Little-used hint: if you cook wood, you can eat it for 1/4 a heart! It allowed me to eat my way back to health in the rest areas (and the two floors with cooking pots) without using my actual food stores.
@marcsmashing: I think the trials are their own reward. I had a blast actually needing to play smart and dodge attacks again. Where I'm at in the game, between the 3 fairies I always have, Mipha's grace, the max-level soldier's armor I pull out in a pinch, and the 3 full panels of food I always keep on me, I never wanted more than 13 hearts. I voluntarily hunt and kill lynels without using ancient arrows, I toy with guardians, and so I haven't faced a real threat in the game until the Trial of the Sword (and Eventide Island) stripped me naked.
It's good fun. I actually had to plan my fights and ration my gear a little.
The other stuff is good, too, but the Trials of the Sword made fighting exciting. I look forward to getting far enough in Master Mode to try my hand against a golden lynel next.
@bbq_R0ADK1LL: Your cynicism is well-justified. I agree that this review tells me almost nothing about how the game actually plays, and makes a big deal about aspects of the game which wouldn't sell me. However, I'd blame the review, not the game, for this. It's certainly hard to see Nintendo rarely make a bad game, and wonder if their scores are deserved. They have, and they do, the most recent Zelda disappointment would be Triforce Heroes, the most recent console disappointment would be Skyward Sword. Triforce Heroes because it was a fine piece of Zelda gaming that forced 3 players or nothing, and had as its selling point "hold your friends over your heads!". Skyward Sword because of unnecessary and tacky additions to the Zelda lore, and more importantly because the actual areas, dungeons, and enemies got repetitive much too quickly for my liking.
That said, I should point out that just about every game from a major Nintendo franchise isn't a lazy cash-in. First, because Nintendo continues to prioritize quality over quantity, and has (case in point, this game) delayed games repeatedly and excruciatingly instead of releasing an inferior game. Second, because there's no mistaking a Nintendo game for a game from any other developer and publisher. Nintendo games come with a special layer of polish: the way puzzles are crafted to be rewarding without being frustrating, the way new skills are introduced in isolation, then combined in clever, possibly unexpected ways, the way audio, visual, and tactile cues are included to make sure the player isn't lost, but also isn't being dragged along by the nose, and the innate fun in their core gameplay (movement, exploration, jumping) are finely tuned.
So, two things:
1. Nintendo makes fun games, even with tired, cliched game mechanics. To fixate on how the "novel" ideas in a Nintendo game are praised is to overlook the lack of complaints about poor balancing, poor pacing, poor visuals, poor audio, poor controls, and so on. People expect Nintendo to make polished games, but you don't take off points because you expect something to be good.
2. Nintendo makes bad games, too. (http://www.metacritic.com/company/nintendo?filter-options=games&num_items=30&sort_options=metascore&page=16) Don't pretend critics give Nintendo games good scores simply for being Nintendo. This is a good effort by a very experienced developer, perhaps one of their best. Time will tell.
@jeanmouloud66: This was what I was going to say. Terrible excuse since they already have an effective experience gateway mechanism. It's called XP. Just make battles available after level 20 or whatever and the problem is pretty much solved from a game design perspective.
But that's right, silly us. We keep thinking Niantic knows how to make games. "But that would mean that they knew how to make software," I say as I continue to have to transfer pokemon one at a time, as lag during a pokeball throw continues to alter its trajectory (because lag during that phase of the game even makes sense), and as delays between menu screens continue to "buffer" input so I can accidentally log out, power up and evolve pokemon without any recourse. Not to mention the inexplicable, endless network issues making the game lose all map data, all pokemon data, and present trainers with the spinning white pokeball of sads.
They're just a bad company, man. A bad company with great Google-maps based tech.
What, Pokemon Go, the game that no longer lets you track pokemon or use websites to track pokemon, but instead forces you to wander aimlessly, is losing users? People are losing interest in an app that has serious UI flaws, crashes, hangs, and freezes often and without any solution, whose developer is painfully uncommunicative about why they're messing with players?
Naw, I'm sure Niantic is doing a fantastic job keeping player engagement high. They're not screwing the pooch harder than an actual pooch at all, especially not while raking in unbelievable amounts of cash. Don't be silly.
"Niantic also explained that developers who spend time dealing with issue have their time taken away from building new features for the game."
I just got back from a hike playing Pokemon Go. I had fun. But I also enjoyed having the app, which was the only app running, become unresponsive 15 times. (The phone was totally responsive, just not Pokemon Go.)
This, in addition to things like spotty connectivity causing every single tossed pokeball to potentially take a few seconds to even minutes, are cardinal sins of consumer software: usability issues. Niantic has released a game that is borderline unusable in far too many situations, and the three-step bug, the removal of the any steps at all, and the elimination of pokemon tracking sites are all examples of blatant, brazen, and unrepentant disregard for user experience.
The quote I start with, in particular, is a prime example. "Dealing with the issue takes time away from building new features for the game" sounds nice, doesn't it? This is what it sounds like to me:
"Niantic prioritizes developer fancy over user pain."
No? Let me try again:
"The devs don't care about us."
