Topic: Nintendo Switch --OT--

@Bentleyma, I thought Bakeru was very fun, very much like Kirby & the Forgotten Land in terms of design, but I heard the Switch version has some performance hiccups (I played on Steam, so I don't know how bad or easy to ignore they are).

I'm now like 15 hours into Xenoblade 3, I feel like most of the handholding is now behind me and I'm enjoying the game a lot more now, even if I couldn't really tell you why. I think a big part of it is the class system, difficulty balance and quality of the teammate AI. I seem to be unlocking a new class every couple of hours. And with chain attacks / fusion attacks / fusion forms and the heroes, generally I never seem to be in much danger in combat, so I can just focus on whichever character has gotten the new class and ignore everything else, until the new one unlocks and rotate to that person and so on. Although I do admit sometimes it gets so tedious getting into battles every two steps I do stick it on auto battle and walk away.

Approaching hour 30 now in Xenoblade 3. Very strange experience. Feel like I could talk to you for hours about all the things I don't like about this game, yet I just cannot stop playing it. Been interesting to see them try to tell such a complicated, twisty, dark story in a way that Nintendo will allow on their platform. Like some sort of Hard Science fiction Apocalypse Now, as told through a Saturday Morning Cartoon lens.

Took me a while to also realise just how much game there is here. If you just follow the main narrative thread, you miss huge chunks of this game. The ridiculous density of enemies and the lack of options to fast forward through low level encounters though, still just makes the world so irritating to navigate for me. It looks like I have missed a bunch of optional classes, but I'm still often not super motivated to go off into the vast areas of map that are off the golden path because I know extreme tedium awaits me.

Or I battle for an hour and find myself at a wall with no way around, that has happened to me a lot, too. With the marker being right in front of you, but it can only be accessed by a specific tunnel or ledge that starts on the other side of the map where you'd never look.

@Pizzamorg It doesn’t seem like the game is for you! I really enjoy the addictive and punchy combat, exploration, sombre tone, music, party interactions, etc… basically none of it felt like a chore. It wasn’t perfect as I didn't really love the way large parts of the story were told, the pacing is a bit too slow and it can take way too long to feel like you’re out of the tutorials, and frankly most of the big moments didn’t land for me (at least in the way they did in XBC2) but the intimate story moments between main characters, even the small camp interactions, really kept things interesting for me.

I think you might be right, so why can't I stop playing it @kyleforrester87? 😂

I've definitely enjoyed combat more when I unlocked all the parts of it, and when I made my peace with just controlling and focusing on one character and letting the AI do their jobs with the others. It makes me want to play the others and see if I have changed, or whether the combat is just better in this one.

But that doesn't mean I want to fight the same four world enemies types in endless loops when I'm just trying to get to the quest marker. The auto battle is a god send, as it means I can just leave the game to it and go do something else until I can take another three steps towards my objective.

Mixed emotions on the characters. There are a lot of of JRPG /shounen archetype skeletons doing heavy lifting here, like I think the chemistry between the cast has developed in a satisfyingly natural way for sure, but the actual characters themselves to me are as generic and bland as they come. Plus cause of the Switch limitations, some of the characters look and move more like V-Tubers than actual characters.

And yeah, pacing is horrible, the first 15 hours are basically one endless tutorial. And even when that's over, the story missions are still a lot of take three steps, cutscene for twenty minutes, take another three steps, another twenty minute cutscene. Feels like I can play this for two hours and I'm not playing for 90 percent of it if I am focusing on the story.

Man seeing people talk about how sombre XC3 is makes me very excited to see people experience the absolute insanity of the stuff that happens to people in XCX.

A lot of it is side quests but I can't wait until people do the quest where a character has to have their mind effectively turned off so they can sleep otherwise they wake up screaming at the trauma of watching their colleague be peeled alive.

But hehe funny sci-fi rap music amirite

Cold Steel 4 got weirder. Man…. I was enjoying the first half too. Since they give you a certain amount of people to hang out with each free time, I took advantage of them without realising that literally every single cutscene with a female character has you being mounted by them. I’ve carried my romance through from the very first game, it’s a bit annoying having characters I’ve interacted with platonically over 4 games suddenly try and shag me, as well as the several very very young looking characters trying to shag me. Having your character being a couple of them’s literal teacher too makes it such a mental abuse of power that you don’t have any opportunity to shoot down. I wish they could go back to having the writing that Sky 3rd has. At least Zero/Ao had a much better balance between the nonsense and the actual plot too. I really hope it ends well, because this is frequently an insult to the time that I’ve put into the series.

This Sky remake… I hope to god they don’t change the script because this current crop of writers will destroy it. Especially the way that Cold Steel 4 is trying to ram Tita x Agate down our throats despite her being a literal child and him obviously seeing her as a surrogate sister as was stated in the Sky games. I just know they’ll retroactively make it noncey.

jfc please no.

Yup. Arguably a lot of the best stuff in the game is side content. Which, tbh, is how the other mainline games should have been. Why have giant open environments if you're not going to take advantage of that and populate the world with stuff to find?

