#they lack single player modes that were in the first game
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helladventurers · 10 months ago
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I'm done with granblue versus rising 😤👏 playing as Zooey is fun, everything else about the game is not, so I'll likely not be buying it unless I either can grab it at a huge discount or they add more single player stuff in the future that's hopefully not tied to dlc
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professorlaytonarchive · 2 months ago
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Dear fellow Professor Layton fans! I’m writing this post to explain the timeline of events about the search for Mansion of the Deathly Mirror to clear up any misconceptions or missing information you may have.
To start, Professor Layton and the Mansion of the Deathly Mirror (レイトン教授と死鏡の館 ) is a game in the Professor Layton series that was exclusively released for mobile. It was available on Professor Layton Mobile. The game features a brand new story formed by 6 chapters in total. Each chapter was his own i-appli, and they were released every two weeks starting from October 2008. As of June 2024, a translation of the original version is in the works, with the first chapter already released and as of September 2024 all 6 chapters have been preserved
Professor Layton and the Mansion of the Deathly Mirror -Remix- (レイトン教授と死鏡の館 -REMIX-) is an updated version of Professor Layton and the Mansion of the Deathly Mirroravailable to i-Mode devices through the Professor Layton Mobile and Mobile R portal. This version has different puzzles, slightly better animations and slightly different dialogues compared to the original version.
Synopsis
Professor Layton and his number one apprentice, Luke Triton, are invited to a party hosted by famous author Drevin Murdoch. At this party, he reveals to be in possession of a mirror that allows the attendants to talk to the dead. However, after Murdoch is found dead the following morning, it's up to Layton and Luke to find out the truth behind the Deathly Mirror, and the secrets Murdoch's Mansion holds.
(Credit: Keitai Wiki)
Chapter 1: A Single Piece
In 2014, a streamer managed to record the first three chapters of Deathly Mirror. A little while after, the streamer began to be harassed by multiple fans, eventually leading them to take down the videos. Due to the lack of preservation efforts at the time, the videos weren’t saved.
Years later, bits and pieces—such as screenshots, articles, and press videos—were found, but nothing concrete.
Chapter 2: A Picture Forming
In May of 2023, a Japanese fan posted the first part of what would become a complete playthrough of all six chapters of Mansion of the Deathly Mirror Remix. This was monumental for the Layton Lost Media (LLM) scene. However, during the 11 months it took to release the full playthrough, there were some difficulties with Western fans. The issues included harassment of the player for more videos, begging for the ROM (despite the player clearly stating they were afraid of Japan’s strict piracy laws), and other forms of harassment.
This period caused uncertainty and worry throughout the Layton Lost Media community, leading the community to strictly instruct members to cease any future contact with the player to prevent the playthrough from being lost before its completion. Around the same time, in February of 2024, thanks to the help of the user @/ponkikipon on Discord, we were able to preserve the ROMs of the original chapters 1-3. In April 2024, the playthrough of Remix came to an end with the release of the video for the sixth chapter. This allowed for the formation of Team Enigma, which sought to fully remake both the original and remixed versions of the game into one package, translate the original game into English, and expand their efforts into other translation projects. Chapter 1 is currently fully translated and available.
Chapter 3: The Final Piece
In September 2024, Keitai Wiki and a user by the name of @/yuvi on Discord managed to locate chapters 4-6 on a junk phone, marking the full preservation of the original Mansion of the Deathly Mirror. This allowed Team Enigma to bypass multiple roadblocks in the development of the remake and translation.
Please show your support by supporting Keitai Wiki, Team Enigma, and Team Professor Layton Archive.
https://x.com/rockmancosmo/status/1834626811646599498?s=46&t=r1PBA7kkYm_L_o06jhQMgw
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cerastes · 8 months ago
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As someone who hasn't touched it yet- how does IS4 stack up? How's first impressions been?
Ok, let me give my thoughts on IS4, now that it's been a week!
TL;DR -> This Rocks, I love it.
IS4 is far, far more polished than IS3. I feel a bit bad blasting and slamming IS3 so much, but the bottom line with it is that it's just very very flawed in ways that really make it hard to revisit it in the same way IS2 is always a fun romp.
If I had to point out flaws with IS4, it'd be that, on a personal level, I wish it had a few more Normal Arknights Maps. The vast majority of maps in IS4 are pranks and checks of some sort. This isn't necessarily a negative, but I do like playing some Tower Defense more frequently than what IS4 allows, since it's always got me worried about "oh god my team lacks X, Floor Y's Map Z checks X, if I get it, I'll D I E " so I try to go for my super tried and true team instead of daring to experiment all that much. This will eventually pass, but it's been a Thing for me.
Besides that, though? I just have a lot of good things to say about it. The systems feel like they were thought out this time: The Fordartals (sp?) system allows for a lot of player expression, agency, and just in general fun in a way the Light system of IS3 can simply never hope to compare to. About the only thing the Light system did right was the way it worked thematically: If you wish to confront The Corrupting Heart, you really, really gotta go in the dark, and for the best possible chance against, Izumik, Mizuki must find the Light again and be filled with hope. Yeah ok sure, thematically, these work, but the gameplay component sucks ass, because Light exists almost exclusively as a form of punishment and in basically no way as something you can use. It opens some roads, sure, but that Rogue Trader and Wish Fulfilled node are not worth having 9 out of you 11 Operators with Metastatic. Speaking of Metastatic, the single worst thing Arknights has done, even if you are maxed out on Collapse in IS4 and are packing four fully upgraded maluses, THAT STILL DOESN'T COMPARE to how bad Metastatic was. Let that sink in.
The endings are no longer RNG! Absolutely wonderful!
Eik is the first IS 2nd Boss I can say I think is good! Frozen Monstrosity was just annoying, Big Sad Lock is incredibly static, and The Last Knight, in my opinion, is the single worst and most boring boss in the entire game, not even just the game mode. Eik is like if The Last Knight didn't suck: Same principle, but done in a way that is actually not snooze-inducing. Mind you, the principle of the fight is still not something I enjoy, but unlike The Last Knight, that's wholly a me thing, as opposed to being an objectively awful and boring fight (like The Last Knight, the worst and most boring boss in Arknights).
Even though I said I'd like some more normal maps, the maps are good, to be honest! I can't think of any Fire and Water Unions or Out of Controls.
IS4 is the Smash of Arknights: (Almost) Everyone Is Here! Brush up on your gimmicks from various events, because they WILL appear.
The Midboss philosophy in IS4 is lovely, in my opinion: It's low HP bosses who can quickly fuck you up in their own way, be it stun, immense conditional damage, or simply supporting their team so well that you get overwhelmed. The Variant stages for the bosses are entire new maps, so that's also cool.
Collapsal enemies are congruent with the map design: Collapsals can be very quick, with a caveat: Normal Collapsal mobs speed up after they get hit, Casters speed up after not attacking for a bit, Aerials are fast but always have many loops and never directly go to the point until after a while. Shattered Champions are the exception, and they can either loop a while or just go straight for the jugular, making them apt Elite units for the faction.
There's much more I could say more concisely, but really, just try the game mode, get your ass kicked a bit, learn it, and then you'll see how coherent the design of IS4 is in terms of systems, maps, enemies, and features. Sorry, IS3, but you got your ass absolutely kicked like I did on my Waves 15 runs when you'd give my 2 main DPS units Metastatic on Floor 5.
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hydropotato · 20 days ago
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So I've been playing Warframe for about 100 days.
I think that should be a pretty decent amount of time for me to get a feel for this game, and well? Yes, but actually no. This game is, for lack of clearer initial description, Amazing.
I first heard of Warframe ages ago from friends playing it. Didn't think much about it. Then I heard We All Lift Together, and added it to my Spotify playlist because it rocks. Didn't think much about the game at that point either. And then one day, I saw a group of my friends playing it and streaming on Discord. "Decree"? "Secrets lie deep within the undercroft; the paradox gives us a means to extract them"? Girl with a skirt on a floating skateboard, firing bubbles at enemies and it kills them?
I was sold. I thought this is bonkers, I gotta check that out. But there was more.
I can't begin to really describe my experience starting off. You get to pick from three frames (sorry, not Loki, the future is now old man), and then you get to pick some starter gear. Every option you forgo in favour of the other becomes available later on, but I didn't know that. I was just stealthily nailing baddies to walls with my Paris and clumping hoards together with Mag's Magnetise, trying to learn how to bullet jump. Days became weeks, and I was unlocking new planets like it was no big deal. Well, it was. I had to learn how to make my gear and abilities work together (like using Pull to group enemies at my feet and then whacking them with my Bo), how to avoid Sentients' spinning beam attacks, how to mod my gear so that I wouldn't die immediately. Now and then I'd stumble upon other random players in public lobbies; you'd get the Titanias, the Wukongs, the Mirages, all speeding to the finish line before I knew what was happening. At some point I thought to myself, I should really go for another Warframe just to explore my options. Citrine stood out to me (her rock fires rainbow beams, and she's a solid support that has good damage potential), and she wasn't too difficult to gain access to.
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Then came the farming. Getting Citrine's components required you to do waves of a Mirror Defence mission up to multiples of 4. I still remember clearly the dismay upon reaching round 3 for the first time, only for my teammates to all extract. I tried to protect the crystals on my own, only for the second one to get destroyed at the very last second of wave 4. I was distraught. It took me much begging in different friend groups for friends to accompany me to the later rounds, to finally get all her parts. It was then that I discovered how powerful a frame like Frost or Gara could be, but Frost, despite being easier to get, just didn't stand out to me aesthetically. So my next goals were Gara and Garuda. But for now Citrine. And Citrine continues to be my main.
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I don't really want to explain every single thing that happened, but I got Garuda, got Yareli, though omg she's so fun lemme get her signature weapon, spent days skating across Orb Vallis for that bubble gun,
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At some point I got a Kuva Lich, accidentally made it rank 5, killed it on my own somehow, then got a Sister of Parvos (Sleeping in the Cold Below is such an awesome song by the way), finished The New War, cleared the Star Chart, and unlocked the Steel Path.
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I haven't even mentioned The Duviri Paradox, which is what I was referencing at the start of this post. That gamemode is so fun, even if all the premade builds for gear and frames are frankly dogwater that only works if
a. You're running normal mode, or
b. You're playing Rhino so it doesn't matter how he's modded, you just don't die and buff everyone
So yeah. This game rocks. It's massive, it's free to play (you can get the paid-for currency by selling stuff to other players if you want to spend platinum), and it's really worth getting into. No daily obligations, the game just waits for you. That, and there's plenty of time gates, so I felt motivated to take breaks, naps, and just relax. Even the dailies on the Nightwave (a battlepass but 100% free) have this system where once you complete the existing ones, any quests you missed from previous days/weeks reappear for you to complete (marked with the word 'Recovered). I could max out the Nightwave despite having started Warframe halfway into it.
Now, I do have some issues with it, though. Host Migration is probably the most annoying of issues, and I genuinely think that the game should just leave you at the previous host's instance, regardless of ping. Sure, if you were lagging you still will be lagging when they leave, but it'll be uninterrupted, you won't lose all your active abilities, I dunno. I just think it would work more smoothly.
Also.
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Can they please rework Wukong? He appears in every mission. It's tiring. Give him a higher skill floor or something. Maybe make him targetable in cloudwalker, I dunno. This game is too much of a sandbox for players to be funnelling into one meta. We gotta encourage people to be more creative.
Also, make Arbitration drones enter the rift when they float into Cataclysm. They're the only thing that annoys me as Limbo in Arbies. Please and thank you.
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splatsvilles-fashionista · 1 year ago
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There's been a lot of discussion about Splatoon 3's content updates, and the quality of Splatoon 3's content updates, in the community recently, so I thought I'd give my two cents on this as well.
