Topic: Nintendo Switch --OT--

Playing the original Super Smash Bros makes me appreciate Melee so much more. Controls are fairly inconsistent even with my N64 controller and physics are a bit off. A lot of staples began in the first game which was cool to see but Melee improved so so much.

@nessisonett Back throw everyone and win.

@Haruki_NLI Or just play as Kirby! Balancing is wonky all round but it’s an interesting one given the foundations it builds.

Does anyone have/played the FF pixel remasters on switch?

Do they play ok? Or better to go with ps4 version?

@PsBoxSwitchOwner I played V and VI on Switch - and yes they play absolutely fine! (as you would well hope/expect considering the games are decades old!!)

I think these games really lend themselves to portable play, and the Switch is perhaps a better 'home' for those kind of titles vs PS4.

Started DK Country Returns
I died a lot
It is more difficult than I guessed, playing it in classic mode
My biggest complaint is rolling not having a dedicated single button, it is really annoying and the main reason of my deaths mostly

Wii is coming to RetroAchievements and with it, any free time that I possibly have. As much as the Cube was my first console and I have incredible memories with it, the Wii saw me through a solid 7 years of let’s just say ‘turbulent’ family life and it was where I played a whole lot of series for the first time. Even just achievements for Brawl and Wii Sports Resort will give me a great reason to go back to them.

I finally decided to shelve Hollow Knight: Silksong. I have completed it twice, with my second playthrogh actually getting 100% without a guide. I think it might be my new favorite game of all time—a feat that I never thought possible. I’m now playing Hades 2 on the Switch Lite and it runs surprisingly well. The story is starting to pick up traction, and it’s also subverting my expectations. It’s more or less more of the same from the first game, but expanded on and has a lot more intriguing mysteries. I’m excited to see where it goes, if I can it out alive.

I’m really hoping I can pick up a Switch 2 in the near future. I’ll be doing a lot of traveling in the coming months, and that handheld will be perfect for my gaming experiences, particularly with RPGs; i.e; Persona 3 Reloaded. I also have Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter but it is very blurry on the OG Switch, so I am going to go back and that game on hold until I get an S2.

@Kraven Extremely impressive by the way; beating Silksong twice. Did you beat Hades 2?

Currently playing Odyssey myself.

I've been watching a streamer I like play Pokémon Legends Z-A recently and I gotta be honest, it's the first exclusive that's made me feel a slight stab of regret at not owning my own Switch. I'm having a good enough time watching it as and when, but I kinda wanna play it for myself someday!

I am just over a week away from my yearly trip to see my family, which means I have to make a choice between my Switch and my SteamDeck to take with me (five weeks and no gaming? No way!).

This year the choice is deffo my Switch 2. I had some serious buyers remorse for my Switch 2 for almost six straight months. I just thought in the world we live in, if I didn't snag one on launch and waited to pick up one when the exclusives started to mount, I either wouldn't be able to get one or I'd need to take out a Mortgage to buy one from a scalper, but it seems like for whatever reason that didn't happen, the Switch 2's have flooded the market just waiting to be bought.

However, ZA and Age of Imprisonment both game out close together and are some of my favourite games I have played released this year. And now I don't feel so bad about being an early adopter of this thing, even if it got no use for months on end. I feel like it is easy to forget just how much cool stuff is exclusive to Nintendo, even minusing their traditional mascot IPs.

I've got three Pokemon games to work through (ZA, my first playthrough of the Switch 2 version of Scarlet and I wanna replay Shield for the sheer joy of it).

Age of Imprisonment and the Switch 2 versions of BOTW / ToTK, not to mention Hyrule Warriors DE which is now locked 60 fps without a patch (come on Age of Calamity, please get patched!).

I am finally giving Xenoblade DE a proper go, I have played all the others but really struggled to get into this one, but I am committed this time.

Every time I take a good half a year away from my Switch I end up booting up either Engage or Three Houses, thinking I'll just do a quick mess around and focus on something newer. Never works. Fire Emblem is like a drug to me for some reason and I've already played about as much Three Houses in like two weeks as I did in Pokemon ZA in like a month and a half. After already playing this for hundreds of hours already.

I also picked up Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter on the Switch 2 as well.

There is also so many Switch 2 launch titles, or Switch 1 games I have bought previously and just never put significant time into. If I was disciplined I could probably just exclusively play my Switch 2 with all the titles I have on it already between Switch 1 and 2 for like two years and never need to buy anything new or run out of stuff.

I am sure once I get back home next year and have access to PS5 and PC again, with all those big tentpole releases that usually come in the first three months, demanding the power of the most high tech thing you own, the Switch 2 will once again go on ice for probably a good chunk of the year, at least until the new Fire Emblem comes out and takes over my life.

But for the purposes of travel and time away from home, I am very glad I got a Switch 2 in the end.

@Werehog Did you play Pokemon Legends: Arceus? Or watch your partner play it?

@Pizzamorg Nintendo gets a LOT of decent exclusives, so the consoles are pretty much always must buys for me. And if absolutely nothing else, I'd want one for the next Xenoblade, Mario, Zelda, and Fire Emblem games regardless!

Although my Steam Deck has absolutely taken precedence as my primary portable console over my Switches in general.

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.