If we’re lucky Nintendo says “Oh no, now our Nintendo Direct is less special because all this stuff leaked out and in some cases went LIVE already.  Now we have no choice but to add something spicy we were going to save for later.

Boy. On one hand, good on Nintendo for delaying their direct in the face of local tragedy. They’re right, barelling forward WOULD have been tacky. Especially foe their domestic audience.

Wait. So it looks good, it sounds good, it plays good, but the story and pacing didn’t work for you so this qualifies as a botched JRPG experiment?

congratulations! You beat the final boss. You were contemplating giving up on it... so did I. But I knew you would be able to do it. In the particular case of this game, beating the final boss isn’t just about the satisfaction of beating the hard thing. It’s about having discovered a game you love so much that you’ll…

You can do it Kirk! If you’ve already had a run where you got through phase 1 with all your health, then you are surely within spitting distance of victory.

Starfield is confirmed to be single player only I think. But the next Elder Scrolls is far enough out, maybe that isn’t decided quite yet? They may wait to see how multiplayer works out for the Fallout game before committing Elder Scrolls to also following that path. A lot of asset generation/world design/quest…

So here’s the thing about hip-hop/rap widely using a word that I can’t say or sing or type ever. That means I’m not welcome. It’s music that I can’t ever sing. I ALWAYS need to treat it as a dangerous specimen where singing the lyrics without modification is a serious failing. And it’s fine that music exists that I…

That’s a little big sad, but Stephen Totilo is the authority on quality Kirby experiences. He was right last time he called out a Kirby game for being merely a checkbox affair (That was Return to Dreamland on the Wii), and he was right when he said that the 3DS games are a cut above.

I know the feeling. SMT 3 has a similar white whale status for me. I love the games and have beaten IV, IV A, Strange Journey, DDS, DDS 2, Persona 3, and Persona 4. Many multiple times. But Nocturne? It’s just one step too user unfriendly for me. I’ve even beat the legendary Matador but... just didn’t stay hooked.

You describe this game as all width, no depth. I totally understand where that’s coming from. Xenoblade X was the same way. But are there other modern JRPGs that you would describe as having width AND depth? Because I like JRPGs with a lot of interlocking systems. That’s my jam. I like building specialized Pokemon…

Ancient dagons as little human girls is a thing you can trace back to Tiki on the NES. So you’re right, it is in many fire emblem games (though not 2, 4, 5, 9, 10, or Fates). But sexualized? That’s new. I’m pretty confident saying that there wasn’t any trashy sexualization of these characters until the 3DS/Wii U era…

Lol. SMT 1, 2, 4, 4 Apocalypse, 5, and Strange Journey (which is a mainline installment in all but name) are all on Nintendo hardware. The ONLY SMT on PlayStation was 3.

It was clearly a little early in development to get a trailer up, there isn’t a ton of substance here. Oh well, I can wait until next year to get the SMT V hype train rolling. Glad Atlus is still plugging away on this series :)

For your first time playing, there’s no shame in sticking to the basics. You want a tank, physical damage, magic damage, a healer, and a misc 5th party member. The games allow you to build dumb parties and once you know what you’re doing it can be pretty fun to see what you can do with sub optimal builds. But that’s…

PLEASE tell me that Stephen Totilo will be covering the new Layton anime series they announced. I don’t see you as an anime guy(?) so I would be real curious to see what would happen if you jumped into whatever this new series is going to be.

Well, that is the next step this article didn’t much get into. What, exactly, is the negative consequence to these men who are avoiding 1 on 1 interactions with women in their workplace?

Wow. This makes me feel a little bit good about myself. Because I kinda struggle with action games mostly? My reflexes aren’t great. I tend to play turn based games, or if it’s a real time action game I set things to Easy. But in Samus Returns I beat the chase sequence in only two tries for each section. One attempt…

THANK YOU. There are a few other crucial things I would add: The game sticks to whip gameplay, which is good because that’s what made Castlevania great in the first place. Playing a side scrolling whip Castlevania is like playing a zoning character in a fighting game. Your positioning is super important, because at…

Sounds like you’re overdue for a dose of Nintendo in your life. They make many games, but never those games.

Question: Would including the pixel art graphics mode from the 3DS game into the Switch version allow longer battery life? I recognize that all the combat calculations would still be happening, but more graphics = less battery, right? So could DQ XI Switch have the retro graphics and last a lot longer on the go…