I think people view Splatoon 2's updates, which through the first year saw one weapon or stage release every single week, through very rose-tinted glasses? There was certainly excitement in knowing you had something to look forward to every single weekend, but since it was only a single weapon a week it kind of intrinsically meant that most of the community got something they didn't care for, most often than not. Something like an alternate Glooga kit is very fun for Glooga players, but most people aren't Glooga players, and as such they waited for nothing. I think it's very indicative that Nintendo swapped away from weekly updates almost immediately after Octo Expansion dropped in favour of dropping weapons in monthly batches with the Kensa and Sheldon's Picks.
Also, I don't think people remember just how bare-bones Splatoon 2 was on release? There wasn't a single Brella in the game at launch, despite them being shown off in the Direct. Actually, that's a lie, because you could play Brella in Hero Mode, but it took them three weeks to add Splat Brella to multiplayer despite it being in the game since the beginning. In fact, out of Splatoon 1's 33 Main weapons, 9 weren't available on the release of the game, meaning that in 2017 most updates were main weapons that were just straight up missing from the game.
There's also the matter of Salmon Run. Aside from the monthly gear and new stages (of which there were three in Splatoon 2's two year of content updates), Salmon Run got nothing new added to it post-launch. With the launch of Sizzle Season we'll have as many Salmon Run stages in 3 after nine months as Splatoon 2 did after twenty-four.
Splatoon 2 only got three major content updates through its live period between 2017 to 2019, a number we're within days of matching within a period of nine months, and we're going to get at least five more of them. I think more than anything the real source of discontent is that three months is a lot of time to wait, and it feels even longer if you've been unlucky enough not to get a new weapon you like yet, but in terms of overall content quality there is not a doubt in my mind that Splatoon 3 is doing better than Splatoon 2 did, and is going to keep doing better for a lot longer.
That is not to say that Splatoon 3's content updates have been perfect. If there's one thing I agree with the critics on, it's that the way they've handled new kits so far has been less than ideal. The problem is both a question of quantity as well as variety. Fresh Season and Sizzle Season both added 11 kits each, and I really feel that 12 should be the bare minimum, and if anything it should be 2-3 more. That said, the real problem is what weapon classes have been getting (or not getting, as the case may be) those new kits. There's been 36 new weapons added post-launch, including Sizzle season weapons as well as the new main weapons, and out of those, 13 have been Shooters. meanwhile, there's only been a single Brella and a single Splatana, and not a single new Stringer kit yet. Couple this with the fact that Shooters are by far the weapon class where the main weapons play the most similarly to each other, and I think that this is what leads, more than anything else, to updates feeling lacking.
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gear-project · 4 months ago
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Annon-Guy: Feel free to disagree with me, but I feel StrIVe isn't exactly fair to single player content and I need to rant here
The CURSED Difficulty Scale system in Arcade Mode along with purposely unfair cheating bosses. I can respect you liking it, but I don't like forced difficulties in fighting games.
Limited World Dollars in Single Player. Beat arcade mode once with Sol: rewarded. Beat Arcade twice with Sol: NOTHING. Chump change for each win in Survival Mode.
Gallery unlocks stuck to a random number generator (Fishing) alongside unless Avatar junk instead of making them seperate items like with the funitrual and Digital Figure Content.
Really now... it feels like Team Red doesn't care much about Single Player Content and wants to FORCE them to play Online to make World Dollars or to have fun, which is not good in my opinion. I get this is meant to be played with friends and for a time, I did enjoy online, but only because I wasn't eating dirt EVERY single time, getting punched into the corner with no breathing room until I got to the guys who love to make me eat dirt. Granted, when I do play online once in a blue moon, I don't always run into them, but it's not pleasant, especially when they guage my skills in the first round before turning me into pulp in the next round.
I'm not a casual player, but I'm no professional player either. While BBTAG lacked single player content, it says something when I had MORE enjoyment with it than StrIVe! At least Team Blue doesn't force people to play online to do stuff.
I still like StrIVe though, but it's sad when I consider Xrd SIGN the best between it, Revelator/Rev 2 and StrIVe.
I'm still looking forward to see if anything good comes from StrIVe, but I feel it's a giant slap to the Single Player crowd.
"YARE YARE DAZE..." as Sol tends to say.
I get what you're saying, but I think it's necessary to address your complaints to ARC System Works directly. You aren't the only one who feels that way.
They tend to focus on Online Gameplay for this game compared to solo play, so of course a lot of ideas were neglected.
As for the difficulty of bosses... they anticipated that casual players won't make perfect runs of Arcade Mode, which is why the "bosses" of the game are usually fought with an Ally to assist you in combat (though the reality is, obtaining those routes isn't optimal). Even in Guilty Gear Isuka, you had to have a second player to assist you as a teammate to play higher difficulties.
I'm a long-time gaming veteran, so most of my expectations are born from harsh experiences against one-sided battles against nearly unbeatable foes... so I totally get that it's hard to face these kinds of bosses the first time you experience a fighting game... in fact it's a heavy contrast to the idea of learning fighting games for the first time!
I first seriously cut my teeth on Guilty Gear XX's Mission Mode, and that was a dive in to some TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE, difficulty... but it also laid the foundation for learning how to play better on my own terms in terms of skill.
I'm not saying everyone will learn the game that way, but it couldn't hurt to do so. Establishing a solid foundation through learning how to play and upping your game is part of the experience, but it's not something you can learn in a day... it takes time, dedication, and patience. Sometimes you really do need to play Mission Mode for a while to comprehend the basics... even just spending hours upon hours in training mode is part of the deal too!
Part of the reason Team Red is so focused on Multiplayer right now has to do with their origins as producers of Arcade Games... making console features isn't something they are necessarily adapted to doing.
But, that doesn't mean they're entirely inflexible, since they've come up with good ideas in the past.
I think it boils down to addressing the issues as a community and making sure they hear our opinions firmly.
This is no longer just Ishiwatari we're talking about, this is a fresh generation of game developers who are cutting their teeth on something new.
Even if you yourself can't think of a way to talk to them about these issues... there are several of us in the community that ARE ADDRESSING THESE ISSUES TO THEM DIRECTLY... so you aren't alone. I want you to remember that in earnest.
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supertrainstationh · 1 year ago
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Why I Quit “Pokémon Violet”.
I'm officially done with playing "Pokémon Violet".
No, I didn’t complete it.
Sadly I found my enjoyment of it so deeply sabotaged by lack of basic quality control, that I gave up on the game fairly early on, though I did put in a number of gameplay hours.
In terms of total concrete plot progress, I completed a single gym, and then briefly went into a Team Star base just to see what it was like.
The gym was by orders of magnitude the most easily completed first gym I ever encountered in a Pokémon game in terms of field-based challenges and Pokémon battles.
From what I heard, the gyms in this game can be approached in any order, but that they don't actually scale with your team's levels, or based on how many badges you already have.
If this is true, this is laughably lazy design for what is supposed to be an open world game in which you can approach challenges in any order, but if this is not true, then pardon me on not knowing in advance whether or not this is true, as I went into the game as spoiler-free as possible in the hopes of experiencing this game without outside bias coloring my experience.
The concept that gym leaders choose to face challenging trainers using a team selected based on the challenger’s current experience level is something that had already been explored in official Pokemon material more than a decade ago, so the failure to deploy it here when the game’s open structure obviously calls for it is inexplicable.
I did the Cortondo Gym first. My levels were similar to the Gym Leader's own Pokémon, but I effortlessly crushed them, and had more difficult encounters with ordinary Trainers out in the overworld in the areas I had been exploring near the city hosting that gym.
I'm someone who will ALWAYS peruse "easy mode" options if they are available. I am completely illiterate in regards to competitive Pokémon battles, and don't even have the full type advantage chart memorized. But even for me, Cortondo Gym was disappointingly lacking in difficulty.
I also want to comment on the pre-gym minigame, which was set outside the gym itself in an area on the outskirts of the town.
The olive roll maze was a neat way to tie in some of the cultural elements of the actual locations the games setting, the Galar Region, is inspired by, but the mechanic of moving the inflatable olive ball felt lame.
Though it is only a minigame which is supposed to be inconsequential, I am harsh on it because it seemed like minimal effort was put into it, regardless of its overall importance to the game.
The playable character's in-game model does not act as though they are interacting with the olive ball, and I would go as far as to say that it appears that they are unaware that the ball even exists within their universe.
Compare this to "The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker", released decades earlier on far less advanced hardware of the standard definition Nintendo GameCube, in which the player character automatically looks toward objects of interest in the immediate area that can be interacted with, and the characters arms and face actually change to reflect the effort and intention of moving that object as the player makes this action happen.
But in this olive roll minigame in “Pokémon Violet”, you just walk at the ball to make it move in the direction you want, while the character mindlessly gazes forward as though nothing is happening. It doesn't feel like a minigame meant to entertain or challenge the player, it looks and feels like a collision detection demonstration assembled with minimal care or game design theory put into it.
And even so, the minigame was completely effortless to win, and I didn't even realize it was over, and that I won, until it took me to the result screen.
There wasn't even an on-screen timer to add any sense of urgency to the minigame, and I have no idea if being penalized for taking too long was even a possibility.
I've been interested in Pokémon since I first read a blurb in a gaming magazine in the mid-90's about a monster collecting and battling RPG for Game Boy that was becoming popular in Japan, and I was enchanted by its world and characters since the video games and anime first hit North American shores.
This franchise shaped my life for the better in ways too extensive and detailed to discuss here, so I'm not happy to be in a situation where even after counting down the days till release and roaming from store-to-store to find a copy, that my interest in "Pokémon Scarlet and Violet" has deflated.
In spite of how much I wanted to give this game a full playthrough, in spite of mounting frustrations, my final straw was when I actually stopped looking forward to streaming on the days I announced I was to play “Pokémon Violet”, and felt regret that I "had" to play it on my show in order to fulfill the schedule I promised to my Twitch viewers to stream the game.
The mere complexities of modern games already made me feel a slight disconnect from this title.
Going from traditional 3D Zelda games like "Wind Waker" and "Twilight Princess" to the new style introduced in "Breath of the Wild" was an extreme learning curve for me, especially in regards to operating the more sophisticated interface, though over time I was able to get the hang of it and enjoy the game.
I never imagined that I'd be in a situation where a Pokémon game of all things had a more complex user interface than the latest major Zelda release, and that I'd be mashing one button after another trying to activate nested and cryptic functions that were accessed in very simple menus even as recently as the Nintendo 3DS era.
In addition to that, this game forces the player into tutorials for the simplest of things universal to most modern games of even the mildest complexity, yet leaves tutorials for mechanics newly introduced to the Pokémon series restricted to completely optional and easy-to-miss places tied to special events.
The real killer for me is the extreme lack of polish in almost every aspect of the experience. Characters even just a single body-length away from the player's character are frequently animated with frame rates resembling a flip-book in which half the pages have been torn away.
Obvious shortfalls in the timing and pacing of Game Freak's cutscene animations lead to thinly veiled shortcuts such as cutscene text scrolling unreasonably fast even for a literate adult with an above average reading speed.
Static screenshots are sometimes used during otherwise fully animated cutscenes, and at other points cutscenes loop clumsily and unconvincingly on a particular moment as the scene waits for a player prompt to continue the narrative
Other times the graphics fail to accurately depict things that players are expected to believe are taking place within the game world. Important details essential to gameplay or story beats are sometimes not shown on screen, are mentioned only in interface or character dialog, or are rendered in outstandingly unconvincing ways.
In the first decade of the 21st Century, I owned Xbox, PlayStation 2, and GameCube, and enjoyed games on all three systems.
Since then, I have focused my gaming habits on Nintendo systems.
I chose Nintendo DS over PlayStation Portable.
I chose Wii over PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360,
I chose Nintendo 3DS over PlayStation Vita.
I chose Wii U over PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
And today, I own Nintendo Switch, but not PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X/S.
If I was concerned with enjoying ultra high-resolution visuals and maxed-out frames-per-second, I would not have been choosing Nintendo systems in spite of them being the lowest performance hardware options on the market.
