Game Title: Dragon Ball FighterZ
Company: Arc System Works, Bandai Namco
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Retail | Digital Download
Battery Life: 2-3 hours
Download: 6.9 GB

Dragon Ball anything on handhelds and I am ALL OVER it. I love Dragon Ball and really wish I was a Dragon Ball Content Creator like Geekdom or Detective Q. But what I can do is do content on Dragon Ball content whenever a handheld game or two come out (or in Xenoverse 2’s case, every time new DLC drops).

Thankfully, things have come full circle for the Dragon Ball Nintendo Switch community. I remember when Xenoverse 2 was announced, and its launch was riddled with even reviewers that crapped on the game because “It isn’t FighterZ”. Well, now you’ve got it, so all of them can finally be happy.

Let’s finally get into this review. Labeled by even the famous Team Four Star as the greatest Dragon Ball fighting game of all time, here is my review of Dragon Ball FIGHTERZ for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

FighterZ takes place in the anime timeline during Dragon Ball Super between the Resurrection and Future story arcs. When strange energy waves appear around the world and suppress the Z Fighters’ power, an army of clones created by the Red Ribbon Army attack the world. Goku then became possessed by a soul that grants him the ability to regain his strength as he sets off to collect his allies and put an end to the clones and the strange energy waves.

The story I wouldn’t call bad, but parts of it are. My main problems are the fact that the story goes really far out of the way to make story aspects that explain the gameplay mechanics. A little tidbit to explain something isn’t a bad thing, but when you have significant amount of cutscenes just centered around “This is why you can play as multiple characters”, it’s really off-putting and takes away from the actual story.

The other is the antagonist. It’s great that we have an original villain in the game, but when the original villain is portrayed as a busty collection of about half a dozen fetishes that makes you feel like you’re watching a soft porn flick every time she’s on-screen. It really takes away from the story, especially since Dragon Ball has always been more tame in its sexual fanservice over the years.

However, not all is bad here. The game has a ton of character-to-character interactions that are hilarious and great to listen to. Even if you don’t like the overall story in FighterZ, the character reaction scenes when you have certain party combinations are a hoot to listen to for Dragon Ball fans.

Gameplay

DBFZ is a 2d fighting game with some RPG elements thrown into the mix. Unlike Xenoverse, this game pits you in 2D arenas with 3-character teams fighting with one another, not unlike the Marvel vs Capcom games.

As far as feature differences, the Switch version has some bonuses the other versions don’t. For Pre-Order Purchases, a Switch port of Dragon Ball Z: Super Butoden, the first Dragon Ball fighting game ever made, was given. You also have SSGSS Goku and SSGSS Vegeta unlocked for play from the get-go. The Switch port also includes some new local multiplayer options, like 6-player offline Party Matches.

Much like Xenoverse, you go into an Online or Offline Lobby when you start up the game, with the online lobbies having more features and game modes available to partake in. In the lobby, you can access different game modes, customize your teams and control styles, and use earned money to buy customization parts for your in-lobby avatar through an RNG-like Shop.

Game Modes are the biggest part of this game, though. For SIngle Player, you’ve got Story Mode, Local Battle, Arcade Mode, and the robust Practice Mode that contains in-depth tutorials not only for various gameplay mechanics but combo tutorials for every playable character. There’s also some smaller modes like Z Union to earn character-based rewards over time and the Replay Theater where you can watch previous multiplayer matches you were a part of.

Then, you have Multiplayer Modes, where things get a bit more mode-heavy. You have World Match, where you take your team to take on an opponent in PvP, Arena Matches where you can match up with others in the same lobby, and my personal favorite, Party Match. In that mode, you have 6 players in one match, each only controlling one character. I found this to be much more fun with the randomness of never knowing when you’ll start in the match and when your allies may tag you in to help them fight.

Out of all of these, though, Story Mode is where the bulk of the game will take place until you start working up the online ranks. The Story has 3 different story arcs, which are centered around different groups of characters to give different versions of the game’s events. The actual story mode gameplay has you in a Budokai 2-inspired grid, where you move from point to point, fighting off enemy parties until you find bosses and advance the story.

This is also where the RPG elements come in. Unlike the other modes, your characters level as you fight and you earn special skills that help in battle, like giving you regenerating health or more experience for each battle victory. This helps keep things fresh and different, outside of doing different party combinations for the special comical scenes I mentioned in the story section.

Now, let’s get out of Game Modes and into Gameplay. This is a 2D fighting game that I consider to be similar to the Marvel vs Capcom games. You are put in a 2D plane with 2 other characters in your party as assist characters. You can fly at your opponent and get them into combos and summon or switch out with your other characters at any time to make pretty extensive combo -> switch/assist attack chains.

The system is surprisingly simple, despite how technical it looks, though. You basically just have a four different attacks and can pull off different skills with some light D-Pad / Arrow Button inputs with each button. It’s pretty easy to learn the system and even easier if you enable “Simple” controls, where super attacks require Trigger holding with action buttons instead of the D-Pad gestures.

The real beauty is how it -looks-, though. The devs put a ton of work into this, as every single move every character does is a recreation of a scene from the Dragon Ball Z and Super anime shows. Even the more cinematic Super Attacks change camera angles and make it look like you are just watching an anime play out instead of playing a game. It really is a spectacle and showing of how hard Arc System Works worked on this. Everything is incredibly faithful to the source material.

Now, let’s get into how much time you’ll get out of this, which a lot of folks were worried about. This is, after all, a $60 game and isn’t a dozens of hours RPG like Xenoverse 2 was. Over the course of the tutorial mode, a few arcade runs, and my first completions of the 3 story arcs, I’d spent around 18 hours on the game. You could certainly get a few more hours into repeating Story Mode in Hard Mode to unlock more skills as well as getting 100% completion for story events, but you’ll be lucky to get 20 hours out of the game’s single player content.

Controls

Controlling the game isn’t terribly hard (though it’s far easier with the Pro Controller to pull off Super Attacks with the default control scheme), and it’s set up pretty well. There aren’t any motion gestures or touch screen controls.

You move around the arenas with the Left Analog Stick or the D-Pad / Arrow Buttons. The trigger buttons are used for the Air Dash and Super Attacks/Guard Break Attacks. Finally, the Face / Action buttons are used for your 4 attack types, most of the time combined with directional input for special or variation attacks.

Presentation

Graphically, this game is the definition of beauty. When you see the introduction cutscenes and even gameplay in docked mode, there are very few if any flaws in the graphics engine. The Cell-Shading of this game is so in-depth that it looks like you’re watching an anime. You do see some jaggies here and there in Handheld Mode, but it doesn’t take a lot from the game.

In terms of performance, Single Player battles run at a perfect 60 frames per second. The game does lag in multiplayer, though. I have yet to be in a single MP match where there weren’t any frame dips or drops. Although this is due to the P2P nature of the game’s online, it is still pretty frustrating to get into a match and see even the intro cinematics freezing in and out before you even get to gameplay.

Battery Life

This is a bit of a weird one. I did Battery Tests when the DBFZ Beta came out and, for some reason, it has more Battery TIme than the full game does. Here are my times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 10 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 18 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 52 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-FI – 3 hours, 02 minutes

This still isn’t terrible, but it’s not super-great either.

In conclusion, Dragon Ball FighterZ is a great 2D fighter filled with fun gameplay, beautiful visuals, and lots of fanservice for series fans. The only parts that bring it down is the overly-fetishy villain and the story trying too hard to justify gameplay mechanics rather than just letting the story flow on its own. If you want a fun 2D fighter for multiplayer, this is a great choice, but those wanting a ton of single player content would be better off looking towards Xenoverse 2.

Final Score: 9/10

Game Title: The Midnight Sanctuary
Company: Sony Music Entertainment Japan / UNTIES
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Digital Download
Battery Life: 2.5 – 3 hours
Cloud Save Support: Yes
Download: 2.2 GB

I’ve played a lot of Visual Novels in these almost-5 years I’ve been playing and reviewing handheld games, from Psycho Pass on the Vita to the risque Nekopara Volume 1 on the Switch. Out of all of these, however, none of them were anything but 2D novels with 2D graphics and renders and 2D cutscenes.

That ended this week when I was pointed towards a new VN that launched on the Switch and other consoles recently. Unlike others, it was 3D in nature. A Story-based Visual Novel with full 3D cutscenes rather than 2D made it stand out on its own, let alone its unique theme and setting.

Let’s not talk too much longer and get right to it. This is my review of The Midnight Sanctuary for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

TMS has you in the shoes of a Guide from a small Japanese Christian Village, one of many “hidden” villages that had to disguise their faith as Buddism in ages past. To try to modernize the village and attract visitors, the pastor and chief bring in a spiritually-attuned expert to help dig up the village’s history and make a guidebook for tourists.

Not all is at it seems, as eerie small towns never are. It isn’t long after she arrives and starts digging up folklore that she happens upon a very different take on the Christian Faith surrounding a Messiah-like being called “The Saint” that is somehow tied to the fact that life and death have a completely different meaning and reality in this town compared to the rest of the world. A simple research mission quickly turns into an adventure filled with paranormal beings and a town’s dark and grim history.

While this game’s story is extremely fascinating, it starts off a little slow. The first couple chapters of the game are pretty sluggish, but once it gets moving and the paranormal starts becoming a factor, its pretty intense and thrilling. I wouldn’t call it “scary” as far as horror standards go, but there are tons of jaw-dropping moments with its religious and dark themes.

Gameplay

TMS is a 3D visual novel game. In VN fashion, you will be cycling through story scenes and enjoying the plot while also navigating through different areas of the town that mixes up the order of some of these events. All in all, though, it’s a VN where you experience a story being told.

The way the game works is that you have story scenes and are always cycling back to a map of the village that lists different areas you can navigate to. All of these areas have new story scenes, but you can choose them in any order, which helps give you a little freedom and a bit of an interaction to do. You don’t have dialogue choices or different endings, so the order of scenes is about as interactive as the game can get.

The game does contain a feature and option that I absolutely love that I wish more games would utilize: The ability to replay any cutscene encountered thus far. I really appreciate this feature because I always make a ton of save files for VNs for showcasing different parts of the game in reviews, but having this replay feature makes my job that much easier.

That’s about all there is to the gameplay. You do have different text and voice options like auto-advancing text, but nothing too extensive, compared to other VNs.

Now, let’s talk length. This is a very affordable game with being only $9.99 on the eShop, so I wasn’t expecting it to be a super-long game. It has some nice length to it for its price, clocking in at around 5-6 hours from start to finish.

Controls

Controls aren’t too extensive. No motion controls, so you’ll always be using the buttons.

You can move around the menus with the Arrow Buttons / D-Pad and the action buttons to interact. Unlike typical Nintendo style, the B button serves as “Select/Confirm” and A serves as cancel, adopting the more PlayStation/Xbox control setup. You can also use Y to pause the game and X to toggle the Auto-Advance options.

All in all, it’s not too hard to grasp, plus the game is set to auto-advance text by default, so you can just start it and enjoy the game.

Presentation

Visually, this game has a very unique style to it. It almost looks chibi, but not quite. It also has a stained-glass look to it, with many characters appearing as a stained-glass background in their robes, as if they’re transparent and you see it behind them. Now, this design is really unique and I’ve never seen anything like it, but it definitely can be hard on the eyes. It takes some time for you to adjust seeing cutscenes move in this way.

Audio is something I can say something about, though. In handheld mode, the voice volume seems abnormally low. I had to jack the volume up to max to hear them properly, even when I maxed them out in settings. This wasn’t as much of a problem in docked mode, though. Just with handheld / tabletop modes.

Performance I have no complaints about. It looks really smooth and clear, and it plays perfectly on the Switch with fast loading sequences and no frame drops.

Battery Life

Battery Life surprised me, as I expected a bit more than we actually got. Here are my times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 30 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 39 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 49 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-FI – 3 hours, 01 minute

This isn’t bad, in any way, but I was expecting a bit more from it.

In conclusion, The Midnight Sanctuary is probably the most unique VN I’ve ever played, breaking the genre boundaries by including 3D cutscenes and including a very dark, religious theme that really picks the brain about what everyone’s faith truly is. It does have some faults with a slow starting chapter and a couple presentation nitpicks, but if you’re into religious and paranormal stories, this one’s worth checking out.

Final Score: 8/10

Game Title: Mega Man 11
Company: Capcom
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Retail | Digital
Battery Life: 3 – 4 hours
Cloud Save Support: Yes
Download: 2.1 GB

I thought the Vita was basically a Mega Man machine when it comes to handhelds, but boy, was I wrong. The Nintendo Switch has become the hub for nearly all-things Mega Man, when it comes to handheld gaming. We got Mega Man Legacy Collections 1 + 2, Mega Man X Legacy Collections 1 + 2, and the Switch just got the newest Mega Man game from Capcom.

With this Mega Man overload going on, we have lots of retro goodness, but what about the brand-new goodness? Is Mega Man 11 the melding between the original and X series that I thought it was when it was first revealed? Let’s find out!

This is my review of Mega Man 11 for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

Mega Man 11 takes place during the original Mega Man series, where Dr. Light, along with Mega Man and Roll are working on maintaining robots that are out and helping people in the world. In the midst of this, Dr. Wily shows up and kidnaps 8 of them, aiming to enhance them with the “Double Gear” system, which Wily was once ridiculed for trying to develop. In response, Light gives Mega Man a prototype of that same system and sends him to stop Wily, once again.

The plot of this game I find to an interesting one. Most of the original-series games didn’t have much of a story at all. 11 not only has a story, but gives background info on Dr. Light and Wily, particularly in how they had their falling out and began to be antagonistic towards one another.

Gameplay

Mega Man 11 is a 2D platforming game with combat elements thrown into the mix. Big surprise there, right? Like most series games, you’ll be navigating through side-scrolling environments and shooting down enemies and bosses until you clear it and move onto the next.

First of all, the Nintendo Switch version of 11 is a bit unique in that it contains an Amiibo feature the other versions do not have. Once per day, you can scan a Mega Man-themed amiibo figure during gameplay and you can get an assortment of random benefits, like an extra life or your HP gauge being refilled. It’s a nice little extra benefit for those playing on the go.

Now, let’s talk the game, itself. This is an NES-style Mega Man game, yet it’s not. The Stage Select, Boss Intro music, and even difficulty levels really scream NES Mega Man and cater to people like me that grew up in that era.

