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This Week in Games - Build Mode

Building mechanics kind of brings me back to the crafting bloat that's happened in a lot of games. Crafting is fun, fun unfortunately there's too much tedium associated with it nowadays. Slapping two items together in Star Ocean 2 and seeing what you get is fun. Having to grind up a bunch of basic building materials you craft into more advanced materials etc is boring. This if funnily enough what I thought Tears of the Kingdom did brilliantly by going back to basics. You don't need ten diamonds or twenty five rocks, you just need to fuse a sword with a rock to get a hammer. Same thing when you make a house, you just need the basic materials then can set it up the way you want. We maybe need to go back to wilder, looser ideas of crafting.

I feel like the Underground in the Gen 4 games left the Secret Bases redundant, but that hasn't stopped people from really bemoaning that the Bases weren't brought back in later generations.

I really like the characters in Azuma so far, I am so hyped

In other rando news that happened past the deadline, Nintendo announced they're putting some of KOEI-Tecmo's SNES strategy games on Switch Online, including their Age of Exploration game Uncharted Waters: New Horizons. Do not sleep on that one!

I hope the dev team is aware of how precious it is to be able to just play the game and not-worry about stuff being gender-locked, I think above any other function of the game.

Otherwise, there's a bunch of people saying that a 60fps mode was found in Xenoblade X and that there's a high chance the Switch 2 is going to be doing some special magic to it.

It's funny how quite a few people just put up teams filled with Blisseys to make EXP grinding easier for others.

Thanks for understanding that these were outside of my deadline window. I didn't know that we had two Nobunaga's Ambition games release on the SNES. It's cool to see that we had so many simulation games release way back then; bit of an under-represented bit of the SNES catalogue.

I saw that going around. Very forward-thinking of Monolith! I was firmly in the camp that the Switch 2 wasn't going to be a blanket solution to Switch game performance because a game nevertheless has to be optimized for specific consoles--a game won't just run better on better software especially if, say, the physics engines are tied to the framerates. A lot of that is tied specifically to how the hardware or firmware processes data. A lot of games are going to need actual updates for that better performance, given the new firmware. Monolith has never messed around with their optimization (especially considering none of the Xenoblade games are bigger than 50 gigs).

There are objects hardcoded for 30 FPS as well as having only 30 frames to use and there's not a whole lot you can do with that. I wouldn't be surprised if Monolith Soft were messing around with it, but just disabled it and moved on. It's like people who were trying to turn the Symphonia remaster back to 60 FPS and the whole game had a stroke.

Throughout my experience covering the RF games for ANN, my limited insight has led me to understand that The Powers That Be are aware that this is a massively-requested feature from the American fandom. And to their credit, it was available in RF5. (RF5 just had such a lackluster dating pool.)

Thanks for being so vocal about this as a feature; if I ever get another chance to interview Marvelous staff, I'll pick their brains about it

As time has gone on, they've slightly kinda stepped away from that - you used to see "rival" romances develop, and if you waited too long to marry, another character would move faster and start a family. Reportedly though, this had the side effect of leaving the Japanese audience feeling like they broke up a fated pair or NTR'd someone from their destined family, so most modern Harvest Moon games now leave the romance options stuck in a forever-single limbo if you don't choose to marry them.

I personally think they should have let those "rival" romances continue - they were a nice way to see the town & all of the characters in it grow. The moment you remove that system though, it becomes very clear that the intent of picking a relationship is the same as picking what crops, outfit, and decorations you want around your town and farm - the game is a customisable sandbox where you get to choose everything you want to pursue.... so at that point, locking the romances behind gender becomes pretty dumb.

I think you could reasonably state that there's a positive argument for some of the Cyberpunk 2077 romances to be gender-locked because they're wanting you to roleplay a living individual with limitations, preferences, and their own personality - it's why while I'd rather play as Kotone in Persona 3 and "insert myself" into the story, in a sense, I'll still play and put up with roleplaying as Makoto because it's still a coherent narrative experience. The part where it gets "dumb" is that in a series that is generally about personal growth and acceptance, Persona is also known for historically scrubbing same-gender romances from post-PS1 titles. In turn if Harvest Moon is a series that is forgoing narrative reasons for various NPC romances to blossom in favour of player freedom, that freedom should also extend to being able to pick from any of the romanceable options within the game's cast. It's just as much an issue of having representation as it is keeping the game feature-complete.