Topic: Nintendo Switch --OT--

Alas, no. The last Pokémon game I got to play was Shield, and even then it was only the first hour or so before my partner lost interest. It was a "try it and see" for him, but since it didn't strike a chord, we moved on. Before that, my experience was limited to SoulSilver on DS.

The impression I get from the streamer's commentary (which could be mistaken) is that Legends: Arceus was kinda where Game Freak tried a bunch of new things to see what stuck, carrying forward any popular mechanics into Scarlet & Violet. If that's gonna be the same situation with ZA, the next main entry could be something real special.

Have you played ZA at all, and if so, what did you think of it?

@Werehog PLA definitely represented a very... different approach to the series, but the unfortunate reality is they try new things with each entry, and, for whatever reason, tend not to carry on positively received changed between entries. It's maddening for the fans lol

That said, I would expect them to keep improving on the 'open' design of these games, which has been what they've opted for with the new entries.

I've not played ZA, since I really don't like the idea of being trapped in one city the entire time. PLA tossed you into a world full of terrifyingly wild Pokemon and interesting environments, and I was hoping they'd continue with that.

That being said, I enjoyed the other recent entries quite a bit, so I'm hoping the next mainline entry seems more my speed.

@Ralizah Ah, gotcha. Thanks for clarifying! I checked and the streamer I'm watching has an archived long play of Arceus so I'll definitely give it a look-see. Because I can totally understand where you're coming from, as much as I love the vibe of Z-A its wild / battle zone gimmick does feel like it could get old by game's end, especially when much of Lumiose City is made up of copy-paste architecture. I'm still watching the early stages of the story, so the novelty has yet to wear thin.

It's a shame that I got the wrong end of the stick, and that the developers actually don't carry forward positive changes after all. If there's enough backlash about Z-A staying within the walls of a single city, I'd imagine they'd open things up a little more next time around. Either that, or Z-A is deliberately unambitious in that regard because they're already putting more effort into designing a huge, sprawling map for the next mainline entry! Fingers crossed!

Beat Odyssey a few days ago... 8 years after I first tried it.

The game is fine. Back in 2017 I dropped off only a short bit after New Donk City. Having played the rest now I feel confident to say the last bit is good too.

I got pretty much all of the moons I could get on my first run. Only to discover after beating the game they basically sprinkle some random moons on the map in places I mostly explored already. It's kind of a bummer that the last half of the game becomes somewhat of an Assassin's Creed game in which you just check all the boxes.

The game is good, don't get me wrong, but I got so much more pleasure out of Wonder. Odyssey hardly surprises you anymore after the first half of the game, while Wonder constantly made me wonder what Nintendo would come up with next.

Oh well, it's good both games exist. I'm now contemplating what game I will play next...

@Werehog Good to hear you and your partner are still together. Ha!

I am getting pretty close to the end of my Crimson Flower route in Three Houses, which I believe will mark me finishing all of the available routes.

It is interesting, because the game was beloved when it came out and then maybe as is the destiny of all things on the internet, over time it does seem there are a lot more loud voices out there now, that are pretty negative about this game.

As I proved with Engage, the Fire Emblem core loop is so addicting to me, I can play these games for hundreds of hours regardless of overall quality but Engage is different in that there wasn't a lot to that game really, beyond the refined core gameplay. Three Houses has much grander ambitions, but I feel that weirdly opens it up to as much additional criticism as it does praise.

I have talked a lot on other places about how much I don't like the monastery side of Three Houses and was grateful Engage did away with it (although it introduced its own problems), so I won't go into that again here. But I did want to say this, that it is weird all these hours later just how cold I feel towards this game. How little I feel like I really know about anything. It holds the player arms length away, and offers them no guidance, your first route is effectively destined for failure if you go in blind, because there are so many obtuse box ticking exercises or time gating, that can cut you off from huge amounts of content, but you'd never know as the game doesn't ever any even hint you may be doing things "wrong". Like, it is the kind of game to be played with a guide open next to you at all times to make sure you are maximising every second of game time, and to me that just kills all the fun of the experience.

The reason it got me really thinking about this, is Crimson Flower has a series of "canon events" that are hard end points to character arcs. But the arcs themselves are not canon. What I mean by this, is you may kill a character who will reminisce in their final moments about the deep relationship you shared together, when you may have never spoken to this person before outside of a few exchanges in cutscenes. For the player to actually form that relationship to begin with, the player would have had to have spent hours upon hours doing unmarked, optional, content, which early on has no tangible feedback or cause and effect to even suggest you are on the right path and doing anything.

So if you are like me, who rushed through the first half of the game to get to the new content of the route I hadn't played, all these emotional moments fall hilariously flat because it just assumes I did something I didn't. And you could argue "well this is your fault for skipping all this stuff" and yes, but the point I am making, is it isn't like I had a quest log of markers telling me to talk to X, do X with X etc and I just ignored it. This stuff isn't ever even offered to the player as an objective.

