Category: Nintendo News

Video games frequently rely on a good old-fashioned fist fight in order to resolve conflict, relishing the chance to set up riotous action scenes at the drop of a hat. In all of that excitement it’s often too easy to forget that most demoralising of attacks; the humble insult. If someone takes your seat on the train, or skips you in the queue at your local bank, with the right combination of cutting words and a keen wit, you can leave them – and their mother, and their cousin, and their ex – wounded to their very core. 

Oh…Sir! The Insult Simulator breaks insults down to their core components, words and phrases, then tasks you with choosing the right combination to win a bitter argument. It’s a gamified version of the real thing, closer to something more akin to Cards Against Humanity than a furious dispute over a spilled kebab, so there’s no real sense of finesse to putting these insults together. All you’re asked to do is make basic, grammatical sense, and you can pretty much run with any string of subjects and adjectives, the longer the better. 

This makes for a game that’s remarkably easy to pick up, though a full tutorial is provided to help you get to grips with the mechanics. Both you and your opponent choose from the same pool of shared words, taking it in turns to select one and add it to your insult. Certain words are more valuable than others – ‘and’ for example is extremely useful for extending your insult – so there’s a bit of strategy in stealing these in order to deny your opponent the same chances. You can see each-other’s insults slowly forming on each turn, making it possible to predict what they’ll need next, and take it for yourself. By doing this you can even render the insult impossible to complete, robbing your opponent of their turn.

Each fragment of your insult is also fully voice-acted, so once you’ve both finished selecting, your character of choice calls it out with reasonably convincing results. You’ll then score points based on how effective your verbal assault was deemed to be, and this will then be removed from your opponents health bar. This ends the round, and you start off again forming an entirely new insult until one of you just can’t take it anymore. There are a few tricks you can pull to get an edge over your opponent, such as extending your insult using the ‘…’ option, which lets you store an entire sentence for your next round, unleashing it as one mega-insult all at once. Players also have a much smaller pool of words only they can draw from, and this can be refreshed once per round by taking a gentlemanly sip of tea.

In terms of content you can choose a single match or a tournament mode, which is the closest thing the game has to a single-player story. In this mode you play five matches in a row, eventually facing off against God himself at the Pearly Gates, unlocking new characters and stages along the way. Matches are resolved fairly quickly, and play out much the same each time, but there are a surprising amount of multiplayer options to help add that personal element if you so choose. Both local and online multiplayer are catered for here, with either friends or strangers. It’s pretty seamless to just jump into a game, and there’s an entire ranking system incorporated to compare skills, in practice we found it difficult to actually find an opponent, and even more difficult to find one who would stick around long enough to finish a game. That being said, it’s great to see this being implemented at all, and perhaps our sharp tongues were just too intimidating for any rivals to challenge. We wouldn’t blame them.

Overall, the game’s presentation is definitely one of its strong suits, with a wonderfully exaggerated art-style and some pompous music to help nail the kind of atmosphere normally reserved for lazy afternoons bragging about your latest hunt at the country club. Characters each have their own personal weaknesses to take advantage of when insulting them – one is afraid of the modern world for example – but what really sells them is the voice acting, which works even when stitched together into some of the clunkier insults. What they’re saying might sound ridiculous, but you can tell they’re having a good time saying it.

This is unfortunately where Oh…Sir! falls flat, and ultimately doesn’t quite live up to its premise. It’s a clever little system for choosing words and phrases, but the end results are never actually all that funny, and sometimes barely even make sense. We feel as though that silliness is mostly intentional, which would be fine, except it makes it quite difficult to understand how points are being tallied. Often you’ll form a perfectly sensible insult only to have the AI compare your sofa to an elderberry and score far more than you, which frustrates far more than it entertains. For such a simple game, it’s disappointing to feel like you’re not really in control.

After a while, each match just starts blurring into the next, and no amount of online play or tournament mode can help alleviate that. Even the phrases and words that initially raise a chuckle get re-used far too often, and the juvenile insults like ‘bum cancer’ wear thin even sooner. There simply isn’t enough variance or genuine humour to warrant playing for more than a couple of hours, which may be fair given the budget price at the time of writing, but those few hours won’t even be to everyone’s taste, relying heavily on silly, random phrases to keep you entertained. It’s a clever system on paper that just doesn’t really hold its own when put into practice.

Conclusion

Oh…Sir! The Insult Simulator is a pretty silly experience, even when it doesn’t mean to be. The concept of choosing words and phrases to form an insult out of is clever enough in isolation, but the novelty wears off pretty quickly once you’ve played through a couple of matches. Any kind of strategy or technique is hampered by some iffy rules on point-scoring, so the online multiplayer – while a welcome addition – is dragged down by that same awkward repetition, whether your opponent is human or AI. For what it’s worth, there’s maybe an hour or so of decent fun here if you don’t mind your insults making very little actual sense, and the price is just about in line with that. Not to be insulting, but it feels like maybe this game could have used a little more work, and its mother was a louse-ridden socialite who married an ambidextrous vole. 