But even within the limitations of the Nintendo Switch, which is running a low-power-consumption mobile chipset that was arguably already out-of-date when it first hit the market six entire years ago, “Pokémon Scarlet and Violet” completely fail at taking reasonable advantage of what the system is capable of.
"Pokémon Scarlet and Violet" are 2022 releases, published exclusively on Nintendo Switch, the same system that launched in 2017 with "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild."
"Breath of the Wild" was was a game designed with the intention of being launched as an exclusive for Wii U, an even less powerful console released closing in on five years earlier than the Switch, and more than a full decade ago as of the time I'm writing this, with Wii U itself having been widely considered under-powered at the time of its 2012 release, being in the performance range of high definition consoles that entered the market as far back as 2005.
"Breath of the Wild" had its technical shortcomings, but even the Wii U version of "Breath of the Wild" completely annihilates "Pokémon Scarlet and Violet" in terms of rudimentary technical proficiency, and when examining "Breath of the Wild" in terms of overall presentation in comparison to " Pokémon Scarlet and Violet", the comparison is such that I'm amazed that Nintendo, who founded their brand as a video game manufacturer and publisher on industry-leading high quality, would allow their name to be associated with the latest Pokémon entries.
I can not overstate the extent to which “Pokémon Scarlet and Violet” fails to deliver on the promise of basic quality control. Games with far fewer technical problems than this game have been criticized severely by review outlets and the gaming community, and I am convinced that these new Pokémon titles are being excused for their incompetence based on good will alone in ways that no other franchise would be permitted to get away with.
In-game tutorial screens featuring screenshots for illustrative purposes are from the Japanese versions of the game, and had this text censored out with a very crudely applied distortion filter in an embarrassing and ineffective attempt hide this fact. This is something appropriate for a work-in-progress demonstration build of the game, not the final product.
The first time I caught a Pokémon, the Pokéball animation froze in mid air, leaving me to think that this was the game's way of depicting Pokemon catching, and that these new Pokéballs hovered in the air rather than falling to the ground as Pokéballs in previous games did.
No matter how good this game is, when malfunctioning animations are mistaken by an experienced player to be representations of what is actually taking place in the game world, that is a serious problem, and anyone paying money for this game deserves better.
Shadows of environmental objects regularly flicker in and out of existence in a way that's not only unconvincing and an obvious malfunction of the graphics system, but in specific instances may pose an actual safety hazard to players susceptible to seizures triggered by blinking lights, which is something a product in the Pokémon franchise in particular should have been exceptionally aware of after similar light patterns in an early episode of the Pokémon animated series triggered seizures in children, which became an international news event, but a cause of widespread condemnation and ridicule aimed toward the franchise and the companies behind it.
The seizure incident caused by the Pokémon anime so impacted the culture of the franchise’s brand management that a particular Pokémon creature featured in that episode was never again depicted in animated form to avoid even the slightest association with the public safety disaster, and references to that particular character have been kept to an absolute minimum in the decades since, so the fact that glitches which cause blinking and flickering patterns being permitted to exist within the newest Pokemon game is mind-boggling.
Characters and objects within immediate sight of the player character frequently vanish and re-appear without warning.
The player character is liable to sometimes phase through the ground, or pass through what are meant to be solid walls, breaking immersion and sometimes causing the game itself to become impossible to play.
It's been amazing to watch Nintendo fans point and laugh for years at slipping quality standards for headline games on competing systems that were significantly more powerful than Nintendo's, using them as proof that more powerful hardware and better graphics alone don't make for better games, only to see them now accuse those who point out the shortcomings and fundamental deficiencies of the newest Pokémon games of being "haters" who are holding Game Freak, The Pokemon Company, and Nintendo, to unfair and unreasonable standards.
The more extreme and irrational defenders of the state of the game have gone so far as accuse critics of lying about quality control issues to make Game Freak look bad, and claim that that the ample footage of these easy to encounter malfunctions was either manipulated by hoaxers using video editing software, or even filmed using deliberately altered copies of the game that were made to suffer glitches.
I feel I am being generous to Game Freak in saying that everyone working on the game had the best intentions, but should have spent (or been allowed to have spent) at least another year on this title.
My already stated observations of the elements of this game which are obviously struggling to function properly don't even begin to address the parts that are simply reflections of either laziness, a rushed development cycle, or both.
When exploring the game's world, I encountered  multiple duplicates of the same stores selling the same items within eye-shot of each other within the same city, or even directly next door to one another.
This was so blatant that it made me speculate if these choices were cheekily made by rebellious lower level Game Freak employees to see how far they could push the limits of corners they were instructed by their superiors to cut, before they were actually confronted over them by their employers.
What's worse, the interiors of most shops are represented in the game only as text based menu interfaces, which pull me out of the game world just as much as laughably bad character animations that resemble fan-made parody cartoons posted to the internet.
Poorly rendered, poorly applied, and obviously repetitive surface textures that make certain objects such as cliff faces and buildings resemble assets lifted from a Nintendo 64 game are just the cherry on top.
"Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon", itself a Nintendo 64 title, has every single shop in the game rendered as a location with an interior that can be entered and explored. No matter how inconsequential those store interiors were, they helped to convincingly portray a living world that is real to the characters within the game.
Menu based shops do NOT do that.
My continued fascination with the Pokémon world, and its creatures, locations, lore, and characters, can not overcome the fundamental incompetence demonstrated by "Pokémon Scarlet and Violet", which completely demolishes my ability to enjoy it, which is a shame, because the intent to create an imaginative world thriving with lively creatures, memorable locations, and characters worth helping or fighting against, is clearly present, and in some cases the heights of care put into these elements match the lows of the bad quality control.
Unless an obvious revolution in The Pokémon Company's standards of ambition and quality is reflected by the next generation of Pokemon games, it breaks my heart to say that "Pokémon Scarlet and Violet" will be the last mainline entries in the series that I will be excited for, or interested in.
I pushed myself to play "Pokémon Violet" in spite of all its bad points.
I'm regretfully ending my time with "Pokémon Violet" in spite of all of its good points.
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This was written LIVE during Episode 1 of my gaming and writing Twitch show!
If you liked this, check out my SCHEDULE and join me live next time!
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luigiblood · 2 years ago
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Everything datamined about GB/A NSO so far.
So I spoke recently of a datamine I made from the GBA NSO 1.1.0 update that added Metroid Fusion, and due to my lack of communication skills, I did not really put all of the information that should be known, so let's talk about it a bit better, and while I'm at it, talk about Link Cable support in general in those apps.
Link cable is already working!
First of all, Link cable support is already there and fully working for both GB and GBA NSO. That's how multiplayer (both local and online) works for all the games, they did not hack the games to add online support, instead it's just a smart way of doing it:
The link cable is a way to exchange data in an instant over the wire between at least two Game Boys. The problem is that this data is fully expected to be received by the systems in an instant, there's no way to introduce lag here, meaning if you actually send link cable data over the network (even wireless local), things can go sour really quick and slow down emulation because it really needs this data to go on.
To make multiplayer work better, they most likely resorted to emulating all the players' GB/As on every Switch. As in like, if you play with 4 players online on GBA NSO, all 4 players's Switch would have 4 GBAs being emulated at the same time, all synced beforehand with each player's data to ensure that everything stays, well, in sync, and only manages the player's controller inputs. You just don't see the 3 other players' GBA but they're there. This allows much more stable online (as in giving more latency when needed without lagging behind).
So when I see people getting surprised that Pokémon exchanges worked when other people modded the apps to include different games, it's just that the link cable emulation already worked, it's literally required for multiplayer to begin with, it does not do anything special or different than other games' use of the link cable!
Link cable instructions!
Most people definitely don't notice this (because you guys don't like to check menus!), but when you play multiplayer (local or online), when you press ZL+ZR, you can see this menu.
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The middle option, "Starting Linked Play" is where the instructions are, and they are very detailed, on every aspect, from Multiplayer to maybe other features such as Ghost Data exchange for Mario Kart Super Circuit. This feature was available since launch for both GB and GBA NSO!
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For GBA, if you are not the first player, you can even press - to go in Single Pak mode and actually play games as if you were playing without the cartridge! The instructions even change if you do this!
I think this is a really cool feature, and very detailed.
Datamine time.
Now that we're on the same page in terms of features, let's talk about everything I found for these apps when I looked into them.
One of the first things I noticed is how the game database file works.
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Every game (on both GB and GBA NSO) keeps track of which game they're compatible with in terms of link cable support. Currently, every game either just lists itself, or include "SinglePak" to mean that they're games that can work with the Single-Pak multiplayer mode where only one player can have the cartridge, while the others can actually play multiplayer without needing the cartridge, since they do actually support this in GBA NSO it is definitely important keep track of.
This can get interesting once the compatible titles start to include different games, such as, as I recently found...
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Metroid Fusion's compatibility with Metroid: Zero Mission.
Within the japanese app of GBA NSO, in the 1.1.0 update that includes the addition of Metroid Fusion, these 3 screenshots, in this order, are included and are named accordingly for the use of the link cable functionality instructions. Now, there's no instructions to be found here, only these screenshots which are clearly left over.
If I had to guess the instructions, the first screenshot might be the GBA logo screen where you might have to press Start + Select to enable the Multi boot mode so that Metroid: Zero Mission can send over a program over the link cable.
The second screenshot tells you to access the option menu in Metroid: Zero Mission, and select the "Metroid Fusion Link" option (as it is named in the english version), and then proceed as instructed...
And the third screenshot shows a successful link where the option becomes "Metroid Fusion Gallery".
These are instructions from the Metroid Fusion side, hence why they are included alongside Metroid Fusion, but I bet Metroid: Zero Mission might get similar instructions as well.
It is definitely obvious that Metroid: Zero Mission would eventually be part of the library, for me it's just a given, I doubt that it would be soon however.
What I find interesting with this is how they're seriously considering link cable features for games... even for games where the only bonus is just a gallery and literally nothing else. And I dunno about you, but that is honestly interesting.
This are for link cable instructions for a single player game. What about the link cable features between Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age, where you can transfer cleared save data between them, such as characters' names, levels, Djinns, stats, items, and so on. You could transfer them with a password... except you have three types of passwords that can transfer more or less things... between 16 characters long... to a whopping 260 characters long! I don't know about you, but it would be great if you didn't have to do this and just use the link cable feature to start with, don't you think?
Also, The Legend of Zelda Oracle of Ages and Seasons has a feature where if you link one to the other, the plot would be actually connected, like, this is a real feature where actual story changes do happen if you do it. You don't need to do the games in a specific order either. You could also input a password, but doing via link cable could be also faster. If they allow you to do this on your own, it can be legit nice. (And it can get even better if they hack the games to enable GBA Mode... while keeping the GBC colors intact.)
This is the kind of thing I'm excited to see when I do these kinds of finds, this kind of detail that I appreciate in terms of features that I do think are worth it, because I consider if you could do that back then on real hardware... then you should be able to do it with emulation now.
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retrogamingloft · 3 months ago
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NBA Showtime: NBA on NBC is often hailed as a spiritual successor to the iconic basketball games NBA Jam and NBA Hangtime, both of which were crafted by Midway. These titles share common gameplay mechanics, featuring exaggerated dunks, brisk action, and an overall more laid-back and entertaining approach to basketball.
Everything looks perfect on paper, but I can't help wondering where the competitiveness is. I mean, I've basically said the same thing about the game's console versions, and I'll say it again for the original: this title lacks depth, and more involved gameplay would have been highly appreciated.
Twenty-four years have passed since its release, and I find myself contemplating how a highly anticipated game like this could be made so accessible, rendering its gameplay virtually non-existent. Upon revisiting the game after twenty-one years, it took me merely half a quarter to reacquaint myself and effortlessly secure a victory on my first try.
While defending poses some challenges, the real perplexity lies in the offensive aspect. I found myself able to execute virtually anything I desired; I missed only a handful of 3-point shots, and I was thwarted occasionally. Trailing throughout the entire game did not concern me in the least; I was confident in my eventual triumph.