However, the modern elements really help things out here. First of all is the Double Gear system. This lets you temporarily activate special powers, mainly being the Power Gear that powers up your weapons (in what would normally be a “charged” version of a sub-weapon) and the Speed Gear that slows down time around you. The latter is especially useful and crucial to the game to be able to freely move around while bosses and enemies are in slow-motion.

Secondly, the item and upgrade system. Although this had a distinct Mega Man X look, the way it handles upgrades is very different and more akin to X8. As you complete stages, you collect Bolts that are used as currency. These can be used for one-time-use items like E-Tanks or Spike Protection (stops instant-death when touching spikes), or permanent upgrades that you can equip to enhance the Double Gear system, increase the probability of health drops, and upgrades of that sort.

The modern features are definitely a necessity as this is not a modern Mega Man game in its difficulty. The levels are long and unforgiving and, outside of the Easy Difficulty, you have finite lives before the stage restarts. It mimics the NES Mega Man games in that you need to memorize the levels as you go so it doesn’t take you as long when the boss inevitably gives you a Game Over and you have to replay the entire stage again.

What about the aspects of the game, though?  The only real disappointment I found in Mega Man 11 is how it sets and hypes up boss fights with Block Man and fails to live up to it with pretty much everything else.  When you fight Block Man, his “2nd Phase” has him go through a really intense transformation into a giant boss monster that you fight.  Naturally, I expected every boss to do this, only to have none of them do it.  I wouldn’t call it a major flaw, but rather a confusing imbalance.

Now, looking past all of its features and modernisms and retroisms, what are you getting in this package? As far as the main quest goes, you’re not getting a ton of time. With Normal having finite lives, I beat the game in around 6 hours, 4 of which I’m convinced were nothing but retrying from Game Overs. In all reality, it’s a 2-hour game. Depending on your skill level, though, it may take you up to 8 hours to get past the difficulty and stage-learning. The length really comes more from having to repeat stages after Game Overs than anything else.

There is a good amount of post-game here, though. Outside of the Cheat items you can buy from the shop upon beating the game, 11 sports in-game Trophies/Achievements as well as Challenge Mode, which gives you dozens of special tasks you can do, be it repeating stages under time limitations or going through a special Boss Rush.

Controls

Controlling the game isn’t too hard. The nice thing here is that the scheme is customizeable, so you can set anything to anything and go at it under your preferred control style.

By default, you move with the Left Analog Stick or the D-Pad / Arrow Buttons. The L and R triggers are used fot the Double Gear system and ZL/ZR are used for cycling through sub-weapons. A is used for sliding and B for jumping. Finally, Y is used for shooting, and X can activate the special Rush abilities to help you platform.

Presentation

Graphically, I can’t complain too much. Mega Man 11 takes a note out of X8 and MHX’s book and opted for a 2.5D style into of the NES-style pixel art. THe renders for all the backgrounds look basically perfect. There are a few jaggies here and there on Mega Man, but they’re not exactly easy to see and point out.

Performance is wonderful as well. You get a perfect 60 fps in both docked and handheld mode, so Capcom did a great job with optimization.

Battery Life

Things didn’t change much between the demo and full game, thankfully. Here are my Battery Times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 18 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 28 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 02 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 11 minutes

All in all, this is pretty good. You’ll get a good half of the game done on a single charge.

In conclusion, Mega Man 11 is a good mix of NES-inspired level design with more modern features to make it more accessible. Although the difficulty makes the experience frustrating from time to time, this is a quality platformer that sticks to its formula with just enough new stuff to keep things fresh.

Final Score: 9/10

Game Title: Drift Legends
Company: Black Fox Entertainment
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Digital Download (Releases Oct. 18, 2018)
Battery Life: 3.5 – 4.5 hours
Cloud Save Support: Yes
Download: 902 MB

Despite the Switch being over 2 years old, there is still a significant lack of driving and racing games on the platform. The biggest one of note for me was Gear.Club Unlimited. While that game is getting a sequel in December, a new game has popped up to help scratch that car itch for handheld gamers, and only for 5 bucks.

Starting as a Mobile game, and then a PC game, and now a handheld game, this game promised a lot in its $4.99 price tag: Realistic Physics, 40 cars, tons of events. So, how is it? Let’s find out. Here is my review of Drift Legends for the Nintendo Switch!

Gameplay

Drift Legends is an Arcade-Style driving game that consists of drift challenges. During each event, you’ll be driving your car around racetracks with the goal of building up drift scores within a time or lap limit. It’s essentially like the Drift Events in Gran Turismo, but with the whole game being around those events.

When you go into the game, you’ve got 5 Game Modes/Options you can go into. For driving, you’ve got Practice Mode to test out cars on various tracks, Career Mode to go through car-specific events for high rewards, and Daily Events that have Career-like events that alternate each day.

Then you have customization with Car Selection that’s used to buy and equip different cars and Car Tuning that’s used for buying paint colors and rims, though it’s worth noting that none of these “tuning” options actually change the way the cars drive and perform.

Now, let’s talk about content differences between Switch and the Mobile/Steam versions. First of all, the Online Multiplayer (Ghost Races) was not put into the Switch version of the game, due to problems the developers had in configuring their servers on Nintendo’s network. This is in all other versions of the game and works with cross-play between PC, Android, and iOS. Black Fox told me they hope to add this in a later patch, but no guarantees.

This version also had its cinematic Photo Mode removed in favor of the Switch’s built-in screenshot button for taking similar shots during replays. On the bright side, they also removed In-App Purchases for money while significantly reducing the prices for each car.

Career Mode is the biggest thing you’ll be doing. In Career Mode, you are set on tracks with Drift Point Goals to meet within either a time limit or a lap limit. If you meet the goal, you get a bunch of cash. The catch is that every event is car type-specific. You could go from a USA-only event to a 4-Wheel-Drive-only event.

This is the game’s biggest bit of feel, as you go from event to event and drive different cars. The only thing is acquiring said cars. Cars cost a lot of money, and Practice Mode doesn’t offer you much in terms of purchasing new vehicles. So, you go through previous events to get the money to buy new cars to do the new event, and this process repeats.

At the start, this isn’t a big deal. You can easily get through the Beginner League in Career Mode with only doing a couple races between a few events where you run out of new cars to use without buying. However, when you get to the higher modes, it gets longer and longer. Despite the fact that you get more credits and cars cost less in this version, it still gets to be very repetitive and grindy towards the end of the “Normal Mode” campaign, which has you stopping to do 12+ races for each new car for singular events and repeating the process as you keep going.

Now, let’s talk about the driving, itself. When you get into an event, you drive around on race-tracks and drift/skid around corners to build up drift points. As per usual with Drift Challenges, you lose points if you hit the walls, encouraging you to do skilled drifts around corners. The base gameplay is pretty fun if you like drifting around, though do note that it’s like drifting games or rally games in that you’re the only car on the track.

Drifting is easy, though. A little -too- easy. The more I played the game, the more I found the car handling was off. Cars that should be much tighter and hard to turn were drifting and sliding at the slightest touch of the steering, while other cars that should drift easily didn’t. It’s made fine if you want to drift easily and have fun, but not if you’re looking for a realistic simulation, which the game advertises itself as doing.

However, I haven’t talked about the great thing about the game: The Amount of Content. For a 5-dollar game, having upward of 40 cars available to drive around in sounds like a great deal. If you throw together all of the different practice tracks, daily events, and career events’ separate difficulties/rewards, you can easily get 5-8 hours out of this game, which is great for the price.

Controls

Controls are very difficult and awkward in this game. I’ll say this: THere are no touch controls outside of menus and the control scheme is locked in place. Just as the PC Version (as I’ve heard) can’t remap controls to different keys, you cannot remap the controls to different buttons.

Here’s the control scheme: The Left Analog Stick (and not the D-Pad) is used for navigating menus. Y is used for acceleration and B is used for the normal brake. A is the E-Brake and the L trigger is used for changing camera angles. These face button controls are also reflected on the Arrow Buttons / D-Pad. This is very awkward as it makes it extremely hard to accelerate and tap the normal brakes.

Another thing is the mode the game puts the Joy-Cons into. This is a game without motion controls, yet it goes into a “Upright” Single Joy-Con Mode when you play it, like 1-2-Switch and Arms do. You can navigate fine when you’re in the game, but whenever you exit it, it still acts in single mode, so navigating around the HUD requires analog movements or re-connecting the controllers via settings.

The weirdness is that the game doesn’t support the double joy-con “grip” mode or the Pro Controller, so you have to use it like this.

Presentation

The presentation of this game is the thing I have the least amount of problems with. Visually, it’s not as smooth as the PC or Mobile versions with the occasional jaggie here and there, but it looks decent enough for what it is.

Performance is mostly good as well. Actual driving is very smooth and without frame-drops, though navigating the menus can be laggy at times. On many occasions, the game would have input lag when moving around and freezing for a few seconds when trying to go into different options.

Battery Life

When we talk Battery Life, it’s one of the game’s more positive features. Here are my Battery Times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 23 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 48 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 14 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 29 minutes

Considering each event is only a few minutes long, you can get a ton of this game done on just a single charge.

In conclusion, Drift Legends is a decently-fun arcade drifting game that disguises itself as a simulation game. The actual driving is a lot of fun for drifting fans and you get a lot of cars and events for your 5 bucks. However, the missing Multiplayer mode, grindy nature of acquiring new cars, and control problems make the Switch the weakest version of this game.

Final Score: 5.5/10

Game Title: Word Puzzles by POWGI
Company: Lightwood Games
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Digital
Battery Life: 4.5 – 6 hours
Cloud Save Support: Yes
Download: 80.4 MB

Word Puzzles are a guilty pleasure when it comes to games. Awhile back, we got a great little Word Search game on the Switch that I really enjoyed. When you don’t want some action-packed, strategy game, it’s nice to just sit back and enjoy a little casual word puzzle to pass the time.

Thankfully, the Powgi games weren’t done there. Later this month, we’re getting a nice, big variety of puzzles for all you casual players out there. Here is my review of Word Puzzles by Powgi for the Nintendo Switch!

Gameplay

This is a large collection of different sorts of Word Puzzles. From cross-words to guessing games to unscrambling games, a lot of interesting and unique puzzles involving figuring out or finding words.

One thing I will note is that the Wii U version’s “Amiibo” feature seems to have been removed, which was used for making custom puzzles.

There really isn’t any “progression” in this game, as all of the puzzles are unlocked from the get-go. You have 6 different puzzle types, each with hundreds of puzzles a piece for you to solve, all built to make you think and try to figure out and recall knowledge to be able to solve.

The big appeal of this game vs the Word Search game is the variety in what you’re doing. As I said above, you’ve got 6 different types of puzzles to go through. You’ve got the simpler Word Maze, which is like a Word Search, but the words move around the grid and complete a Maze-like pattern to the more difficult Circles where you to unscramble circle grids to share letters and still spell out words of a certain theme.

If you’re not terribly big on brain-bending puzzles, there is a built-in Hint feature. The game will log if you use it, but it’ll make things easier, like revealing what words are in each Word Maze instead of having you guess or giving you the first letters of each word in the guessing-oriented games.

Of course, if you ask me, the most interesting part of this game is how much content you’re getting here. If you recall, Word Search by Powgi gives you around 320 puzzles for $7.99. Word Puzzles costs $9.99 but offers you far more, at well over 1,300 different puzzles to solve. If you ever get tired of that, though, you can also buy DLC for $9.99 to double that amount to over 2,600 puzzles, which is a massive leap over that 320 puzzles in Word Search, which is substantial in itself when compared to Word Search books you can buy in retail stores.

This ties into length to give you tons to do. Each puzzle isn’t very long, normally clocking me an average of 30-60 seconds, making the entire game a bare minimum of 10-12 hours of content. If you’re a fan of Word Puzzles, you’re gonna be very, very busy.

Controls

Controls are pretty simple here. When you’re in handheld mode, you can do everything with the touch controls, but button controls are also an option.

Navigating the menus is done with the Arrow Buttons / D-Pad, but can also be done with either of the analog sticks. The triggers can be used for activating hints for puzzles. You actual interact with puzzles with the A button for selecting options and B for canceling options. It’s pretty simple.

Presentation

Not much to say here. There aren’t any “graphics”, really. The game looks nice and clear and it never had any problems freezing or lagging on me.

Battery Life

As expected, the Battery Range of this game is pretty amazing. Here are my Battery TImes, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 44 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 5 hours, 02 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 5 hours, 54 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 6 hours, 15 minutes

This is just slightly under Word Search by Powgi, but still great.

In conclusion, Word Puzzles by Powgi has a lot to offer any fan of word puzzles, from cross-word mazes to word scrambles. On the downside, the Wii U’s amiibo feature is gone, but with over 1300 puzzles available for ten bucks and that much more available via DLC, you won’t be running out of puzzles to do anytime soon.

Final Score: 9.5/10

Game Title: Starlink – Battle for Atlas
Company: Ubisoft
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Retail | Digital (No toys required)
Battery Life: 2 – 3 hours
Cloud Save Support: Yes
Download: 12.6 GB

Ever since the Switch came out, there’s one sci-fi franchise I’ve wanted to be on it that hasn’t been on it: Star Fox. As much as Wii U fans seemed to hate it, I’ve been crossing my fingers for Star Fox Zero to be ported over to the Switch, like many games before it. It hasn’t (yet!), but we did get Star Fox on the Switch this week.

While technically not a Star Fox game, but with how they handled the cross-over, it might as well be one. Here is my review of Starlink: Battle for Atlas for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

Starlink takes place in an alternate reality where a strange alien life-form crashed on Earth, bringing the secret to interstellar travel. As a thank you, a group of humans set off through the universe to help that alien find its home again, only to be attacked once they warp into a star system called Atlas.

With their captain and main reactor core stolen, the crew is left to pick up the pieces and go after their attackers, turning a home-coming journey into a fight for the survival of the Atlas system.

At the same time of the initial ambush, the Star Fox team happen upon the human ship and come to their aid, deciding to work together with the humans as they travel through Atlas to find Wolf, who’s been tracked to this part of space.

The story isn’t a bad one. All of the main characters have special and unique quirks that come out during cutscenes, and the inclusion of the Star Fox crew definitely raises the charisma and humor of everything going on.

Gameplay

Starlink is an open-world (space?) 3D flight combat game with RPG and toys-to-life elements. Across the entirety of the game, you’ll be flying around in ships meant for space travel as you explore planets and engage in intense dogfights with both alien lifeforms and alien spaceships.

