Topic: Nintendo Switch --OT--

I hope that Nintendo's next console is comparable to a PS4 when it comes to specs. I was playing Ratchet & Clank earlier and couldn't help but think how good a Mario game could look on something as powerful as a PS4.

Considering how good Nintendo manage to make their games look on the Switch, I think they could make some amazing looking games.

@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.

@Haruki_NLI Nintendo did release The Super Mario Bros. Movie, so it's possible that they might aim for that type of look with their next 3D Mario game.

Yoshi’s Crafted World uses UE4 and that looked good and played quite well from what I remember. Although I'm pretty sure the resolution took a hit.

@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

@Ralizah Most of Nintendo's Switch games look really good and would still hold up well against a lot of games on more powerful hardware if they had a better resolution, but the next Nintendo consoles definitely needs to be more than a Switch Pro.

I'm currently playing (and enjoying) Bayonetta 3 and it sort of feels like I'm playing a heavily downgraded port of a game that's on a more powerful console. It definitely needs more than a resolution bump. I even think that would end up making the game look worse because it would make all the bad textures stand out even more. If their next console was at least as powerful as a PS4 then the next Bayonetta game could look as good as something like Devil May Cry 5.

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.

@Haruki_NLI I'm guessing it's not as good as Super Mario RPG then? I finished that the other day and was thinking about picking this up soon. Looks like I'm better off going with Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door?

@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.

I think I am now close to the final stretch of Xenoblade 3, I dunno if there is any post campaign stuff or how substantial it is, but I am clocking in close to 70 hours now and my party are all around that level as well. I think I still have one class to unlock (there may be other secret ones, but I have one blacked out person on the hero screen), no clue where this quest is though as I’ve scoured every question mark I could find on the map. I also haven’t got all the base classes to the point where they can go over the level cap either, but a lot of these are fairly obtusely hidden, found in random locations after overhearing seemingly unrelated conversations and I don’t care enough to just fast travel from camp to camp trying to find these, if I am being honest.

I have to say though, while I a may not be so hungry I want to mop up a bunch of hidden, unmarked, quests, overalls this game is still such an enigma for me. I’ve played so many games over the last few years I’ve utterly adored within the first 10 - 20 hours, been utterly burned out on by the 40th hour, and then had to slog through whatever hours remain, utterly souring and resenting the game I once loved by the end.

I never had that high point with Xenoblade 3 where I felt like I was truly loving it, but I haven’t experienced that burnout ever, either. In fact, knowing this experience is possibly almost over actually makes me kinda sad, honestly (although again, yes, not so sad I want to find hidden quests) and I’ve picked up Xenoblade 2 to chase the high as soon as I am done with 3.

And like I say it is so wild to me, cause I can express to you I have this feeling while still not being able to really define for you what I even like about 3, but all I know is, I spend all day wanting to play 3 and then when I finally sit down and play 3, I can’t stop playing 3. This game is like a drug that bypasses all my logical reasoning and just hits at a pleasure point deep inside my brain directly.

So I finished Chapter 7 of Xenoblade 3 and… what the eff was that?! Lol!

Major spoilers ahead, for those who intend to play.

Still ain’t got a scooby what this game is about. There is some sort of coming oblivion so two worlds need to be separated or something or maybe they need to be combined, either way, it makes zero sense. So a machine is built to do one of those things, I think? Then somewhere along the way negative emotions create a being called Z (or something?). He is able to loop time in a ten year span, and in doing so, this stops the two worlds colliding creating the annihilation event which will kill everybody? But the worlds are separated and seemingly everyone is fine so… what are we doing here again, sorry? Also the machine can separate the worlds, but then Z can keep them separated, but they didn’t intentionally create Z, so what was the plan if Z didn’t keep the worlds separated? What even is the plan… period?

Z then decides to populate the 10 year loops with a fabricated war where cloned children from the two worlds fight to the death and get endlessly recycled as energy seemingly just for the banter, as it doesn’t appear to serve any actual real function, as this tech seemingly was created long after Z was. Z then spends the entire game sat in a magic cinema watching the cutscenes. Like… huh? And what was the purpose of Mobieus then? Puts them in goofy pink outfits and lets them run around causing trouble, just to what, create more storylines for this show he fabricated?

The final stretch was Z ranting utterly incoherent nonsense, and then Noah or Mio going “I get it now” and then offering a non explanation like “I get it now, you need the endless now because of the possibilities, because we cut ourselves off from our own future. There is only one thing to believe, the path we are on.” Sorry, wanna try that again in English?

