Topic: Nintendo Switch --OT--

@Pizzamorg I imagine the handholdy tutorials were a reaction to almost universal player confusion regarding Xenoblade 2's combat, which isn't nearly well-explained enough in game for how complex and layered it gets. This game has elaborate tutorials AND a section to go back and check them out again, as I recall, so it's on players if they don't get it.

Most battles in XC3 don't require much micro-management. Especially on Normal difficulty, which is pretty easy throughout. Hard is rougher to manage, but even then, chain attacking is still broken (although 6 hours is probably too early to have gotten to that yet). The AI is generally pretty good about following up your attacks if you inflict Break on an enemy.

Be sure to focus your party's attacks on individual enemies, try to make sure you balance of healing/defensive/attacking units is on point, and that you're canceling attacks consistently.

@Bentleyma I'd say go for it. Although the Switch 2(?) will be 'formally announced' this fiscal year, so by close-Q1/25, there is no guarantee as to when it will hit the shelves.... for all we know, Nintendo may target a September-October release which is a year away.

Backwards compatibility has been confirmed, so all your games and overall investment into the ecosystem (physical and/or digital) will still stand upon the successor release.

10 hours into Xenoblade 3. The introduction of new classes, the fusion skills and forms and the chain attacks definitely do bring the combat all together into a much more enjoyable overall package than I found the previous game I played to be. I don't really remember anything quite like this in the OG Xenoblade game I played on Switch, maybe I just bounced off too quickly.

Still quite annoyed by the constant walk three steps, enter into a half hour long cutscene and then a menu tutorial with eight pages to flick through and 16 hard locked steps. To get control back again for all of 4 seconds before they do it all over again. But I assume I have to be towards the end of this now, surely?

@Bentleyma Yeh those Nintendo 1st Party games are unrivalled in some respects.

Mario Wonder is pretty great, but don't sleep on Mario Odyssey either! (The 3D Mario that launched with Switch, currently -33%)

Also the 2 open-world Zeldas, Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom - these are wonderful.

Metroid Dread is also a firm favorite of mine, a brilliant 2D return-to-form for the franchise. Quite hard at times, but if you enjoy metroidvanias then this is a must play.

But yes definitely embed yourself in the Nintendo eco-system now. I have both OLED Switch and LCD Steamdeck.... both amazing devices, but I slightly prefer the switch (even though Deck performance is far superior!)

If the Switch2 can incorporate some elements from steamdeck, it will be amazing (increased power, ability to customise UI, remap of controls per/ game profile, toggles/sliders for FPS and other functions etc)

@Bentleyma Have fun... and that massive backlog of games you already own will keep you busy until Switch 4 is released

@Bentleyma Kirby and the Forgotten Land is a banger, and I'm not even much of a Kirby person.

Interesting that you bought a third party controller over a Pro Controller. Curious to hear how it works out for you.

@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.

... Honestly I feel the exact same way Ral

Except of course I've only played Cold Steel 1 & 2 and think maybe it wasn't so bad as I think only for ness to list off something and go "yeah nevermind it was".

Thank you for suffering this absolute nonsense @nessisonett to help dissuade me from ever picking this stupid series up again!

@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!