

Just finished Fire Emblem Engage a couple of days ago. The story is utter garbage, but the gameplay is absolutely superb. I was playing on hard, and nearly all of the last 9 chapters were nail bitingly tense, and you really had to use all of the tools available to you to win. The engage mechanic is a ton of fun as well. I had a great time with it, but was a bit sad that the incredible plot, world building, and characters of three houses was abandoned. I still prefer three houses overall, it's my favourite fire emblem game of the ones I've played for sure, since even though engage's gameplay is a big step up, three houses' gameplay was still pretty damn good.

It's just a shame they can never seem to nail both plot and characters Vs gameplay in these games. They've been alternating from Awakening (plot>gameplay), to Fates (gameplay>plot), to Three Houses, and then to Engage. Three houses gets the best mix overall, but I still find it frustrating that this series can't perfect everything. But who knows, maybe the next entry will!

@BranJ0 Awakening's map design wasn't ideal, but I definitely wouldn't say it was a plot > gameplay entry. If anything, Engage is HEAVILY reminiscent of Awakening, even down to the way the plot is structured.

Anyway, the wild difference in Engage vs Three Houses is explainable by the two games effectively having different developers. IS had input into Three Houses, of course, but it was primarily Koei-Tecmo's baby, whereas Engage appears to be an entirely in-house production.

But I sympathize nonetheless. While I don't think Engage's plot is particularly bad (if nothing else, it's miles better than Conquest in that respect), it obviously has nothing on Three Houses. It'd be nice to get an entry that runs well, looks beautiful, has a great story, and features excellent map design for once.

@Ralizah I'm inclined to agree with you for Awakening, but I do think overall the bare bones maps and easy-to-abuse pair up system make it a bit lacklustre in the gameplay department.

I was vaguely aware of Koei-Tecmo's involvement in 3 Houses, but I didn't realise it was primarily them, that's very interesting! But it also makes me a bit nervous to see if present day IS is actually capable of making a compelling plot.

Engage's plot has nothing on the disastrous mess of conquest you're right there! But I also just found myself completely uninterested nearly all the time, with the game wanting to have big emotional moments with characters that were one note and plot elements that felt completely unearned. It wasn't like Conquest where it actively ruined part of my enjoyment of the game, but I did struggle to actually care about a lot of the plot, which was a shame.

I've heard some of the older fire emblem games manage quite a good balance, have you played any of them? The only one I've played pre-Awakening is Sacred Stones, which was fun but I didn't find it to be anything too special.

@BranJ0 Of the last six pure IS Fire Emblem games (Awakening, the three Fates campaigns, Echoes, and Engage), the NES remake was the only one I'd say actively had really good writing. I didn't mind Awakening either, although it definitely had the Engage issue of characters with, like, one personality trait that they shove down your throat endlessly. And, uh, you already know how Fates turned out, although that appeared to be a result of them pulling in an outside writer, so I'm not worried about future games being as bad.

The same rumors that talked about the existence of Engage prior to its reveal also said a remake of Genealogy of the Holy War was coming. It's hard to imagine them screwing up that plot. If true, the writing should be way more in line with something like Three Houses, in terms of being shocking, intense, and more grounded overall.

The Radiant duology on GC/Wii is pretty unimpeachable in terms of its gameplay/story balance. Really hoping we get remasters at some point, since it costs a small fortune to buy them on the secondhand market.

I put around 60 hours into Engage, finishing it in early February and already feel like I remember next to nothing about it. I found my review on Nintendo Life I wrote at the time which got kinda lost in that thread I think, as I was a little further ahead than some others, who all generally liked the game a bit more than I did and one of the main things I said is how I'll probably not remember a thing about this come the summer and I'm certainly on track for this to come true.

"This game served a function and a purpose. It got me through one of the worst months of the year for me. I'd rather have had Engage than not.

Next year there’ll be a different January game to forget all about come July, but this year it was Engage.

Thanks Engage."

I love my pass agg closer on this review, I had to share it 😂

Started up Future Redeemed over the weekend! Just arrived in Colony 9, and this is looking like it's going to be much more of what I wanted out of the main game (not that I didn't end up loving it).

Think I spent half an hour on the second half of the Chapter 2 boss though. I had no idea you could target the two robot halves, so I was just attacking the Moebius in the center for 20 straight minutes doing jack all to him. I was seriously convinced I was supposed to intentionally lose the fight, but for some reason the boss wasn't strong enough to wipe me out (I had enough time to build up & use three different chain attacks before realizing what I was supposed to do, lol).