Note that I said this game has Toys-2-Life ‘elements’, and that’s because of how the digital version of the game works. If you buy Starlink’s physical copy, you get this large toy mount and have to change out toy figures for different ships, characters, parts, etc. But with the digital version, you just navigate your inventory menus and you’d never be able to tell that it’s a toys-to-life game at all.

Before moving on, though, let’s talk about Star Fox. I expected the cross-over content to be pretty short, amounting to a mission or two and that’s it. However, we got a lot more. Not only do the Star Fox missions account for a good 2-3 hours of the game, but Fox is included in a lot of the CG cutscenes for the game’s main campaign and he has voiced dialogue for virtually all cutscenes, along with interacting with NPCs. It feels like he and his team were created as a part of the core game, rather than being a cameo/cross-over character.

So, main progression. How does it work? You are in a huge open-world star system with free-roam, but missions will give you waypoints to where you can do those missions or advance the story forward. When you reach those points, you’ll mostly either be fighting enemies or collecting resources, though the second half of the game gives you a lot more to do when you’re introduced to facility management, defending allies, and fighting giant bosses.

The one thing I would advise that you do is save free-roaming for later on in the game. When I was about 2 hours in, I free-roamed a bunch and found the lack of different things to do a bit boring. When I pushed the story forward, a lot more became available to do and it became much less so, even in the same areas because all of the extra things you can do hadn’t become available.

Let’s talk about gameplay, though. When you’re flying around, you have 2 flying modes: Hover Mode where your ship navigates while hovering above the ground and Flying Mode, where you have more free-roam to greater heights. Both of these are very easy to learn, with little extra bits outside of a recover button for when you run into objects and a dodge/boost option to use up fuel for when you need to use the boost to chase.

The customization comes with combat. You have a bunch of weapons you can equip to your ship to customize it, along with giving you elemental attacks for enemy weaknesses and puzzles. Any ship can use any weapon, outside of the built-in laser cannons of Star Fox’s Arwing. It’s like a Lego game with the parts that can be combined with pretty much any other part and is interesting to see the combinations that can be made.

The customization goes further with different pilots that have different chargeable abilities and modifications that you can unlock and combine to enhance the stats of both ships and individual weapons as you progress through the game. There are a ton of different ways to play, from playing with the laser cannons like a Star Fox game to throwing massive flamethrowers onto a tiny wing-less cockpit.

Now, all of this is a ton of fun. The flying is fast and the combat is exhilirating. It’s not all fun and games, though. When you get to a certain point of the story, you heavily have to dive into planet management and facility management gameplay mechanics. At first, this feels a bit different than the prior parts of the game, but with how much of it you have to do without much of anything in between, it goes from feeling different to feeling repetitive and grindy when all you’re doing is making facilities in one planet and then another and then another and then another. That part of the game could’ve used more variety instead of just shoving nothing but management at you for a good 5-6 hours straight.

Speaking of time, how much content are we talking here? I spent a pretty fair amount of time doing side-content, especially the Star Fox and Main Story’s own side campaign, and I cleared the game in a little over 20 hours. Once you beat the game, you can clear up any unfinished side-quests and manage enemies that spawn and attack your planets. Even so, I don’t see that adding any more than 5 hours, at most, unless you’re playing on a high difficulty setting or didn’t do anything but required missions beforehand.

Controls

Controlling the game isn’t too hard, though it’s worth noting that single joy-con play is not possible. With local co-op being in the game, two joy-cons are required for each player.

The Left Analog Stick is used to accelerate and decelerate and the Right Analog is used for moving around. The Arrow Buttons / D-Pad are used for menu navigation, along with accepting side-missions during gameplay. The ZL/ZR triggers are used for firing weapons and L/R triggers are used for activating pilot abilities and toggling between flight modes.

Then we have the face buttons. A and X are used for the Boost/Shield that use energy and B is used for jumping in Hover Mode.

It’s not too complicated, and the game does a great job of explaining what everything does as situations come up.

Presentation

Graphically, I wouldn’t call the game perfect, but it does look really good. You can see a jaggie here and there in docked mode, while handheld mode has a slight blurring effect on objects close to the camera. The latter is certainly noticeable, but doesn’t negatively impact the experience when in combat.

Performance is great. I never saw the frames drop, load times aren’t terribly long, and the game never crashed on me. The only thing I will say is that the game would glitch from time to time, not showing parts of the HUD when collecting materials or not playing audio during some scenes, even when they played fine the previous encounter.

Battery Life

I wasn’t expecting a mountain of Battery Life, but what I got wasn’t awful. Here are my Battery Times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 18 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 21 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 34 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 49 minutes

It’s about what I expected. Not a lot, but still a decent amount for this sort of game.

In conclusion, Starlink: Battle for Atlas is an fun and intense open-world space exploration game, with a big Star Fox cross-over on top. It isn’t perfect, with a very grindy section towards the end of the game along with some small glitches, but if you’re a fan of Star Fox or just space flying games, it’s definitely worth a look.

Final Score: 8.5/10

Game Title: Valkyria Chronicles
Company: SEGA
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Digital Download
Battery Life:  3 – 4 hours
Download: 

As a lover of RPGs, I will admit that I’ve got preferences of games I could play anytime and those that I can’t. Strategy RPGs are the kind of RPGs that I can really get into, but not in mass succession. Thankfully, there are bunches of SRPGs that twist around the formula and combine with other genres to make things more interesting, both for RPG fans and non-RPG fans.

One shining example of this is the Valkyria series. Revolution aside, the series has melded the SRPG genre with the Third-Person Shooter genre, giving off very strategic turn-based combat with the action-like thrill of a shooting game.

Despite being unable to acquire and review the newest game of the series, the original has graced the Switch and handhelds in general for the first time. Originally released on the PlayStation 3, here is my review of Valkyria Chronicles for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

VC takes place in the 1930s in a fictional version of Europe called Europa. Two countries have been at war over a magical resource known as Ragnite, with the smaller country of Gallia staying neutral in the conflict. When a rich supply of Ragnite is discovered within Gallia’s borders, however, The Empire invades, causing the Gallians to take up arms to defend their home.

The story is centered around Weklin Gunther, a small-town nature-lover-turned-squad leader whom fights off the Empire when they invade his hometown and earns himself a leader position in the Militia because of it. Together with his sister and a local patrol officer, they put together a squad and travel the country, aiming to take it back from the Empire.

As the series is known for, the plot of this game is very good. Every character has a ton of charisma in and out of gameplay, and there’s a lot of background mythos that makes this both a history fantasy story and a science fiction one.

Gameplay

As I said in the intro, VC is a Strategy RPG filled with Third-Person Shooter elements. As you go through each stage, you move units in turn-based combat and fight with various firearms like rifles and grenades.

First of all, this is not VC Remastered that released on the PS4. While Remastered didn’t have content differences from the original, outside of including the DLC, this also doesn’t have the redesigned R&D and improved sound quality from that release.

Progression in this game takes place in menus in the form of a history-book (as if the game is a tale being retold by a scholar or teacher). The main modes here are Book Mode that holds story scenes and story mission, Headquarters that lets you recruit new characters and customize/upgrade your tanks and units, and Skirmishes that are repeatable missions you can use for experience and money. There are others as well, like Personnel that lets you see character backstories, but those 3 are the ones you’ll be constantly in and out of.

The customization and characters of this game are really unique because of how they are done. At HQ, you can allocate experience points to classes as well as spend money to upgrade weapons and tank materials. The way leveling works is that you level classes and when a class levels, every unit of that class levels up with it. This makes leveling individual units vastly easier than other SRPGs.

For better and for worse, character customization is very in-depth. Every character has their own character quirks and personality traits and they all have latent abilities that are based on those quirks. You have some characters that do well when certain other characters are around, like they’re besties. You also have negative abilities to go off their personalities, like lonely-prone characters having stat decreases when they explore areas where they’re by themselves. There was a lot of effort put into making every “generic” character feel like they’re part of the story.

Getting out of customization, let’s talk about gameplay and combat. When you are thrown into a mission, you have set areas where you can place your units. Once battle starts, you go through turn-based combat where you have a certain number of points that a character will use when they take action during that turn, with units using one point and the tank using 2. Each unit can freely move around the level during their turn, but have a set number of Action Points for moving around, and each class has different movement ranges.

As you move around, you can stop to use items to heal or attack with one of your weapons. This is where the interesting bits really come into play. When you fire a weapon, you aim like you do in a third-person shooter where hitting certain body parts do different amounts of damage than other parts. Every weapon has range and accuracy and damage ratings depending on how close or far you are from your target.

The other aspect of it being a shooter is the fact that you can be attacked as you move around during your turn. If you are moving from cover to cover and walk into the range of an enemy scout or shock trooper, they will start firing on you with their rifles and machineguns until you’re out of their range or start your own attack phase. This goes both ways, as your units can do the same to enemy units. This makes the game a lot more difficult, as it’s very easy for a unit to be knocked out just from moving around.

This aspect is also where the game starts to get a bit glitchy. There are a lot of times, where you will be shot at and the game will have a bit of a delay when you go into a different mode. I saw many cases where I would be moving into my attacking phase and the 2-3 seconds my character was raising their gun and focusing in that phase and I’d keep taking damage from being shot at while other times, the moment I hit the R button, they’d stop firing. It’s not very consistent.

This system works very well and feels very unique for a strategy game. This is a bit of a difficult game with lots of difficulty spikes, but not ones you can’t get around with good strategy. While I would say there is a fair amount of Skirmish grinding to be done, you’ll be spending more time on story progress than you will with grinding for levels.

Now let’s talk about content and length. The base story campaign will likely take you at least 25-30 hours to get through, plus a couple other campaigns with the included DLC. For $20, that’s a lot of RPG to dive into and enjoy.

Controls

Controlling the game isn’t too hard and most everything is explained to you during the tutorial missions you’re sent through.

You move around with the Left Analog Stick and move the camera with the Right Analog Stick. The D-Pad / Arrow Buttons are used to navigate menus as well as more sensitive and precise aiming in combat. The triggers are mostly used for opening the map and entering Attack Mode during gameplay, though they can be used in the menus to cycle through game modes.

As far as the face buttons go, A is used for confirming menu options and attacks while the B button is used for canceling options. X is used for pulling up character info and Y for changing aiming styles.

Presentation

Graphically, the game doesn’t look too bad. It’s not as crisp as the PS4 Remaster, but it looks loads better than the blurry graphics of the original PS3 release. It does look a little grainy around the edges in many of the cutscenes, though gameplay renders look good.

Audio is another one of the game’s glitches with this being the original release instead of the Remaster, however. There are many times where sound effects don’t sound when they should, and the audio for reloading weapons at the end of each turn are rarely ever synced with the actually animation. Listening to those bits sounds like you have lag between what’s happening and hearing the effect.

As far as performance is concerned, things aren’t bad, but there are some small frame drips here and there when you’re moving around levels. This isn’t as massive of a deal with this being an RPG, but it’s quite noticeable.

Battery Life

With this being a 3D game like this, I wasn’t expecting great battery life. Here are my times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 11 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 28 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 01 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 12 minutes

Gotta admit, this is more than I was expecting.

In conclusion, Valkyria Chronicles remains a very unique blend of RPG, Strategy, and Shooting. This not being the remaster does bring with it some glitchy audio and the frame-rate isn’t as perfect as I would like. However, if you’re a fan of JRPGs and RPG Shooters, it’s a great gem that finally brings the origin of the series to handhelds.

Final Score: 8/10

Game Title: Gal Metal
Company: Marvelous, XSEED Games
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Retail (DLC Included) | Digital Download
Battery Life: 3 – 4.5 hours
Cloud Save Support: Yes
Download: 2.8 GB

With as many rhythm games are out there in the world, it’s a known fact that they typically don’t have storylines to them. The Hatsune Miku Project Diva series did eventually get a storyline-centric game, but it took them 3 PSP games, a 3DS game, and 3 Vita games before Project Diva X came with a plotline and dialogue from the Divas.

The Switch’s rhythm games have been off and on with stories. Deemo has a storyline to it and a particularly-tragic one at that, but most others don’t really have a lot of plot to them. They’re just music games where you play music.

XSEED Games, however, just brought over a new rhythm game to the West for all you Drummers out there and it’s got tons of plot to cycle through. Here is my review of Gal Metal for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

Gal Metal is about a guy and girl that live in Japan who are abducted by aliens and both placed inside the girl’s body by aliens aiming to destroy Earth for the Voyager Satelite’s accidental destruction of their own home planet. With mere days left, they must go to the girl’s school and pose as her to gather up her friends in the Metal Band Club and their unique power to harm the aliens: The Power of Metal Music.

The story of the game is very cute and comical, showcased in a comic book/anime fashion with comic tiles for each of the scenes. There is good and bad, though. The good is that you can unlock special scenes for each character, showcasing funny little scenes of you hanging out with them and showing their personalities.

The only thing I don’t like is that the story tends to drag a bit during the chatroom sections.

Gameplay

Gal Metal is a freestyle-oriented rhythm game with some light RPG and Social elements thrown into the mix. You’ll be playing through songs with the joy-cons or buttons like any other music game, but you also have “daily life” segments where you can do stat management and hang out with other characters.

When you go into the game, you have a few game modes to choose from: Story Mode, Free Play, Practice, and Mode Change. You can go into the different songs in Free Play and Practice to play through them, but you can’t do that until you go through Story Mode to unlock them. So, really, you only really have Options and Story Mode to do until you progress further into the game.

Progressing in Story Mode is pretty different from other music games. Each chapter gives you a certain amount of time to go around town and partake in part-time jobs and hanging out to increase your stats, along with practicing to learn new rhythms to use in concerts.

This is also where character events can be viewed. As you spend time with characters in the same areas, or make certain dialogue choices during chatroom events, you unlock special events between you and the other members of the band. These events don’t give you any rewards, but they do offer cute little scenes for you to view and special trophy-like Badges if you’re more of a completionist, or just really want that “Eri’s BFF” badge like I did.

When you run out of time, or choose to go into it, you’ll perform a concert where you play Metal Music to fight off the alien invaders. This is very different from a typical rhythm game because you don’t have set inputs to do that fly towards you on the screen. As the band’s drummer, it’s up for you to decide what sort of beats and rhythms to use with the current song you’re playing. Each chapter gives you a few beats to practice for that song and it’s up to you to decide what you want to do.

