The drink will flow and blood will spill

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
nettiperuna
machine-saint

remember, it's imperative to turn your aesthetic preferences into moral ones. you can't just dislike neutral colors, or glass-and-steel skyscrapers, or flat design, they have to be symbols of neoliberal capitalism in decay. it's incredibly important that you make sure everybody knows that the only reason anyone could like the things you don't like is that they're an empty shell of a person.

I’m gonna give a bit of a take here. I’m pretty confident in it, but I understand the potential negative reactions you could have to it, so, bear with me here.

Xenoblade Chronicles became one of Nintendo’s biggest series for reasons that had nothing to do with it being good.

Now, I don’t think the series or the original game are bad. It’s not my favorite JRPG, and not even my favorite game in the Xeno series, but I understand why people like it so much. It’s a solid 7 to me.

But I, like many of us, first learned about the game through Super Smash Bros. 4, when Shulk was announced and none of us knew who he was, at least in the States. Smash has a way of legitimizing games by raising awareness, just like it did for Fire Emblem and Kid Icarus before. By gaining this presence in a massively popular crossover fighter, Xenoblade gained a presence in people’s minds. So many people, including me, wanted to try this Monado RPG.

The hitch was, it cost $100.

I remember those days. Xenoblade was a limited release over here, so actual copies of the game got sold on eBay for twice the price of the game at launch. I remember this, I bought it for that much. And if I spend that much on a video game, I have to like it. I am willing to put aside the shitty graphics and overwhelming number of mechanics and abundance of boring sidequests, because the high price point already works as a magic circle. I am invested in what the game is doing, because I’ve already bought into it, literally.

The cost for playing this game isn’t just individual, either. The game unavailable in North America for years, despite already having an English translation. The choice to actually make it available over here was the result of a push known as Operation Rainfall to bring three already-translated Wii RPGs out of Europe. (Incidentally, The Last Story and Pandora’s Tower don’t get nearly the same attention as Xenoblade, which I think is unfair, they’re also fine and would probably be somebody’s shit if they’d heard of it) There’s a kind of narrative that comes from that, isn’t there? The game we only got to play because of the people who love the genre pushing to bring it over here.

But the fact the localization was done by Nintendo of Europe led to the game having a pretty unique style. I actually think the localization of Xenoblade is really good, particularly the translated names being alien in a way that still feels believable. But the choice to cast British voice actors was one of convenience for NoE. Despite this, it makes the voice direction stand out, gives it more character than we would have heard if it was the same American voice actors we’ve heard for decades.

I have a weird complex surrounding Nintendo RPGs, that I won’t go into here because they’re not relevant. (I’ll just say, play Xenogears and FF12) Again, Xenoblade is a good, fine series of games, solid 7. But it’s been interesting looking at it as one of the defining RPG series on the Switch. How did we get here? I do think a lot of it is in the circumstance surrounding it, and I hope I’ve convinced you of that here. Anyway did you did Monolith Soft worked on Dirge of Cerberus?

Xenoblade Chronicles

Is Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest a REAL Fire Emblem game?

Yes

No

No opinion but want to push button

The cover for Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest. At the top is the logo, written in a subtle purple-to-white gradient. The cover art depicts characters from the game in front of a cloudy purple sky, facing right. From left to right, these characters are: Gunter, Flora, Camilla, Elise, Leo, Xander, and a female Corrin. On the bottom left is a "Rating Pending" ESRB rating. On the bottom right is the Nintendo logo. On the right edge is the Nintendo 3DS banner, and the amiibo compatibility sticker.ALT

Conquest advertised itself as the more “traditional” Fates game for more “Hardcore” players. While it is similar to classic Fire Emblem in terms of structure and difficulty, There are some key different inherent to Fates that I feel are worth pointing out. The level design is primarily focused on one-off gimmicks, unique level features used once and then discarded, almost like a Mario game. Weapons do not degrade, which removes a lot of the resource management angle. This isn’t unheard of, Gaiden and its remake also do that, but it is worth considering. It also features an extra-easy difficulty, Phoenix Mode, if anybody cares about Casual Mode discourse anymore.

Fire Emblem