Darkest Dungeon might just have you questioning your sanity. This is a game that delights in making you feel wretched, whether through its brutal difficulty or its oppressively bleak atmosphere. And yet before long you’ll swear blind that you’re having the time of your life. 

Sanity plays an integral part in DD. This brutal dungeon-crawling RPG from Red Hook Studios treats your rag-tag party’s mental wellbeing as a stat that’s as important to monitor as health or status. Fear saturates this dark Victorian fantasy world, as our protagonist resolves to clear his family mansion of an ancient supernatural threat. 

Each self-contained dungeon sees your four adventurers – picked from a random selection of knights, assassins, rogues and priests – trudging from left to right. The tension of the situation steadily saps their spirits, as do frequent battles and random events. Allow your team to become too highly strung and they will snap in a range of unpredictable ways. One might freeze with fear, another might refuse medical assistance, while yet another might flee to the back of the party.

That latter example is a problem, because positioning is in important factor in each of DD’s turn-based fights. Each party member has a preferred position within the team. Knights, barbarians and other tanks favour the front lines, while healers and projectile specialists tend to bring up the rear. It’s not just a matter of preference either. Certain attacks and moves will only make themselves available to each member when they’re stood in a particular position. This works the other way too, so utilising moves that force your opponents back or pull them forward is a viable disruptive tactic.

Once your mission is complete, returning to town brings its own strategies to consider. You’ll need divert some of your limited resources to lowering your bedraggled team’s stress levels, and perhaps even work on some damaging character traits that appear when things get really hectic. This might be as simple as leaving them in the local pub for the next mission, or as severe as booking them into a sanatorium.

Either way you’ll probably be without their services for the next mission, so you’ll need to recruit additional members to keep the lineup fresh. Finding effective new party members with special abilities or strong stats is one of the real pleasures of DD, and there’s even a certain morbid pleasure in dealing with their negative personality Quirks. One member of your team might become more prone to disease, while another will become scared of excessive light – a particular problem given that keeping your torch well lit makes the dungeon you’re in easier. That said, letting things get dark makes the rewards meatier, so there’s a layer of strategy here too.

You’re probably picking up that there’s an awful lot to consider in DD. We’ve barely even scratched the surface of what it has to offer, such is the sheer depth of content on offer here. One negative result of these layers of systems is a screen that’s always dense with information. Like so much of this grisly RPG, it’s initially rather overwhelming, and it takes a while before you can properly parse everything that’s put before you. Unfortunately, this information overload also poses platform-specific problems both when playing on your TV and directly on your Switch.

When docked, the game’s text-rich, menu-heavy interface has plenty of room to breathe, and you can really appreciate DD’s beautiful hand-drawn comic book art style. However, that same busy UI maps uneasily to a control pad. It just never feels wholly comfortable or consistent, and flipping between menus and remembering which stick you’re meant to be using to navigate ends up being a bit of a chore.

It’s much more easy and natural to control in handheld mode, where you can directly interact with menu elements through the touchscreen. Unfortunately, Switch’s 6-inch 720p display isn’t quite big or sharp enough to render all of the aforementioned UI elements (or the small text) optimally. All in all, neither way of playing is without its issues, leading us to conclude that Switch isn’t the ideal platform on which to play DD. It’s a PC game at heart, and that remains the preferred format.

Of course, DD is a game that revels in imperfections, whether you’re managing the psychological flaws of your party, limping home with a sole surviving party member, or struggling to pull your drunken field medic out of the pub for a mission. In this context, squinting at some slightly-too-small text or working an awkward control layout is no major hardship – especially when the rewards for perseverance are so rich.

Conclusion

Darkest Dungeon has always been an RPG that finds ways to make life uncomfortable for the player, and this Switch version manages to add a couple of usability issues to that list. However, this remains a dauntingly deep, thoroughly absorbing dungeon crawler that will swallow you up for hours at a time.

When Wii Sports helped to launch Nintendo Wii back in 2006, the Tennis mode was lauded as one of the reasons to own the console and an instant hit with gamers of any age or skill level. Its simple yet addictive gameplay was easy to pick up on and follow, and on top of that it shipped with four other excellent sports to try out. Now, 12 years later, a new title is hoping to replicate that simplicity and feel.

Tennis, as it’s simply called, arrives on Nintendo Switch to very, very little fanfare. But in spite of that, does the title offer up a solid back and forth encounter? Unfortunately not. Tennis is one of the most barebones experiences we’ve ever engaged with.