You can go through the entire opening 12 chapters without forming a single connection to anybody, and anybody you do want to form a connection to, you have to go out of your own to do it and will never have a clear indicator along the way that you are actually progressing towards anything. I dunno, I just think the design is bad.

@Pizzamorg I haven't really noticed much overt negativity about the game (aside from people who never really liked the game in the first place). Particularly after FE Engage released and reminded everyone why, despite its obvious and occasionally severe flaws, they loved Three Houses in the first place.

I will say, though, that its issues mostly become more noticeable as one replays the game. Despite not getting to see a huge chunk of content, I'd probably recommend most people to just play the game through once, because the larger structure of the game becomes painfully clear as you replay it.

"Like, it is the kind of game to be played with a guide open next to you at all times to make sure you are maximising every second of game time, and to me that just kills all the fun of the experience."

You've played modern Persona games, right? They're the same way. It's just how it goes when a game adopts that sort of calendar-based progression.

As with Persona, the best way to play it is still blind, and to accept you won't see everything IMO

@Herculean It's funny how much experiences differ. I was constantly surprised and delighted by Odyssey, but was pretty wildly disappointed by Super Mario Wonder, because it felt like a very unimaginative game outside of the Wonder Flower set-pieces. It's also disappointingly easy, which I reconfirmed when I played through NSMB U again recently and found it to be a fresh challenge in comparison.

@Ralizah Yeah I guess like you could miss basically all the bonus content in 5 royal if you don't follow a specific guide, but I do think with the overall game, it has a smaller cast, and way less activities, so it minimises the risk you could just miss massive chunks of game. Like a blind run of Three Houses, you could easily miss like 70 percent of what that game has, contentwise.

@Pizzamorg I guess I didn't stress too much about it because you'll always be missing content in any playthrough regardless, just because of the construction of the game itself.

If I had to pinpoint one major flaw of Three Houses I don't see discussed as much, it's how disruptive the recruiting system is to the overall design of the game. On my first playthrough, I recruited basically all of the interesting characters from the other houses before the timeskip, so the second half of the game (in my initial Golden Deer run) really missed out on a lot of emotional impact, because I wasn't usually fighting against characters I'd cultivated relationships with earlier in the game. I think it also makes the playthroughs less unique, because you're not working with a unique set of characters each time, but can basically build your custom army in the monastery section of the game.

The emergent narratives of individual character growth work better within Houses, too. Seeing Hilda's evolve from a pink-haired wastrel to one of the strongest units in the later half of the game wouldn't be as impactful in a non-Golden Deer run, for example.

@Ralizah I just think it was a problem here specifically, because the end points of arcs are largely fixed, so you can miss all the content in the middle and still get the end point like you did all this relationship cultivating, making it so obvious there's this gaping hole in the middle of this. I feel like the game should have been more adaptive to reflect the real relationships you invested in. I'm pretty sure there's even a close ally thing in the stat screen so it's collecting some data somewhere but not using it for anything.

Aww, thanks! Yep, still together, and still wondering how and why he puts up with me every darn day.

He upgraded to a Switch 2 but based on his gaming habits, it hasn't seen much use of late. We obviously played a bunch of Mario Kart for the first week or so (which... eh, it's okay, I guess) and he was more impressed with Donkey Kong than I was, but not enough to go further than its first few hours. He also got the Tears of the Kingdom upgrade and we both nodded at that for ten minutes, noting its improvements and taking a screenshot of a pretty landscape, and then... yeah. That's kinda been it, really.

I'm hoping he likes the forthcoming Animal Crossing update. That might get him back in the zone.

@Werehog Did he just fall off gaming entirely or did you find something else to play?

My partner and me hardly game together anymore. It's given me some more freedom in choosing games. The last year alone I beat do many games they aren't interested in. On the flip side, I do miss spending that type of time together. It's mostly down to them losing interest, but also less games releasing of the kind we both enjoy. It's not like a Red Dead Redemption releases every year.

Currently playing Metroid Prime Remastered on my Switch. I played Metroid Prime 3, but never the OG. So far it's very impressive in a lot of areas, though it also has the same problem every Metroid has for me: I never really know if I'm enjoying my time.

@Herculean Yes and no...? He's never been a play-for-hours gamer guy anyway, but he did get on a bit of a management sim kick and played the Two Point and Jurassic World: Evolution games on his Xbox. Even with those, however, he was (and still is) being a little stop-start with 'em.

I'd always been interested in the Jurassic World games myself, so it was on his recommendation that I got them for my PS5. We live apart, but I obviously play way more games than he does, and so despite his sporadic progress he still pulled ahead but because we're both spoiler-phobic folks, he would refuse to talk about anything I hadn't seen for myself yet. The result is that "Have you fed your dinos yet?" ended up being our new running gag for the year ("No, I'm busy playing Shenmue." "Does it have dinos in it?" "No." "Well, then it's a bad game. Feed your dinos!"). I think he just wrapped up Evolution 3 in the last couple days, while I'm only halfway through Evolution 2.

