[Megathread] Nintendo Switch

[ryanmahaffe]

Got my switch the night it came out along with Breath of the Wild
Was stolen a few weeks ago, fuckin sucks.

[Jastall]

The theme of the game kind of prevented me from buying it too. When I think of Fire emblem I think of Wyvern riders, pegasus knights, Cavalry, barbarian, pirates and archers etc raiding a castle held by some demon lord. I wasn't expecting some rom com school setting doing training exercises. But I have only played the old gameboy advance games so /shrug. I'm just not sure if the setting is grand enough for me to be interested.

I've given it more time and it definitely has those things, the story quickly opens up beyond what happens within the walls of the monastery. You eventually have access to stuff like Wyvern Riders, Pegasus Knights and such later down the line but at the start everyone is on foot as a basic soldier and you gotta train their skills up so they can unlock more advanced classes. It adds a neat additional layer of progression as you can customize who becomes what, which if fitting as you're literally the teacher around here. Characters are somewhat railroaded towards some roles as baseline but you can change that, and nothing's really stopping you from turning the quick sword guy into an archer or the big axe user into a lance-wielding knight if you slant their growths towards those skills earlier on. Or even turn a physical attacker into a magic user if that's your jam.

I do think the monastery part drags on a lot. You can ignore most of it but recruiting characters beyond your initial batch is tied to having good relations with them, and building that up means doing stuff with and for them in the monastery. You also need your main character to level up skills they like which IMO is baffling since it means the people you recruit to round out your team... have similar skills to yours anyway.

I'm warming up to the setting TBH. The monastery may suck but the story pulls you into the wider world's politics pretty quickly and it's seemingly less about "good kingdom beats evil empire backed up by some ancient demon" and more grey and grounded without going overboard into Game of Thrones territory or anything. Between the Persona sections and random battles against bandits (which give much needed exp so it feels bad skipping them), there's just a bit too much filler between important missions for my tastes. The difficulty is also pretty low on Hard, but I heard the next one up, Maddening, is aptly made and just not fun unless you're a masochist.

[GreenJesus]

I've given it more time and it definitely has those things, the story quickly opens up beyond what happens within the walls of the monastery. You eventually have access to stuff like Wyvern Riders, Pegasus Knights and such later down the line but at the start everyone is on foot as a basic soldier and you gotta train their skills up so they can unlock more advanced classes. It adds a neat additional layer of progression as you can customize who becomes what, which if fitting as you're literally the teacher around here. Characters are somewhat railroaded towards some roles as baseline but you can change that, and nothing's really stopping you from turning the quick sword guy into an archer or the big axe user into a lance-wielding knight if you slant their growths towards those skills earlier on. Or even turn a physical attacker into a magic user if that's your jam.

I do think the monastery part drags on a lot. You can ignore most of it but recruiting characters beyond your initial batch is tied to having good relations with them, and building that up means doing stuff with and for them in the monastery. You also need your main character to level up skills they like which IMO is baffling since it means the people you recruit to round out your team... have similar skills to yours anyway.

I'm warming up to the setting TBH. The monastery may suck but the story pulls you into the wider world's politics pretty quickly and it's seemingly less about "good kingdom beats evil empire backed up by some ancient demon" and more grey and grounded without going overboard into Game of Thrones territory or anything. Between the Persona sections and random battles against bandits (which give much needed exp so it feels bad skipping them), there's just a bit too much filler between important missions for my tastes. The difficulty is also pretty low on Hard, but I heard the next one up, Maddening, is aptly made and just not fun unless you're a masochist.

Thanks for the summary. Since its on sale for like $26 right now at gamestop I'll definitely give it a try then. I've recently played the Gameboy games emulated on my phone while on the plane and still love the core gameplay so ill give it a shot. Seems like its much more involved which could be interesting, but I hope I dont screw up too bad to the point I'm fucked down the road. Ill have to make sure auto save is turned off xD

[Jastall]

Thanks for the summary. Since its on sale for like $26 right now at gamestop I'll definitely give it a try then. I've recently played the Gameboy games emulated on my phone while on the plane and still love the core gameplay so ill give it a shot. Seems like its much more involved which could be interesting, but I hope I dont screw up too bad to the point I'm fucked down the road. Ill have to make sure auto save is turned off xD

No problem, at first it was a hard sell for me as this thread showed but I'm having more and more fun, I just wish the filler wasn't so abundant but if you're not worried about powergaming or recruiting specific characters it's quite minimal.