The redeeming quality of the versus mode does little to alleviate my disappointment—why should I need another player to enjoy the game? Especially when, back then, a single game cost as much as 4 credits, four times that of the majority of other arcade titles.
In conclusion, no elaborate final thoughts seem necessary; the last paragraph succinctly conveys my sentiments. It stands as a significant letdown with nothing more to add, a disappointment of considerable magnitude.
Fun Fact: the game was also included in a dual cabinet alongside NFL Blitz 2000, which Midway called the "SportStation." That’s the version I’m playing now.
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nintendowife · 1 month ago
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I rolled the end credits in Easy Come Easy Golf on Nintendo Switch in June. Very fun arcade golf game, filled with good vibes.
Easy Come Easy Golf is the latest title by the developer Clap Hanz famous for Everybody's Golf / Hot Shots Golf series. Their golf game expertise and pleasant design philosophy shows here too.
There's a twist on the normal golf formula here: you don't play as one character but as a team of 9 characters. Each character is assigned to tee off on one hole of the course and the next character handles the next hole. Your characters gain exp and their stats improve as you use them.
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Easy Come Easy Golf was originally a mobile game and unfortunately that shows in the gameplay mechanics that have been simplified a bit. The triple-click shot mechanics are fine and work well but they lack the more intricate real-time mechanics that were used to apply spin in the Everybody's Golf games (here spin is applied on ball before swinging, not during). As a result the gameplay doesn't feel quite as engrossing and satisfying. Also the visual feedback on swings and ball travel has been toned down which takes away some of the excitement of making a successful swing.
Weather, ball lie, surface, etc. affect how the ball travels, just like in their earlier games. There are some differences here it seems and I still have trouble predicting how much wind affects the ball. Reading the green based on the animated grid is quite similar with earlier titles. I still haven't managed a hole-in-one on a regular cup course and I've been playing the game for some time now.
If we continue with the negative points, the music department here is lacking. Gone are the fantastic course specific tunes for example. Most of your golfing is spent in silence, accompanied by some ambient sounds.
The golf courses are well designed with some tricky narrow points, water hazards and bunkers. Carefully weighing the risks is a key to success - will you attempt to cross a lake with a top spin swing to have the ball bounce from the water surface or will you play it safe and take a detour, resulting into extra shots? Progression is a bit grindy as you unlock more courses and playable characters by earning stars from tournaments. You can also unlock alternate costumes and color variations for characters.
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Difficulty level is very forgiving. The game's CPU opponents feel significantly easier than the ones in Everybody's Golf / Hot Shots Golf, so don't worry if you're not the best golfer out there.
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What this game truly excels in is character design. The whimsical caricature-like designs really hit the spot for me. There's 30 different characters with a lot of variation on body shapes, ages, personality, etc. The characters have their own strenghts and weaknesses - some are great playing in the rain, some may have great power but poor control in their shots. Character animations are unique and quite humorous at times. Rosie Weaver, a calm teenage girl with bad posture is one of my favorite characters, along with the refined lady Madam D. and older grandma-type Bella Donna.
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What I especially like in Clap Hanz's games is the way the game encourages you to improve your skills. Challenging yourself and noticing how you're getting better and better is an addictive feeling. Even if you're bad at the game at first, the game gives you positive feedback and gently pushes you to try again. You might lose a tournament but at least you got to see some funny animations when your character is boiling with rage! The cheery, positive mood is a great stress-reliever and infects with a good feeling.
My experience on the game is purely from offline single-player mode. The game also offers some kind of online multiplayer possibilities which require Nintendo Switch Online subscription.
Based on the single-player content on offer here, I'd recommend Easy Come Easy Golf to anyone looking for an enjoyable, laid-back golf game. This game offers a lot of good fun but it is a downgrade from Everybody's Golf / Hot Shots Golf in some ways. It took me about 45 hours to roll the end credits. After that there's still tournament ranks to reach and more characters to unlock so you probably won't run out of content too fast. I'm hoping one day Clap Hanz will delight us with a sequel that's been built for Switch from the ground-up, includes more finesse on gameplay and adds music on courses.
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overnightshipping · 1 year ago
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So I completed Pikmin 4 on Thursday with all treasures, all onions, and all castaways rescued. Basically everything except going back to platinum the Dandori challenges, which I probably don't care about but maybe someday. As promised, I have a lot of thoughts on Pikmin 4.
In some ways, Pikmin 4 is truly the Pikmin game that I have wanted since I originally got hooked on Pikmin and Pikmin 2 on the Gamecube. It is grand, expansive, and polished in a very Nintendo way. It brings back many fan favorite elements from the previous 3 numbered Pikmin games and expands upon them, adding its own unique twists and interesting concepts. It dives further into the society of weird little interplanetary explorers you play as than any previous game, expanding them across multiple planets (since apparently they sure do have a lot of planets). It was a very enjoyable experience and one that I don't find it difficult to recommend.
In other ways, it is a game that in making itself as marketable as possible has lost the charm of Pikmin. It is a game that feels at odds with itself, a game that loses some of the most potent elements that made Pikmin a compelling strategy game. I have seen at least one person liken it to a collectathon platformer moreso than a strategy game, and while I don't think that is completely accurate I think it clearly outlines one of Pikmin 4's biggest, most prevalent problems: the lack of strategy in a strategy game. It's a game that is terrified to punish the player, presumably in an overcompensation for the previous games not selling well and Nintendo thinking it was because they were too hard.
I don't want to make this a full on review, but let me see if I can make some sense of my thoughts under the cut. There will be full game spoilers, both for before and after the credits roll.
The first warning sign for Pikmin 4 was how slow, tedious, and long-lasting the introduction is. In previous games you had a single day of tutorial, giving you the ropes, and often had characters chime in for extra things you needed to learn afterwards, like what different Pikmin types did, but it was never so annoying as 4. 4 makes you go through multiple ingame days where the characters laboriously explain to you everything and admonish you if you try to go off on your own - the games point you directly at the first cave and if you don't go there IMMEDIATELY the game yells at you to do so. Thankfully after a few days it finally gets less overzealous, but damn was it a poor first impression.
Unfortunately, it only gets a bit less overzealous, because the characters do. Not. Shut. UP. In Pikmin 4 you have a crew of rescue explorers (who you save) who just are constantly chiming in from the peanut gallery. All the way into the very end of the game will characters remind you that you have Pikmin sprouts to pluck, or tell you to go attack the enemy's weakpoint, or whistle at Pikmin if they catch on fire, or say "aw man it's so sad we lost so many Pikmin, if only we could turn back time" not-so-subtly hinting at the game's (fine and appreciated for newer players) accessibility feature to rewind to certain points and undo mistakes. By the end of the adventure I wanted to strangle Collin in particular who is the worst offender.
The game chirps these "helpful tips" at you when you are doing the post-credits challenge mode that is explicitly the hardest part of the game! For fuck's sake! I know how the play the game by now!
This brings me to the game's accessibility options, which are much appreciated even if I wish they were less imposed on the player. You can rewind time to an extent if you need to undo things, and if you ever get lost you can get your dog to sniff up a path on where to go next. Now, I wish the game wasn't constantly telling me to use these features I didn't want to use, but I'm glad they are here. Pikmin 4 is definitely the most accessible Pikmin game and I think that is worthy of praise, even if I have some (okay maybe a lot of) gripes on how exactly they were implemented.
Speaking of the dog, I was skeptical about how it would be implemented but I largely really enjoyed Oatchi. He essentially takes the place of having a second captain and it works quite well. The big highlight is that Oatchi has different capabilities from your captain, which means you have to put some additional thought into which character you want where. This is at its best in the nighttime missions, where the captain is the only one who can use the Glow Pikmin's powerful glow bomb blast thing which is an extremely useful tool for dealing with the nastier enemies.
Unfortunately, Oatchi also kind of... is overpowered as hell. The main thing you will use Oatchi for is to carry Pikmin - when playing as Oatchi or riding him as a captain, your Pikmin will all cling to Oatchi's back instead of following behind in a group. This is extremely useful against bosses in particular, since it means you can dodge enemy attacks directly rather than having to manage the horde of Pikmin following you. Because a bunch of the bosses are ported over from Pikmin 1 and 2, this trivializes them in a not insignificant way. Man At Legs is a great example, as it is absolutely pathetically easy in Pikmin 4 since you don't even have to think about Pikmin management, just circle strafe with Oatchi while it's shooting and you'll never lose a Pikmin. This is not even taking into account how powerful Oatchi's charge and carrying abilities get when you upgrade them.
The best bosses in the game, unsurprisingly, are the two Pikmin 4 original bosses that feel actually designed with Oatchi's mobility in mind, the Groovy Long Legs and the final boss. These are also the only bosses that come close to the complexity and satisfaction of Pikmin 3's boss fights, since the game eschews boss encounters tied to going to new areas entirely, which is a damn shame since if it was going to take anything from 3 that would have been a great thing to take.
Speaking of things to take from 3 which I hate, the lock on. It sucks! I didn't like it much in Pikmin 3 but at least there there was still a bit of strategy in needing to aim after the lock on to hit enemies in particular weakpoints, and at least it was manually triggered. In Pikmin 4 you automatically lock your cursor to everything as you pass the cursor by it. This has two effects:
It can be quite annoying to try and get the cursor where you want it, and heaven help you if you want to aim at something which the game doesn't lock onto. For example, Skitter Leafs hide as leaves and then skitter when you approach, but you can instant kill them if you throw a Pikmin on top. Your lock on works when they are revealed, but when they are hiding it doesn't. This means that if you have killed a Skitter Leaf but there are others hiding nearby, you just can't even try to kill the ones that are hiding since your cursor will be locked onto the corpse your Pikmin can carry. This annoyance only happened a few times, but boy howdy is it annoying when it does crop up.
More importantly, it trivializes aiming at enemies. Throwing Pikmin in Pikmin 1 and 2 was a skill you could get better at - if you throw Pikmin near a Dwarf Bulborb, they would attack it, but if you threw a Pikmin directly on top of one they would kill it in one shot. This incentivized getting a feeling for the throwing arc of Pikmin and carefully lining up your shots to kill enemies quicker and safer. In Pikmin 4 you just... lock on automatically, and can throw a Pikmin and kill the Bulborb in one shot and go about your day. This wouldn't be so bad if so many enemies weren't ported over from Pikmin 1 and 2 directly - enemies like Shearwigs, Flint Beetles, and Breadbugs aren't balanced with the lock on in mind and as a result feel impotent. The only thing the game does to acknowledge this at all is make other Dwarf Bulborb types need two or three Pikmin to kill them, which... doesn't help much.
To swing back into things I like: the Pikmin types! The way Pikmin are introduced is reinvented and works really really well. You get Red Pikmin first with their Onion as normal, but after that you will find other colors of Pikmin in caves as wild Pikmin, or with the help of Candypop Buds, and integrate them into your team without having their Onion and thus being unable to grow their numbers manually. However, you can also find each color's Onion somewhere in the world, allowing you to raise as many as you want just like normal. This is really cool! It means that every Pikmin type (except Reds and arguably Yellows) gets a chance to be rare and important, really making you second guess how you approach things in case you lose out on those Pikmin that you might need for other things. This hit home for me when I was doing a cave with Blues and Ices, and was having trouble killing an Aristocrab. I finally killed it, but my Blue numbers had dwindled to the point that I couldn't carry a treasure out. That's cool! I love having to deal with the consequences of my actions. I ended up being put in a situation where I could keep charging forward into new areas and hope that I found more Blues or I could backtrack because I thought I had seen a Blue Onion in an area I was in before but couldn't get to it, but maybe I can now...
The one issue I have with how the Pikmin are given to the player is that the way means they aren't very well paced. Since it is essentially tied to whatever caves the player goes into, it is perfectly possible to get to the credits before even finding every Pikmin type - this happened to me, actually, as I got my first Winged Pikmin post-credits. It's a far fling from the careful metering out of the types in 1-3, but I think it largely works well outside of some pacing issues.
