c/nintendos’s Official Head of VNs
I checked out Robotics;dash Elite form the library again and gave it about an hour. I LOVE Steins;gate, but it’s been hard getting into other visual novels in the Science Adventure Series. Maybe I’m just not in a reading mood lately.
SciAdv VNs are very different from each other, liking some of them but not others is fairly common. And as much as as love Robotics;Notes that one is a very slow burn, it’s mostly a slice-of-life story with some mystery and sci-fi sprinkled on.
From what I can gather it’s a new standalone game taking place in the same universe as their mobile game (also called “Atelier Resleriana”, but with a different sub title).
Interesting about the Yumia game, I guess it’s the one to skip.
You’re going to find a lot of people saying “solid JRPG, bad Atelier” for Yumia, and I think that’s the perfect summary for the game. There’s the technical problems that still need to be adressed, but the developer has been consistently pushing updates so hopefully most will be fixed eventually.
Also, since we’re talking about this series - we just got a trailer for a new game, which looks to be more of a “classic” Atelier game but this time including Shop management! Hope that part of the game works well, I remember very fondly my time playing Recettear.
Finished Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land!
I enjoyed my time with the game, but it’s a definitely a flawed one.
It’s buggy and poorly optimized, and it lacks the relaxing feeling and exceptional crafting systems that people expect when the see the “Atelier” name. I think the “Mixed” rating it has on Steam is excessive, but I can understand why some people are not happy with the game.
I really liked the worldbuilding and and exploration aspects. The crafting system is serviceable and better than most non-Atelier games, but honestly among the weakest in the series. Yumia is great and I hope to see more of her in future games. Story is fine, but too sparse for a game that tries to have more focus on that aspect.
Playing Never 7: The End of Infinity (part of the Ever 17/Never 7 Double Pack)!
After a lot of headaches with shipping and customs I finally got this. It’s a pack of two very old VNs (Never 7 is from 2000 and Ever 17 is from 2002) from the same author as the Zero Escape series which is one of my all-time favorite VN series.
You can clearly see the age of the game in the technical aspects - background and art look dated, and the low quality of the voices in Never 7 is definitely bothering me (thankfully I booted Ever 17 and they sound much better there). One thing I noticed is that this VN has a lot of choices - I took a peek and found a flowchart for the game and it looks very complex, so I’m most likely just doing an initial “blind” run then using a guide to get the remaining endings. 😃
As for the story, there’s already some hints of sci-fi elements (potentially time travel?) from the earlier scenes, with the protagonist having strange “premonitions” for the future. The main negative so far is that I don’t like most of the cast, but let’s see if they’ll grow on me over time.
Playing The Mummy Demastered!
Current side game. So far it’s a solid metroidvania.
Looks like this will be a very short game, I’m at ~30% of the map with a little more than 1h of gameplay. But I got this on a sale so this doesn’t bother me too much.
There’s a lot of videos and articles like this one discussing how Stage 1-1 of Super Mario Bros for the NES is a cleverly designed tutorial for the core game mechanics.
Not me, but this is a post by someone who had drift with a OLED after 1 year. https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/zuxqwn/joi_con_drift_refund_or_repair/
Is the Chapter 13 new content for the DE?
Yes, the ending for the WiiU version is what you see after Chapter 12.
Game Key Cards won’t function without connectiong to the internet to download anyway, so there’s probably not much point in including firmware updates on those.
I don’t believe it does. From what I’ve heard the Game Key Cards don’t even contain the game icon.
I’ve been using backloggery.com for more than 15 years.
It’s a simple, manual site, but I think that’s also its main strenght - I’ve had too many issues with other sites where I wanted to add a niche game I played but it was not in their databases, inconsistent naming between games in the same series, no ability to add duplicates when I occasionally double-diped on a game and so on.
It has all features I need - you can add reviews, notes, track priorities, wishlist, borrowed games, make custom lists, get stats… it’s also community supported with no ads.
The site was a bit stale without development for a while, but Drumble (the owner) finished a major rewrite last year and started developing new features again. You can check his profile here for an example.
Yes, I’ve had someone mod my Pro Controller with Hall Effect sticks after it started drifting, and it’s noticeable that the battery lasts less now.
Of course, it still lasts a LONG time.
Well, Switch is my favourite console, and I just wanted a faster Switch with Switch 2, so don’t really have any reason to not buy it.
Me too, but I’d rather wait a bit to see if there will be hardware-related headaches on this first batch of consoles. And while the extra processing power would be nice (see my comments on the Switch 1 struggling with Yumia), it’s not like there’s any games I really want to play for that platform right now.
I never finished Atelier Ryza, but didn’t it have a similar theme about people frowning upon Alchemy and an old kingdom getting destroyed because of it?
There was a plot point about an old kingdom self-destructing due to the abusing alchemy, but it didn’t reflect much in the present - alchemy was mostly forgotten, Empel and Ryza weren’t subject to heavy discrimination and so on. They also didn’t focus much of the story around it, it’s more about Ryza and friends growing into adulthood.
In this game almost everyone treats Yumia’s with suspicion and/or disdain at first, like a criminal who is “allowed” to use her skills because they need her for the expedition. The plot is almost entirely around the exploration of a kingdom similar to the one mentioned in Ryza, except this time we are going much deeper in detail in their misdeeds and abuses. Plus, the main villains of this game are people related to that kingdom that continue to abuse alchemy to this day, and almost every single party member has a tragedy in their backstory related to alchemy.
It’s not a comfortable controller for adults, but it’s a complete controller with all buttons that is very small.
It’s good for young kids or if you want something small you can carry around for quick sessions on the go - I used it several times to play simple games like Vampire Survivors while cycling on the gym.
