Nintendo

I was so busy I forgot to write!

After successfully camping Wednesday for a Switch 2, I went into school for the last day for teachers and played the board games Dwellings of Eldervale and Dominion.

For the weekend, I casually played Mario Kart World. I love how the races are not just laps around a track! The highlight was playing with my two children Friday on Knockout Mode and playing with the older kid and my wife on Sunday. (“You let me win” she kept saying as I found almost every way to fall off every track. My 3rd, 4th, 4th, 2nd was the best I could do!)

I also bought Picross S 8 and I just realized I am a little more than halfway finished. Those are the easier puzzles, though. Lots more podcast and zone out time ahead.

The biggest news is that I completed chapter 12 of Xenoblade Chronicles! From what I understand, this was about where the Wii U game ended? I also dove into chapter 13, act 1 because the story is too much to put down. I’m hoping I’ll wrap everything up before July so o can start my first physical Switch 2 game: Bravely Default Remaster.

I never finished Zelda TOTK before my last switch broke, and they deleted all my save data from the cloud so I'm starting over on that one. No regrets

Switch 2 is here! Well, not mine, but in general. Should be getting mine soon though. How many of you have gotten it already? And how are you liking it so far?

I got it on Thursday, first time ever I get a new Nintendo console on release date! I'm really enjoying it! I only bought Mario Kart World for Switch 2. I haven't tried the new stuff for the Zelda games, because I know once I do that's all I'll be playing for weeks. But I will go through some of my backlog, see if I notice any improvements on different games. I also want to get Cyberpunk at some point, it's just with these prices, I need to really think before getting a new game...

Mario Kart World is amazing. I still haven't gotten used to it, but I've finished all the cups in Grand Prix. It's cool because it's more Mario Kart, but also I feel like I'll still keep playing Mario Kart 8 forever. Makes sense Monolith helped out. I know they mentioned it before, but experiencing is a whole thing, they actually built an open world Mario Kart! I've been enjoying all the little references and easter eggs. It'll be a blast to play this with friends!

Finished Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, the main story at least. There's a lot of content on this game, and I played a bit of the post-game stuff. I think I might keep going to get the final ending. In regards to performance with Switch 2, there is an issue with loading screens on 1, they take forever. This improves on Switch 2, but the main improvement I noticed was in the stages where you get to play with the Divine Beasts. It feels like a completely different experience, it runs much smoother.

I am definitely getting the new Hyrule Warriors on Switch 2. They really work on the story on these games (way more than Nintendo do). So if you're interested in the story from Zelda games, I definitely recommend Age of Calamity. I hope they fix some of the technical issues for the new one though. It's not about hardware limitations as much as issues with the camera in some parts. I feel like the camera should get further away in some circumstances, instead it kind of gets locked between the enemy and a wall and you can't see anything, neither your character nor what's happening. Also I hope they moke more different enemies. I don't know how many Moblins I defeated, but it got boring 😅

Played Mario RPG Remake this week. It's quite short and I was on vacation, so I finished the entire thing. It's fun, although the post game bosses did get annoying and I didn't beat all of them - maybe I'll finish them over the weekend.

Besides that, I'll join in on the fun and start Xenoblade X.

Oh, and I started a replay of Monster Hunter Rise with my partner. This time around, for every mission, we roll a random weapon each we have to beat it with, which is quite fun. After playing about 200h using the hammer exclusively, it's nice to slowly learn all the other weapons too.

I finally beat Brothership yesterday. It should have ended last weekend, but the end of the game really drags on. You know that obligatory five minute cutscene about the friends you made along the way that a JRPG tends to have in between the final boss and the true final boss? Brothership turned that five minute cutscene into a three hour backtracking segment! And the true final dungeon is very long, too. Something I wasn't really in the mood for anymore...

It was a good game though! The cynic in me expected the RPG side to be very simplified and easy, but it's the Mario & Luigi it has been when I still played it on the GBA. And the optional boss re-fights in the late game hit hard!

My main criticisms are:

• The plug system gets very annoying with you constantly needing to replace them. At least let me favorite some of them so I don't have to find them all the time.

• First strikes are very awkward. For comparison, my first strike rate in Thousand Year Door is easily ~98%. I'd be surprised if I got more than ~5% in Brothership.

