Nintendo NX is now Switch (Official thread) (1 Viewer)

[Morgan Jolley]

Mine is waiting at my door for me and has been for a few hours. Luckily, I get out of work early on Fridays. (I actually only work every other Friday, and get out an hour early on the ones I do work. The defense industry is weird.)

GameRankings currently has Mario Odyssey as the highest rated game of all time. Even assuming that this will dip lower, that some negative reviews will come out just because of course they will, it's still a stellar achievement for Nintendo. Two of the best games ever made in the launch year of new hardware.

 

[LeoA]

This is the one that has me really wanting to buy a Switch right now.

I'm satisfied with Breath of the Wild on the Wii U, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe isn't enhanced enough that I feel the need to upgrade from the original, and all the nice arcade classics and such that have grabbed my attention on the eShop still aren't system sellers for me.

But Super Mario Odyssey is another matter entirely. It will be my first Switch game when I make the jump after my Wii U backlog diminishes. All the positive attention it's getting though makes the Wii U fan inside of me feel like Super Mario 3D World really got cheated by the lack of commercial success for the console it was developed for.

It's a top notch Mario platformer, but it woefully undersold and was quickly forgotten thanks to the Wii U's struggles. I'm glad I was able to experience it, but I wouldn't mind seeing that one be ported later on and given a second chance for the millions of Switch owners that never owned a Wii U.

 

[Clinton McClure]

I got to play for about 4 hours yesterday evening and, aside from a couple of very questionable “action” design choices in the way Mario moves and throws his hat (come on, Nintendo, please stop it with the stupid waggle controls), it’s a pretty good game. There are some irritating things that I’ve come across already but so far, I would give it an 8/10. If the controls were better (waggling a Pro controller is no fun) I would give it a 9.

 

[Sam Posten]

I turned off motion controls

 

[Morgan Jolley]

The motion controls haven't been a problem for me. And technically, you only NEED them for a handful of moons (out of the 800+ that are in the game). That said, I'm really enjoying the game a lot.

 

[Clinton McClure]

After putting in about 10 hours on the first three worlds trying to collect all the coins and items specific to each level and get all the moons, I’ve decided to only get the required amount of moons to progress through each level and just play the main quest.

Even turning off motion controls doesn’t help with the waggle-specific actions when using a Pro controller. It also becomes a bit awkward playing in handheld mode when you have to start shaking your Switch around to do different things. I know that’s how Nintendo designed it but it’s a bit short-sighted. We don’t all want to have to flick our wrists or flail our arms about while playing video games. I have also hit a couple of spots where a bizarre camera angle made me miss my jump or get hit by an enemy but that’s par for the course and I don’t hold that against the game, it’s a design flaw inherent in all games like this.

Overall, its still a fun and excellent game, although not as good and groundbreaking as Breath of the Wild. Even though I am enjoying it immensely, I still stick with my score of 8/10 because of unnecessarily convoluted controls.

 

[LeoA]

And technically, you only NEED them for a handful of moons (out of the 800+ that are in the game).

Sounds a lot like Super Mario 3D World in that sense.

You need to be able to blow into the gamepad's microphone to raise platforms and hit the touch screen to activate platforms, but it's only 3-4 levels of the entire game.

It's gimmicky, but Nintendo restrained themselves so that it didn't wear out its welcome. The only real harm was that it kept it from being 100% Pro Controller compatible.

 

[Morgan Jolley]

I'm about 11 kingdoms deep so far and I'm really enjoying Odyssey a lot. After the first few worlds I thought they were a bit small but I've found out just how DENSE they are. I've got about 250 moons and have probably gotten only about half of what is shown as "available" in the worlds I've visited.

I've read that it's literally impossible to get EVERY moon and coin before beating the game and "something" happens to unlock the rest later. So I'm not going too crazy to get everything now.

Also, I have 3 amiibo (Mario, Link, and Mega Man from Smash Bros.) and I've been using Uncle Amiibo and Talkatoo a lot to get hints on moons. I have over 4000 gold coins but I don't want to spend them paying the Toad guy for hints. If you use any of those 3 hint-givers in a world and they stop giving hints, it means that you've gotten all of the moons that you can get for now (the rest are available post-game).

 

[Morgan Jolley]

The plan Nintendo has for their internet subscription (coming next year some time) is $20 for the whole year with free NES games. That's not too bad.

 

[Clinton McClure]

I would be ok with that if I could download and keep the games on my Switch. If it’s a streaming service like PlayStation Now, they can keep it. I want a virtual console, not a subscription where the game I’m playing today becomes unavailable tomorrow.

 

[Morgan Jolley]

IIRC, the NES games included in the subscription will be download-and-keep so long as your subscription is active. At one point it sounded like it would be a rotating free game every month (as in, you get Mario for NES one month but Golf the next month and lose Mario) but Nintendo corrected that and said it would be yours to keep. Those NES games also are getting new online features, like online two-player coop in 2-player NES games.

 

[Clinton McClure]

That’s a bit more intriguing.

 

[Ruz-El]

monthly free NES games and the exclusives might get me to buy this thing!

 

[Clinton McClure]

Back on the topic of Super Mario Odyssey... I completed the main story yesterday morning and have unlocked two new kingdoms so far. I don’t know how much more time I’ll put into it since the main reason to play (for me, at least) is now gone. I will say that the Metro Kingdom festival is probably my favorite video game moment. Ever.

 

[Morgan Jolley]

The Metro Kingdom Festival is pretty awesome. Certainly one of the high points of the game.

There are about 860ish moons to collect in the game. After you beat the final boss, you unlock the ability to buy unlimited moons (at 100 coins each). So you can technically max out at 999 moons. You don't even have the ability to collect half of the game's moons until after you "finish" it. There are 3 bonus kingdoms (one you get for finishing the game, two you get access to once you find enough moons).

This game is pretty massive and a single play through to the credits is kind of just the beginning of it.

I'm at the point of about 750 moons. I haven't even touched the 2 bonus kingdoms that you unlock with getting enough moons. There's also all the bonus costumes that you have to buy (one costs 9999 coins) or unlock via other means.

 

[Clinton McClure]

I saw the 9999-coin bonus costume in the Crazy Cap Shop and spent about 3000 coins buying moons before I set off for the next bonus world. I’m not a completionist and I don’t care about 100%ing any game so I only played for about another half hour before I lost interest in the end-game stuff.

 

[LeoA]

Looks like my prediction that card sizes wouldn't be nearly big enough or economical enough for 3rd parties, is coming true.

 

[Morgan Jolley]

While it is a concern that 3rd parties have crappy solutions to the small cart sizes, it also says something that all of Nintendo's games have been under like 8 GB in size. Mario Odyssey is only like 5-6 GB and the game has a ton of content. Third parties are spoiled by the lack of size limitations on bluray discs and are lazy when it comes to either compression or designing games to use less space.

 

[Bryan^H]

I think Super Mario Odyssey is perfect. In every way. This feels like the sequel to Super Mario 64 that is 20 years over due.

 

[Morgan Jolley]

Honestly, I basically agree. The game is designed in such a clever way to allow hardcore players and casual newcomers the ability to make progress and advance without sacrificing a lot of the experience for either group. There's a ton to do, just moving around and jumping is fun, and there are so many little references and callbacks to the series. It's almost like a tribute to Mario as a franchise.

I have gotten every single moon with the exception of the final triple moon from the 2nd secret kingdom. I also have 3 sets of costumes to buy (9000 coins total for them) and then the remaining moons that need to be purchased to hit 999 moons (like 120 or so, I think).