I dunno, I still feel like most of my questions remain unanswered, because for whatever reason huge amounts of Xenoblade 3's story, as in core pieces that are needed to fully flesh out the main thread, are scattered throughout unmarked side content you just gotta find by I guess just fast travelling through settlements in a loop until you eventually find the right quests? I know some people like this style of game design, but I don't.

Also major villains die in basic boss fights, that don't even have any post fight cutscenes. I am playing in Japanese, and I have picked up a little Japanese over the years, which is lucky as these shafted villains give speeches as they die, but as its not in a cutscene there are no subtitles. I was able to grab the gist, but I wonder how many playing in Japanese just walked off here. Some major villains don't get their arcs rounded out in the main thread, and have to be found in those unmarked side quests. Not sure I've ever played an RPG before that has a main narrative thread which if played through in sequence is intentionally fragmented and incomplete, forcing you to wander aimlessly through it's open world trying to find the other parts with zero direction.

It just feels like they completely ran out of time and money at the end of Xenoblade 3.

Oh, and the Origin Dungeon has to be one of the worst dungeons I have ever experienced in a JRPG. It basically has two rooms repeated endlessly, that contain the same three enemies in, and the enemies are about three centimetres apart and never break agro, so you are basically forced to fight for hours on end without any breaks as you crawl your way through this exercise in mind breaking tedium.

And if you thought that was boring oh boy, that final boss? It was like they had an in-house challenge to squeeze in as many bullet sponge phases as they could. Towards the last couple I was so bored I just left the AI to fight and walked off and did something else.

@Pizzamorg The ending actually makes more sense if you've played both previous games. Suffice to say that Bionis and Alrest (the worlds featured in the first two games, respectively) were originally one, but an event separated them into distinct realms. These realms weren't ultimately stable and were always going to recombine, resulting in the destruction of the inhabitants and cultures of those two worlds. The Origin ark was designed to digitize both the collective knowledge and souls of the people fated to be destroyed. But the anxieties in the digitized people gave rise to an emergent property, which we know as Z, who embodies the intense fear of the unknown and the yearning for the comfortable and familiar. He fashions the result, Aionios, into something resembling a perpetual motion machine, where nothing really ever changes or evolves, to preserve an "Eternal Now" that feeds on and recycles the digitized souls from Origin.

You played Persona 5, right? Aionios is sort of this game's version of the Qliphoth World from that game in the depths of Mementos. Persona draws super heavily from Nietzsche, though, whereas XC3 seems to draw more heavily from Hinduist/Buddhist ideas, with the struggle to break free from the samsara-like cycle of reincarnation in Aionios.

It's a bit metaphysical, yes, but also excellently representative of XC3's overwhelming focus on existential themes. Which is the best way to read this text, because unlike its predecessors, XC3 is less interested in fantasy gobbledygook than it is in exploring the embodied nature of human existence, and the terrors and joys that arise from this.

Hope that helps.

And yes, Chapter 5/6 is shocking, and probably the best stretch of storytelling in the entire series, for my money. Ch. 5 actually trended on Twitter when the game first dropped for that reason, as I recall.

That does make a lot more sense when put like that @Ralizah thank you for that. I thought 3 was standalone so I didn’t play the others, seems I should have played the games in order, but I tried to get into the first one on Switch so many times and just always bounced off. I started 2, and I feel like maybe it is just the destiny of these games to make horrible first impressions, and I wonder if I had just stuck with the original, if I would have eventually liked the original one.

Xeno 3 takes probably around 15 hours to stop tightly gripping your hand and stopping your progress every two seconds to give you a tutorial. And you may argue this is a necessary evil, but I feel like there had to be a better way to deliver this information. Worse, it takes over 40 hours (and that is probably on the shorter side) for the story to really properly get going, too. You really have to either love certain aspects of Xeno 3 or be willing to really persevere to see the best parts of that game.

With 2 I am maybe around 8 hours, and its clearly what 3 learnt from, as it has the opposite problem where it rapid fires you tutorials early, which gets them out of the way, but they can’t be accessed from anywhere I could find, and a lot of these tutorials aren’t useful until hours later. I was getting absolutely wrecked by enemies early on, the objective marker for quests is utterly useless, I don’t understand how to do chain attacks properly at all as the tutorial came and went hours before I could actually do them for some reason. If I hadn’t got the context of Xeno 3 in mind and just how long it took for that game to really start coming together, I’d have given up on this game hours ago.