It's not as hard as I remember the GBA games being TBH. On Hard I'm turboing through the game, some of the units I got as the Blue Lions house are absurdly powerful, albeit I may have gotten lucky growths I suppose. If you want a stress free experience put it on Normal which is probably quite accessible to anyone, also you can disable unit permadeath if so you wish.

[Video Games]

But Persona 5 is the greatest game ever made that created new genre of video games and founded whole new style of music!

P5 is still great, but smt 5 highlights a lot of its flaws.

Too many cutscenes
Extremely repetitive dialogue and some of it is insulting to the players intelligence
Palaces were too linear
Purse oweners lock behind confidants

Smt 5 is near perfect and adding giant open areas with real platforming is awesome. Only thing I think it needs is more side areas/caves, an addition 2-3 big dungeons and a longer intro akin to smt 4 to establish the human characters a bit more. It's kind of weird none of them seem to know you and all of sudden you're all besties

[Jester Joe]

Oh man, the same rehashing of the same wishlists from the last 2 years.

How novel.

Don't you understand, it's the curse of the thread

Every 10 pages we must discuss the topic of Pokemon difficulty and the Switch Pro

[Video Games]

Don't you understand, it's the curse of the thread

Every 10 pages we must discuss the topic of Pokemon difficulty and the Switch Pro

Then maybe they should make pokemon harder and a switch pro

[Jester Joe]

Then maybe they should make pokemon harder and a switch pro

There's rule 34 for one of those.

[RobertoCarlos]

Pokemon really should have a hard mode.

Or new game plus+

Or any modern innovation really that adds difficulty/longevity at minor development cost.

It would be rather easy to implement also.

Perhaps they are worried the target market would hit "expert" by mistake and then complain when their starter pokemon didnt near one shot the entire game.

Edit. It would be like shining a turd though, the entire game would need a rework to actually incorporate a higher skill ceiling because "super effective" moves one shotting pokemon is kind of insane when you think about it. Oh your level 70 grass pokemon just ate the dirt to my level 50 fire pokemon in one move? Too bad

[Video Games]

Pokemon really should have a hard mode.

Or new game plus+

Or any modern innovation really that adds difficulty/longevity at minor development cost.

It would be rather easy to implement also.

Perhaps they are worried the target market would hit "expert" by mistake and then complain when their starter pokemon didnt near one shot the entire game.

Edit. It would be like shining a turd though, the entire game would need a rework to actually incorporate a higher skill ceiling because "super effective" moves one shotting pokemon is kind of insane when you think about it. Oh your level 70 grass pokemon just ate the dirt to my level 50 fire pokemon in one move? Too bad

All they have to do is give them decent coverage, decent abilities, slightly better ai and slightly increased levels. Romhacks prove this works

[RobertoCarlos]

All they have to do is give them decent coverage, decent abilities, slightly better ai and slightly increased levels. Romhacks prove this works

Yeah that would go a looooong way. I still worry it would be a bit gimmicky. I feel like they would need to rework resistances or buff defenses stats so battles werent so cut and dry

[Tech614]

Then maybe they should make pokemon harder and a switch pro

I dunno though.

Maybe people should accept Pokemon is a game aimed at kids and casuals and Nintendo is never going to release top of the line hardware. Even then eventual Switch 2 or w/e will be underpowered and people will be clamoring for a Switch 2 Pro that won't happen.

[Jtbrig7390]

Then maybe they should make pokemon harder and a switch pro

Or stop complaining about the same thing every time there is a new entry in the series. Accept the game is catered more towards kids and casual gamers.

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There's rule 34 for one of those.

Correction there is rule 34 for both of those lol

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Pokemon really should have a hard mode.

Pokemon did have a hard mode in BW2. Sadly it was yet another feature thoughtlessly thrown away by the time the next game rolled around.

Or any modern innovation really that adds difficulty/longevity at minor development cost.

With the Pokemon Company's hundred billion dollar franchise, there really isn't any excuse why a couple devs can't be hired who fine tune the balance of the game.