I'm sorry your partner has kinda fallen away from gaming of late. I recall you mentioning your shared experience of playing Red Dead together before. Do you think maybe Grand Theft Auto VI might be an option for you both, if it offers that same kinda immersion? It's gonna be such a big cultural touchstone that they might not be able to ignore it. And I'm guessing Split Fiction didn't grab either of you? Saw a heck of a lot of buzz around that, it's apparently excellent.

Yikes, that's a kinda damning thing to say about Metroid games (especially one that's all new to you, despite it being a remaster)! Here's hoping it picks up for you.

Made a start on Three Hopes because I have been just so impressed with Age of Imprisonment and it is like... insanely good? Like maybe I need to revist every "franchise as a musou game" spin off at this point, maybe they aren't just gimmicky cash grabs.

At least based on these early few hours, it fixes a lot of the storytelling issues I had with Three Houses (although it has some pacing issues of its own), does some serious fleshing out of the world, characters, all the stuff happening in the background in Three Houses as footnotes and flavour brought into the foreground here. Just have such a firmer grasp on place, on who everyone is and their dynamics and motivations with one another. Some of that is obviously helped by my pre-existing knowledge from Three Houses, but it has also helped shine a light and add clarity to things that will enhance any future playthroughs of Three Houses as well.

It is also a reminder for me that while it is a taste thing, I forgot how much I dislike unvoiced protagonists in games, I feel so much attachment to Shez in just a few hours versus hundreds with Byleth, as she / he stares silently and the characters have to exposition dump back to me what my character was meant to have said and done, meanwhile Shez actually gets to act out the dialogue choices I pick fully.

I do prefer turn based games overall, but they have also got the game feel of these games down to a fine art, like with AOI, the weaving in of the Fire Emblem bits feels well done and thoughtful rather than gimmicky and running at 60 fps on Switch 2 probably helps in a big way too.

@Pizzamorg How does it look undocked? I know it's unpatched, and some some 720p games don't look... very good on the 1080p screen.

Tells you how good the Three Houses cast is, though, that it's enough to support an entire game on its own.

@Ralizah it retains the look of Three Houses, to the point where I wonder if it reused a lot of the assets. I think Three Houses is a really ugly game, with it's flat, jaggy, PS2 looking graphics and so this has all the same problems by default.

@Pizzamorg Oh, yeah, I expected that. It should look like Three Houses tbh.

I just mean some unpatched games look very... fuzzy on the screen because of the higher resolution. Some don't. Was curious where this fell for you. The texture work obviously won't be any better, though, and I don't really need it to be.

I only played the demo (did buy the full game on sale, though), but really appreciated how much thought it put into trying to feel like a proper Fire Emblem experience (with completely different combat, obviously) as opposed to merely a Dynasty Warriors game with a FE coat of paint. One of the best things about Switch 2 is how any of the uncapped games seem to just enjoy automatic and dramatic performance improvements. Makes me wish Age of Calamity had been uncapped, too.

@Ralizah It is weird, because I am very sensitive to FPS. I am one of those who will tell you 30 fps is borderline unplayable for certain genres, but I am for some reason not very sensitive to blurry visuals for some reason.

I know the knock on PS5 performance mode titles is often how blurry it apparently looks versus the quality mode and try as I like, I just cannot see it for some reason. Maybe I sit too far away from my TV or whatever.

I think the first Switch 2 game where I noticed actual blurriness, not just like artifacting or some equivalent from really low resolution being packed down by the Switch, is weird the performance mode on Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter. It is mostly in the open zone sections, it looks exactly like how the world looks without my glasses on, in that I have like a circle of clarity all around me, and then a few steps forwards everything is very blurry. Like the Switch 2 performance mode is an aura around my characters and the rest is the Switch 1 version, and it only gets worse when played in handheld, for some reason.

Hyrule Warriors DE and Three Hopes both had an uncapped Framerate which lets you hit 60 on Switch 2 without a patch, AOI is 60 as standard, I think the other Fire Emblem Warriors Game and AOC were both 30 locked so won't be able to hit 60 without a patch. I heard that first FE Warriors game wasn't great, but I hear AOI was very good, but I just can't play a game like that in 30 fps.

@Pizzamorg I can't think of a type of game I couldn't play at 30fps. Even Crash Team Racing at 30fps was fine for me. I also kinda struggle noticing higher framerates than 60fps.

But terrible resolution scaling will absolutely destroy a game for me. Which is just one reason why the 1080p screen on Switch 2 IMO isn't my favorite choice. I also feel like it underperforms with some games because it's dumping resources into maintaining a higher resolution. Steam Deck is 800p and I've never really thought it needed to be higher resolution.

This might not be a popular idea, but Switch 2 would have been a DOPE 720p handheld. No need for patches to improve resolution, and, frankly, the system isn't even hitting a native 1080p docked with some of its more demanding games. Thinking about it, it's a little more powerful than a PS4, and even that console struggled to hit that resolution consistently without having to worry about a lower-powered handheld mode.