@Pizzamorg XC3 is largely standalone, which really annoyed people who wanted something that explored the lore of the first two games more. That said, like the also largely standalone XC2, there's stuff in the last chapter that doesn't make a lot of sense without knowing what happened in previous games.

Those fans (i.e. not me) actually got what they wanted with the Xenoblade 3 expansion, Future Redeemed, which is like a proper sequel to the entire series, to the point where it'd be incomprehensible for someone who hadn't played all of the preceding Xenoblade games and remember a lot about them. Actually, maybe the larger extended Xeno universe, since there's apparently even a possible connection to stuff that happens in Xenosaga Episode 3, lmao.

And yeah, XC3's tutorializing was arguably an overreaction to widespread complaints about XC2's inadequate tutorials (which was also a problem for me in Xenoblade X, so let's hope they address that in the upcoming Switch port!). There's actually a youtube video I usually link people to that'll help them make more sense of the combat in XC2:

FWIW I tried four times and never fell in love with Xenoblade 1. I have a million issues with it and kept dropping it at various points. I've basically liked every successive game in this franchise more than the last. I did finally beat Xenoblade 1 via the improved Switch remaster, but it's still the same clunky, barren game I never understood the appeal of back on Wii and 3DS. I don't regret beating it, but I'll never, ever understand why people love it so much.

You do miss out on some references and plot connections if you play the games out of order, but, aside from Future Redeemed, it's not that big of a deal. The games are worth playing for the music, emotional storylines, characters, etc. rather than the lore dumps at the end that don't mean that much to the larger experience of the games.

If you can get past the technical inadequacies, bad tutorials, fanservice moments, and occasional moments of horrendous VA work, Xenoblade 2 is so full of heart and charm. It really won me over after XC1 largely left me cold.

Thank you for this vid @Ralizah - it is funny, cause in some ways, Xenoblade 2 is easier to play than 3, cause there are less people in your party so way less visual overload, and it doesn’t appear you can switch characters mid battle, so it makes me feel confident about just focusing on the role the character I am playing as, and largely ignoring everyone else. I did this in 3 too, honestly, but I was never sure if I was meant to, as you could switch characters mid battle there, but I just never did. This made me worried right until the end there was some extra layer to 3’s combat I never tapped into. Then again that game was so easy, I never needed to.

The one thing I can’t wrap my head around though in 2 is the Chain Attacks, the levels, all the icons appearing on the screen when to use those, I really miss just pressing the Chain Attack button and the game pausing to allow me to do it, like in 3. So hopefully this video will make sense of it all for me.

@Pizzamorg You know, when I first saw the number of party members in XC3, I was worried about that too, but it never became an issue for me.

It made sense of it for me. I had to look it up because there's a late game boss that's almost impossible to kill if you don't understand the stupid chain attack/orb breaking system.

I really liked the system in XC3, even if it did kind of break the difficulty on hard bosses and take too long sometimes. That jazzy theme always got me pumped up.

I definitely feel more in control @Ralizah in 2. I dunno if thats also just cause I am generally more used to the combat of this series in general now after 70 odd hours of XC3 right into 2, or what. When I played the original XC on Switch I don’t think I’d played another game with combat like that since that one Final Fantasy that kinda worked like that all those years ago.

But I do think having less active characters on the field helps, as it does feel more player focused. I did feel at times playing XC3 that the game was just sorta playing itself. Like a bar brawl had kicked off around me and I decided to just join in.

That said, in 2, I was deeply misunderstanding certain mechanics until I watched that video you linked, so I appreciate you sharing that. I also think XC2 having timed inputs for things makes things feel more active and engaging. Which I am surprised to say, cause I normally turn off these kinds of mechanics when I can in RPGs.

I will say at least early on though, XC2 feels significantly harder than 3 did. Like early on XC3 could be tough, but once I had a full party I sorta never found the game hard ever again. Bosses, especially the Moebius ones had absurd amounts of health, but I never felt like I was in much danger, it was just sorta tedious.

In XC2, the bullet sponge enemies return, but it also feels like we are all either alive, or dead, I never seem to notice any damage being taken before I’m suddenly reloading a checkpoint barely registering I’d wiped. I have had to play some stretches on easy, as a few of those early story bosses, I just got fed up. We’d spend ages chipping away the health getting right down to the end of the fight and then something would one shot my party, or if not one shot, melt us so rapidly it’d just be game over. Felt like I couldn’t learn anything from those deaths and didn’t want to go back to chipping away again.

Me when Cold Steel 4 undermines the most satisfying chapter in the entire series with lesbian rape jokes