Speaking of pacing, this game really wants to be an open world in some ways, it's kind of silly. The areas are all bigger than normal and, as aforementioned, there aren't mandatory bossfights to get to the next area anymore. Your ability to explore is just tied to the Sparklium you collect, which has its pros and cons. Hell, Pikmin 4 even has a menu clearly riffing on the minimalist approach of BotW for some reason.
Luckily, this mostly works. The areas are great! The caves are also great! Everything feels really satisfying to explore, aided by the cool new feature to move your base to one of several predetermined areas on the map once you have found them (and usually killed an enemy on top of them). It's really fun to be able to take different approaches on each of the maps depending on where you plop down your ship and Onion.
Unfortunately, Pikmin 4 completely whiffs the "exploring a hostile alien planet" theme and tone. Every cave has a little "intro card" penned by Olimar explaining roughly what to expect in it, often spoiling the sense of discover when plunging in. New concepts are similarly explained - in previous games, Candypop Buds are shown to the player, the player is suggested that the Pikmin want to be thrown into them, and so the player tries and, in so doing, discovers what they do. In Pikmin 4, Candypop Buds are shown to the player, and the player gets a little explanation by Olimar and the other characters as to exactly what they do before the player has a chance to experiment. It's a subtle change, but when it applies to much of the game it really stands out.
The planet's hostility is a joke this time around. If you, like me, were a bit underwhelmed at how Pikmin 3 was easier than Pikmin and Pikmin 2, I have bad news: Pikmin 4 is even easier. I wouldn't even have that much of a problem with this if it weren't for one key thing that ruins it for me: enemies never respawn.
This is the single thing that bothers me most about Pikmin 4. In previous games, the choice to continue to explore a single area or go to a different one was one you made thoughtfully, because while your progress would be saved, over time enemies would respawn and you would have to deal with them again. Certain areas would even spawn harder enemies after enough time had passed, meaning that even in Pikmin 2 where there was no omnipresent day-based time limit to the game, there was still an incentive to go quickly - too long and that Snagret would be back, or a Sheargrub would chew up your bridge, or you would have to deal with a Beady Long Legs where one wasn't before.
Pikmin 4 takes this away entirely, which makes the game feel artificial in a way that the others didn't. Where once was a living, breathing world which actively continued on when you weren't looking now there is a bunch of video game levels where you can kill a Bulborb on day one and come back on day fifteen to pick up its corpse for Pikmin sprouts. It sucks, and is even worse in caves. When I went back to that cave from before where I needed to get a treasure but didn't have enough Blue Pikmin, I expected to at least need to fight that Aristrocrab again, to fight it smarter so I would still have Pikmin ready to carry the treasure. Instead it was still dead, its body still right where I had left it, and I just picked up the treasure with no obstacles in my way whatsoever. Where is the challenge, the satisfaction of holding your own against a hostile environment? Where is the friction? This change baffles me.
It's one thing to make a game easier to appeal to a wider audience, but it feels like another to me to make it so easy that you remove the satisfaction from actually besting its challenges. It would be one thing if this was an optional difficulty mode, or something, but Pikmin 4 has no such thing. And this is all on top of the copious ways that the game is made easier for the player optionally, such as the items that you can use to trivialize most enemy encounters.
The OTHER thing that I absolutely hate about Pikmin 4 is that it is a reboot for some reason. Despite being the fourth numbered entry in the series, and despite Nintendo seemingly going out of their way to port the rest of the series to Switch prior to 4's release, Pikmin 4 is a reboot, retelling Olimar's original trip to the Pikmin planet with a lot more shenanigans. I guess they did this because they wanted the whole dogs through-line to be more important to the Pikmin planet's history? It's a strange decision that didn't need to be made, and mostly serves to further make this feel like this is less a game for Pikmin fans and more a game desperately trying to appeal to everyone but.
This is a lot of text complaining about Pikmin 4, but I do want to emphasize that I really did enjoy the game. It might have beaten out Pikmin 3 for my third favorite in the franchise by its quality of content and enjoyable design. I just really truly wish it were more Pikmin and less anything but Pikmin. It feels like Pikmin has lost its character in favor of being a more generic Nintendo family friendly franchise for kids, and that's a shame.
Okay, final random comments, mostly nitpicks:
They brought Smoky Progg back which should really excite me but a loading screen tip spoiled it for me and it shows up so many times - not to mention when it does show up having nothing to do with its unique and fucked up "summoning" in Pikmin - that is dulls the impact for me. Makes me sad.
Puffstool is back but not Mushroom Pikmin??? This is baffling why even bother bringing back a fan favorite enemy if you don't bring back the reason why it was a fan favorite.
I alluded to this earlier but Groovy Long Legs fucking rules, I'm a little sad it didn't get an encore in the final boss rush dungeon. Definitely a highlight moment for me.
It's really silly that the Piklopedia entries basically only make sense if Pikmin 1-3 still happened despite the game obviously being a reboot lmfao. What the hell is a Beady Long Legs or a Ranging Bloyster, Olimar? I've never heard of these before they sound like they are from an alternate timeline or something.
I hate how many enemies just have a bigger version as a miniboss. It feels really unimaginative for Pikmin in a way that really bugs me.
Why did they remove the Pikmin dragging long enemies to the Onion from Pikmin 3, that was suitably macabre in a satisfying way. Carrying a curled up Snagret just isn't the same.
It's funny that they introduced this new baby Snagret enemy but then had like one Snagret outside of challenge rooms.
Purple and Whites finally got Onions and this made me very happy. :) It felt like a good reward for the challenge area. Speaking of the Onion I love it visually in this one, the colored segments look great.
It's very telling of the difficulty of this game in general that the hardest caves BY FAR are the final cave (as a lengthy boss rush thing) and the Waterwraith's cave they ported from Pikmin 2. Which wasn't even a late game cave in Pikmin 2 it was near the middle.
The three Pikmin types at a time felt too stifling to me, a limit makes sense but I feel like they could have made some cool puzzles around 4-5 types at a time. Also three at a time doesn't evenly divide into 100 which is obviously agonizing. Also I really hoped the final dungeon would go crazy and set me up to have every Pikmin type but nah.
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bmpmp3 · 1 year ago
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some fashion dreamer adventures from playing too much in the past two days :) (MY USER ID IS LGXwM6wQk5 FEEL FREE TO request stuff or whatever u do in this game i forgor) :
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(ignore shocked shane this aint about him) made my OC dave as my first muse so i am kinda playing hard mode with the type b body situation but im like. determined now. im gonna make the flashiest and cutest and over the top outfits i can muster with the scraps theyve given the the type b (jk jk its not TOO bad its the best we've gotten so far but I do wish i could wear shorter shorts and crop tops and some of those type a socks are so cute i saw some that were like bandage thigh highs. dave should be allowed to wear thigh highs. dave should be allowed to wear thigh highs)
still having a lot of fun tho! sometime i should get around to making a type a muse but most people i meet are type a so i never run out of people to dress either way LOL
like most people i have things i hope they add in the future (like i said before, the lack of zoom is DIRE) and right now some of the currencies and levelling systems feel a little unbalanced (i have so many of the star things and bingo things and a decent amount of gacha things but the photo prop coins are my most coveted thing rn i have like 1 single one JKDLSJFDS) but im enjoying myself a lot like i knew i would
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was trying to take a pic of this other player's muse that had this really neat witch situation but i accidentally made dave dab and got really scared <3
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in the end we must all go to the photo egg. in the end we all go into the photo egg. the universality of the photo egg.
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kinda wacky from daylight savings time changes i always get wacky i dont know what year or time it is. i spent twenty minutes scouring the ACT cocoon for the showroom stream 'cause i couldnt find it until i accidentally went into this like. basement alley. its in the basement alley <3 <3 <3
i guess we dont just go into the egg. we also. go into the. cocoons. the cocoons. in eve? cocoons in eve have. eggs in them
anyway i just unlocked cocoon FUN and its so awesome and scary and so so scary look at this bear
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free this bear somebody please free this bear ignore dave posing free this bear cocoon fun has bears behind bars and gazebos that raise you into heaven its so scary and awesome
going back to the photo props my favourites so far are the flowers theyre so cute
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i dont do the vertical photos that often because theyre kinda hard to do (u have to like. turn ur head or the switch to the side..... im nearly exclusively a tabletop switch player so i cant imagine what its like for docked player LOL) but this ones cute!
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but yeah very fun and extremely addicting i need to go to bed. i need to go to bed. i have assignments and i need to go to bed. but i want. to make outfits..........i must.....make outfits......graaaaahhh........GRAAAAAHHHHHH (turns into a zombie before your eyes)
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alln64games · 8 months ago
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Nagano Winter Olympics ’98
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JP release: 18th December 1997
NA release: 29th January 1998
PAL release: February 1998
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
N64 Magazine Score: 32%
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The first Olympic title on the N64 – and, curiously, the last one on a Nintendo platform until Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. Olympic video games are usually collection of simple games based around Olympic Sports, often catering for multiplayer – and while Nagano does the first, it doesn’t really focus on multiplayer.
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There are 10 sports – some with a few variations and are slow and tedious at best, and outright uninteresting at worst. The Skiing and snowboarding slaloms are best, but they’re both slow with some slight turns as you go through gates. The halfpipe is probably the worst, which has you copying input commands before you jump and your snowboarder doing a trick.
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The AI is also insanely good at the game, so unless you manage to master the unclear and terrible controls, you’ll be happy if you make it to 15th place. The snowboard slalom is an odd exception, as I fell over a few dozen times and still won by a significant margin.
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The massive let down in the multiplayer side is the complete lack of any simultaneous events. You all have to take turns setting records. Speed Skating is against an opponent, but in multiplayer you all race against a CPU player. Only curling, which is a turn-based sport, has any kind of interaction between players. On top of that, from what I can tell, each player still needs their own controller.
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Nagano Winter Olympics is a shoddy sports minigame collection with poor controls and a terrible multiplayer mode.
We tried playing single Nagano events until we were really good at them. We tried the seven-event championship mode. We tried multiplayer championships. At no time – not even for a second -did we have any fun whatsoever.
- Jonathan Davies, N64 Magazine #12
Remake or Remaster?
Both older and newer Olympic titles have done a much better job than this.
Official Ways to get the game
There’s no official way to play Nagano Winter Olympics ’98
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khapaleaf · 8 months ago
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Done with my unfair run, finally (well, I was done with it on the 10th, but I wanted to celebrate by gorging myself on extremely sour candy, and afterwards I needed a day to calm down). It took me longer to finish than I had initially anticipated, but it was a grand experience filled with fun times. Anyway, trying to organise my thoughts here, because it will be interesting for me to see whether my opinions will change over time later on, and so into archiving mode I go.
First things first, I think Owlcat did a fantastic job at making this versatile and complex setting accessible to those who are not entirely familiar with it. Prior to playing the game, my own knowledge of this universe was limited to a small number of short stories and a much bigger number of memes without context. Yet going into the game, I never felt overwhelmed with new information, and felt right at home in the Koronus Expanse (or about as much as one can in this grim and unforgiving setting). The in-game glossary and the informative mouseover parts that can appear during dialogues to briefly explain what this or that organisation does, or who that person is and so on helped immensely in helping to ease into it. Bless all developers who do this, honestly. The soundtrack (10/10; not a single bad track, a triumph of a mood-setting music that seamlessly blends with the visual style), art design (pretty fucking metal – love the skulls everywhere; and it is also very interesting to see how Owlcat makes progress with each new game in terms of graphics), and characters all also play a big role in making the game a cohesive and truly engaging whole, and allow to uncover the myriad of complexities native to this setting. I laughed, I wept, I felt a myriad of powerful emotions. This is really it, this is what I want in my rpgs! And I want to play it over and over and over again. Fortunately for me, my brain is wired in a way that allows me to do just that without getting bored.
