Astonishing Quality, Insane DLC Dickbaggery - 2015 Nintendo Xmas Loot Report

Even though I grew up in a mostly Segan household with a bit of NEC PC-Engine on the side, we've owned every major Nintendo Handheld device from a crappy Game&Watch thingie to a GameBoy classic, Advance/SP, Color and the DS in various shapes and releases. Also, I'm going to pretend the VirtualBoy never happened.

With very few exceptions, I've always considered Nintendo's portable games to be something you do whilst waiting for the bus, taking a dump, some quick and easy entertainment when there's no PC or home console nearby. I've spent ridiculous amounts of time playing games like Gargoyle's Quest, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and, weirdly enough, Monster Racers, when these games came out, but for the most part I didn't play these portable games for more than 30 to 60 minutes at a time. It was entirely possible to beat most shmups and brawlers within these amounts of time, lengthier titles came with a save feature and some 10-20 hours of total play time. Happy days.

Having spent a few days with the humble ten or so games we now have in our 3DS library, I've come to realize that handheld gaming has changed a whole fucking lot from one generation to the next. Some changes are really surpsising to me, such as portable games with production values, which make certain PC titles look like shit by comparison. On the not so happy side there are invasive DLC and microtransaction methods, which rival all the shit I'm used to from EA or Ubisoft. Yes, Nintendo were facing some hard times when the WiiU bombed, but holy shit, they're cold and greedy for somebody, who is all about family values.

I have spend the last three days playing Fire Emblem: Awakening, interrupting only for a few hours of sleep here and there. I'd get up, fire up the 3DS pretty much straight away and play till 5 or 6 in the morning, Claire doing pretty much the same, alternating between Tomodachi Life and Ocarina of Time. I have never finished a Fire Emblem game before, even though I tried some of them on the GBA. I liked the gameplay, because it was very similar to Shining Force, but the crappy visuals and the permadeath mechanic always put me off in the long run. Awakening lets me play without permadeath and it looks absolutely amazing, so it was the first game in the series I actually played all the way to the end. I got about 40 hours of play time out of it, not including most DLC or bonus missions. That's some great value for ~25 Quid.

In many ways, Fire Emblem: Awakening is like a better Shining Force. The tactical, turn-based battles are very similar to Sega's ruined franchise, there's a friendship system, which allows your units to provide bonuses to one another and since this is a Japanese game we're talking about, of course certain characters can also get married and have children, which will eventually join your army when they're fully grown up. Because reasons, time travel, the story is pretty awful, but what the hey.
The game also sounds pretty fucking great:

There's also enough paid DLC available to spend more on added content than on the original game. There's a lot of free DLC here, too, and the main storyline was created without bonus content in mind, so you can easily complete the whole thing without forking out for extra stuff. Still, it's annoying to play a brand new game and five minutes in you're presented with a cash shop, which offers tons of new stuff for lots of real currency, including Pay2Win-crap such as paid maps, which reward you with insane amounts of gold and experience, which can be played an infinite amount of times.

But the game which absolutely takes the piss when it comes to microtransactions is Bravely Default, which combines old school JRPG mechanics with the worst, most annoying features of browser/mobile gaming.

Holy shit. Bravely Default features so much quality voice acting, incredibly detailed hand-drawn landscapes and an absolutely amazing soundtrack, I haven't seen such production values in a portable game since Final Fantasy: Advent Children. Which makes sense, seeing as they were both made by Square Enix.

The game actually freaking looks like this!

Hidden underneath the fancy visuals and audio and tons upon tons of unnecessarily cheesy, cringeworthy dialogue is a fairly standard JRPG, which plays a lot like the old-school Final Fantasy games. You have your four warriors of light, you put a bunch of weapons, armor and spells on them and explore dungeons, solve quests and battle your way through tons of random encounters. The whole thing gets spiced up by the brave/default combat mechanic, which lets you perform multiple actions in advance at the cost of missing turns further into the battle. Or deliberately skip a turn, turtle up, then perform multiple actions afterwards. Or ignore the whole thing and just play it like any other JRPG before it. It's pretty fun, I guess.

What ruined it for me about ten minutes in was a popup, telling me that I can basically cheat by spending real money via microtransactions. There's a feature, which lets you freeze time and perform attacks, spells or any other action in order to gain an advantage in battle. Normally, you only get one of these actions for every eight hours you put your game into sleep mode. However, you can buy potions to refill your action meter by spending real currency. But the game doesn't just tell you about it once and then shuts up about it. It goes out of its way, breaking the 4th wall and all immersion the first time you try this feature.

