Like, I don’t think any sense of fun was sacrificed for art direction.
That said, I was up to Last Judge and then an update made the walk-back easier, and I knew about the Bilewater benches and poison protection before attempting to get through it, which definitely made it far less annoying for me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve loved what I played up to and I personally find it to be an improvement on the original in many ways. The speed and fluidity of movement is a joy compared to the first game, the atmosphere and characters are great, finally beating a boss that took 20 tries is liberating.

The thing that killed most of my steam was discovering that I’ve permanently missed an event with an NPC that adds them into the logbook. I’m OCD about completing my checklists and it’s a huge sour taste that I’ll have to redo the whole thing just to see that event play out.

Same, partway into act 3… it’s still on the to-do list but it’s kind of fading from my radar.

And yeah seriously: play the PAL version.

The extra mode you unlock is SO MUCH BETTER.

On the 30th.

You’re not alone.

Who knows- maybe she really is chasing Pikmin around her room, it could be what led her to finding her way to the other world! Pikmin already appear in a bunch of recent Mario media tie-ins, like the Universal park…

I don’t doubt there’ll be at least one third party solution for the visor, but a controller would be very possible.

I have a few 8BitDo controllers and their quality is great; if they can match the bizarre shape and feel of the Virtual Boy controller, it would be a reasonable placeholder.

I’m just tired of price being an increasing point of contention in recent media. Nintendo prices have been pretty stagnant for at least two decades, a ticket increase on newer tech is hardly unexpected.

For some perspective, I have a PS5 and all those games are as expensive as Switch 2 games here.

It would likely be similar to the price of the SNES controller; similar amount of buttons.

I know nothing of manufacturing and materials cost, nor do I know anything of the intricacies of the model or the 3D lenses, so I can’t complain about price. Inflation and tariffs, life is expensive lately.

- Screenshots and videos are seemingly no longer limited to specific numbers, and the auto-upload option is fantastic.

- I also love that your carefully curated folder groups are also moved across completely intact, and it’s now easier to manage adding/removing and reordering games within your groups, with little menu options at the side of the screen.

I should also point out here that System Transfer does NOT wipe your Switch 1 as all profiles and game lists remain on the source console.
Save files are moved across but can be individually sent back and forth pretty easily.

- The Welcome Tour definitely should have been a pack-in, but it’s charming and fun for what it is with plenty of little history tidbits. Trying to 100% it is not so fun with apparent reliance on peripherals. Apparently there are cheats to skip parts?

- Performance and frame rate boosts are great so far. I didn’t know Pokémon SV could feel this good! I’ve heard good things about even games that didn’t get any patches, will be fun to test them all out.
- SanDisk needs to hurry up and release 1TB express cards asap.