• Overworld travel gets very tedious after a while. It basically becomes Spirit Tracks without any of the action.

Now, I planned to beat the game before the Switch 2 releases, but now I had a comparison here, too. I didn't notice load times being much shorter, but the game definitely runs smoother in those moments when it matters. There's a Bro Move that has you alternate the A- and B-Buttons quickly, which is easy enough. But about halfway through the timer the game would briefly slow down, which always messed me up until I started to specifically slow down in anticipation. That slowdown is gone on the Switch 2!

Next, I plan to play Kena - Bridge of Spirits on PC, a game I know nothing about. I picked it out from my backlog because I was in the mood for something green. I wanted to frolic in nature, but most games in that category are large RPGs that I wasn't in the market for, because Xenoblade X was the game I intended to replace Brothership with. There's nothing to stop me from just playing Xenoblade now, but I already had Kena downloaded and installed when I decided to focus hard on Brothership.

And on the side, I dabble in Mario Kart World. I can't say much about it yet, but I was blown away by the fact that they have a track that acknowledges Super Mario Land! That's so rare... But I can't say I'm a fan of the Grand Prix format. Driving from one track to the next is cool, but if it comes at the cost of reducing all but the first track to a single lap, I'd rather not have that at all.

Got the flight module after that, and now I can fly everywhere! Completed FrontNav of Noctilum, and now just running around doing affinity missions so that I can be couple of levels above the recommended level to start the next chapter.

Just flying around the world doing quick missions, killing monsters and finding relics was so fun. Spent way too much time doing that.

How many of you have gotten it already?

On the fence about it.

I've been quite impressed with the reviews about its overall build quality, the results of some durability test videos I've seen are honestly amazing. Well, asides from the screen film that scratches easily, but I planned on putting a screen protector on it anyway. However, I've been traumatized from so many drift issues I had, and the teardowns show that the design for the new sticks is very similar. There's some tweaks and it's possible they solve the main issue, but I'm not convinced about that yet.

Since finding SD Express cards also quite hard around here (and I want a 1TB one) I'll probably wait more to see people discussing/testing the new sticks, and also follow the backward compatibility progress since there's 7(?) games I own that are still listed with problems.

Playing Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land

The technical aspects of this game are starting to annoy me. Performance is wildly inconsistent, with some regions running quite well while others are a stuttering mess. This wasn't as much a problem earlier in the game but gets significantly worse in the the later regions, in particular the third. Also, this game is a bit glitchy - I've had issues like clipping through ground, getting stuck in places you shouldn't, or geometry not loading. It's nothing gamebreaking and more on the "amusing" side, if you're curious about it you can see some examples in this video. Finally, got a couple crashes too - but lost no progress thanks to the autosave. All of these things combined made it very clear to me that this game needed more development and testing time.

Despite the technical problems I'm still enjoying it, but it's gotten to the point where I needed to highlight this for potential buyers. Word around is that it's poorly optimized in other platforms as well, but obviously the Switch is the one that's going to struggle the most due to that.

Back to the game, I took some time in the weekend to craft some equipment, which is another way of saying "tripled my stats". And then I did if again some mid-week when I unlocked the facility that lets you duplicate crafted items, so I'm ridiculously overpowered right now. All of this was completely unnecessary given how easy the game is, but I just can't resist when a game gives me the option to break it in half 😀.

I figured out that a (!) marker instead of a (?) in the map means it's a Normal quest intead of Random one, so I went and cleared all of those that were available. Also finished the Pioneering goals for the first three regions, mainly because I got tired of seeing places I couldn't get to because I needed the special ammo you get from these.

After that I focused on the main quest and got a lot of progress, and I'm now exploring the fourth (and probaly last) region. While I miss the all-wholesome story from the previous games I'm really liking the way this one touches on the dangers of alchemy - most of the sad/messed-up character backstories are related to its misuse, and there's a lot of unpleasant implications on what the Aladiss Empire was trying to do with alchemy prior to its collapse. This is something that the Dusk trilogy had touched upon, but has a much bigger focus in this game.

The twist at the end of the 3rd area was really, really interesting too.

I'm probably close to the end now, so I should finish it during the next week. Still have to decide what I'll be playing next, but feeling the urge to go back to VNs, been quite some time since I finished one of these.