Switch & Nintendo News/Discussion

[Alan]

What was the consensus round here about the last one? I didn’t get the heaps of praise, most of it just annoyed the crap out of me.

[Mantis]

It's one of the only open world games that didn't feel like a massive chore from the very beginning. Similar to Elden Ring, I liked being just sent off with a vague goal and just exploring the world entirely of my own volition. There was a genuine sense of wonder to scaling a high cliff and then spotting interesting looking areas to work your way down to without any of that Ubisoft bollocks of every secret in the game being waypointed all over your map already.

The cooking was pretty standard stuff and the weapon durability and constant need to craft new ones was a pain in the arse. I never finished it.

It was a good game for the intelligent world design but the other mechanics were all fairly standard and the little puzzle dungeons that made up a pretty significant portion of the game never really felt like they fit in within the wider context of the world or had much point to them other than grinding for better stats. I don't really get why it's regarded as one of the greatest games ever, it was just good.

[Raid]

What was the consensus round here about the last one? I didn’t get the heaps of praise, most of it just annoyed the crap out of me.

Not sure about concensus, but it's my joint-favourite game of all time. Can't say I'm massively surprised about the praise for the new one. It's just about the only single-player open-world game where it actually felt like an adventure. I understand the detractors who loathed the weapon durability, but even though I've otherwise always hated systems like that, it just never bothered me, and I enjoyed being forced to regularly use multiple weapon types.

[Alan]

It’s probably just my aversion to most open world games. I’d have liked a way to delete the open world and just warp me to the next challenge. It’s another game where the open world just makes me feel like I’m wasting my free time.

New excuse me as I go fanny away 4 hours in Eve Online for no real payoff :p

Maybe I’ll try again one day with a printed map and an infinite durability mod.

I wonder what the future will be for classic style Zelda games now they don’t have a second low powered consoles to release them on along side the big 3D ones. I didn’t think much of the 3DS one but man the Capcom ones were goodass games! They’ll probably just remake an old one every few years on the Links Awakening engine.

[DjchunKfunK]

What was the consensus round here about the last one? I didn’t get the heaps of praise, most of it just annoyed the crap out of me.

Not sure about concensus, but it's my joint-favourite game of all time. Can't say I'm massively surprised about the praise for the new one. It's just about the only single-player open-world game where it actually felt like an adventure. I understand the detractors who loathed the weapon durability, but even though I've otherwise always hated systems like that, it just never bothered me, and I enjoyed being forced to regularly use multiple weapon types.

Pretty much similar to how I feel. I can't wait to get stuck into Tears of the Kingdom tomorrow. I have generally gone off openworld games over the years, never finished Elden Ring partly because of that and wish it had been more like previous games, but I will always have time for another world like that which Nintendo created in Breath of the Wild.

[Raid]

Honestly I haven't actually been that excited for Tears, largely due to not having even turned on my Switch in a year, but one look at review scores and some incredibly light verbal poking by Mantis and I immediately went and ordered a copy.

Funny thing is, despite being massively enthusiastic about the original, I never actually finished it. I got to the point where I was probably over-equipped for the assault on Hyrule castle, but I wanted to do every shrine and there were a few I was missing, and it's quite difficult even with a map to work out which ones you need as there are 120 of the things. Perhaps I could give up on that and get it finished in the next couple of days ready for the sequel.

[pappaduck]

Funny thing is, despite being massively enthusiastic about the original, I never actually finished it. I got to the point where I was probably over-equipped for the assault on Hyrule castle, but I wanted to do every shrine and there were a few I was missing, and it's quite difficult even with a map to work out which ones you need as there are 120 of the things. Perhaps I could give up on that and get it finished in the next couple of days ready for the sequel.

I did this the other week, Hyrule castle was extremely easy if you've done a good chunk of the shrines and the Divine Beasts. I'd put it off because I didn't want to be finished with the game which I absolutely loved so now there's a whole new quest to enjoy I actually just sat down and got it done.

I've been playing the new one on and off this weekend and it is a classic sequel. A lot of the game mechanics are identical so if you bounced of BoTW your likely to bounce of this one, I think they've almost leaned into the mechanics that got some criticism but so far I've been having great fun. The first dungeon was properly epic in scope and the boss fight was far more interesting than any of the BoTW calamity Ganon clones. It's got a real sense of mystery about it which I really like, I'm actually interested to see where the plot goes which is odd for a Zelda game.

[Raid]

I did exactly the same last night, finally getting around to finishing BotW. Given it's the culmination of the game, I finally dove into my collection of hundreds of special arrows, along with bows that fired 3 or 5 at a time. I hardly ever used them during the game, which was silly given that it hands you bucket-loads of the things. It was extremely easy. While I did kill the two gatehouse lynels fair and square the first time around, I left the area to go and upgrade some armour pieces (I finished the game in fully upgraded barbarian armour), buy a few more ancient arrows, and cook a ton of health food (I cooked maybe 15 full health restoring meals, hardly any of which I actually needed). When I came back, I one-shotted the lynels with ancient arrows and ran through as if nothing had happened.