This creates a bit of uniqueness as there is no “Fail mid-song” feature like other music games and you can use anything you want. As long as you can perform the beats and build up enough points to pass, you’ll proceed to the next chapter. I’ve never played a music game like this and, as a drummer in high school and college of my own life, appreciate the idea of a “freestyle” method of performing concerts.

As far as how much stuff there is, this game has a pretty short tracklist. They’re all unique tracks and not real-world songs (as far as I know), but there’s only 13 of them. If you throw the story content in as well, the game clocks in at only around 5 hours. For a $30 game, that’s not a whole lot of content to go around.

Controls

Here’s where the game is unique, but also has short-comings. There are 3 ways to play Gal Metal: Joy-Cons, Touch Screen, Buttons. The Joy-Cons use motion controls to be whipped forward like real-world drumsticks for special hits while the Touch/Button controls have specific areas of the screen specified with different drums that you hit for each note impact.

These ways of playing are very unique, but each has its own faults. Obviously, the more technical beats are way easier with motion controls, but the motion inputs are largely inconsistent. When I played (and went back and recalibrated many times), the left joy-con followed my inputs pretty consistently, but the right joy-con did not. Sometimes, it would work correctly and other times, it would completely miss when I move it just as far as I do the left Joy-Con.

Because of this, I often switched over to the button controls for play, and it has its own short-comings. The button controls do work, but the input isn’t always that precise. There’s always a slight amount of delay between hitting a button and the note being put into a combo. I did this with the Joy-Cons, the Pro Controller, as well as handheld mode. You can adjust to it, but it remains awkward from start to finish.

Presentation

Graphically, this game looks very cute and unique. The cell-shading during concerts is very colorful, crisp, and smooth. I never saw any jagged edges as I played through the game and that style does give it a bit of a unique look to it over other rhythm games.

Performance I have no issues with. THe frames never drop and all the load times are nice and quick.

Battery Life

The amount of Battery Time is pretty nice, honestly. Most of the game isn’t 3D, but you still get quite a bit. Here are my times, from 100% to 0%

Note: The following readings were all taken within 3D gameplay. Not the 2D Map sections.

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 58 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 33 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 52 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 23 minutes

All in all, you could get almost the entire Story done in one charge.

In conclusion, Gal Metal is a very unique music game with freestyle drumming and a ton of comedic story to keep sci-fi fans entertained. It is definitely brought down by the fact that none of the control schemes get it quite right, the dragging chatroom story sequences, and the short overall amount of content, but if you’re a music guru, it’s a cute game to trek through.

Final Score: 7/10

Game Title: Dark Souls Remastered
Company: Bandai Namco
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Retail | Digital
Battery Life: 3 – 3.5 hours
Download: 4 GB

For many years, new gamers have been known to be more catered to easy, hand-holding games that require almost no skill and have very little difficulty to them. Mirroring the majority, though, is a set of games and its unique fanbase that instead prefers very difficulty learning-curve games filled with absurdly-hard boss fights, or so the reputation goes: The “Souls” franchise.

Souls have been all over consoles and PC, but the only Soul-esque games on handhelds have been games like Salt & Sanctuary. In other words, handhelds haven’t been able to handle the full 3D games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne. That is, until now.

The remake/remaster of the original Dark Souls game that started this huge Souls Frenzy in the gaming world is on the Switch and available to the handheld world. Here is my review of Dark Souls: Remastered for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

In the world of Dark Souls, there was once a great war between Dragons, the original inhabitants of the world, and the Lords that weilded God-like power. After all the Dragons had been eradicated, the flame that fueled the world slowly began to wane in power and the world fell into chaos.

In Dark Souls, you play as an Undead, one of countless dead beings cursed to forever be animated until the end times. Unlike the others, you are chosen and sent on a quest to travel to the ancient Land of the Lords to claim power and rekindle the world anew before everything is swallowed by the darkness as “The Flame” is quickly dying out.

The thing about Dark Souls is that it’s a lore-heavy game. You have the main story that is told to you here and there, but there’s a literal mountain of backstory around the Undead and a ton of the different boss characters about the world and how it and they came to be where they are now. From load times to dialogue to item descriptions, it’s one of those games where there’s a never-ending supply of lore to learn, even in just the first game of the series.

Gameplay

Dark Souls is a 3D Action RPG with lots of exploration and crafting elements thrown into the mix. As you play through the game, you’ll be exploring a huge map of interconnected dungeons in Metroidvania fashion while being in constant real-time fights with enemies and bosses.

The way Dark Souls works is like a huge metroidvania game. You are on a giant map with interconnected areas that act as dungeons. Your goal is to traverse each area, fighting off enemies, and activating Bonfires/Checkpoints as you go along, working your way towards the boss of that area so you can access the next area.

This is pretty RPG 101, but the sheer amount of exploration is what makes this game so vast and interesting. You have a bunch of areas you need to go, but just as many, if not more areas you -can- go but don’t need to. Dark Souls has a ton of dungeons that are completely optional and lots of areas you can visit in any order you want, whether you’re leveled and equipped enough for those areas or not. You have a lot of freedom with exploration.

But let’s get onto the real meat of Dark Souls: Combat, Dying, and Difficulty. The combat in Dark Souls is pretty simple. You can equip weapons, shields, and spells and can use them freely in battle, though every action you do uses stamina to keep you on your toes. It feels very hack n slash in nature and you can freely swap out weapons in mid-combat if you’re better against certain enemies with weapon types you’re not currently using. You have a lot of options to choose from.

And you need all of those options. Dark Souls is notorious for being a very tricky, difficult game. The difficulty is very high for the game and it constantly climbs to new heights as you progress. After playing through it as my first “Souls” game, I view it like old NES games. Every area is tricky and every boss has attacks that are brutal and unforgiving at times. However, it’s built in a way that it gives you constant difficulty walls for you to learn and remember. As you learn and remember them, the uber-difficult boss fights become cakewalk fights.

The big difference here between Dark Souls and other difficult RPGs is that most RPGs have difficult boss fights, but doable dungeons or vice-versa. This has both. Every dungeon is a wall for you to climb and once you climb it and reach the boss, you’re given an even higher wall to climb. It’s a constant test of patience, endurance, and learning capacity.

Of course, if you still have problems with some bosses (and you will, as some of them are clearly designed not to be taken down solo), all of the online co-op features really help. When you have online enabled, you have nifty co-op features like the ability to summon ‘phantoms’ of other players to help you with areas and bosses, and it makes a world of difference when you’re ripping your hair out trying to solo a boss and try again with 2 allies and suddenly it’s the easiest thing in the world. You can also leave messages for other players to find, helping each other find secret areas.

Now, not everything is great in the game. This game is gigantic and you don’t get the ability to fast-travel until you’re really far into the game. As such, every time you need to grind certain items for upgrades or just backtrack for new story developments, you’re going to be running back and forth and back and forth and back and forth through areas you’ve already been in. Even with all the unlockable shortcuts between areas, it feels like a massive hassle when you want to go back somewhere and going back there involves a good 10-20 minutes of backtracking and fighting and then doing it again to get back.

Before closing this section off, let’s also talk about the wonderful and terrible nature of how insanely-glitchy this game is. For a Remastered game, this game has a lot of instances of glitching and this works both in your favor and in the enemy’s favor. In some areas, you can trick bosses into falling off ledges, instantly killing them. Meanwhile, in other areas, the game can easily get you stuck to a wall, making you almost instantly lose to whatever you’re fighting at the time.

Now, let’s get into content, because this is really varied. Dark Souls has a ton of content for sure, but how long it takes you will depend on how many optional dungeons you visit and your skill level. A seasoned Souls player could probably clear the game in a good 20-30 hours. Or, if you’re like me and are new to the genre, it’ll likely take you upwards of 60-80 hours to do so. Either way, there’s a lot of bang for your buck.

Controls

Controlling the game isn’t too hard. If you’ve played this game on PlayStation, it’s basically got the same control scheme, though it is customizeable from the menu if you don’t like it the way it is.

The Left Stick is used to move around while the Right Analog Stick is used to move the camera. You can also click the Right Stick to lock onto nearby enemies. The four triggers are used for using weapons and shields with L and R for light attacks and ZL/ZR for heavy attacks.

With the action buttons, A is used for running and dodge-rolling while B is used for interacting with NPCs, Bonfires, and other objects. Y is used for using items and the D-Pad is used for cycling through weapons, items, and spells.

Presentation

Graphically, I can’t complain too much. Nothing really looks grainy or washed out or anything. All of the models are smooth and it looks pretty much on-par with the PS4 and Xbox One versions of Remastered.

Couple mishaps here, though. A well-known audio glitch does plague the game from time to time. Sound effects will randomly be extremely quiet or be muted altogether. It’s not a massive problem, but it is pretty strange when you suddenly don’t hear your sword striking the enemy when it clearly is doing so.

As far as performance is concerned, the game stays at a steady 30 fps in docked and handheld mode. The only problem I’ve found with performance is the fact that the game has frozen and crashed on me a few times. Thankfully, these all happened when I’d auto-saved recently, but it’s still troubling to think that you’re wandering around, making progress and could lose that progress at any given time.

Battery Life

I wasn’t expecting much here. Here are my times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 50 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 54 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 16 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 19 minutes

All in all, this is actually a bit more than I was expecting.

In conclusion, Dark Souls: Remastered marks the first time the series has come to the handheld world. It’s certainly not perfect with this version having audio and freezing issues, along with the base game’s extreme amount of backtracking for its first few dozen hours. If you’re into ARPGs that push your limits, though, there’s a ton of depth, exploration, and RPG here to enjoy.

Final Score: 7.5/10

Game Title: Child of Light – Ultimate Edition
Company: Ubisoft
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Digital Download
Battery Life: 2.75 – 3 hours
Cloud Save Support: Yes
Download: 2.1 GB

There are a lot of RPGs out there in the handheld world, and even fewer that I would choose to go out and buy on two separate handhelds for the purpose of replaying and making new/updated reviews on those games for the new platform. If you wanted to dwindle the number even further, you could include western-developed RPGs.

But that is what we’re going to talk about today. Ubisoft launched a Western RPG on consoles back in 2014 that had a huge, story-book world and played like a poetic fairy-tale reading. Then it came to the Vita and I was charmed by it’s, well, charm.

With the Switch, Ubisoft’s own fairy tale has reached new handheld audiences, and I’m more than ready to head back to Lemuria once more. Here is my review for Child of Light: Ultimate Edition for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

Child of Light is centered around Aurora, the princess of a kingdom who lost her Mother at a very young age. After years of being raised by her father, he finds a new bride and Aurora’s room burns around her that same night. Being dead in the real world, she awakens in the magical realm of Lemuria as its savior from a dark witch that has stolen away the sun and the stars.

The story of Child of Light can only be described as a Fairy Tale. The entire script is made in rhymes and everything from the intro cutscene to the random banter between Aurora and other party members is straight poetry. THe game weaves a magical tale of a princess saving a kingdom and is heart-warming from start to finish.

Gameplay

Child of Light is a turn-based RPG and a Metroidvania game all thrown into one experience. When exploring the world, you’ll be side-scrolling through a large overworld and when in combat, you’ll take part in turn-based battles.

First of all, this is “Ultimate Edition”, so all previous Child of Light DLC is built in, including the special Golem Side Quest along with all of the extra items and special costumes for Aurora. All of this is available from the get-go, so you can play the entire game with the other costumes and get a head-start on equipping gems to enhance your stats.

The way you progress is to move around the world and platform/fly to objectives to advance the story. At first, this will be a very linear game but after the first hour or so, it will become very open with a lot of new paths for you to explore and side events to find alongside the main quest of the game.

In this manner, you’ve got a bit of a meld between platforming and RPGing. As you fly and jump around, you have hazards that you would normally have in a side-scroller like hazardous terrain you have to carefully maneuver around and hidden chests in small paths in hard-to-reach places. Along with that, there are enemies all over the place that spark turn-based battles when you touch them.

The big thing with this game is that you’ve got a firefly partner that can interact with things as you move around, making things easier for you. On the map, he can unlock certain chests and solve certain puzzles. For combat, he can blind enemies before you engage combat, guaranteeing you a pre-emptive strike along with slowing enemies down while in the middle of combat.

The battles, themselves, aren’t just your typical battles, either. You have an Active Time Battle system like a lot of RPGs, but with a twist. Every action you do takes time to “cast” and if any character or enemy is hit before their casting time is done, they become Interrupted and their entire turn is cancelled out.

There’s a lot of strategy here with the firefly, too. You can use his energy to slow down certain enemies, giving your characters time to catch up and deliver an Interrupt so you go one more turn without taking any damage. His energy isn’t limitless, though, so you have to be wise with who you decide to use it for when you’re fighting multiple enemies.

When combat is over, things get more traditional with gaining experience and leveling up. Then comes customization. Leveling gives you skill-points that you use for skills in each character’s skill-tree. Similar but less complex than FFX’s Sphere Grid, you go from point to point, gaining skills as well as extra stat upgrades as you gain more Skill Points.

One thing to note is that, despite being like a JRPG, this isn’t that long of a game. On your first run, I wouldn’t expect to spend more than around 12 hours on the game. It’s a great amount of length for the price being paid, but it’s not like the 20-40+ hour RPGs available on handhelds. It’s a much shorter experience.

Controls

Controlling the game isn’t too tough. You move Aurora around with the D-Pad or Left Analog Stick and move the Firefly around with the Right Analog Stick. You can Jump/Dash with the A and B buttins and interact with objects by using the Y button.

Outside of the + button opening the menu, that’s all there is to it. It’s an extremely simple game to play.

Presentation

Graphically, the game looks colorful and beautiful. There aren’t any jagged edges anywhere and the world looks drawn straight out of a storybook. Everything down to the hair effects on Aurora and all of the moving backgrounds look pristine and fit right into the setting.

There is one mishap, though. The frame-rate does drop quite a bit in a few small areas. This doesn’t affect combat, but it does affect exploration in those small areas. On the bright side, all of the crashing and long load times from the Vita version are not present here. It looks better and plays better.

Battery Life

When it comes to Battery, you get a fair chunk out of the game. Here are my Battery Times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 43 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 49 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 04 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 07 minutes

I was expecting a bit more, but it’s not terrible.

In conclusion, Child of Light is a unique RPG that feels far more Eastern than Western. On the downside, the frame-rate drops in some areas. However, that’s just a small blemish on a beautiful and affordable fantasy tale disguised as a WRPG.