"Is it true that there are other ways to use this ability besides putting the system to sleep?" Your fucking characters say these things out loud while you freeze time, constantly hinting at the fucking cash shop. This isn't a Free2Play game, it's not a budget title and having characters ruin immersion like that, only to remind me that I should spend more money on microtransactions is absolute bullshit. And while this is the only form of microtransactions I've encountered thus far, Bravely Default still goes out of its way to keep you from actually playing the fucking game.

You see, there's a little minigame, which has you rebuild a village in real time. Tell your villagers to build or upgrade the potion shop, have them open a weapon shop, that kind of thing. Think WoW garrisons. Some tasks only take five minutes, others take several hours and a little icon will flash at you and remind you to keep checking on the villagers whenever they complete something. There's also a flashing icon when new sidequests appear. "Change the order of your party!" "Slow down or speed up combat!" Yes, tutorials are great and everything, but I've played RPGs before and I'd really like to skip this. You will also get random visits from other players' characters, who can be summoned in battle for a bit of extra damage, which also causes random update notes to flash on your screen. So in between build orders on your village, pointless side missions and random online crap you get drowned in so many notifications that it becomes pretty difficult to focus on the actual game. Thank god you get a "party dialogue" notification flashing every two or so minutes, whenever you group wants to share their thoughts on the situation. And they want to share a whole fucking lot.

Music is good, though:

Out of all the games I've tried so far, Bravely Default is the only one that really disappointed me. I'll keep at it for a little while longer and give it a chance to convince me, but I'm not expecting much. I don't like it when a relatively basic RPG is cluttered up in so many minigames, social media features and other meaningless garbage. Just let me play the damn game!

On the other side of the spectrum is Luigi's Mansion 2. I didn't really want that game, but Claire put it on the Christmas list for the heck of it. I played the original for a few minutes, but I never had a Gamecube and I've never been a huge Nintendo fan outside of their handheld department, so I didn't expect much. And damn, was I wrong!

This game is amazing. I think it looks even better than Fire Emblem or Bravely Default, because it has some incredible lighting effects, it makes excellent use of the stereoscopic 3D and plays around with perspective a lot, when you move and tilt your DS. Music and character animations are awesome and it's really funny when Luigi suddenly hums along with the background music. See, this is how you break the 4th wall without fucking up the atmosphere, Square Enix! Vacuuming up ghosts is pretty easy and for the most part this game reminds me more of a point & click adventure than a platformer or whatever it's supposed to be. There's a lot of discover, it has a great sense of humour and I'm surprised at how much I'm enjoying this. Definitely worth it!

Another big surprise was Street Fighter IV. It's been out for a while, but I still can't believe how close it is to the PC and console versions:

Characters, moves and animations are just like in the "big" version and they even put all the taunts, colours and costumes in there! The one thing that bothers me is how all the characters and animals in the background have been turned into flat, dead cardboard cutouts. I know they're doing this for performance reasons, but those bystanders just don't look right when they're flat 2D pictures with zero animations or depth to them. This is especially true in the dynamic 3D mode, which slightly alters the camera angle for a better 3D effect. You get to see all the 2D bystanders from the side and they look incredibly fake and cheap. On the other hand, how much time to you spend looking at details in the scenery when you're playing Street Fighter? It's not a massive drawback and the game is still incredibly fun, but I think I'd prefer it if they had removed those guys altogether instead of turning them into still, ugly sprites.

People in the background never move and they're all in 2D.

I'm pretty sure there is nothing that hasn't already been said about Super Smash Bros., Mario Kart 7 or Ocarina of Time, so I'll just say they're all great, though Mario Kart feels unusually difficult for some reason. The entire 50cc cup is so laughably easy, that I was bored the entire time and really just wanted to get it done. But when you get to the 150cc races, things get so incredibly tough, that the whole experience can get a bit frustrating, especially when you just want to unlock additional characters and vehicles. It looks great, it runs well, it's a nice game and everything, but it didn't really blow me away. I'd say it's still worth it, especially when you have friends to play against. It's just a shame that the stat system for the karts seems a bit messed up and apparently everybody chooses maximum acceleration over stats like speed, weight, handling or off-road, as most of them are pretty useless. I prefer Smash and the Zelda remakes, but none of these games are really bad.