The main story itself is ultimately not all that complex, but the way it is built up within the game is genuinely interesting and engaging even despite the relative emptiness of the post-Commorragh chapters. I like that the planetary quests are structured a bit like self-contained episodes, while at the same time falling neatly into the puzzle that paints the bigger picture of the state of the Expanse. Still, I wish that there was a kind of overarching red thread present throughout the narrative like in the Pathfinder games (even though, yes, I get that these are vastly different settings and narrative experiences). For example, in Kingmaker, the kingdom has to resolve numerous issues throughout the years, but the threat of Nyrissa destroying it altogether looms over the heroes at all times – that is the kind of red thread I am talking about. It seems to me that there is a distinct lack of such a detail in this game, but if it were actually present in the story, the momentum after the third chapter would not have been lost, and it would have added some gravitas and an emotional punch to the later part of the game. Maybe there should have been more focus on Theodora’s involvement in the grand scheme of things, and how it affected the present timeline, maybe there should have been an overarching antagonist... There should have been more interactions with Nomos, definitely. Still, even with the blemishes, the story managed to draw me into a state of fascination and infatuate me with its vast cast, even though at times it felt as if I am taking part in a quietly moving tragedy, with every small decision slowly leading to a point of no return (but it fits the setting, so no complaints there). And really, this is not my first time loving a game with a less than stellar closing chapter. After all, both Tyranny and Kotor 2 stand among my favourites.
I do wish that it were possible for the player character to be a bit more involved in/written into the setting in terms of reactivity to their background and selected class. The amount of variation in the character creator with all of the different backgrounds, archetypes, skills and triumphs and so on is phenomenal, but the fact that it is all there pretty much only to serve the game mechanics side of things instead of the narrative is honestly a bit of a letdown. I suppose that this could be related back to Theodora’s insistence to forget their previous life in one of the earlier dialogues, but the option to acknowledge the character’s background would have been a fantastic touch nonetheless. I thought it was ridiculous that my first (and main, as is customary for my playthroughs) character, a voidborn, had the option to ask Vigdis to explain just what the hell a voidborn is, and how their lives are structured, but no actual option to relate to her on that level. Of course, it is entirely possible to disregard those questions completely, but then there would not be much to talk about with her, unfortunately. And she explains things so poetically, too. Just... give my character the option to relate to this experience (even though, as far as I understand, the rogue trader cannot be too voidborn-y, otherwise they would not have had the option of becoming a rogue trader in the first place). They did apparently add in some reactivity options along with the big patch back in February, but I do not have a save from that early in the game, so I cannot check whether anything at all was written in for this particular instance, or if this reactivity meant something else entirely.
Also, when it comes to the player character, I am still not entirely sure whether I enjoy the conviction system or not. I like that it restricts certain items, decisions, colony projects and such to specific conviction levels, but I do not like how it ties into the endings in the sense that one with the highest rank overrides everything else without taking into consideration the actual decisions made in the game. Basically, do tell the story of my character’s deeds, but do not presume to know what they were motivated by. My character had the most points in the Iconoclast branch (though it was roughly equal points-wise with the Dogmatic branch prior to the lock-in), and was described as an open-minded, merciful soul because of it. Open-minded, perhaps, certain in-game decisions do point to that being a possibility, and I do not even mind the fact that the Imperium feels the need to go to war with the entire Expanse because of those decisions – this fits, more or less. But was she merciful and compassionate? I do not think that a person who servitorises people left and right, uses them as fertiliser, thinks that cutting out the tongues of servants is a great idea to emulate, executes entire noble families as a precautionary measure, nukes and purges whole ass planets, and pretty much channels her inner Camellia on a regular basis is the space mother Teresa that the game makes her out to be. She is a basic bastard, but she is my basic bastard like all of my characters are, but I enjoyed her journey and I am rather protective of her, for lack of a better word. Perhaps it is a minor thing, but I do not like that the narrative makes assumptions about my character like that. And what of nuance? Sure, she did offer help to certain individuals, but it was done more from the point of view of someone who wants to ensure their loyalty, not someone who is genuinely concerned for said individual. That one dialogue with Cassia in particular was a defining point in her character building.
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So here I am, trying to make a cohesive portrait in my mind, taking mental notes on what makes my character tick, and then the ending slides come up, and introduce their own static idea of what my character was like. Oh well, I suppose such are the limitations and restrictions placed on the character due to their native environment being a video game. Perhaps I could simply ignore this part, as I did with the whole kidnapping shenanigans timeline in WotR. Something to think about, I suppose.
Fortunately, the other characters, both the companions and the support characters are all a colourful bunch. And largely consistent in their attitudes and beliefs! Each of them speaks and acts in ways unique to no one but themselves, and I really like when the companion characters specifically chime in with their opinions and even have their own back and forth interactions in conversations. There is a lot of that, more than in any other Owlcat game to date, I would say. Still, when it comes to the companions specifically, I wish there were more deeply developed ways of interaction present. What I mean is that there is no option to really get to know them and become confidants, if not friends. I do feel attached to them as a player, but I would like to see my character actually interact with them more outside of their personal quests. Talking to Pasqal while he is being involved with all of the tech stuff on board? Cool! Cassia visiting the rogue trader to ask for their advice? Excellent, give me more of that, please. Getting drunk with Jae? Absolutely fantastic and hilarious (well, that was actually part of her quest, but it was still pretty unique bit, I think). I wish there were more scenes like that throughout the entirety of the game, but that is honestly my wish for any game that features companions.
On a smaller note, I also think that the book excerpts, letters and notes were wonderfully written, and I could easily imagine the personality of the author behind them, their worries, their beliefs and their desires in life.
I do think that there should have been a bit more voiced dialogue, especially when it comes to non-companions, to get a better feel for their personality as well as their presence in this world, but at the same time I am also not at all upset that a huge bulk of the dialogue happens through nothing but pure text, as I generally prefer to read and skip past the voice acting in video games on subsequent playthroughs, anyway. Unless the lines are really good, of course. And what is actually voiced is fantastic – Owlcat always manages to pick voice actors that are so vibrant and memorable and are a joy to listen to, always. Even now, I can read a line, any line, and imagine that it is spoken by Ekundayo or Jaethal, for example, all with their unique speech patterns and inflections. Here as well, the voice actors did such a remarkable job of bringing life to the characters, that I find it easy to imagine what their unvoiced lines sound like.
That said, I did not particularly enjoy the voice sets for the player character this time around, at least initially. It seems to me like they all have a bit too much personality, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but I am used to selecting these voices as a mere formality (so that the character would make noise when they are hurting in combat, or when they find something on the map), not as a pretty damn defining feature for my characters. It definitely took time to adjust. Still, it was an interesting experience, because these voice lines, somewhat surprisingly, helped me develop the character even further because I go into games without having a clear vision of what the character is going to be like, and instead develop them on the go. But! The voices for the dudes are all kind of revolting to listen to. Unfortunate, but not surprising, because I also disliked all but one in the Pathfinder games. They all sound like they have a fish bone stuck in their throat and need someone to german suplex them to get it out, looney tunes style. How will I ever experience the romance with Lady Cassia under these conditions, damn it?
Speaking of romances, I think it is hilarious that the one my character ended the game with (Marazhai) is on the opposite spectrum in terms of pretty much everything to the one I wanted her to end up with (Yrliet) before playing the game. On my first run, I was certain that the latter caught a bug sometime during its course, and thus ended abruptly without even having a proper start, but apparently Yrliet does not like it if one decides to stab a dude in the neck in front of her, as it was later explained to me. Not a fan of such colourful methods of courtship, then. But it is fine, I would rather see the characters fit together rather than force anything by having my character act in ways that do not fit them to keep the romance going. So in comes Marazhai. The dude definitely has some enviable home decor skills, is very useful in combat encounters and deals a ton of damage, sends out a bunch of his kabalites to kill the enemies of the dynasty, gives not one, but two very cool and useful buffs (and they are intangible, which means more place to equip all sorts other beneficial items – and there is such a wide variety of items to choose from, it is incredible), and is pretty hilarious overall. Also! He managed to take out nine fucking participants (five of which were at full health) of the Aeldari ambush all by himself after the rest of the party was taken out of commission. That was the most clutch moment of the game for me. So... A worthwhile investment, I say. And, most importantly, he and my character actually fit. It is stupid and hilarious, perhaps unintentionally, but they fit.
The combat! I approached it cautiously because, while I do enjoy turn-based combat, I did not actually like what I saw of it in WotR, because it seemed a bit too wobbly to me, as if the camera was swimming all over the place whenever I tried moving the party, and that made me nauseous (I never finished the fallout-bunker-type side quest due to this). To my surprise, I ended up enjoying it very much from day one, even with my immensely stupid decision to experience the game on hard difficulty during my first run of the game. I am not going to say that it was an easy task, but it was fairly manageable, and I also think that it actually helped quite a bit with making the story feel more fittingly uninviting and grim, given the amount of obstacles the characters had to overcome. Thus far, I have three full runs in total: my main run, which I did twice now, and a kind-of-sort of gimmick run with three officers in the party (plus three other characters to bash enemy heads in), though playing an officer and controlling a party member that happens to be an officer feels different to me, and I have to admit that I did not actually enjoy having the main character be one.
For my unfair run I decided to take my first character, partly because she is the one I consider to be my main, and I wanted get a more polished version of her journey, partly because I read a brilliant comment of someone saying that the warrior class is shit in this game, and my character is indeed a warrior. Well, a warrior/psyker/assassin, with the psyker disciplines being telepathy and biomancy (some people shit on telepathy, too, but it is my favourite due to offering quite a few ways to debuff and damage enemies). Still, I became curious whether she is fit to handle the unfair difficulty. And she is! My strategies may not be the best, and my builds do not allow for instantaneously killing the big bosses (oneshoting a creature with over 20000 hp? In your dreams, maybe), but they do get me through the entire game without me ever needing to lower the difficulty. And at the end of the day, so long as there is more of the enemy on the floor than there is of my guy and their party, that is the only thing that matters. Here are some of her greatest hits.
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Considering that she is a bit of a hybrid build, and thus has to juggle between more ability scores than a pure warrior class, I think the results she can show are pretty good. These are all from the last zone, of course, but she is indeed able to hold her own in a fight and dish out substantial damage, both mental and physical, throughout the entirety of the game.
Overall, I was expecting the unfair difficulty to make me feel like the tussles with the wild hunt in Kingmaker did – as if I am about to experience explosive diarrhoea and vomit at the same time. And while there were numerous times when I felt like a single enemy attack could dismantle my entire party (fortunately, that tension is all part of the fun for me), ultimately as the companions levelled up their archetype abilities, and the number of available actions and manoeuvrers grew bigger, most of the fights stopped presenting a challenge in a way where it felt that the deck is truly stacked against them. I often felt like going into the difficulty settings just to check whether it is still set to unfair. Still, while I do not think Owlcat has plans for such a dlc just yet, I would actually enjoy going through a purely combat-focused one, perhaps with a planetary multi-level dungeon with an extravagant amount of dudes to have mega tussles with. More challenges, please!
But I will also admit that I do not yet understand how to build some of the party members to make them valuable in combat. Idira should be extremely powerful, in theory. And she is, but she is also doing way too much damage to the party and often gets taken out of commission during the first round, and look – now the party has to fight a shit demon on top of these other twenty guys. I am missing something crucial here, a way to prevent that from happening, a way to reduce the perils of the warp phenomena from occurring. Could it be the difference between a sanctioned and unsanctioned psyker? Mine is able to spam both damaging abilities and buff the party when the purple warp bar is at full capacity, and yet no demons will be summoned, what the hell?! Heinrix is another character that I do not know how to build properly just yet in a way that would make him strong on the lower levels. Passing out during his own quest? Pathetic!
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I know it is my own fault for failing to build him properly, but come on dude, work with me a little!