Final Score: 9.5/10

Game Title: Diablo III Eternal Collection
Company: Blizzard
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Retail | Digital
Battery Life: 3 – 3.5 hours
Cloud Save Support: Yes
Download: 13.2 GB

When it comes to loot-based RPGs, you’ll never find a list of recommendations or “the best” of that particular genre without seeing one franchise in particular: Diablo. The Diablo franchise has been -the- loot RPG for a long time, whether you’re talking about Diablo 2 or the infamous Diablo III, branded by many as the best loot ARPG of all time.

This is a genre that handhelds have largely been left out of with big name titles. There was Borderlands 2 on the PS Vita, but that port was very technically challenged. If you wanted smooth, well-ported handheld loot RPG, your best bet was getting a small laptop or making an attempt at running some of those PC RPGs on the GPD Win.

Not anymore, though. Blizzard has brought their infamous ARPG to the Switch in one of the most optimized games on the platform to date. Here is my review of Diablo III: Eternal Collection for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

20 years after the events of Diablo II, a falling star crashes down in a cathedral in the town of New Tristram. Deckard Cain (the elder from Diablo I and II) is trapped in the depths of the Cathedral as the falling star has a side-effect, the dead rising from their graves and attacking everyone in sight. The protagonist arrives in town and assists Leah, Cain’s niece, planning to investigate the falling star and why it’s raising the dead.

The plot of Diablo 3 is an interesting one, as there’s a lot of lore behind it. While it is a direct sequel to Diablo II, the game has a lot of background info that brings you up to speed on everything that’s going on with the Angels, Prime Evils, and the Eternal Conflict between them. In this way, it brings newbies up to speed so you don’t need to go back to I and II to understand what’s going on.

Gameplay

Diablo III is an Action RPG that is heavy on dungeon-crawling and loot-acquiring. As you go through the game, you’ll be navigating dungeons and fighting off huge hordes of enemies with the goal of clearing them out and getting better gear to give to your character and advance them to bigger and better things.

First of all, this is Eternal Collection, so all of Diablo III’s DLC is built into this game. It includes the base game, the Reaper of Souls Story Expansion as well as the Rise of the Necromancer DLC that added cosmetics, new challenges, and the Necromancer as a class to choose for your character. In other words, all of Diablo III’s content is here for handheld gamers.

When it comes to exclusive content, Diablo III on the Switch has a Zelda-themed crossover with Ganondorf-themed armor styles and a Cucco as a pet that can follow you around. The game is also Amiibo-compatible, letting you scan Amiibo figures to spawn special waves of enemies for you to fight.

When you go into Diablo III, you create a character and go through 3 different game modes: Campaign, Adventure Mode, and Challenge Rifts, 2 of which are unlocked from the moment you create a new character. Do note that when creating a character, it defaults to Seasonal Characters, which are more online-oriented and have special challenges and rewards non-seasonal characters can’t get on their own.

However, if you utilize multiple characters, remember that you cannot switch over to seasonal characters from someone else without an internet connection. If you try in Airplane Mode, the game won’t let you, giving you a “Season Not Ready” error message. Make sure that whenever you plan on taking Diablo III on the bus, you have the game already set to the player beforehand that you wish to use.

Campaign is the 5-Act Story Mode that tells the tale of both Diablo III and Reaper of Souls. It’s built to teach players the game with moderately-increasing difficulty while telling the story of the Nephalem (the protagonist) and their quest to stopping the end of the world from taking place.

Adventure Mode is similar, but offers far more in terms of gameplay content. It has Bounties, Rifts, and Powers that Campaign doesn’t offer. Bounties are mini-missions that infinitely respawn in each area and give you huge gear rewards when an area’s bounties are complete. Rifts, on the other hand, are spawnable dungeons that are created to test your skills against clearing the enemies within, ending with a challenging “Rift Guardian” boss that will net you special items and currency for higher-tier gear and “Greater Rifts” that offer even higher challenge and rewards.

This is also where the Multiplayer aspect really kicks in. Diablo III is a Co-Op game and the Switch version has both Online and Local Co-Op options for you to trek through. At any time you wish, you can join or grab someone else from around the web to jouney together, whether you’re going through the campaign, bounties, or rifts.

When you actually go through dungeons and fight off enemies, you’ll be moving around in an isometric plane and duking it out in real-time combat. Every class has their own skills and playstyle, but you’ll be moving around and using abilities and skills to fight off enemies and as you level your character, you’ll be constantly learning new skills and “runes” that will power up your other skills with different elements and effects.

While fighting, it’s pretty easy to get overwhelmed as Diablo 3 will give you more and more groups of enemies to fight. The start of the game that has you fighting against groups of 3-6 enemies at a time can quickly turn into fighting groups of 10-20+ enemies at a time, creating not only a very hectic and chaotic experience but a strategic one in how you wish to maneuver around and fight them.

That really raises the combat and gear drops to be the big satisfying factor of Diablo III. Seeing your character summon endless hordes of the undead or fire off a colorful barrage of magic bullets to overwhelm the opponent and be rewarded with gear that sends your stats through the roof is the thing I really love about this game. On top of that, there are 17 difficulty settings, each with greater challenges and even more amazing gear for you to acquire.

Although this game does eventually turn into a dungeon-crawler grind with its gameplay, it has a lot of content to go through. As far as Story goes, I had an incredibly hard time finding accurate readings across the web on how long story actually was. When I trekked through both D3 and Reaper of Souls, I’d clocked in at nearly 20 hours with the Hard Difficulty for most of the way through and doing a fair chunk of the side dungeons and lore readings.

When you combine that with Adventure Mode’s Bounties, Rifts, Greater Rifts, Challenge Rifts, and all of the exclusive rewards and challenges for Seasonal Characters, there’s a lot to do here.

Controls

Controlling the game isn’t too hard. There aren’t any touch controls for the game, so you don’t need to worry about this playing like the recently-announced Mobile DIablo spin-off.

You move around with the Left Analog Stick and can dodge roll with the Right Analog Stick. The D-Pad is used for shortcuts, like the mini-game and teleporting back to town when you’re done exploring. The four triggers are used for potion and skill shortcuts, and the face buttons do the same.

These are all unlocked as you level in the game, so you’re not given all of them all at once. It progresses in a way that’s pretty easy to get a grasp on.

Presentation

Graphically, the game looks good but at the same time, the visuals are a bit flawed. You do get the same amount of detail you get on other platforms, but there is a fair blurring effect when you see the models up-close. This is apparent in both docked and handheld mode. It doesn’t hurt the eyes, but it’s definitely noticeable.

Performance, though, is great. The game runs at a solid 60 fps docked and handheld, and the load times are nice and short. They did a great job with optimizing this game for the Switch.

Battery Life

I didn’t expect a ton of Battery Life, but I was surprised with what I got. Here are my Battery Times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 54 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 58 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 24 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 29 minutes

This isn’t too bad at all.

In conclusion., Diablo III is finally available on handheld consoles and the devs did a bang-up job on optimizing it. While the visuals are a tad on the blurry side and you might have some minor issues switching to seasonal characters on the go, there’s a ton of content to keep any Looter happy for a long time.

Final Score: 9/10

Game Title: MechaNika
Company: Mango Protocol
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Digital Download
Battery Life: 5 – 7 hours
Cloud Save Support: Yes
Download: 136 MB

In the media world, dark humor is in a lot of deceptive material, namely cartoons. When you scroll through Netflix and see a cartoon, it’s not uncommon to see one that is all about sex, abuse, and other dark tones while throwing humor into the mix.

Video games, on the other hand, haven’t made quite that many outside of the South Park RPGs. When you see an adorable little cartoony 7-year old girl that doesn’t like the world around her, you’d never expect that she would be the star of one of the most adult-themed games on handhelds to date.

But that’s enough talk, let’s dive right in. This is my review of Psychotic’s Mecha Nika for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

Mecha Nika is centered around a young girl named Nika who hates the world. Her teacher ignores her and spends all of her teaching time playing on her phone, her mom gets constantly brainwashed in front of the TV and never signs her up for the classes she wants, and the only real friend she has is Agatha (the very same from Psychotic’s Agatha Knife), whom has an affinity for worshiping pig gods and sending all her cute animal friends where they’ll be safe, chopped up in little pieces and gulped down into her tummy.

One day, Nika just can’t take the world anymore and plans to destroy it with a giant mechanical machine of her own making. To do that, however, she needs parts, so she sets out on an adventure through time to collect parts and create her doomsday machine.

As you may have guessed, this is a very dark game with a lot of adult humor and some very shocking turns of events that you would never see in any other game series designed like a cartoon. But that’s part of what makes this game so unique. I really liked how the story was constantly surprising and shocking me with events, along with a mountain of built-in references to all things video games and media.

Gameplay

Mecha Nika is a point-and-click adventure game with puzzle elements thrown into the mix. Throughout every area of the game, you’ll be navigating Nika around rooms and using a pointer to interact with people and objects to get items, dialogue, or moving to new areas.

The way progression works is simple. You’ve got a list of components needed to create MechaNika once you finish the tutorial area and you’ve gotta find all of them to lead you to the game’s ending. Finding them is a matter of walking around the town and various homes to get them, either by picking them up or getting them from NPCs.

This leads the game to be a bit of a puzzle game as there are loads of items you can gather into your inventory and they are used with a certain place or a certain character. For example, you might get a certain item from your grandma that doesn’t work as a component on its own until you take it over to Agatha’s house and have her slice it up into what you need. There are also certain events to get components that don’t open up until later.

On top of that, not every interaction is obvious, as some require you to get out items and interact. It’s a game of exploration and thinking. Of course, if you have trouble, there’s an option in the backpack menu where Nika drinks a suspicious drink from a flask to give you a hint on what you need to do next.

The only problem is that it only works in a room where there’s more to do. So, instead of pointing you where you need to go, you need to figure out where you need to go before it gives you a hint on where you need to go. I found this quite frustrating towards the end as it required me to just go to every room of every house and every building on the street until I finally got it to respond and tell me what I needed to do.

This all does sound a bit confusing, but once you learn how to interact with stuff and walk around town, it becomes pretty simple. It is also because of that simplicity that the game isn’t terribly long. I finished my first run of the game in a little over 3 hours, which isn’t bad for the price tag of $5.99. May not seem like a lot to some, but a short game with a low price balances itself out quite nicely.

Controls

Controlling this game is really nice. This game was originally a Mobile and PC game. As such, it can be controlled both with button controls or touch controls. Being a point-and-click game, I found it extremely comfortable and convenient to use touch controls as opposed to moving the cursor around with an Analog Stick.

With button controls, you can move Nika around with the Left Analog Stick and move the cursor with the Right Analog Stick. You can use the ZL button to run and ZR trigger to show interactions for anything the cursor is hovering over. Then we get to the face buttons. A and X let you interact with objects and NPCs while Y pulls up the menu and B cancels options.

And that’s all there is to it. The L and R triggers don’t do anything, and the + and – buttons just serve to pull up the control scheme.

Presentation

Visually, the game looks very cartoony. The design does look pretty crisp and right in line with the developer’s style from Agatha Knife. The performance is also solid, as the game never froze on me or dropped frames.

Battery Life

I expected to get quite a bit of Battery Time out of this game, and we definitely did. Here are my times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 46 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 5 hours, 16 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 6 hours, 48 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 7 hours, 12 minutes

This throws MechaNika into the list of games that have more battery life than the entire game is long.

In conclusion, MechaNika is a cute little adventure game filled with references and comedy. On the downside, its hint mechanic isn’t quite as expansive as I would’ve liked. However, if you like dark humor and point-and-click adventure games, you can’t go wrong with this short title and equally short price-point.

Final Score: 8.5/10

Game Title: World of Final Fantasy Maxima
Company: Square Enix
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Digital Download
Battery Life: 3 – 4 hours
Cloud Save Support: Yes
Download: 10.7 GB

What’s the best way to prepare for the Pokemon games coming up this month? Playing Final Fantasy Pokemon, of course! While I impatiently play Pokemon Go in my nostalgic hype for the Let’s Go games, Square Enix re-released their Final Fantasy take on the Monster-Catching formula and it’s been a recently-requested game I play through and review.

This is more about Pokemon and requests, though. I played through WoFF when it came out on the Vita way back when and was really sore that Square decided to block PSTV Support for the game. With no PSTV Support, of course, I had no way of doing video content on the game. With the Switch, that all changes and I’m that much happier about it.

Here is my review of World of Final Fantasy Maxima for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

WoFF is centered around two siblings that awaken one day to find their memories erased. They are told they used to be “Mirage Keepers”, collectors of monsters from a world called Grymoire. After being granted the ability to change their size to blend in with the chibi “Lilikin” residents of Grymoire, they journey through to recollect Mirages and reclaim their memories.

The overall plot of this game isn’t all that bad. It’s got a lot of serious tones along with humor on the side. The fanservice factor is also shot through the roof with tons of Final Fantasy characters showing up in each chapter of the story.

However, there are 2 things that bring the story down from being truly great. First, the two protagonists interact with the other characters very strangely and they very easily derail serious events and conversations into sibling bickering that goes on for far too long. When there’s a boss right behind you, it’s hard to take the story seriously when that boss is ignored for an argument about trivia.

Second, the voice-acting for the English dub is very inconsistent. Some VAs do a bang-up job with their lines while others having random pauses in mid-sentence that lead to very awkward listening. Thankfully for Japanese fans, the Japan Voice-Overs are built into the Switch version, unlike the Vita version that required a separate download for the other voice pack.

Gameplay

World of Final Fantasy Maxima, like its original version, is a turn-based RPG with a lot of monster-collecting elements thrown into the mix. It’s like a cross between Pokemon and a traditional Final Fantasy RPG.

Firstly, this is Maxima which is an enhanced port of the original WoFF that released on the PS4 and PS Vita. It comes with most of the original’s DLC (Sephiroth and Balthier Champion Medals). New content includes new story chapters, intervention quests, Mirages, Bosses, and most notably the Avatar System, which I’ll explain more later.

Progression is traditional, yet not. You move from area to dungeon to town to area in typical RPG fashion, but you don’t have a giant overworld map you explore. Instead you have a hub town and a World Map Fast Travel menu to instantly travel to previously-explored locations. You can move from area to area manually, but you don’t need to when going back to previous areas.