And that's a problem, since they want us to play their game, and spend money on their game, and share their game and say good things about it. Well, I have good things to say about their game: it can be fun at times. I don't have good things to say about them. They're bad at writing usable software. They're bad at community relations management. And above all, they're bad at making games. Pokemon Go wants so badly to be a fun game, but Niantic has a problem, and it's Niantic.
It's of course stunning to me that you think Nintendo regurgitates, or that you've developed an opinion on how the internal development teams at Nintendo work. The Mario games have innovated repeatedly in the platforming genre, and every change they've made has been more than a mere gimmick. It would be foolish to call the move from Metroid to Metroid Prime to be regurgitation, and even more recently, the people known most for iterating on the Pokemon franchise released HarmoKnight, which is nothing if not a departure from what they know best.
If you're still replying to these, I guess my question changes into "how far back do you think Nintendo has been regurgitating?" When did the innovation stop? If your complaint is that Nintendo isn't devoting enough resources to new ideas, we probably disagree on how we think Nintendo develops games. I've read enough stories about Miyamoto's development process to believe that they're not trying to add new mechanics to existing franchises so much as they're matching interesting ideas to suitable, familiar worlds and play experiences. Super Mario Galaxy could just as easily have been Super Space Jumpman, and in fact the spherical platforming was not originally conceived for the Mario genre at all, much like how the motion controls weren't so much tacked on as they were included experimentally and found to be a productive direction.
Does Nintendo spend longer putting extra polish on games its fanbase has come to expect? I wouldn't doubt it. Is that evidence that Nintendo is going easy on its newer ventures? I find it strange to honestly think that these last few years are proof that Nintendo isn't experimenting so much as it shows how the company continues to emphasize gameplay over content, which means working experiments aren't made into entirely new franchises without good reason. We could both point to Project H.A.M.M.E.R., for instance, and I would see evidence that Nintendo tried to start a new franchise. But you could just as easily suggest that the game's cancellation wasn't a result of insufficient fun, but instead because the game wasn't Mario.
Props for sticking around to respond to comments, Tom. I really like that you take the time to answer these.
I'm a little curious as to what sort of expectations you have for Nintendo; if you look carefully, they've released a series of new IPs, some to great acclaim, others to lesser fame, and many of which never really succeeded. For every Pikmin, there's also a Chibi Robo, an Electroplankton, and a Steel Diver.
Is your observation that the new games Nintendo makes that immediately gain media attention (and usually commercial success) are well-established franchises? Are you blaming Nintendo for making really good games in existing franchises? Or are you expecting Nintendo to come up with a completely new intellectual property on a regular basis?
To further this... dilemma, let's say, are you asking Nintendo to drown out its third party opportunities altogether?
I'm as big a fan of new Nintendo ideas as you are, but this is the third time I've heard you express disappointment at them. Perhaps you could describe what the release timeline you would have liked to have seen from Nintendo, so I can get a sense of what we see differently.
I think I need to stop here and leave my thoughts, because I've gone and read this article a third time now and I still don't see the actual criticisms. Tom seems to somehow entirely overlook the next RPG by Monolith Soft, the collaboration called Fire Emblem X Shin Megami Tensei, or company's long history of developing new IPs. Pikmin wasn't always an established franchise, nor Smash Brothers, nor Metroid Prime, nor Luigi's Mansion, nor Chibi Robo... (there's a long list of Nintendo IPs, many of which we've long since forgotten).
Was this an argument that Nintendo told its fanbase what it wanted? Was this some sort of attempt to justify the oversimplification that Nintendo "sticks to its guns"? I can't figure out what Tom is trying to say here, because he covers a lot of valid issues and somehow combines them into the rather alarming conclusion that Nintendo doesn't innovate.
There's no doubt that Nintendo is trying to win back the people who gave up on the Wii when they felt that Wii Fit, Wii Sports, Wii Music, and so on were not the games they expected to be offered.
But really, I have to wonder, what on Earth was Tom hoping would be announced? We already know that Nintendo was and is more aware (and at least seems to be trying to fix) its poor relationship with third party developers. We already know that the people at Nintendo EAD don't often make "sequels" in any sort of the same way most of the rest of the industry thinks of them.
So what is this article saying? What's Tom's point? I don't think everyone was going to be impressed by the news, but these are not the things that would explain why the recent announcements wouldn't please everyone, because that would be stating the obvious:
Slonekb05, I appreciate that you think there are 25 year's worth of Zelda and Mario games. On the other hand, I think Nintendo has been inventing whole new franchises this whole time. Steel Diver, Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Wii Party, Wii Music, Pikmin, Luigi's Mansion, Animal Crossing, Brain Age, Wario, Star Fox, Nintendogs... It's worthwhile to point out that Nintendo has lots of franchises and you're wrong if you think Nintendo is "living off" a mere two. I'd also like to point out that, curiously enough, the difference between any two Mario or Zelda games is invariably larger than the difference between two games of any other franchise. No company reinvents their franchises the way Nintendo does, and that's because Nintendo doesn't start with Mario or Zelda and tweak the formula, they start with prototypes and decide what franchise it best suits. Compared to most sequels, a Zelda game is an entirely different game that also happens to involve a hero in a green Tunic.
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