I have not yet grown fond of the space battle mini-game within the game. I can see them being thematically necessary an largely unavoidable when taking the setting into account, and yet I appreciate them only slightly more than the puzzles in their previous games. I think I would have liked them more if the battles were presented in storybook format (with skill and equipment checks and so on) in order to make them feel less like padding in the game. Oh look, the green field is now positioned in a way that forces the ship to fly in the opposite direction of its enemies! And now the damaged enemy ship is attempting an escape, and now our guns cannot even reach them, and now they are successfully leaving the battlefield. And I have to reload the entire thing and try to shoot them down immediately because I cannot accept anyone making a successful escape. I understand that one enemy ship escaping still counts towards our party’s victory, but I need to see everyone in pieces.
Well, I am probably forgetting about a number of smaller details I would have liked to talk about, but the main thing is that I loved the game. Top 3, definitely! I will not deny that there are quite a few blemishes that hold it back, and there is still a lingering feeling that it game could have been even bigger and more complex, if only the development time was longer. Hopefully, that potential will be tapped in a sequel, if Owlcat ever decides to make one. And I hope that they will stay true to themselves when they do so.
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legion1227 · 10 months ago
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Games Played/Beaten in 2023: Ranked!
28. Dynasty Warriors 9- 2/5,
As a big fan of Musou games and the Dynasty Warriors franchise, I'm deeply upset at how disappointing and underwhelming the last major entry in the DW franchise was. With a boring open world, dull gameplay, and a monotonous story, there is little to no reason to divulge as much time in the game as they want you to do.
27. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Campaign Mode.- 2.5/5.
As someone who does not play COD Warzone whatsoever, the levels playing Warzone-esque are no bother to me and are welcome. Other levels garner minimal intrigue and I wish there were more intriguing stakes in a story that ends way too soon and abruptly.
26. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order- 3/5
I wanted to like this game more than I did, and while it's in no way bad, I realized after 8 hours that this game wasn't for me. With level traversing as confusing and nerve-wracking as it is, coupled with gameplay that's not as stimulating as I'd like, I feel better off watching someone play through the story instead of playing myself.
25. Prey- 3.5/5
Gifted to me as a present years ago, it took time before I finally gave Prey the good ol college try. Trapped on a space station with shape-shifting aliens, you are tasked with self-destructing the station before the aliens can reach Earth. The stakes are there, and exploring the station is engaging, but the combat falls a bit short to my liking.
24. Granblue Fantasy Versus. 3.5/5
As a fighting game casual fan, I could stand to have more single-player content in my fighting games. Before Granblue dropped its sequel last month, Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising, I dived into the previous game back in the early Fall. The character designs are quite anime-esque, and the RPG mode is quite fun, especially with a companion, but the fighting game itself lacked weight that other fighting games I played this past year harbored. Other games simply felt better to play than Granblue.
23. Final Fantasy XV- 3.5/5.
While Final Fantasy XVI was on the cusp of dropping this year, I thought it appropriate to replay the previous entry for the first time in years. The main character, Noctis, and his group of royal guards are mostly enjoyable. The rest of the cast, the gameplay, and the open world itself all fell into the same territory of being decent but could've been even stronger if more time was dedicated to each facet. To be fair, both playthroughs I've done have lacked the DLC so I'm unsure how much of a difference it makes on my overall enjoyment of the game. Next time I play, we'll have to see if it does, and maybe I'll rank it higher then.
22. Lego Harry Potter- 3.5/5.
As Playstation Plus made Lego HP one of the free monthly games, it was only a matter of time before I gave it a try as I have a moderate enjoyment of the HP series and a stronger attachment to Lego games in general. Bringing the magical wizard world of HP into Lego opened up many possibilities for endearing storytelling in its usual Lego charm upon replaying all eight movies across the game. Blowing the more recent HP game, Hogwarts Legacy, out of the water, it doesn't hold up as much as another Lego game I played this year that we'll get to later.
21. Attack on Titan- 3.5/5.
Released in August 2016, the Attack on Titan game was developed and produced by Omega Force and Koei Tecmo respectively, the same companies behind the Dynasty Warrior games and numerous other Musou games, AOT covers the first season of the show in game form. It does a good job at capturing the feeling of exhaustively slaughtering titan after titan as a human fighting for humanity, but as a Musou fan, I prefer their other titles immensely.
20. Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 2- 3.5/5
I am unbelievably hyped for the next entry in this franchise. As someone who's played BT3 to death for years, I never got too much time with its predecessor for complex reasons. After snagging a copy for the Wii years ago and completing the story mode just this year, I can say that BT2 is fun and captures the feel of a DBZ fight you see in the show, but it's a much lesser version of BT3 that I can't help but feel after playing that one for years. BT2 has plenty of characters but still lacks against BT3, and many of the fighters have the same rush moves and lack distinction, again, unlike in BT3. The only aspect I enjoy much more in BT2 over BT3 is the execution of the story mode and the What If scenarios at our disposal. And even then, there was room for improvement in some aspects.
19. One Piece Pirate Warriors 4- 3.5/5
My second favorite anime after Dragon Ball Z has two of my favorite Musou games in Pirate Warriors 2 and 3. Pirate Warriors 4 skips plenty of arcs, but still tells the major story beats in the One Piece story with flashy gameplay as you mow down hundreds of enemy fodder with the unique cast at your disposal. Too many characters that were playable in the last Pirate Warriors were axed for newer characters, of only a few feel really fun to play. After a while, Pirate Warriors 4 can become a bit monotonous with its objectives or story beats with the characters accompanied by its gameplay, which is fair to say with almost any Musou game, but it feels more apparent with Pirate Warriors 4 than others.
18. Doki Doki Literature Club- 4/5
Visual novels are not my cup of tea and neither are horror games, but this one was too great. Of course, it's been out for years and I've known some of what happened in the events of the game, but as you have the option to go through different story routes at this high school, the twists and turns and creepy imagery were intriguing enough to make me want to continue. Doki Doki Literature Club deserved the praise it got at the time and still deserves praise for its writing and creativity.
17. Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate- 4/5
This is the last Musou game listed here I swear. Warriors Orochi is peak when it comes to the Musou format. Between hundreds of characters to choose from the Dynasty Warriors franchise, Samurai Warriors, and many original characters and guest characters, the variety at your hand while getting to pick any team of three and mow down enemies is a treat. Character interactions are endearing to any Dynasty or Samurai Warriors fan, the combat is more flashy than other games in its genres, and combined with a more traditional fighting game mode and a mode where you traverse a dungeon with a team of five, WO3U is one of the best games in its genre for certain.
16. South Park: The Stick of Truth- 4/5
The raunchy RPG based on the classic TV show really started picking up steam for me in the last few hours. Playing as a new kid who's moved into South Park, getting to create your combat class, pick up gear, and travel around the town of South Park to interact with the iconic cast or indulge in references and easter eggs as a fan of the series was hilarity incarnate. Performance issues plagued my run that stem mostly from playing on a PS3 for this. I wished the game utilized having more than one companion accompany you in combat, but Stick of Truth is a must-have, or maybe must-replay since its ten years old at this point, for RPG fans or South Park fans.
15. Dokapon Kingdom- 4/5
An underrated PS2 game that combines RPG elements to a classic Mario Party style. In the story of Dokapon, the fictional land is attacked by an army of monsters. The king offers his daughter, Princess Penny, to marry whichever player can finish the game with the most amount of money. It can induce the same amount of rage you would get playing Mario Party with friends, but it's also just as fun. The combat is simple yet thought-provoking, the random encounter events are entertaining with amusing characters, and the art style is cute to look at. It can be hard to obtain the original game these days, but I know a remake titled Dokapon Kingdom: Connect on the Switch exists that is almost exactly like the original, so I would recommend trying it out there if you can and play with friends.
14. Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate- 4/5.
In anticipation of Mortal Kombat 1 releasing, I bought a physical copy of MK11 to play for a time. The ultimate edition of MK11 separated itself by adding all DLC content such as characters like The Terminator, Spawn, Shang Tsung, etc., and the story mode "The Aftermath." Mortal Kombat 11 continues to be one of the prime examples of what I would like in my fighting games as a casual. The story mode is a stellar cinematic romp to play through, with an amusing option of picking one of two characters at some points when I can. Coupled with an arcade mode worth plowing through with characters having epilogue after completion, the Krypt being a fully explorable place, and a constantly changing tower of fighters to compete against, the single-player aspect is the basis of something I would like to see in future fighting games for people like myself who don't really want to hop online and fight others.
13. Spider-Man: Miles Morales. 4/5
A perfect appetizer that served while waiting in anticipation for Spider-Man 2. Taking the role of Miles Morales as Spider-Man instead of Peter Parker, Miles' story laid a solid foundation following his idle beginning in the first game and before exploring him somewhat further in the sequel. His dynamic with friend turned-enemy Phin is a decent precursor for a more explored friendship in Spider-Man 2 with Peter and Harry, but Miles' arc and assuming his great power AND responsibility is interesting. Miles Morales is short but great from a gameplay perspective more than the story, but it's also hard to go back to this game after playing Spider-Man 2.
12. Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time. 4/5
Released back in October 2020, Crash Bandicoot 4 was the first original entry in the Bandicoot franchise in over ten years. Combining the gameplay from the classic games and remakes, but updating it with a futuristic gloss, has helped concoct a supreme platformer. The option to turn either on or off lives helps supply gamers with whether or not they want a challenge, which I appreciate. It's About Time is not only clever with its double entendre name, being literally about time, and also being a well-overdue sequel, but clever in its boss fights, and presentation, adding up to a platformer that was more than worth the time.
11. Doom Eternal- 4/5
Gameplay-wise Doom Eternal is an improvement upon its predecessor, Doom 2016, in almost every way. Between the vast array of weapons and power-ups, there are almost too many ways to rip and tear through the armies of Hell. Traversing level through level with boosters and platforming combined with fast-paced action makes Doom Eternal a triumph in its genre. Story-wise, I prefer the simplicity of Doom 2016 over this, but Eternal is still stunning.
10. Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2- 4/5.
Guilty Gear may not have the amount of single-player content that Mortal Kombat 11 does that I like, but there are some things Arcsys' anime fighter does that I have to give them respect. The character designs are much more unique and stand out more and the gameplay harbors a quicker place that lends to more frantic, fun fights. Its story is confusing and a tad convoluted, but luckily, its characters, in terms of personality /and/ how they play, more than make up the nonsensical anime bullshit that shows up on the screen. Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 is a balanced, hard-hitting affair that absolutely is entertaining in is own right.
9. Kingdom Hearts- 4/5
For years, I have tried completing this game, but thanks to the help of a friend, I finally managed to do so. Square Enix and Disney coming together to make its first collaborative effort will forever be iconic. Playing as a young child named Sora and traveling to different Disney worlds like Agrabah from Aladdin, the Coliseum from Hercules, and Wonderland to fight dastardly enemies like the Heartless is sensational. Not every world is made equal, (the jungle world from Tarzan is an awful, confusing mess), but the vibe is immaculate. Working together with Donald Duck and Goofy and enjoying the least confusing KH games is sometimes hard, with boss fights like Sephiroth or definitely the final boss, but it's an easy classic.
8. Final Fantasy X- 4/5.
Possibly my favorite Final Fantasy game to date, or at least on par with the FF7 remake. The cast of characters you play is likable and interesting in gameplay, with their abilities that separate each person from one another. The sphere grid, the system that centers around how you can build and level your character by maxing out their stats or magic, is a system I prefer over the usual level build-up you see in most RPGs. The depth of the story is engaging but comes secondary to the turn-based gameplay that I'm more fascinated by.
7. Persona 5- 4/5
The only RPG played this year I like slightly more than FFX. Persona's sense of style is mesmerizing and helps enhance the experience of a playthrough. As a group of high schoolers look to change the hearts of criminals in over-the-top setpieces that involve the cast diving deep into lavish worlds, the turn-based combat is more bombastic than any other of its kind. I put over 100 hours into Persona and didn't even accomplish everything I wanted. I cannot wait for a replay, but I need to get Persona 5 Royal some day as it has even more content than its vanilla version.