The core game centres around three modes: Rally Challenge, Tournament, and Quick Play. Rally Challenge is a test of endurance as you trade the ball from side to side with the CPU, Tournament pits you against three opponents in your quest for first place, and Quick Play is self-explanatory. Much of your time with the game will be spent within these three modes, and their depth goes as deep as a puddle. Rally Challenge will speed things up a little as you successfully trade the ball and the players you compete against in Tournament increase in difficulty ever so slightly, but besides these two modifiers, your very first match will play out exactly the same as your last does.

Tennis is so utterly devoid of content that we weren’t sure if the game had booted up correctly when the main menu first greeted us. The three modes are incredibly basic, their depth is pretty much non-existent, and you’re going to tire of them all too quickly. There’s maybe an hour or two of content present, and it’s almost insulting.

This sparseness also carries over to the characters you can choose from, with there being eight in total. They all come with their own set of stats, separated into the categories of power, spin, movement, and control, but in-game they have a minimal effect. What is so egregious about them though is their catchphrases, which they feel the need to say after every single hit of the ball. Take Chris for example, he’ll shout, “Yeah!” or, “Take that” every time he manages to return the green sphere, and it makes the simple act of just playing the game even more of a chore thanks to it becoming excruciating to listen to just two minutes in.

Six different courts accompany the sparse character cast, and these locations don’t fare much better. You’ve got the typical basic court that wouldn’t look out of place down your local park, the ever present grass court that tries to resemble Wimbledon, and a smattering of other courts that you’d find at other Grand Slam tournaments. Then there’s the court that’s situated in a field surrounded by a lake, which is probably the most imaginative Tennis gets.

Another factor that makes Tennis feel so basic is the fact that you’ll never directly control your chosen character, the game does it all for you. All this leaves you to do is to take the shots themselves, and this is where the tiniest amount of complexity can be found.

When using the Joy-Cons, you can either twist or flick the controllers to vary your shots. Tilting them will slice your shot, flicking them to the left or right will place some top spin on the ball, and a drop shot can be achieved by pointing the Joy-Con downwards. Executing these shots will build up a meter, which when full, allows you to unleash a super shot which pretty much guarantees you the next set of points. While these are probably the flashiest part of the game, they actually make matches even easier than they already are due to how often you can use them.

Everything you do in the game earns you TP, but they don’t actually seem to feed into anything. There’s an achievement section on the main menu that lists your accomplishments within the game and bonuses, but they just seem to be there for the sake of it. Tennis Points feel like they should be there for unlockables, but with there not actually being any, the whole system is entirely redundant.

Conclusion

Tennis is so lacklustre in every single department that we’re honestly baffled this managed to get a full release. The modes on offer are incredibly basic, the characters are dire, and the lack of any sort of progression through the game means there’s absolutely nothing to keep you going. The Joy-Con controls are a very small highlight, but Tennis is one we’ll want to forget in a hurry.

By this point in time, JRPGs have come quite a long way since their humble beginnings, and it seems like every new release is trying to find a way to reinvent the wheel once more with a flashy new battle system or premise. Even so, there’s a certain kind of charm to the relative simplicity of early JRPGs, and that’s what Tokyo RPG Factory endeavors to capture in its releases. I Am Setsuna was a game that doubled down on playing it straight; a 90’s RPG in spirit that divided opinion over how backwards it seemed to some. Now, the developer is at it again with a spiritual sequel, Lost Sphear, which carries on many of the ideals of its predecessor while trying to make improvements where they’re needed. It largely succeeds in this effort, and though Lost Sphear may be reliant on tried and true tropes and formulas that won’t be surprising to veterans of the genre, it nonetheless proves to be an enjoyable, quality RPG.

The story of Lost Sphear stars Kanata, a kind orphan boy living in Elgarthe village, and his band of friends. It doesn’t take long for things to get interesting when the ‘Lost’ concept is introduced, wherein objects, people, and places can disappear and leave a white void in their wake. After discovering that he possesses the unique ability to restore Lost things to their original form by utilizing the power of memories, Kanata and his crew set off on a journey to reshape the world and get to the bottom of what’s causing the Lost phenomenon.

Though the plot is riddled with tired JRPG clichés, it nonetheless remains well-paced and engaging. There may not be many points for originality here, but it’s a well-constructed narrative with a diverse cast of interesting characters, and some of the plot twists are genuinely surprising. There’s a balanced mix of adventure, sorrow, humor, and passion, and we felt a connection to the main cast of heroes after not too long.

Battle takes the shape of a more polished version of the system present in I Am Setsuna, and the changes made are quite welcome. All players’ actions are governed by an ATB gauge, but a notable change here is that you can move character around a la Xenoblade Chronicles 2 to get an edge on enemies in combat. Clever positioning of party members can give you advantages like striking multiple enemies with the same attack or having some party members evade a wide area of effect attack. It still feels more turn based than it does live action, but the additional nuance offered by character positioning is a welcome change.

