Garwoofoo

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment

I went back to this after a long break and found I was closer to the end than I thought I was.

This is a musou game so you know what you're getting: thousands of enemies, loads of characters and a whole lot of enjoyable button-mashing. They've all got a slightly different style and this one is low on battlefield management (your allies generally go to sensible places under their own steam) and high on flashy attacks and multi-character combos. It's very enjoyable to play, has quite a lot of stuff to do between battles, has tremendous cutscenes and fits in very well as a canon prequel to Tears of the Kingdom.

However it is that link (haha) that also lets it down slightly. The problem is that TOTK doesn't really have many significant characters who also exist in this prequel period, so most of the roster is simply made up. And they get a bit desperate: it's fair enough that you have a Goron ally, a Rito ally, a Zora ally and so on, but then later on you unlock another Goron, another Rito, another Zora (and then just a couple of random blokes for good measure) and it's clearly padding for the sake of it. There are, in all honesty, just five really distinctive characters in this (three from TOTK and two significant originals) and everybody else is just a bit generic.

But it's fun, it looks spectacular, and if you want a combat-heavy button masher then it's a good choice. Personally I think the series peaked with the original Hyrule Warriors (especially its Definitive Edition on Switch) which just had so many unique characters and settings and huge dollops of fan service - but this is decent too.

New Switch 2 system update enables VRR in docked mode (I think there is a dock firmware update too).

A fantastic feature but in true Nintendo fashion each game will need to be individually patched to take advantage of it and the only thing to support it so far is Welcome Tour.

I thought it looked great, I’m just ever so slightly disappointed it appears to be a straight remake given that I replayed a big chunk of the N64 version this year before the rerelease was announced.

I've played a bit of Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy but I'm not sure I'll stick with it. The previous two games in this series were basically stealth games where you needed to solve various light-based puzzles to avoid being eaten by swarms of rats - they also had a really strong and atmospheric medieval setting that really lifted them apart from the competition. This prequel is an Uncharted-alike with a much more generic ancient Greek flavour and a combat system based around annoyingly precise parries. It looks absolutely spectacular but honestly this isn't my thing, it's competing in a very crowded marketplace and it's probably not going to make much impact overall. A shame.

No-one's started this yet this month so let's go.

Play

Final Fantasy XIV - still absolutely loving this. It's the kind of game that elbows almost everything else off the agenda, because there's always stuff to do and whatever kind of mood you are, there will be something that fits the bill. I'm partway into Stormblood now, which I know is thought to be one of the weaker expansions but I'm still having a great time.

However I have found time for a couple of Fire Emblem games, here and there: Path of Radiance on the GameCube, via NSO, and Fates on the 3DS (my reliable holiday companion). They're both good, in slightly different ways: Path of Radiance is fun but very simplistic, with a linear campaign, while Fates is much more involved to the point of having a little too much fluff and stuff to do around the good bits. Neither have the "oh shit" rewind feature that Three Houses had, though, which means I spend a troubling amount of time playing levels twice to undo obvious fuck-ups.

Want

And following on from the above, Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave is out in a week or two, at which point I'll probably move over to that. It looks great, and I am assured by Mart that there is loads of stuff in there that hasn't even been touched upon in the previews. Three Houses was probably my favourite Switch game overall so I am expecting great things from this.

And, still in a strategy mood, Star Wars: Zero Company looks great: I like XCOM, I like Star Wars, I even like The Clone Wars, so this is getting bought sooner rather than later.

Bin

I hate to say it, but probably Game Pass? I'm paid up until next year but I'm using it less and less: I'm not sure if the game selection is getting weaker or they're simply not getting word of mouth out any more, but I scan over the list of recent titles and I have no idea what any of them are and no-one seems to talk about them like they used to. The various discovery tasks that used to be part of Microsoft Rewards did a huge amount in terms of encouraging people to try games out, and since they removed those it's just a list of titles you don't recognise. Now they're introducing a farcical 15 hours a month limit for their cloud streaming (a feature I do actually use), there's increasingly little reason to keep it going. When my sub runs out I might just knock it down to Core and keep playing the games I've bought that I actually want to play.