The Nintendo Switch

homing hat is big advantage for odyssey

oh hey, for those of you who DON'T do the individual joycons-in-each-hand playstyle for Mario, I have some news for you: cappy can be thrown by using the right hand joycon like a wiimote! finding that accidentally while playing was one of my biggest OMG I LOVE THIS GAME moments

au$69 for the biggest ever open-world super mario is just incredible.

finished XC2. good game overall, would highly recommend to anyone who likes JRPGs but probably builds up way too slowly for people who aren't into the genre or the anime stylings. i wouldn't be surprised if this ends up being the best regarded xeno-series game besides xenogears but i'm not ready to call it a masterpiece.

pros:
+excellent music, mostly excellent environment design. these are what this series/studio is most known for and it shows
+good story that takes its time to blend in the weirdo JRPG mythology stuff before going somewhere really unexpected in the final act.
+combat system is fun once you have all the main mechanics available, and it does a good job of introducing small twists deep into the game
+very player-friendly save/retry system, you never lose any progress when you die which makes it way less stressful to experiment

cons:
-parts of the UI and especially the map UI are bad. in general, the whole game lacks the Nintendo Polish and it seems likely that Monolithsoft is still working independently on these despite being part of Nintendo now.
-the rare blade designs that were done by guest artists are extremely hit or miss
-the sections of the game where the story takes away one or more of the main characters were much less fun for me because this game's combat system is more about mastery of execution than tactics and thus taking away something you've been relying on is disruptive in a bad way rather than an interesting way.

good review, thanks. i'll probably give it a chance when it comes down in price

Wow that was quick, I’m on chapter 5 so roughly how far in am I?
I read somewhere that a lot of the main Monolith staff didn’t work on the game as they were called in to help on Zelda, so this game was made by a smaller more B type team. It shows as it is rough around the edges and as you say and lacks technical polish, even compared to the first XC which was a minor miracle of programming given the hardware they had to work with. I’ve had two occasions where I’ve been trapped in menus and can’t get out, had to reset the software - can’t remember the last time I had to do something like that with a Nintendo published game. And yes some of the character designs are truly awful.

Still enjoying it though, seeing that “battery low” message so often is a good indication that I’m having fun haha

heh, i feel that one!

you're probably close to halfway? there's 10 chapters but the last one is mostly just cutscenes and the final boss & ending

i think my final playtime was under 60 hours but i really rushed through some bits, i'd guess 60-70 hours would be normal

That sounds about right, I’m about 38 hours in. Extra levelling up at inns feels like cheating!

the inn mechanic is, i assume, essentially a difficulty slider so you can do a lot of sidequests and not outlevel the main quest if you don't want to

ciderpress does your completed save file let you go run around and hunt down named monsters to fight and whatever or do you pop back to outside the boss room

For some reason I get annoyed by the latter system, like i just want to run around in Zelda with the world saved

same thing as zelda, it saves that you beat the game and you get a nice final title screen but when you load up you're outside the boss room

I accidentally played Vostok Inc for like six hours today.

xp oh well I’ll live (we’ll see how much noodling around I’ll actually want to do if I beat this thing) (my partner is going to be gone for 10 days over New Years of course I’m going to beat it)

I watched an ex-ilxor play Mario for about 30 seconds and two months later I still have pangs of wishing I could learn to throw a cap

fuck throwing a cap

I can't turn my power bar into a heart

oh one other thing about XC2 if y'all haven't figured it out yet is the skill in the skill tree that lets you cancel arts into arts is pretty much mandatory for maximum enjoyment - once you have that you can chain combo through every art on all 3 of your equipped blades if your execution is good and get huge multipliers

also if you're playing as Rex i recommend an eventual setup where you have Pyra, Roc, and a greataxe rare blade (i had Agate) which lets you do an entire topple -> launch -> smash sequence on your own off of Nia's break. if you're able to combine that with the above you'll practically one-shot normal enemies. it's pretty fun.

I’m just glad I finally got to the point where I’ll have enough elements in my party to pull off blade combos more easily and not end up with as many dead ends

Getting a topple or launch while the stage II special status is on is so clutch, the status meter refills a bunch and sometimes you get party meter. There’s another possibility or two for the bonus but I can’t tell what it is.

Anyway love chain attacking a boss with 2+ orbs and doing 46000 damage or whatever

ok, I've got my heavy hitter cartridges, what download or indie games should I consider? keep hearing binding of Isaac, cave story ... what else?