Building on the focus on player agency in the flow of battle, each character has a separate gauge that slowly fills up, giving them a Momentum Point once full. This allows characters certain enhancements, like higher damage or a life steal effect, if the Y button is pressed when a light flashes the moment before an attack is made. It’s a simple inclusion that’s not too hard to pull off, but it can add an additional layer of strategy and tension to a fast-paced fight.

Another notable inclusion is the Vulcosuits, special mechs obtained a few hours into the campaign that greatly help out in boss fights. These essentially function as an overclock mode, boosting a character’s stats significantly so they can deal and take much higher amounts of damage. Usage of the suits is governed by a VP pool which depletes when any Vulcosuit makes an action, and this is where there’s a bit of a bottleneck in the combat design. The VP pool is small enough as is, and until much later in the game, your options are greatly limited for replenishing your points. This unfortunately has the effect of sidelining the Vulcosuits in most battles, as it isn’t worth it to use up the precious resources that they cost. It’s a bit of a shame, but the flipside is that the typical enemy battle seldom demands that you use them; Vulcosuits would be overkill in most uses.

Character customization is simple enough to pick up, but has a pleasing amount of depth for those that are willing to put in the time. Aside from the typical weapons and armor, characters can be equipped with Spritnites – basically Materia – that allow them to pull off special attacks and cast spells. Though most of these are straightforward, some Spritnites can be equipped that enable passive enhancements—like a team-wide buff against certain damage types—once a character stores enough Momentum points in a battle. As if that wasn’t enough, Spritnites can also be equipped on others to give them an even greater effect if a Momentum point is spent when performing the action. All of this comes together to form a system that gives you lots of options and favors lots of different playstyles, yet it’s presented in a straightforward and easy to understand fashion.

Building somewhat off of all these customization options, a new ‘Artifact’ concept factors into the world map, granting a different kind of enhancement to your characters. Certain points on the map allow Kanata to restore a Lost structure, which will then cast a passive benefit that follows you into your battles at various places on the map. This allows you greater control over things like how fast gauges charge or how high critical hit rates can be in certain situations, and the broad amount of Artifacts gives you plenty of choice over how you want to sway the battle in your favor. Do you build artifacts that favor filling the Momentum Gauge as fast as possible, or do you swap out the magic-focused party member and build one that cripples the effectiveness of magic attacks? Artifacts are a great way to provide indirect character customization and new ones are introduced at a fairly steady clip.

One complaint levied against I Am Setsuna is that the environments lack proper variety, choosing instead to go for a mostly uniform snowscape. Lost Sphear addresses this by offering a diverse array of locales that are visually distinctive. One moment may find you searching for treasure in a graveyard of ships, while in another you’ll find yourself in a Victorian-esque metropolis. Though the narrative can be a bit padded at times with fetch-quests, it’s alleviated by how you never know quite where you’ll end up next, and the overworld map feels suitably epic.

Even so, there’s little here that will blow you away from a graphical perspective. The minimalist art direction is welcome, but feels a little cheap in some places. Reused assets and simplistic models are a common sight, making this feel like a mobile game in many ways. Though that isn’t too much of an issue when playing in portable mode – which we’d recommend for this game – it still feels like more could’ve been done from an artistic perspective to leave a greater impression on the player. As it stands, there’s not much here that you’ll likely be remembering a few years after playing, and it’s a bit of a shame given the underlying quality of the rest of the game.

Now, at the time of writing, Lost Sphear is listed on the eShop for $50, which is frankly a ridiculous asking price for what’s being offered, and will likely be the point that makes or breaks the game for many a potential buyer. Though there’s lots of content on offer, it pales next to the near limitless depth of Xenoblade Chronicles 2, which is available for just ten dollars more, and that makes this a much tougher sell to those who aren’t diehard fans of the genre. Make no mistake, Lost Sphear is a quality game that is certainly worth your time if you’re looking for a traditional JRPG, but whether it justifies the premium price will be up to you.

Conclusion

There’s little in Lost Sphear that you haven’t seen before in JRPGs, but that doesn’t mean it’s a title to be dismissed out of hand. If you can look past the clichés, Lost Sphear presents an engaging world, deep battle system, and plenty of replayability which will likely delight many an RPG fan. Tokyo RPG Factory has proven with this release that it’s capable of learning from past mistakes, and though Lost Sphear still might not be the game to surpass Chrono Trigger, it proves itself to be worthy of that legacy. We’d recommend Lost Sphear to anybody who loves a focused, traditional RPG; it may be priced a little high, but this is an enjoyable experience that fans won’t want to miss out on.