I also use it for VNs at home - in those games you’re very often just pressing a button to move the text forward, so I hold with the buttons facing up, kinda like a small TV remote.
Got the flight module after that, and now I can fly everywhere! Completed FrontNav of Noctilum, and now just running around doing affinity missions so that I can be couple of levels above the recommended level to start the next chapter.
Just flying around the world doing quick missions, killing monsters and finding relics was so fun. Spent way too much time doing that.
How many of you have gotten it already?
On the fence about it.
I’ve been quite impressed with the reviews about its overall build quality, the results of some durability test videos I’ve seen are honestly amazing. Well, asides from the screen film that scratches easily, but I planned on putting a screen protector on it anyway. However, I’ve been traumatized from so many drift issues I had, and the teardowns show that the design for the new sticks is very similar. There’s some tweaks and it’s possible they solve the main issue, but I’m not convinced about that yet.
Since finding SD Express cards also quite hard around here (and I want a 1TB one) I’ll probably wait more to see people discussing/testing the new sticks, and also follow the backward compatibility progress since there’s 7(?) games I own that are still listed with problems.
Playing Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist of Memories & the Envisioned Land
The technical aspects of this game are starting to annoy me. Performance is wildly inconsistent, with some regions running quite well while others are a stuttering mess. This wasn’t as much a problem earlier in the game but gets significantly worse in the the later regions, in particular the third. Also, this game is a bit glitchy - I’ve had issues like clipping through ground, getting stuck in places you shouldn’t, or geometry not loading. It’s nothing gamebreaking and more on the “amusing” side, if you’re curious about it you can see some examples in this video. Finally, got a couple crashes too - but lost no progress thanks to the autosave. All of these things combined made it very clear to me that this game needed more development and testing time.
Despite the technical problems I’m still enjoying it, but it’s gotten to the point where I needed to highlight this for potential buyers. Word around is that it’s poorly optimized in other platforms as well, but obviously the Switch is the one that’s going to struggle the most due to that.
Back to the game, I took some time in the weekend to craft some equipment, which is another way of saying “tripled my stats”. And then I did if again some mid-week when I unlocked the facility that lets you duplicate crafted items, so I’m ridiculously overpowered right now. All of this was completely unnecessary given how easy the game is, but I just can’t resist when a game gives me the option to break it in half 😀.
I figured out that a (!) marker instead of a (?) in the map means it’s a Normal quest intead of Random one, so I went and cleared all of those that were available. Also finished the Pioneering goals for the first three regions, mainly because I got tired of seeing places I couldn’t get to because I needed the special ammo you get from these.
After that I focused on the main quest and got a lot of progress, and I’m now exploring the fourth (and probaly last) region. While I miss the all-wholesome story from the previous games I’m really liking the way this one touches on the dangers of alchemy - most of the sad/messed-up character backstories are related to its misuse, and there’s a lot of unpleasant implications on what the Aladiss Empire was trying to do with alchemy prior to its collapse. This is something that the Dusk trilogy had touched upon, but has a much bigger focus in this game.
The twist at the end of the 3rd area was really, really interesting too.
Yumia losing the memories of her mother that were her main drive at the start of her journey and having to find herself a new reason to continue caught me completely by surprise. I really like how this also works as a way for her to grow, as this re-evaluation lets her accept both the “good” and the “bad” parts of alchemy.
Another great thing is how this is subtly foreshadowed by several things - Rutger’s past where he “sold” memories through an alchemic device, the lore that mana is made from memories and also in-game mechanics - when you fall down from a high place you spend mana to avoid the damage.
So it makes sense in-universe that when Yumia falls from a gigantic structure she can survive using mana - but needs to get a lot of that, and unconsciusly uses her strongest memories to create it.
I’m probably close to the end now, so I should finish it during the next week. Still have to decide what I’ll be playing next, but feeling the urge to go back to VNs, been quite some time since I finished one of these.
Truly broken and deeply unfinished games shipping on cart/disc are (were?) still kinda the exception.
DoesItPlay? tries to track this, and they currently list 92% of Switch games being playable without a download. Most of the remanining 8% are games that don’t have all the content in the cart, not games that need a patch due to bugs.
And most likely it’s higher than 92%, since it’s easier to track down the “exceptions” that require download or are broken than it is to test the thousands of available games to say “yes, I played it through using the version in the cart and it worked fine”.
Nice, I love my Ultimate and I’m glad it will also be usable if/when I get a Switch 2.
The company said more updates are coming soon.
Also nice to hear. Hope the Micro gets an update, I often use it for “low interaction” games like VNs and it’s also good for small kids, my nieces really like it.
Took a peek to the specs:
So it’s about halfway between the OG Switch and the Deck in terms of weight.
There’s a lot to hate Nintendo for, especially regarding the switch 2, but this is totally not on them.
The screen being very close to edge of the box does sound like a poor choice that will make it easier to damage in transit. In particular when several people are commenting that the (fixed) plastic film on top of the screen scratches very easily.
That being said… this case is definitely the store’s fault.
Seeing a teardown of the Joycon and how similar to the Switch 1 the sticks look was the main reason I gave up on purchasing one for now. ☹️
Maybe the small changes they made or quality improvements in materials will be enough, but the drift problem was such a major pain in the OG Switch that I don’t want to risk dealing with that again.
While I agree with the overall message, I’d say this is on Nintendo for not doing proper communication on the topic. They must know this is a major concern for most people who had a Switch.
Yes, I get they don’t want to acknowledge the drift problem publicly, but surely someone on their marketing team can still come up with a way to discuss the improvements they made and alleviate fears.