What chapter you on?

I believe I am on Chapter 5, approaching the 40 hour mark? Last thing I did in the main thread was get a boat from the rebel peoples. I spent the last like 10ish hours going back over the previous maps and hitting all the question marks. I kinda appreciate how the game doesn't scale, and doors seemingly don't close on anything, so I was able to do level 5 quests that were clearly designed to be enjoyed right at the start of the game, with a full level 50 party 😂

I now believe I have all of the classes available to me at this stage of the game, along with one of the base classes now getting a new level cap. Kinda wondering whether I should buy the season pass to get the additional classes as well.

@Ralizah There was a moment there in the hot springs where the rest of the cast keep mentioning how much she’s grown in certain areas and hinting to Agate

@nessisonett You know, every time I think about picking this series back up, you post some horrifying thing that does nothing to disabuse me of the notion that Trails of Cold Steel is like a crappy fanservice show from the 00s in terms of its writing (it already is in terms of the character designs!).

Maybe I should just stick to Ys. There's almost none of this creepy stuff.

@Pizzamorg Oh boy, chapter five, huh? Definitely curious to read your next few posts.

I really loved how the scope of the game opened up in this section, both narratively and in terms of exploration with the boat (which feels freeing in a similar way as the airship in FFVII did). And yes, the way XC3 largely retains a family-friendly image while going for a grittier feel and tackling some incredibly bleak subject matter is interesting. SO MUCH fictional profanity in this game. The Ouroboros concept, while very cool in itself, oftentimes feels like it was concocted as a narrative vehicle for exploring dynamics of sexual and emotional intimacy between the main cast, which always struck me as neat. There's also a lot of... hinting at, or alluding to, awful things, without actually showing them. Especially in the back half of the game.

@Ralizah Trails is a strange mix of brilliantly interconnected storytelling and a long-standing political intrigue subplot along with some of the worst, tropey nonsense out there. Sums up a lot of my feelings towards shonen content in general to be honest.

@HallowMoonshadow Remember how the ‘civil war’ in Cold Steel 2 miraculously had zero deaths and you showed everyone the error of their ways? Ramp the stakes up to 11 except also everybody’s somehow redeemable and you’ve got the war in Cold Steel 4. It was one of my main gripes with Azure too, let people be bad!

@Bentleyma I suppose it depends on how you want Mario to look. The raw horsepower can enable more, but Nintendo always opts for functional art styles that serve the game, so looking as good as Ratchet only matters if they want a game to look like a CG movie, which is the goal of Ratchet.

But it is exciting, Pikmin 4 is basically the only good running UE4 game on the platform and that game looks incredible.

@Bentleyma Crafted World was pretty low resolution, and didn't run great but aimed for 60fps. It was also developed by Good Feel, whereas Pikmin 4 was internally developed, higher resolution at a solid 30fps.

Peaks and troughs really.

And sure they could aim for the Mario movie, but you'd think Mario Wonder would have done that given it would have been developed in tandem with the movie

Crafted World didn't even hit 720p docked, if I recall correctly, lol. Given the absurdly low res numbers, it still looked surprisingly decent, though. Too bad the game itself wasn't all that great.

I think titles like Mario Odyssey, Pikmin 4, Xenoblade 3, etc. already look fantastic. I just want them to run at higher framerates and upscale to higher resolutions for modern TVs

Trails of Cold Steel 4’s ‘everyone is here’ moment I regret to say absolutely landed, I know I’m a sucker. Nice to see threads being picked up from what feels like a lifetime ago for me, never mind for fans who must have waited years and years. Yeah, the games have their issues but it’s those sorts of moments that justify the absurd timesink.

Something about Mario & Luigi Brothership is really hard for me to go back to. I can't play it for too long and when I think I need to go back I just don't. Which is weird, because both Super Mario RPG and Thousand Year Door were games I didn't want to put down.

@Bentleyma I'm also not above putting it down to timing. I work in retail management and everything has got a bit hectic lately with several departures and the run to christmas, so even though I had a week off for it at launch, I've not really had any time to go back to it, instead opting for less intensive things like BTD6, Shadow Generations and Pokemon battles in my few hours of downtime a week.

But at the same time, back in the height of summer AND last christmas, I was bombing through two other RPGs.

I also tried the Superstar Saga remake on 3DS when it was new and I just couldnt finish that either.

Wow, yeah, Xenoblade 3 went from just being sorta okay to truly next level in chapter 5 / 6. Up until this point the most interesting thing about this story for me was seeing how they would portray the latest dark concept or moment of extreme violence in a way Nintendo would sign off on. Nothing could have prepared me then for the sharp escalation as it unleashes twist, after twist, after twist. I kept waiting for all the twists to make the entire thing come off the rails, but while its convoluted and maybe I couldn’t tell you how all the finer details worked, but I found it remarkably cohesive and intelligible given just how out there it goes from where we began. Donnie Darko meets Apocalypse Now, as told through a Saturday Morning cartoon lens.