I do feel the final final boss was a bit of a letdown. It was epic, sure, but the preceding fight was more interesting. I think if they'd reversed them I'd have been happier. But the whole Hyrule Castle finale was excellent if you ignore the fact that it's quite easy if you've completed almost all of the shrines and loaded up with gear before making the assault. While the game had a very gentle, understated soundtrack for the most part, the music throughout that final area really gave the final part of the quest some much needed oomph.




Onto Tears then, and it has that issue that open-world sequels sometimes has in that it strips you of all of your abilities which can be a little jarring. It makes perfect sense from a pacing perspective, don't get me wrong, but I've died more than once jumping from a high cliff because it didn't occur to me that I didn't have the glider anymore, which was such a fundamental part of the original that it just feels wrong not to have it.

It hasn't won me over yet. I don't like the weapon fusing mechanic. It's a nice concept and all, but it just looks silly, and I'm not sure how much of it the game is going to force you to do. It's not all bad, it's nice to not have to carry around the utility weapons like hammers and big leaves, but it's just another piece of inventory fiddling that slows the pace down. So far the large item fusing feels gimmicky too, at least in the starting area. It's hardly taxing your imagination when you walk up to a sky-rail, and, oh what luck, someone has placed some planks and giant hooks nearby!

Perhaps I shouldn't have completed the previous game the night before starting the new one, as going from a near-godlike flying arrow machinegun to a half naked boy swinging a stick taped to a rock has been a bit jarring, and might be colouring my experience a little.

[Mantis]

I'm making an effort to finish the first one before I move onto the sequel too. With a fresh look at it, the cooking and weapon durability mechanics aren't quite as cumbersome as I originally remembered. It's just generally a super chill open world experience that genuinely feels quite fun to explore.

I'll probably give it a bit before I move onto Tears though.

[DjchunKfunK]

Tears of the Kingdom is a lot of fun. It's also a bit more directed than Botw in that there are more what you would call standard side quests and the main quest is much more story orientated. Having said that it does not push you to do any of these and you are free to just wander the world going wherever you see fit.

[pappaduck]

I'm 30 hours deep now and really enjoying it, the world is so much more dense than BOTW and the puzzles are incredibly satisfying. Nothing has been too difficult but the physics mechanics are so solid that you come up with an idea that makes sense but wouldn't work in almost any other game and it just happens. Like how do the gliders not just buck you off immediately when you launch them with a rocket? It's madness.

The plot is also much more of a driver, I've just got passed the first big reveal which was pretty heavily telegraphed but I have not idea where it's going next and I'm excited to see it.

[Raid]

I'm not quite that many hours in, but while I'm largely enjoying it, there are elements that just aren't gelling with me. I'm still not keen on the weapon fusing from an aesthetic perspective, even if I get what they were trying to do mechanically. It lets you essentially design your own weapons, where you pick up the weapon type (short range slashing, long range stabbing etc.), then modify it with an ingredient to give it it's damage property. It means you don't have to clog your inventory with elemental weapons that you're saving for a special occasion. But it just looks terrible, and Link goes from "master swordsman" to "duct tape enthusiast who lives in a rubbish dump", and the interface for attaching things from your inventory is far clunkier than it ought to be, especially when you do the exact same thing with arrows and it's perfectly streamlined. Why do I need to go into my inventory, drop the item on the ground, select the fuse power then choose what I want to fuse it to, when for an arrow I just select the item from the inventory and it's automatically stuck on the end for me?

I also found out very easy to miss important things because of how many quests it throws at you. In BotW it was impossible to miss the hang glider because you needed it to progress. In TotK you can quite easily miss it because you have to follow one specific quest to obtain it, and nothing in that quest description suggests it's the reward. Outside Xtra did a video this week on whether it was better to go in blind or seeing how others were playing it, where they revealed one of their discord members had been coming to with strategies for using the glider contraptions. It was only when someone asked them "why don't you just use the hang glider?" That they realised they'd missed a fundamental part of the experience.

And honestly I'm finding the puzzles a bit too simple, because the way they give you a set of components to solve them makes the solution a bit obvious. I'm still having the odd moment where the solution is extremely simple and I've been trying to do something complicated that doesn't work (trying to reach a high chest with a fan, I was trying to mount the fan to my shield and do that shield surf move, when all I had to do was put the fan on the floor and hang glider over it), but that was maybe one shrine out of 30.

But despite all this it's still so much better than most open world games. As pappaduck says the physics engine is incredibly solid, and almost everything I've tried works the way I wanted it to, which given the breadth of items you have access to is astonishing. I think my only real complaints are down to just how ridiculously good BotW was, but that was less ambitious with it's mechanics. One of the reviews I watched said that this is a game that dares you to break it, and while I agree with that statement, I've not managed to break anything yet.Even at the relatively early stage I'm at, there are more story points and interesting characters, and I'm enjoying the progression the world has gone through because that world was amazing to begin with.

[Raid]

Well there's something I never expected; they're remaking Super Mario RPG (originally for the SNES, but never saw a European release). I always assumed Nintendo's breakup with Square would prevent this from ever happening.

[pappaduck]

Seems like the Switch 2 is official:

https://www.eurogamer.net/nintendo-demo ... t-gamescom

[DjchunKfunK]

Prime 4 finally makes a reappearance.




I thought it was a really good Direct, a new Mario & Luigi game and Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom looked very promising.