As you’re traversing around, you’ll have random encounters with monsters. Combat is mostly the same as traditional FF games. You have an Active Time Battle gauge and you take turns inputting commands like using items, attacking, or casting spells. This game has no MP pool, though. You have Action Points (AP) that each skill uses up and getting kills and taking turns nets you AP, giving you the ability to continually regenerate AP as you go through battle, letting you bide your time and redo your big spells without needing to use Ethers/Elixirs.

What makes this game different is that all of the monsters you fight can be captured and added into your own party of characters. Every mirage has conditions where they will start to spark, showcasing they’re ready to be caught. At that point, you can throw “prisms” at them and have a chance of catching them. There is a way to stack some conditions to make it easier but every attempt is fair game for catching.

Once you have them caught, you can add them to your “Stacks”, or party member slots. Each Stack can have up to three characters, one of each of three sizes. All monsters have specific sizes, so you can make up your stack of any monsters with the correct sizes to fit into the slots. The two main characters can also switch between Medium and Large sizes, letting you try out different combinations to get the ability and stat combos that you want.

The stacking system also comes into play in battle. Not only do the stats and abilities of each Mirage in a stack combine, but your enemies can do it, too and stacks only stay stacked as long as they are stable. Each attack has a certain level of damage it does to the stability of what it’s attacking, so you can start to wobble and eventually topple so it’s important to not only watch your own stability but the enemy’s as each individual character is significantly weaker when attacked than the combined stack.

This catching system can be a huge time-sink in the game because you can enhance your Mirages with Skill Points they earn as they level and they can almost all evolve into larger, more powerful forms. They change Sizes throughout this, too, so you’ll find yourself constantly re-arranging your stacks when your Small Sylph because a Large Siren and you want to keep her in your party.

The final aspect of combat is the Champion Medals. As you progress the story, Final Fantasy characters can be unlocked and equipped as Champion Medals, which are used to do flashy, dramatic summons to do massive damage to enemies. These are very reminescent to how summons worked in Final Fantasies VII, VIII, and IX.

However, Maxima enhances this system even further by giving each Champion a Jewel you can equip to transform you into that character. Instead of summoning a character, you can play as them and gain a couple signature moves for permanent use. I found this incredibly useful for repeating their skills and for the fanservice factor of having character combinations like Lightning riding on top of Magitek armor fighting alongside Squall as he is being carried around by Shiva.

All of this comes together pretty well. There are lots of elemental weaknesses to exploit via stack combos and the game adds onto side content past Mirage Management with all of the side missions you can do for unlocking specific Mirages, both from the original release and brand new to Maxima.

As far as content goes, the original World of FF took me around 43 hours to complete. The Main Quest of Maxima took me a around 35 hours. Considering the amount of content here and the fact that I already knew the game, I wouldn’t expect you to spend anything less than 40 hours or more on the game if you’re experiencing it for the first time.

Controls

Controlling the game isn’t too tough. All the controls are shown to you pretty well and a lot of functions have on-screen prompts so you never forget what does what.

Moving around the field is done with the Left Analog Stick and the Right Stick doesn’t really do anything since the camera is always fixed. The D-Pad is used for Mirage Field abilities, like having a Chocobo stroll next to you or riding in Magitek Armor. The four triggers are mostly used target selection in combat, though the L and R triggers are also used in the field to swap the leader character.

Then come the face buttons. A is used for selecting and interacting with NPCs while B is used to cancel menu options. X is used to open the customization menu and Y is used for quick travel in the hub town.

Presentation

With presentation and performance, I think I should applaud Square Enix, but at the same time, I’m not really sure. Graphically, the game looks just like the original PS4 release when docked. The main difference is that it has a blurring effect that goes over each screen for a moment before disappearing to show the pristine near-flawless graphics of the game. It really does look beautiful on a TV.

In handheld mode, there is the same blurring effect, though it never goes away. There is a constant slight blur going on, though admittedly it does still look better than the Vita version did.

Performance is something odd, though. In docked mode, the frame-rate is flawless. In handheld mode, you do get some choppy frame drops during combat. On top of that, the game makes the Switch’s OS chug, lag, and freeze. Almost everything you do on the Switch’s home screen while WoFF is running lags really hard and almost every time I minimized the game to do something, my entire system froze on me, forced to do a restart.

This is a very strange occurence. I’ve seen the eShop lag before when games are running, but not everything from the photos menu to settings.

Battery Life

I was hoping to have a decent amount of Battery here, and we pretty much got it. Here are my battery times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 58 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 19 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 41 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 47 minutes

I’m glad more games are starting to go into the 3-4 hours range. Keep em coming, devs!

In conclusion, World of Final Fantasy Maxima is an adorable fanservice title for FF fans that are into monster-collecting. Although the story does get a bit off-track and we’ve got a strange assortment of technical problems, the game looks beautiful on a TV and is a welcome addition to the Final Fantasy library on the Switch.

Final Score: 7/10

App Title: YouTube
Company: Google, Inc
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Battery Life: 4 -5 hours
Download: 90.8 MB

For the longest time, I’ve seen how today’s gaming world is. When we get something, we want something else and when we get that, we want something else. I remember when Final Fantasy VII released on the PlayStation Network for PS3 and PSP owners. People begged for it and the moment it came, “But where’s FF8 and FF9?”.

The Nintendo Switch audience is no different. The hybrid device’s lack of streaming apps has been a big topic of debate. We had nothing. Then we got Hulu and people wanted YouTube. Then we got YouTube, and what does the public community do? “Where’s Netflix?”

Thus the cycle goes on and on. But I’m not here to lecture you about the cycle of today’s whine-infested group of gaming keyboard warriors. Let’s enjoy what we have and take a look at a new app! Here is my review of YouTube for the Nintendo Switch!

Design

The app’s design on the Switch resembles the same apps on other consoles. Since the PS4 and Xbox One apps got redesigned, we have an interface with a vertical side-bar for major functions, a horizontal bar at the top of the screen with genres, and a middle part with tons of videos for users to cycle through and start listening to.

First of all, let’s talk about features and all these menus. Once you link up your YT account through a code to input on your computer or phone browser, everything is synced up and catered towards you. It’s a very simple process and one I vastly prefer over having to manually type account info with the on-screen keyboard and the Switch’s controllers.

The Side Menu is where everything is. You’ve got a search function as well as account and app settings for you to cycle through and tweak. Then you’ve got your 3 viewing modes: Home, which shows you featured and recommended videos. Subscriptions shows you videos channels you’ve subscribed to have recently uploaded. And finally, Folders lets you cycle through your videos, liked videos, and playlists.

Once you start playing a video, there’s plenty for you to interact with as well. While you can’t access comments in the app, it does allow you to modify some settings of the video you’re watching, like quality, captions, liking, and viewing the channel of the person who uploaded that video. You can also tap X to pull up the search from anywhere, be it the menu or in the middle of watching a video.

All in all, it’s a very simple app and is easy to navigate around and get to what you want. There’s also versatility in the fact that this app has both button controls and touch controls. You can cycle videos with the Arrow Buttons and then select and skip around with the action and triggers, but you can use the touch screen to tap and use options while you’re in tabletop or handheld modes, something the Hulu app does not support.

One thing I’ll say about the touch controls, however, is the fact that you can tap options with the touch screen, but you cannot scroll with it. Scrolling through videos has to be done with the physical controls as any attempts to make swipe gestures will register as a tap.

Performance

Having this as a perfect copy of the PS4 app is all good and dandy, but how does the app perform? That is the important thing and the home of both the good and the annoying things about this application.

First of all, the app runs and navigates as smooth as butter. It launches before the Nintendo Switch splash screen barely has time to even start and the entire experience is lag-free. It runs much faster and smoother than the PS4 app does with little to no waiting between menus.

Now as far as video quality is concerned, the actual picture quality looks very nice. HD videos look nice and crisp whether you’re watching your favorite handheld reviewer’s latest release or Geekdom101’s newest spoiler video for the upcoming Dragon Ball Super movie.

But there are some nitpicks and annoyances here. First is the sound volume. To comfortably listen to videos, I have to increase the volume on my TV a lot, and in handheld mode, I have to almost max out the volume to bring Let’s Play videos just up to the point where I can hear what they’re saying. You can certainly hear, but it takes a lot of volume to do it.

There’s also the matter of Mono Sound Quality. If your Switch has its sound settings set to Mono, YouTube will not play any videos and will give you random playback errors. The Switch’s System Settings MUST be set to Stereo Audio to play videos in the app.

A minor annoyance I found was through ads. Skippable ads have to be toggled selected two times in a row before they’ll actually skip. Even when they are highlighted, it requires the two inputs or it won’t skip the video.

Battery Life

Video Streaming I’ve always seen as something that wouldn’t really drain that much power from the system. Here are my Battery Times from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 43 minutes
Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 54 minutes

As expected, you can get quite a bit of battery time out of YouTube.

In conclusion, YouTube on the Switch is just like it is on other consoles, but faster and smoother. It isn’t without it’s annoyances, however, with double inputs, partial touch controls, and some sound settings that the app doesn’t play well with. With a little adjusting, though, it’s a great way for Switch players to keep up with their favorite YouTubers.

Final Score: 7.5/10

Game Title: Pokemon Let’s Go Pikachu / Pokemon Let’s Go Eevee
Company: Game Freak, Nintendo
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Retail | Digital
Battery Life:  3 – 4 hours
Cloud Save Support: No
Download: 4.1 GB

Pokemon has been a part of my life since I was a small child. I was almost 10 years old when Pokemon Red and Blue came out in the West and it was something that I and my friends at the time really got into and loved playing, both solo and by using that crazy link cable to link up two of those giant bricks Nintendo once called handheld devices.

For this reason, every time Game Freak has made remakes or remasters of the older games, I’ve always been thrilled. I put endless hours into Red and Yellow and then again with Fire Red and Leaf Green. And now, I’ve got a new remaster with gorgeous visuals and a new way of experiencing Pokemon’s origins both on a handheld and on a big TV.

While this wasn’t without some slight questions regarding the new catching mechanics, let’s get started. Here is my review of Pokemon Let’s Go for the NIntendo Switch!

Story

Let’s Go centers around a kid from Pallet Town that gets his first Pokemon and sets off on his journey across the country of Kanto to collect new Pokemon, challenge Gyms, and eventually take down the Pokemon League to put his name into history. It’s the story plotline all Pokemon fans have burned into our brains.

This story, however, is a bit of a mix of different mediums. There are very heavy elements here from Pokemon Yellow, like Pikachu and Eevee as the starters for you and your rival, along with Jessie and James making several appearances as part of Team Rocket. However, the story also has a few elements thrown in from Pokemon Adventures, making this a similar, but still a bit different journey than the one we’re familiar with.

Gameplay

Pokemon Let’s Go is a turn-based RPG with a lot of collecting elements thrown into the mix. Like any other Pokemon RPG out there, your goal is to navigate around the country to collect and train any and every wild Pokemon you come across in the grass, water, and the sky.

FIrstly, differences. The main differences are the Pokemon Go inspirations with random encounters now being capture mini-games like Go’s version of the Safari Zone and the actual SZ location being turned into the Go Park where you can import Pokemon from Go into Let’s Go. You’ve also got some Quality-of-Life changes with the Pokemon Box no longer being locked to Pokemon Centers, any Pokemon following you around or carrying you around the world, and HMs no longer being battle moves, removing the “HM Slave” aspect of the older games.

Outside of these, it doesn’t feel much different from the original games. It’s in 3D now, but navigating each area and fighting off with Trainers and Gym Leaders feels just like it used to, albeit with trainers and Gym Leaders’ lineups being a bit inspired by multiple games. Some Gym Leaders have teams like the originals and some even from rematch lineups in the Generation 2 games.

But let’s talk about encounters and catching. Pokemon now run around on each route instead of stay hidden in the grass until the encounter begins. This is different, but the encounter ratios are still here, as they spawn and go through a cycle once you enter the route, and never in the same order. When you go into Viridian Forest, you could see a Caterpie first, leave, and go back in to see Pikachu and Bulbasaur spawn in the same spot. It’s different, but still random (which should help Nuzlocke players keep variety).

When you go into encounters, you do a catching mini-game. Inspired by Go’s version of the Safari Zone game, you can throw food at wild Pokemon and throw balls into colored rings around them to get better throws and better chances of capturing them. This is a game of patience and observation as a lot of these Pokemon will move around on the screen like they do in Go, though there are berries you can throw at them to keep them still.

The throwing process is a bit different, though. To throw a Pokeball, you flick the Joy-Con in a direction (or in the case of the Pokeball Plus, do a throwing gesture), and there’s something to be said about this. The motion options are really great, when the Pokemon is in the middle of the screen. Throwing to the side isn’t so easy for the Joy-Cons. Not that the gestures are hard to do, but the balls don’t throw consistently with gestures off to the side, making it a bit more frustrating to capture those flying Pokemon than it should be.

Once you get a successful capture, your party gains experience and can level to make up for the fact that you don’t “fight” wild Pokemon anymore. This makes it feel more like it’s different but still the same rather than completely different. This system is also balanced with Pokeballs being significantly cheaper to buy in the shop to give you easy opportunities to buy them in bulk if you ever need to grind a bit.

Now let’s talk Difficulty. People have been going nuts about how much hand-holding there is with the Gym Requirements, conditions that must be met to challenge each Gym. I will say this, though. Brock is the only Gym to require type-specific Pokemon to challenge. Some Gyms don’t have requirements and the ones that do are Pokedex and Level requirements. This may sound tedious, but unless you actively skip fighting trainers and doing encounters, you should never have to go out of your way to meet these other requirements.

As far as how hard it is, it can be very difficult. After Brock, I never stopped to grind for levels and some of the Gyms gave me a very hard time, and the coach trainers gave me an even harder time. How difficult it is mostly depends on your lineup and type coverage, along with how often you use the “Candy” feature that lets you turn extra, transferred Pokemon into permanent stat upgrades for a Pokemon of your choosing.

For example, if I bought myself a good 200 Pokeballs and went grinding for Caterpie with all of those Pokeballs, I could get enough candies to turn a Butterfree into a monster that could thrash anything and everything that their moves are neutral or super effective against. The candy system can easily be abused to make a Butterfree into a Mewtwo-killing tank, but without grinding away to abuse that system, the game still retains a lot of the difficulty of the originals.

Finally, let’s get into the game’s content. Unlike Fire Red and Leaf Green, the Sevii Islands do not make an appearance in the Let’s Go games. But once you beat the Elite Four and post-game starts, you do have a fair amount of stuff to do. Without naming spoilers, you have a couple post-game story quests, 3 “Super Boss” trainers you can fight, plus “Master Trainers” for all Pokemon that you can challenge in special 1v1 fights for profile titles.