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, December 8, 2017 10:34 AM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Just don't make the same mistake I did with Binding of Isaac i.e. be aware that there is a lot of poo in it before you buy it.

Picross S! But if you're already a Picross addict, you knew that

boi is a really really good game fwiw

I agree! But the above caveat is important if you're easily grossed out like me. :)

It was actually one of the first two games I bought when I got my Switch a few months ago (along with Mario Kart)...I didn't think I had time to get lost in Zelda yet, and this was right before there were suddenly large piles of Switches at every store I went to so there was a sense of urgency when I found one. Checked Metacritic, saw it was highly rated and saw "roguelike" in the description and that was that. I literally could have done 20 more seconds of research and realized what I was getting into.

so help me I've been reading video game message boards just to get my fix of Nintendo release calendar speculation, the Nintendo Switch has made me extremely stupid and hungry for marketing

they've been awful stingy with it!

yeah we're entering mystery territory now, i suspect they're gonna have a Direct right after the holidays to announce stuff for the first half of 2018

i'm fine with this, actually, there's always other systems and platforms to backlog through. also it with all the cross-platform games announced it sounds like most the big companies are going in on Switch and probably have a lot of stuff in the works for late '18/'19

Here’s some arbitrary shit I hope to see on Switch that’s not probably a total given, the sooner the better

2D Zelda with a novel art style
2D Mario with a novel art style
New Golden Sun
New Final Fantasy Tactics
Some brand new local multiplayer game from Nintendo (Flip Wars is this technically but I didn’t buy it…)
A new Paper Mario that’s good and not bad like the Wii U one apparently was
The whole Game Boy Advance library
A Zelda game where you play as Zelda, ideally Zelda from after the end of Breath of the Wild

the new kirby looks like it's got a local multiplayer focus

If a new FFT comes out for switch I will have to bite the bullet and get the console, regardless of bills or rent or personal obligations

FFT and Golden Sun have both been dormant for ages haven't they?

even just an updated final fantasy tactics would be cause for some celebration.
it seems really simple to make! don't understand why it's no one's priority.

Yeah Golden Sun got a DS game in 2010 (which I never played) but it seems like it underperformed the GBA ones sales-wise (towards the end of the DS lifecycle) which probably consigned it to the Nintendo vault

I want to believe Nintendo of 2017 can revive anything though

The last FF Tactics game came out in Japan in 2007! D:

for reference
After fourteen years of on-and-off play, I finally beat Final Fantasy Tactics last night

I’ll be honest I’d play any tactics game

except disgaea I tried the demo and the setting was too gross

if they put every single wii u game on switch vertical console i would be super happy

if they added some courses to wii golf i would be super happy

well there's almost certainly a fire emblem game in the works re: tactics

So if they move another 3 million or more in the next month and a half, that puts the Switch into Wii / PS4 territory

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/12/putting-nintendo-switchs-10-million-sales-in-context/

this thing's 2nd and 3rd fiscal years are going to be even better, whenever they get a "truly portable" model at the one-for-every-kid price point.

Those Wii U numbers are sad, especially for the ~13 million that DID buy the system that it's considered a bomb financially

It's good that Nintendo finally got their act together for their production line and you can actually buy Switches this holiday season. SNES Classic still a pain, but them's the breaks

for all the shit that Xenoblade rightfully got for Pyra’s design, there are some really good female characters in this game, Morag in particular.
Steamworld Heist is coming out on Dec 28th, don’t sleep on this if you want a tactics game

my Switch was delivered today but we're gonna hold out for Santa Day because I dunno it's still a surprise for the kids & this way I can work through my iOS backlog a little more before starting Zelda.

gonna buy Overcooked right away, in fact seeing that it was on Switch was what tipped me from "wait another year" to "buy now" because I love cooking games and I love coop games and this is both!

this thing's 2nd and 3rd fiscal years are going to be even better, whenever they get a "truly portable" model at the one-for-every-kid price point.

if they can either get the technology down to build a smaller switch (without too much joycon compromise), or keep the current size but double the battery life, this thing will just keep growing and growing.

the switch is the first full console i’ve bought since the free ps3 i got with a tv purchase in 2010 (i also bought a 3ds in 2011 iirc). the combination of price, versatility (i can play while ‘er indoors is watching tv) and killer games is the reason i even considered getting a switch, and i reckon it’ll get a load of jaded 30-50yo ex-gamers back into consoles as well. i love the absolute pants off this thing.