All they have to do is give them decent coverage, decent abilities, slightly better ai and slightly increased levels. Romhacks prove this works

The problem with your average Romhack (that isn't Gaia) is that they are absurdly overtuned and/or too narrowly designed. There are far too many Pokemon and moves. Too many combinations but the designers usually only design the puzzle around a small handful of them that your average player has no reasonable way of figuring out. So that pretty much means the only way to beat the game in a timely manner is to focus on powerlevelling one or two Pokemon and then to use the rest of your party as fodders for revive/full restore spamming the one or two mons that actually matter so they can one shot everything, which isn't fun.

The most challenging Pokemon games are the ones that are designed around a "small" number of Pokemon and a small number of moves. Ie, gens 1-2. Stadium 1 & 2. Colosseum. Battle Revolution. And the BW games. The game designers are able to present problems to the player, and the player likely has the tools to solve those problems in his party already, or at the very least knows where to obtain the right Pokemon and the right move within a short amount of time. Hence the satisfying "volia!" moment.

[rarhyx]

i really don't get the pokemon must be harder argument
I mean pokemon is generally only hard if you are underleveled and/or type disadvantage and/or if you don't use items in a fight
(I'm not counting endgame/postgame stuff like battle tower etc.)
and the exp share is only a time saver (atleast for me it only saves grinding time)
but what really bugs me: the newer games tell you what attack is type dis/advantage

[Zenfoldor]

It will most likely be "underpowered" by the big brain metrics(it's Nintendo and also likely hybrid handheld) but also it will probably perform better than the specs make it seem thanks to software optimization and Nvidia, and all Nintendo haters ever will come out of the woodwork with "two gamecubes duct taped together" memes and marginalizations no matter what the specs are.

Everyone was all fine with Switch when it was a mildly popular quirky little side console for Nintendo games, but now that its selling, they get defensive.

[Poppincaps]

Jesus christ people it's just an option. It's not even an uncommon option. Most games have difficulty options. "Why does Pokemon need a harder difficulty?" Because a portion of the playerbase wants it. That's it. I don't understand why some of you are so against it. Hell, there's even precedent considering Black/White and Black 2/White 2 had an easy and hard difficulty.

[Wilian]

I dunno though.

Maybe people should accept Pokemon is a game aimed at kids and casuals and Nintendo is never going to release top of the line hardware. Even then eventual Switch 2 or w/e will be underpowered and people will be clamoring for a Switch 2 Pro that won't happen.

So what's your stake in hoping for less choices and options? Surely it's not in fear of burdening the developers while they rehash the same game tenth time over?

[Darththeo]

Pokemon did have a hard mode in BW2. Sadly it was yet another feature thoughtlessly thrown away by the time the next game rolled around.

Yeah, but you had to beat the game to unlock it ... as well as easy mode.
But, you could only give it to another game. So, it only worked if you had 2 DS and 2 games.

The difficulty mode was welcome, but it was terribly done.
Honestly, it would be great to come back to the series, but I don't see it happening. Because a lot of the changes they made make sense if you think of it as Gamefreak is trying to push Competitive PvP pokemon.

Gen V added hidden abilities which alter play for some pokemon.
Gen VI overhaul breeding to improve getting max stat pokemon and right natures.
Gen VII added further improvements.
Gen VIII added mints to change natures, further breeding upgrades, etc ...

Even things like Unbreakable TM and farmable TR in SwSh fit this model. Gamefreak seems to want to push Competitive play. The game itself is almost secondary now.

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i really don't get the pokemon must be harder argument
I mean pokemon is generally only hard if you are underleveled and/or type disadvantage and/or if you don't use items in a fight
(I'm not counting endgame/postgame stuff like battle tower etc.)
and the exp share is only a time saver (atleast for me it only saves grinding time)
but what really bugs me: the newer games tell you what attack is type dis/advantage

It is more people are arguing for options on difficulty than an overall difficulty increase.

[Tech614]

So what's your stake in hoping for less choices and options? Surely it's not in fear of burdening the developers while they rehash the same game tenth time over?

Actually I just don't play Pokemon. Why would I bother playing a game I don't enjoy and complaining about it in this thread? If I want to play a baby brain JRPG I just play atelier games, not garbage like pokemon.

Buying a pokemon game every year just to bitch about it being Pokemon is the yearly ritual in this thread. You would think people would stop buying games they don't enjoy.