Now if we’re talking hours, I beat the Elite 4 after playing the game for around 32 hours. Considering I know Kanto like the back of my hand, I imagine most players will take at least 35 hours to beat the game and reach the post-game content.

Controls

Controlling the game is very simple, but also a bit odd. Let’s Go was made to be playing with a single Joy-Con to help promote the couch co-op feature that’s built into it. Because of that, you can control the game wither with one joy-con, the pokeball plus, or handheld mode with handheld being the only two-controller scheme you can use.

Thankfully, this setup is extremely easy to use and adjust to. Basically, the Analog Stick lets you move around and navigate menus, and the action buttons interact with those menus. The “Top” action button pulls up the menu, the Right button selects options, the Down button cancels options and the Left button lets you go into options and different menu types.

Like I said earlier, though, the capture game uses motion controls, which aren’t very consistent when you’re using the joy-cons. When you use handheld mode, though, you just use motion to aim at the moving Pokemon and use button inputs to throw balls, which is significantly more consistent and doable for those flying types.

Presentation

Graphically, this game looks gorgeous. When you’ve got this docked, there are essentially no jagged edges anywhere and loads of detail into environments, attacks, shadows etc. While this isn’t the “Realistic” style that Sun and Moon were, this is the best Core Pokemon RPGs have ever looked in terms of graphics.

And performance is the same. I never saw frame drops outside of navigating menus every so often. Whether you’re walking around by yourself or have a massive Zapdos following you around, the fps is super-smooth.

The only blemish I found in performance was during double battles. This doesn’t happen in all of them, but some double-battles would have a bit of a delay between putting all of the team’s attack inputs and that turn’s attacks actually starting. Note that this only happened in double battles for me, like fighting off Jessie and James or by using the Co Op feature.

Battery Life

With the beautiful graphics engine, I expected handheld mode to tank in Battery Life and Game Freak proved me wrong. Here are my Battery TImes, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 16 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 36 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 22 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 39 minutes

A bare minimum of over 3 hours out of a high-graphics 3D Switch game. That’s a feat if I ever saw one. You’re going to get plenty of handheld time out of a single charge here.

In conclusion, Pokemon Let’s Go is a beautiful remake of Yellow that bridges it with a couple different audiences. Although some motion gestures in docked mode aren’t consistent and there is a bit of delay and lag when inputting commands in double battles, this is a polished and adorable RPG with a lot to do and have fun with.

Final Score: 8.5/10

Special controllers are a thing that developers have tried every once in awhile for quite some time. Back in the days of the PS2, they really pushed this idea with Guitar Hero and Rock Band with using all the instrument controllers, while Guitar Hero also had traditional controller schemes for those that couldn’t afford them. There’s also the various light gun accessories as old as the NES, itself, and the steering wheel and pedal peripherals for racing games.

Nintendo has tried it once again not only with a controller, but with a Pokeball controller. Looking as sleek as a normal Pokeball and allegedly having all the buttons necessary to play the newest Kanto adventure, here is my review of the Pokeball Plus controller!

Design

The controller design is remarkably simple. It looks like a round Pokeball with a hand strap attached to it.  The inputs are built into the design with the B button a soft button on the top of the ball and the “button” of the Pokeball being the analog stick that can be moved around and clicked for A button inputs.  The other face buttons and menu options are triggered with shaking gestures with the controller’s gyro/motion controls.

Outside of that are the motion controls for catching Pokemon in-game. This is a little different from the Joy-Con controls. Instead of just flicking the controller in one direction to throw a ball, you actually have to aim and do a full throwing motion to throw a Pokeball. It’s got a bit more motion than the Joy-Cons do, but I have gotten a lot more accurate throws with the Plus.

The final features are LED and Speaker features.  Whenever an attack hits in battle or you throw a Pokeball, LED lights come up around the controller’s button and you hear sound effects through Plus along with the speakers.  This heavily reminds me of the speaker and lights from the PS4’s controller.

Of course, the features of this controller aren’t the big grabbing factor of the Plus, it’s Mew.  Pokemon #151 is exclusively available from within the Pokeball Plus.  Going with this idea, you can also put other Pokemon into the Plus and take them with you when you leave the house.

But before going on, let’s make something very clear.  The Pokeball Plus has ONE Mew inside.  Once you take them out, the Plus becomes empty.  If you sync the Plus up with another Switch or another profile, there will no longer be a Mew to transfer over to your game.  So, if you ever decide you want to reset your save file, put Mew back into the Plus or you’ll lose them forever until you buy another Pokeball Plus or find a very generous player to trade theirs to you.

Once something is in the Plus, it will then count your steps as you are away from your Switch and reward you in-game with experience points and candies based on how far you walked.  The Plus also doubles as a Pokemon Go Plus accessory to link up with your phone, letting you catch Pokemon and spin Poke Stops in Go without having to mess with your phone.

Performance

Now let’s talk about the controller’s performance. Holding the controller works pretty well, but is a bit difficult for anyone with larger hands. The ball is a bit on the small side, which is a clear sign that it was designed for small children as opposed to adults. When I hold it, I often will have my thumb cramp up when I try to click the analog stick down, opting to push it down with the side of my thumb rather than the tip.

The motion controls in the Plus work nicely, though. Instead of flicking motions for wild encounters, the Plus has you do an actual full throwing gesture to throw a Pokeball in-game. To add onto this, you can ‘aim’ the controller to the left and right and it is much more consistent than the Joy-Con side throws are.

Another thing that is a big appeal for this controller is its Battery Life. Despite all the LED lights and speaker use, this controller will last you a good 20 hours on a full charge. I was pretty impressed at this range.

In conclusion, the Pokeball Plus is a sleek-looking controller disguised as a Pokeball. Although it is clearly designed for those with smaller hands and it is painfully easy to lose the exclusive Mew in the case of save file resets, this is a cute controller with incredible Battery Life for anyone who wants to be the very best, like no one ever was.

Final Score: 7/10

Game Title: Marenian Tavern Story – Patty and the Hungry God
Company: Rideon, KEMCO
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Digital
Battery Life: 5 – 6 hours
Cloud Save Support: Yes
Download: 913 MB

KEMCO is a company I’m very familiar with, at this point. As a lover of retro JRPGs, I’ve played lots of their published games on handhelds, and a couple over on Mobile platforms as well. They’re well-known for publishing games that play like typical SNES-style RPGs like Final Fantasy and I don’t typically see a lot of games from them that deviate from that formula.

Today is different, though. Their newest handheld game isn’t from EXE Create, but Rideon, the makers of Mercenaries Sagas. Giving us a more slice-of-life game that gives me some Atelier vibes, here is my review of Marenian Tavern Story: Patty and the Hungry God for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

Marenian Tavern Story is about Patty and her little brother, children of a famous Tavern owner who run into a string of bad luck when they offer food to the God of Poverty and are possessed by that same God. That very God eats their happiness and makes them lose their home and become poor on top of their father disappearing from town. They then have to start from ground zero to run a new tavern and earn back their lost home.

The story starts out decently and the game does have that unique “slice of life” feel to it. When you meet characters, you’re not getting together to save the world, but collecting a group of friends to help the tavern succeed and overcome your debt and theirs.

What I don’t like is the fact that a lot of things happen really suddenly. The game does a really great job of building up what’s supposed to be the end of the game, and to maintain the RPGness of having a huge final boss, has this sudden story element appear out of nowhere for their “Oh by the way, here’s a final boss no one saw coming because this is an RPG too”. I’m down for Final Bosses in RPGs, but the game felt very conclusive before that bit suddenly happened at the end.

Gameplay

Marenian Tavern Story is a bit of a cross between a Cooking Sim and a turn-based RPG, though a much better comparison would be that it’s similar to an Atelier game. Your goal in the game is to collect and combine ingredients into dishes to sell at the tavern, while the collection of ingredients often involves exploring dungeons and fighting monsters in turn-based combat.

The way progression works in this game is that you need to Rank Up your Tavern to work your way up to having a 5-Star Restaurant, where each rank equates to half a star. Leveling Up requires you to feed the God of Poverty, sell so much money in food at the Tavern, and complete that “chapter”‘s story quests, normally involving exploring a new dungeon and taking down a boss.

The way you do this is pretty simple, overall. In essence, you just need to gather ingredients and combine them into dishes. Ingredients can be obtained from town shops as well as from harvest points and defeating enemies in the many dungeons available to you throughout the game. Once you have ingredients for recipes, you can make them at the tavern and use them.

The way you use them leads into uniqueness, though. You can feed them to the God of Poverty or set them out to sell at the Tavern. But, you also use dishes to give your party members experience points. Fighting monsters in dungeons only nets you materials, so if you want to level up and be stronger for the next boss, you have to feed your characters meals so they can level up.

This leads into a bit of strategy and planning. Since you can only visit one dungeon or city per day, you have to see what you gather and buy and decide what your dishes are being used for. Since there is no time limit on your satisfaction and sales goals, you could use all of your dishes immediately to fill up the God of Poverty, or use it all at first for sales and just grind for levels when you need them for a boss.

Speaking of grinding, let’s talk about how grindy and repetitive this game is. When you start out with your low ranks, things go by pretty easily. Once you get into the flow of gathering ingredients, getting money, and filling up the God, you advance pretty fast. But with each consecutive rank, the more you have to grind. Not for fullness or levels, but sales. I would often be able to easily get 100% fullness on the first day and spend literal weeks very slowly building up sales for the next rank with constantly going out into the field and collecting ingredients, along with burning all my money on special ingredients for the more expensive meals to make the process go faster.

Granted, there is a way to speed this process up. MTS has a premium currency and a SHop where you can buy items that can sell for massive loads of cash (or equipment you can find later on in the game). I did this at the start and had me set on money for the majority of the game, but that still didn’t keep me from having to do a lot of grinding for sales. You simply can’t sell huge amounts of money very quickly, even if you completely take away the dishes you’d normally be using for leveling your characters.

The Shop system does have a nice affect, though. On Mobile, this was used for IAPs/Micro-transactions and, as such, can be used to fully resurrect your party members if you get a Game Over in battle. The currency is pretty easy to come by if you don’t constantly buy in the shop so by the time you get to the later and tougher bosses, you can “cheese” them by damaging them as best you can and survive the fight long-term by using those free revives to keep dishing out damage until those bosses fall. Makes you grind a bit less when the bosses get really tough and require a lot of level-grinding otherwise.

Of course, all that grind will eat up time as well, so let’s talk about how long this game will last you. I did a fair bit of the side quests that popped up as I went, and I cleared the game in around 20 hours. You can keep playing your Clear Data after you take down the Final Boss, but there’s no sort of New Game Plus here.

Controls

Controlling the game isn’t too hard, though it does use the majority of the buttons available on the Switch.

You can move around with the Left Analog Stick or the D-Pad / Arrow Buttons. All four triggers are used in battle for various commands, like Auto Battle and Fleeing. And the face buttons are all used. A is used for confirming options and B for canceling. X is used for pulling up the menu and Y is used for recovering your party outside of battle.

All in all, it’s pretty simple, though some of the battle options don’t always respond to your inputs. It takes me a few tries to get the Auto Battle toggle to turn on and off in mid-combat.

Presentation

Graphically, the game is fairly unique in that it’s another one of those “let’s combine 2D and 3D gameplay” RPGs. Your character sprites are 2D and made like old SNES-style games, while the environments are smoothed 3D models. This does have a unique look to it, but it really makes the 3D environments look blurry and hurt the eyes in handheld mode.

As far as performance goes, no complaints. Load times are quick and the game has never had any frame drops or crashes. It runs nice and smooth.

Battery Life

Being a 2D RPG published by KEMCO, I was expecting stellar battery life. Here are my times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 54 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 5 hours, 22 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 5 hours, 36 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 5 hours, 59 minutes

As expected of KEMCO, lots and lots of Battery Life.

In conclusion, Marenian Tavern Story is a nice slice-of-life RPG that deviates from what KEMCO usually throws our way. It is brought down by a lot of small issues like its sudden final boss in its story and tedious repetition of tavern sales, but if you like gathering and synthesizing RPGs like Atelier, you should give this one a try.

Final Score: 7.5/10

Game Title: Mud Runners – American Wilds Edition
Company: Saber Interactive
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Retail | Digital
Battery Life: 2 – 3 hours
Cloud Save Support: Yes
Download: 3.0 GB

There are a lot of ways you can define driving games with the word “simulation” or “simulator”. You could talk about Gran Turismo and Forza, where you are racing, but in enclosed raceways with a high level of real-world physics being built into each car.

Then, you’ve got specific types of driving games that simulate an entire lifestyle around a type of vehicle. An example of this is American Trucking Simulator, which greatly replicates the day-to-day life of a truck driver, all the way down to the feel of the truck, how to pick up and drop off loads, and resting when you get too fatigued to keep driving.

Today, we have another example of extremely-real physics being portrayed in the life of a trucker, except this game takes us off the safe and grounded land of asphalt and into Mud, Dirt, and everything to do with offroading.

Here is my review of Mud Runners: American Wilds Edition for the Nintendo Switch!

Gameplay

Mud Runners is what you’d call an Offroading Driving Simulator. As you play the game, you’ll be driving a variety of trucks and Jeep-like vehicles through muddy and dirty roads from the vast country of Russia to Northern America (the same kind of place where this reviewer lives).

First of all, there have been 3 versions of this game. American Wilds is an enhanced edition of Mud Runners, which was an upgraded version of the game Spintires. In essence, what we have here is the “Ultimate Edition” of Spintires, containing all content from all 3 versions in one simple package.

As far as Game Modes go, you’ve got your Tutorial Modes with the Tutorial and Challenge Mode that has you doing preset missions to prepare you for the different types of terrain you’ll be conquering over the course of the game. Then you’ve got Sandbox Mode in Single Player and Multiplayer, where you travel around 10 Sandbox environments to fulfill deliveries and discover new locations and vehicles.

What you actually do in the game is drive a vehicle around muddy and dirt terrain to pick up loads of wood logs and deliver them to lumber mills, not unlike picking up company loads in ATS and driving to warehouses to deliver them. You do this by attaching special trailers and attachments to your trucks before heading out to be able to pick up specific sizes of loads to deliver for different point rewards towards clearing the map.