Was also going to post about it on the PX "Switch" thread, but it's recently turned into a page long circejerk about how terrible Nintendo is, and how they'd be better off going 3rd party/being a MS subsidiary, so I'm going to keep away for now.

@RR529 That's pretty par for the course in terms of dialogue on Pure Xbox, lol. The toxic users tend to be the most prolific, and they all hate Nintendo and are perpetually angry about Playstation.

BTW, I had the same issue with the Ch. 2 boss. I was wondering why I wasn't doing any damage to it. I even chain attacked it!

@Ralizah, yeah it's really weird too. NL users (in general) seem to think MS & Nintendo are on good terms and aren't too hard on them (of course there are exceptions), while that outlook doesn't seem to be shared over on PX (I mean I could understand a bit of anti-PS fanboyism due to them being MS' closest competitor. Console wars are silly true, but I could at least understand some of that, but the Nintendo hate is weird given that they're really not in the same space of the market).

I still think it's largely down to one specific user though. I won't name names, but it seems like their "Switch" thread can be dead for months, and not too long after someone (or a few people) try to jumpstart it, this specific user comes back in to sour the conversation regurgitating the same 2 or 3 negative points they've already made the last time there was activity on the thread.

@RR529 Microsoft has thrown a few bones Nintendo's way (allowing the Ori games on Switch; allowing Banjo in Smash; probably some other stuff too) and they collaborate occasionally, as when they teamed up to promote cross-play when Sony was being an ass about not letting Playstation users interact with other ecosystems in multiplayer games. And, of course, the CoD deal was a thing, back when people still thought the Acti-Bliz acquisition was going through. So I think it's fair to say the two are on reasonably good terms. The fanbases maybe not so much, but most gaming communities tend to trend toward toxicity, in my experience.

If we're thinking the same person (we probably are), they have a long history of unpleasant fanboyish behavior, and seem to hate everything other than the Xbox brand. They actually got mad and stormed off NL for a while when they tried pulling that nonsense in one of our threads, and a few users pushed back. They're back on NL now, but they seem to be behaving on there atm.

There are a few other pretty toxic users as well. It wouldn't be a big deal on a larger site, but due to being shut down for years in the Xbone era, the site is still pretty small, and so they have an outsized impact on discussions.

@Kidfried I've had The Messenger on my Switch for a year or two now. Still haven't played it. Some time extremely soon, I think I'm cutting myself off from new games full stop so I can actually enjoy my considerable backlog.

PlayDate... that's the handheld with a crank and no backlight where you download the games for free, right? Definitely curious to hear what you think of that!

@Ralizah That's a bit tragic when you put it like that! I have been meaning to get round to playing echoes, but likely won't for a while I think. Awakening's plot was great for 1/3, then bad for 1/3, and then good idea but poor execution for the last 1/3. It's a fun game, but you're right with the characters, they all have a single trope that's played out as much as it can be.

Those rumours for the genealogy remake seem pretty strong which gives me a lot of hope. I was thinking of emulating it but I might wait a year or two and hope it materialises!

And yeah the Radiant games do look wonderful, but as you said they're just outrageously expensive. I always have my eye looking out for them in the wild, but I just think they're too rare and too expensive, which is a shame. Maybe it'll be on Nintendo switch online when they do GameCube games in 2029!

I'm tempted to try the Blazing Blade though as that's confirmed to come to GBA online in the next year, so I think that might be my next fire emblem game, even if it's not technically the "best" next one I could play

@BranJ0 Echoes is an example of quality > quantity. There's not a ton of dialogue, and supports are extremely short, but they cut to the heart of who these people are, so you feel like you really know your armies (the game's campaign is split between the two leads, who each have their own respective recruits/party members) by the end. IS unfortunately added a yandere character to the remake, but otherwise it's really good, and even she chills out a bit by the end.

The original game was long hated by the fandom for how weird it was (it feels much more like a JRPG with tactical combat than a traditional FE game), but aside from the battles having literally almost no map design whatsoever (most of them are skirmishes in the countryside/swamps/caves/etc. with enemies you can see on the map), I think it has aged beautifully in many respects. At least, insofar as most of its systems and intricacies were carried over to Echoes.

FE7 is fun. All of the GBA games are. The story isn't incredible or anything, but it does the job.