6. Uncharted 2- 4/5
Nathan Drake's second adventure improved upon the first game in so many ways I can't believe. As Drake is tasked with finding the entrance to the lost city of Shambhala, the stakes were as high as ever at that point. As I steadily make my way through the Uncharted franchise, the 2nd game improved from the first with its shooting, level design, and character work with Drake, Sully, and the introduced Chloe among others. From the opening scene where you control Drake trying to escape a train dangling over a cliff, I understood almost immediately how some consider this the best Uncharted game in the series.
5. Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga- 4/5
As someone who played plenty of Lego games growing up with friends and family, one replay after years revealed how this is one of the best Lego games out there. The Complete Saga's name is outdated now, but at the time you had every Star Wars movie from the Prequels and Original Trilogy to go through in Lego form with 160 characters for you to choose from, including overpowered Jedi ghosts and Indiana Jones. Lego Harry Potter is fun but pales in comparison to the weight of swinging a lightsaber around or shooting droids and clones with your blaster. The newest Lego Star War game, The Skywalker Saga, I have not touched, but I know that the original Complete Saga is another classic etched into the echoes of video game history.
4. King Of Fighters 2002- 4/5
This game is not so much for a fighting game casual like myself, but I can't help but be roped into something so special. The KOF series is something I've had a soft spot for since my godparent's son showed me the franchise as a child. It's rough, it's hard, it's unforgiving, it's a classic fighting game in every sense. The characters are special to play and I wanted to learn most of them and see what combination of characters benefit me the most. There really isn't much single-player content to offer and this is a game for the hardcore fighting game fan-based, but there's just a feeling....a sensation to this that's hard to describe or replicate. I never hopped online, but I kept going back to fighting the CPU over and over again with different characters and just playing for several hours. KOF 2002 is an outstanding achievement that captures that feeling of playing fighting games in an arcade in the old days that you can't recapture these days.
3. The Last of Us: Remastered.
After the first season of the Last of Us Show dropped, I dived into the game for the first time in years. The Remastered version, as opposed to "The Last of Us: Part 1" is Naughty Dog's crown jewel. It's quite grounded for a zombie game, it's characters, especially Joel and Ellie, are rich, the ways to take down zombies and fellow survivors alike is gratifying, there's solid reasons why Last of Us is an achievement for Playstation, but these next two games amplify that mindset.
2. Spider-Man 2- 4.5/5
One of the few games I played this year that actually came out in 2023. Everything that made the first Spider-Man game and Spider-Man: Miles Morales so great is improved upon in this in almost every facet. The combat is sublime, being able to switch between both Peter and Miles is excellent, the story may lack in a few areas surrounding Miles, but it's still massive and overwhelming in the best sense. But the definitive aspect of the game has to be traversal. Swinging around the city feels so weighty and impressive- do you know how good it has to be to move around in a world when there is a fast travel option but you don't want to use it because you WANT to swing around the city, or in some cases glide? Spider-Man 2 is a spectacle in so many ways that it will be hard to go back to the previous games. As far as games that came out in 2023, it's my game of the year then. But if we are to take into account every game I played this year, regardless of what year it came out, then there's only 1 game I preferred over Spider-Man 2...
God Of War: Ragnarok
Like many of the other games on this list, GOWR is a sequel that surpasses its predecessors in almost every way. Ragnarok continues the story of Kratos and his son Atreus in a meaningful way as Kratos continues to evolve as a character and an older Atreus grows into his own. What is there to say about the game that hasn't been said already? The voice-acting performances are phenomenal across the board, the combat is righteous and immensely satisfying, and the design of each of the realms are awe-inspiring with top-notch graphics. And with GOWR dropping FREE story DLC in Valhalla, which incorporates a dungeon-like style into the open-world hack-and-slash style only cemented itself as my game of the year. Valhalla not only gives a unique, fun mode for players to lose themselves in for hours but tells a story basically of Kratos going through therapy after the heinous acts he committed in the original three games. The only fault in all of GOWR I had was one section with Atreus, but besides that I adore this game to pieces. And with that, GOWR is absolutely my favorite game I played in 2023.
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purplekoop · 1 year ago
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Mario+Rabbids Kingdom Battle Character Overview #1: The Marios
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Let's get started with the title character and the character you can rearrange the words to also make the title character.
Mario Mario is not only one of the three characters you get at the start of the game, but he's one you're stuck with the entire playthrough. Given the dedicated and unchanging role of "Leader", Mario is forced to be in the party at all times in the main single player modes.
Good news: Mario is in fact good. While he lacks any defensive utility, his all-out all-around offense makes him a solid addition to any team.
Talking about his stats, Mario is generally average but with a key weakness in mobility. His basic movement range is the lowest in the game accounting for max upgrades. However, his health is solid, and he can improve his mobility thanks to his movement ability.
Mario's special movement trait is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Stomp Jump. After team jumping off of an ally, Mario can then select an enemy within team jump range to then jump off of in much less friendly fashion, dealing a solid chunk of damage and allowing Mario to land nearby. The secondary landing range can be improved, making for an unconventional boost to mobility if enemies are nearby in the proper position. The damage of the stomp shouldn't be understated either, as with max upgrades it serves as the second highest damage a single non-weapon attack can deal. Mario also has an average single dash attack, but his two sources of free damage can make him an especially flexible fighter.
Mario's main weapon is the humble Blaster, a solid single-target medium range weapon that's the baseline to compare all other primary weapons to. There's not much to note about it, honestly. It's a gun. That Mario has. Its basic reliability is a fine fit for Mario though, who can enhance it with his special techniques and supplement its average damage with our next topic:
Mario's secondary weapon meanwhile is both more interesting and more conventional of a presence in the plumber's arsenal (yes I remember Yoshi's Safari but hush), the hammer-shaped Melee. This close-quarters weapon works, as you'd expect, only in melee range, or one tile away from an enemy. To compensate, Melees are the strongest out of any main or secondary weapon, and even have a larger AOE splash radius as long as you've managed to target a direct hit first. As with all secondaries, there's a one-turn cooldown between uses, so you can't use this attack every turn. For Mario Mario specifically, his short movement range makes this not always an ideal fit, but it can be a great way to secure a kill on an enemy you just stomped and just landed right next to.
Mario's arsenal is privy to two super effects whenever he gets a critical hit, both of which he can apply with moderate regularity: Honey and Bounce. These are a solid pair of effects, around middle of the pack in my opinion if I were to rank them. Honey mucks an enemy's feet and stops them in place. While fine in most situations, it excels against Smashers and other melee-range enemies with reactionary movement abilities. Bounce meanwhile will simply bounce an enemy in an arc backwards. If you happen to knock an enemy out of bounds, then they take bonus damage. Both of these positioning-disrupting abilities are solid, but interact especially well with Mario's first ability:
Hero Sight is a reactionary attack that you activate on your turn, where you wait for an enemy to move within your weapon's range to fire a free attack. While this is generally used on an enemy's turn to catch their normal movement, any enemy movement will activate the reactionary attack, including super effects, enemy-positioning abilities, and enraging Smasher-like enemies. Also worth noting that Bounce will stop an enemy's movement if it's their turn, so with either effect a lucky Hero Sight shot can put an enemy into an unintended position on their part. Mario can also upgrade this ability to have higher damage than his normal shots, and fire two of them per one use of the ability. (also the term that Xcom fans use to describe this kind of ability is "Overwatch" but that's gonna be confusing so I'll just call these abilities "Sights". Mostly because the mental image of Mario: 76 is funny)
Mario's kit is very damage-focused so far, and that comes to a climax with his last ability: M-Power. This punny but potent effect gives a massive damage boost to all allies in range. The boost lasts until the start of your next turn, so you can start a round with all your team grouped together, let them spread around to deal heavy damage wherever needed, and even pair it with an ally's Sights ability if you want. You can't use M-Power and Mario's own Sights on the same turn though.
Overall, it's not too much a shame to have Mario be the one forced team member, since his reliable damage output is solid enough to where he's always nice to have around.
His interdimensional mutant counterpart on the other hand is a much more bombastic presence: the peak of masculinity, Rabbid Mario.
Rabbid Mario is unique from the other Rabbids compared to their non-Rabbid counterparts in a few ways. He's the only one you unlock after the original, partway into the second of the game's four main worlds. And unlike the others, where the original is more extreme than the parody, Rabbid Mario takes his counterpart's damage-focused playstyle and cranks it up to be a risky close-quarters high-damage menace, and a top-tier threat that I've seen some players ignore in favor of safer team comps.
Rabbid Mario has slightly above average health, and also some of the better movement range of the cast, though not quite the highest. These stats both aid in Rabbid Mario's role as an aggro bruiser.
Also aiding in this role is the dramatic Boom Dash. While the classic characters all have abilities to augment their team jumps, the playable rabbids all have special dashes. In addition to having three total dashes with high damage upgrades, his dashes unleash a shockwave AOE that damages anything nearby the initial target, making him deadly against grouped opponents. Though note: any time I bring up an attack having an AOE component, remember that while single-shot attacks can't friendly-fire, AOE attacks can, so Rabbid Mario works well when his allies are a safe distance away while he goes to town, especially since this applies to both of his weapons as well.
Rabbid Mario's main weapon is the Boomshot, AKA oh god this man has a shotgun. Boomshots are the only AOE-based primary, dealing damage to anything in a conical radius. It's also the only primary with falloff damage, dealing high damage up close but low damage at its max range, which is still limited but can pick off a low-health enemy while putting a heavier dent into whatever's between you and them.
Somewhat redundantly, his weapon is the Melee, shared with Mario. Rabbid Mario's unique set of skills can still make use of it, arguably even better than Mario can, but it does mean he struggles with range more than any other character.
Rabbid Mario has the best set of super effects in the game though: Stone and Vamp. Stone is the ultimate "nuh uh" debuff, completely disabling enemy movement, attacks, and techniques. Rabbid Mario makes exceptional use out of it, as his aggressive close-quarters positioning can leave him in some dicey positions if he doesn't finish the job, but the Stone effect can let him leave an enemy alive while not being subject to a counterattack. Vamp is perhaps less objectively great, but still a personal favorite. A critical Vamp attack will not only return a portion of the damage dealt by the initial attack back as healing to the attacker, but will also let any further attacks from any other source gain the lifesteal benefit as well. Rabbid Mario can take more damage than the rest of the cast thanks to the aggressive positioning he demands to be effective, but getting Vamp frequently against groups of enemies lets him self sustain like got dang Reaper Overwatch with his lifesteal shotgun. He's on the luckier side too, so he can rely on these effects with relative consistency in the late game.
The first bad part about Rabbid Mario is his first ability, Body Guard. All Rabbids have a personal defensive bubble ability in the same way all the normal Mario-verse cast has a Sights ability, and Rabbid Mario's is the worst. It specializes in denying body damage, such as dashes and landing impacts. However, these attacks are not only uncommon, but hard to anticipate in advance. The shield can be upgraded to block a tiny amount of weapon damage too, but the max is still pretty dang weak.
But last up is Rabbid Mario's second ability, and the butter on the toast that makes him the juggernaut he is: Magnet Dance. Using his sheer charismatic appeal, Rabbid Mario seduces any enemy in range to get as close as possible to him (more or less). I feel the need to remind you how much Rabbid Mario thrives against groups of enemies and enemies up close. The combo of Magnet Dance and either of Rabbid Mario's weapons can't be beat, especially lethal if combined with his counterpart's M-Powerment to jack up the damage to be lethal to almost any normal enemy with a crit, in which oh hey, you also just either denied all of them their next turn or healed yourself back up from literally any amount of health. It's the best thing in the game for clearing groups of enemies quickly, and makes him a mainstay in speedruns for any enemy-based mission for the entire run once he joins the team.
Rabbid Mario is a top-tier menace who I've seen some people argue is the best in the game, but some players also seem to be averse to his playstyle because of the raw moxie it takes to play to his strengths. For those willing to brave a quick, glorious fight though, Rabbid Mario is a one-man wrecking crew so efficient it makes his human counterpart's early career look pathetic.
Next up though, we can't have Marios too long without some Luigis to pair with them, so next up we'll go over the fan favorite and my favorite out of the cast.
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