There’s a fair amount of detail to how all of this works. You’ve got a ton of different types of trailers you can use in the game, from small log carts to special trailers that allow you to manually pick up logs with a crane to store and take to your destination. You’ve also got a lot of more “assistance” attachments, like repair kits, spare fuel cans, and entire utility trailers.

And that falls into the co-op focus of the game. There are Local and Online Multiplayer Modes so people can help each other through each map along with the ability to switch trucks in Single Player because this simulation game is extremely accurate when it comes to offroad driving. Something can and -will- happen to mess you up, be it getting stuck in mud, rolling down a hill, or sinking in a river. That’s why there are Utility Trailers use for repairing trucks and Fuel Trailers to fill up gas tanks if you can’t make it to the nearest Fueling Station.

Quite possible the factor that makes this an incredibly-impressive game is how it handles the physics of offroading. Every truck feels and handles very different from every other and even moreso when it is pulling a trailer. Not only that, but the terrain has some crazy physics involved. Not only can you easily get stuck in mud and pull yourself out by winching nearby trees, but every dirt road will affect you differently each time you drive through it. I’ve gone through the same dirt road several times in a single game and every time I went through, it would get more and more difficult to travel, even in the same truck.

But that’s not the end of the impressive amount of detail this game does into. Driving also has a surprising amount of detail. You’ve got toggles for turning the engine on or off, a winch that you can attach to trees, objects, and other trucks, and manual buttons for the Differential Lock and All Wheel Drive. Shifting is a bit unique, though, as you have to manually shift into Neutral, Automatic Mode, or Reverse. It’s not a press of a button, but rather clicking an analog stick and moving that analog in the direction the gear shifter needs to go to go into those other driving modes. I’ve never seen a handheld driving game have that much detail in shifting before.

Now, physics aside, how much content is there to this game? In simple terms, just enough to justify the price-point. There are 12 challenges in Challenge Mode that I easily cleared in about 1.5 hours, while clearing each of the 10 sandboxes by myself took me around 2-3 hours a piece. This was me exploring in a Jeep to actually reveal the map’s paths and then jumping into a truck to make my deliveries to clear it and unlock more to do. Granted, there’s very little variety in what you do, but there’s a good amount to do.

Controls

Controlling this game isn’t too tough. No touch controls, though. Just button controls.

You use the Left Analog Stick to steer your vehicle and the Right Analog Stick to move the camera and use the gear shift. The Arrow Buttons / D-Pad are used for camera settings and advanced winch/engine/truck settings. The R trigger is used for honking your horn, while the ZL and ZR triggers are used the brakes and accelorator.

The face buttons are also used heavily. X is used for pulling the winch, A for selecting/confirming loads while the B button is used for canceling options.

All in all, pretty easy and all covered by the tutorial. The camera is a bit of a nuisance, though. It easily gets stuck on buildings and when you try to turn out of a logging station, it has a habit of constantly refocusing on your trailer, making you endlessly reset yourself and try again, which leads to much frustration.

Presentation

Graphically, most of this game looks quite nice. The trucks, mud, and damage levels as you run through hazards is pretty nice. Some of the environments aren’t as detailed as the more muddy terrain, but it still doesn’t look bad.

The visuals do go down a bit in handheld mode, though. The blurriness that is become more and more typical with Switch games going forward is here as well. It’s not a huge blur, but it’s definitely noticeable around the trucks when you’re going through the daytime sequences.

As far as performance goes, it’s mostly good. The game does skip frames at times when it autosaves, but it isn’t often and the stability is, well, stable for the most part.

Battery Life

When it comes to Battery Life, I expected this to be another 2-3 hour range game, and it turns out that I was right. Here are my times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 41 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 2 hours, 45 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 06 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 11 minutes

About what I expected and not too bad. Way more than enough time to clear an entire map and then some.

In conclusion, Mud Runners is a driving sim with some of the most impressive physics and detail I’ve ever seen in this sort of game. Granted, the game is brought down by its troublesome camera, lack of task variety, and presentation hiccups, but if you love driving sims and have a buddy to play with, there’s a lot of realistic offroading to be had here.

Final Score: 8/10

Game Title: Longstory
Company: Bloom Digital
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Digital Download
Battery Life: 4 – 7 hours
Cloud Save Support: Yes
Download: 358 MB

There are a few ways a game description can immediately get me into a game. Horror, Simulation, RPG, Romance, Dating Elements, the list goes on. There are a lot of things I absolutely love in games and when I see them written in descriptions, the game goes from “This looks interesting” to “So, I need to play this”.

One such game is a little VN/Adventure sort of game from Bloom Digital that promised to have options for a lot of different kinds of people and the moment I dating options, I was in. I adore dating sims and games with romance elements.

So, after having played through and been given a torrent of emotions, here is my review of LongStory for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

Long Story is about you, a student in middle school having just moved back to their old town. You head back to your old school to encounter old enemies and to make new friends and spark new relationships, along with all of the drama and impulsiveness that comes with it.

The thing about Long Story is that all of its characters are very charismatic and they really fit with the setting. Across the entire game, all of the MC’s impulsive decisions I was constantly face-palming at and vocally remarking “No, don’t. Why. You Fool!” and always thinking on each chaotic dramatic decision and realizing just how each decision fits with someone in that age group and going through all of the feels and changes of that part of life. Similar to how impulsive and embarrassing I was when I was that age.

In this way, the game’s subtitle of being a “real world” dating sim really does fit. The protag’s rash decisions and the inclusion of recent-day issues for students like learning disabilities and gender identity really brings out the realism and modernism, even for someone like me who’d graduated before all of that really got mainstream in school.

However, there is one nitpick I have, and it’s the fact that this is advertised as a dating sim. Yes, you can go on a character’s “route” through the game, but the actual dating part is a fairly small part of the game. I won’t spoil it for you, but by the game’s end, it doesn’t really feel like you’re playing a dating simulator, but more of a story about middle school with some dating elements.

Gameplay

LongStory is like a Visual Novel, where you go through story scenes and enjoy the story along with having many dialogue choices that can change how the story progresses and what cutscenes you do and don’t see as you play through the game.

The first order of business is the fact that this game is advertised as an LGBTQ+ friendly game. What this actually equates to is the fact that you’re not limited to heterosexual protagonist or dating partners. You can make your character identify as male, female, or they (like some transexuals choose to identify) and you can date any character you want, no matter which gender you are and they are.

The main goal of LS is the same as any VN: enjoy the story and change the story with choices. There are loads of dialogue choices that will change what character’s “Route” you get for main story events and what cutscenes and events you can or can’t get as you travel through the game. A single choice can change whether you see two friends fighting or you getting ganged up on by the local bullies.

Though Routes are something we should talk about. When I think of VN Character Routes, I think of Endings around that character, and that’s not what you get here. When you choose to crush on Abby or Nora or Colin, it affects events in the middle of the game, but not the end of the game. The end happens mostly the same way no matter who you choose or what you do, which is also why I mentioned earlier that this feels much more like a VN with some romance elements than a full-on dating sim.

Outside of reading and dialogue choices, that’s about it for the game. But that’s not to say the game doesn’t have a lot to it. There are a lot of optional events and 5 different routes, so completionists will get a good 5 treks through the game before they find everything.

For the rest of us, let’s talk play-time. I spent around 6-7 hours my first time through the game, though a bit of that was fiddling around with different dialogue choices to see how different events turned out, but I’d still say you’ll be spending over 6 hours on the game before you reach the end of Chapter 8.

Controls

There’s a lot of versatility in controls as you’ve got button controls for docked mode, but have options for using the touch screen in handheld mode. The touch controls work the same as they do in the mobile version, from double-tapping dialogue options to hitting the “send” button on the on-screen phone to send texts.

As far as buttons go, truth be told, not many of them are used. The – and + buttons are used for settings and saving your data and the L/R triggers are used for reversing events and using the Auto-Skip feature.

The only face buttons you use are A and B for select and cancel, and the Left Analog and Arrow Buttons are used to cycle through dialogue options.

Presentation

Visually, the game looks very colorful and pretty. It’s got a very unique and cute art style that really helps it stand out and give all of the characters that extra bit of charisma to make them really interesting, even outside of just their personalities in the story.

Performance-wise, everything is good. I never had any problems with freezing, crashing, frame-drops, or anything of the sort.  The only hiccup I had was the A button a couple times not functioning normally.  I got to a couple areas of the game where the A button didn’t work while navigating dialogue until I’d saved and reloaded a save file.  Never happened in the same place, though.

Battery Life

Bering a VN, I expected a lot out of Battery Life. Here are my times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 34 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 5 hours, 06 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 6 hours, 21 minutes
Low Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 6 hours, 54 minutes

As expected, you get quite a bit.

In conclusion, LongStory is a VN-like game that showcases a very realistic modern take on middle school life. On the downside, it’s got a strange bug with the A button and it doesn’t really feel as much of a dating sim as its description and subtitle advertise. Still, if you like story-based games that touch on school life and romancing outside of the typical boy and girl spectrum, it’s a very good adventure.

Final Score: 9/10

Game Title: Atelier Rorona DX – The Alchemist of Arland
Company: Gust, Koei Tecmo
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Availability: Digital Download
Battery Life: 3 – 5 hours
Cloud Save Support: Yes
Download: 8.4 GB

The gaming world has a way of surprising me, all the time. The Atelier series is one of those surprises. I started that series with Atelier Totori and Meruru and really disliked the series but tried again with the Dusk games and have loved every Atelier game since then. It was a surprise as a series I thought I would hate, but really started to love after trying another part of the series.

The series has surprised me just in time for the website’s 5th anniversary. Just as I was getting ready to go into ARK: Survival Evolved and get the word out to my userbase, Atelier popped up on the eShop and created a big “I need it!” situation.

So, to celebrate today, the 5-year anniversary of the website, here is my review of Atelier Rorona DX for the Nintendo Switch!

Story

Atelier Rorona is centered around an alchemy workshop in the kingdom of Arland. When the King threatens to close the workshop down, a young girl named Rorona is pushed into the task of working with the kingdom to prove that the workstation can help out and not just be a waste of space. Over the next 3 years, she is given assignments to complete and overcome the business leaders that are trying to shut her down.

There’s something unique about Rorona, even among Atelier games. The series has always focused more on light-hearted slice-of-life stories rather than the big save-the-world RPG stories, but Rorona seems much more in that setting. There aren’t any bosses you have to fight for story progression and it’s all about Rorona’s fight against Corporate Arland rather than her rising up to fight off a world-ending threat.

Gameplay

Like the other games, Atelier Rorona DX is a turn-based RPG with a heavy emphasis on time management and collection materials to synthesize into new and better items.

First of all, Rorona DX is basically a new version of Atelier Rorona Plus. Like on PS3 and PS Vita, this has the base game, all DLC bundled in, and the “Additional Story” expansion involving Totori and Meruru that happens after the main game has ended.

Progression in Rorona is pretty straight-forward. You have a town as your “Hub” where you take on quests, synthesize items, buy from shops, and have character events, and then you’ve got a World Map with all of the different dungeons you can visit when you need to find materials and ingredients for your alchemy recipes.

First, let’s talk Time Management. Every “Chapter” has you doing an Assignment with 3 months to complete. If any assignment is not completed, you get a Game Over for failing to prove the worth of your Workshop. Of course, almost everything you do takes up time. Traveling to dungeon, synthesizing, and resting to recover MP to do more synthesis all takes up days of the term.

Of course, the time management doesn’t matter a great deal with how easy the Assignment requirements are. Outside of a select 2 or 3 assignments, I already had recipes and stock available to turn in all of my Main Assignment items within the first week of the term, leaving me with 2+ months to just do whatever I wanted. This does make it seem really unbalanced, but the game also has a good 15-20 optional assignments you can fulfill to unlock special rewards, like stat boosts and new equipment. These assignments easily use up the rest of the terms, balancing things out a little bit.

Although it isn’t nearly as emphasized in this game, you also have turn-based combat when you’re out in dungeons and need to get materials for synthesis. There are quite a few party members you can recruit (for a fee), each with very specific weapon styles and skills to help Rorona with fighting monsters for materials. You can also combo skills together when Rorona uses battle items, which makes optional bosses useful for getting rare materials.

All of this comes together pretty well, for the most part, especially in terms of choice. You can play the game without doing many battles and just do assignments based on harvesting items, but can also spend a lot of time in synthesizing weapons and armor to take down the special bosses in the post-game. This is nice, since most more modern Atelier games make you fight bosses and final bosses for beating the game.

In terms of content and length, Rorona isn’t quite as long as the other games. The main game should take you around 20 hours to finish and the Additional Story scenario will likely add around 3-5 more hours. 25 isn’t nearly as long as the Mystery games, but it’s still not a bad trade-off for $39.99.

Controls

Controlling the game is pretty simple. Not really any touch controls to deal with, so you just use the buttons.

You move around with the Left Analog Stick and the D-Pad / Arrow Buttons are mostly used for menu navigation and “taunts” in dungeons. The ZL and ZR buttons don’t do much in the game, but the L and R triggers are used for quick access to menus, like Saving and Assignment Details.

The rest is up to the face buttons. A is used for confirming options and B is used for jumping and platforming around. X pulls up the menu and Y lets you strike enemies on the map for pre-emptive strikes.

All around, it’s simple and sticks to the original PlayStation control scheme.

Presentation

Graphically, this game looks really nice. The environments and effects are flawless and smoothed out. The character models do have occasional jagged edges in handheld mode, but it looks great and clear, and all that blurring from Atelier Lydie is nowhere to be found.

Apart from looking good, it also plays well. There are no frame drops in docked mode while certain areas have small drops in handheld mode (but nothing like the big drops in Lydie). The game does kind of lag and freeze when accessing the save menu, but actual gameplay plays nice and smooth from start to finish.

Battery Life

With all this performance optimizing, I’m happy to say Battery Life also benefits from this new remaster. Here are my Battery Times, from 100% to 0%

Max Brightness + Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 13 minutes
Max Brightness + No Wi-Fi – 3 hours, 45 minutes

Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 24 minutes
Low Brightness + Wi-Fi – 4 hours, 50 minutes

It’s great to see this improvement over Lydie’s times.

In conclusion, Atelier Rorona is a cute, adorable adventure that is quite possibly the one entry of the series that truly fits into the “Slice of Life” aspect. Granted, the super-easy assignment goals does make the game feel a little unbalanced and handheld mode has occasional frame drops. Outside of this is a cute RPG that any series fan will laugh at for dozens of hours.

Final Score: 8.5/10