I've been struggling to get it into words, but yeah, you nailed it. People are assuming that the Switch and its era count as Nintendo creating during a period of success and it makes no sense to me, at least in its early days. It was born out of Nintendo struggling.
This feels like a weird thing to say, given it’s still outselling at least 2 of those games (I don’t know what the sales are on Diablo), and it’s getting massive content created for it on social media still.
Wait, do you deny that Nintendo specifically went for a new kind of casual consumer in the Wii / DS era? They were perfectly open about it. They got those customers, and promptly lost them to mobile about 4/5 years later, and returned to their more traditional audience of kids/families/core fans. That's how it went down.
It also ignores all the "casual bait" games Nintendo released during the Switch era including
I mean Odyssey or Labo are absolutely creative. So were BOTW, 1 2 Switch (+Horsies), Arms, Octo Expansion, Ring Fit, Bowsers Fury, TOTK and seemingly Mario Wonder. Otherwise non EPD games are amazing on Switch. Though I agree with you that they are playing it safe for their Multiplayer games.
Thank you for saying Pokémon started declining with XY, it often feels like the general public only noticed the decline with Sword and Shield and like, XY are a big dip in quality.
Yup. It's romanticized video game hipsterism. They don't like current Nintendo because it's no longer a niche opinion that they can use to indicate they have better taste than others, so... yeah, "I liked them before they were sellouts", but for vidya, is what this is. That's really all there is to it, from my perspective.
You raise a lot of good points but you lost me when you called TOTK "Safe, Jesus" as if TOTK is not the largest and most ambitious game Nintendo has ever created from a systems and sheer breadth of content pov. I would argue that using the same but completely modified multi-tiered Hyrule and banking so heavily on physics experimentation is anything but safe but it inevitably was only because they pulled it off (what many developers described as something akin to a miracle) with such polish and gusto.
i dont see it as overly safe , but you could argue:
I dont think people remember how slow the Wii U interface was. Is character really more important than that?
Ideally a good OS would be both fast and soulful. The Wii's was.
Aww, hell no. If I absolutely had to choose, I'd take the snappiest of the Switch UI over the slow, but pretty Wii U. I just wish there was a middle ground... plus, the Switch eShop is just as slow and less pretty.
I think the best way to look at ToTK for me is that it's absolutely not safe at all from a dev standpoint (the devs said this themselves and I'm inclined to agree) since it's a lot harder to reuse the same world and make it interesting than it would be to just make a new world. But despite that it still can feel pretty similar to BoTW a lot of the time, which can be easily conflated with it being "safe"
Wait that was actually said by them on their latest podcast?
I’m guessing you mean Good Job?
Yes. Even though some aren’t made by Nintendo directly, them publishing it still reflects on them wanting to give out more chances to games that otherwise might not get them.
At least the cubeez and the wiibs made quantifiable claims since the GC had more single player "core" titles than its successor, while the Wii had more games than the WiiU. It's really funny that when the WiiU memberberries get to present their arguments to the class it's some elusive crap like "personality", weaponizing a man's death, and an olympic display of mental gymnastics that borders on gaslighting their audience.It always been this case with Nintendo hardcore fanbase since GameCube days lol.
GC era: I don't like all these kiddy looking games. i miss N64 era where Nin used to make Grownups games.
Wii era: I don't like all these non-gamers/casuals games. I miss GC days when Nin used to make hardcore games
Wii U era: We have no games and the Wii U gimmick is boring. I miss the Wii days when Nin used to make more games and have interesting motion based games.
And now here we are
Yeah. I've always disagreed with having a sort of parasocial relationship with a corporation. I'm a huge Nintendo fan, I've been since I was 9 or 10 years old, but I know that I shouldn't treat them more than what it is: a corporation trying to make money by selling products I'm hugely interested in. I care more about said products and the circumstances regarding them (like development/marketing/promotions) than whatever personality the corporation decides to have in the current year. A silly puppet show wouldn't convice me to buy a subpar product, no matter how cute and how well done the puppets were. A nice e-shop with cute music wouldn't make me buy an overpriced game with little content.
It's funny how Nostalgia blinded so many people. I grew up playing with the N64 and it will always have a place in my heart, but in hindsight it had many problems and except some huge masterpieces the library was lacking. I love my switch, and I don't doubt that in 20 years I will be nostalgic about it, but I won't use that nostalgia to put down whatever consoles are out at that time. I will always remember the downsides and problems the switch had.
Every time I remember trying to access the menu while I was playing the Wii U version of BOTW and trying to get back to the game makes me shudder internally. And now that most Wii U services are down half of the console is just designed around dead services that only work to make everything slower.
Even setting aside the sales argument, which I wouldn't know why would you set it aside considering that the difference in sales makes the Steam Deck waaay more niche, the two products target a completely different demographic. Does he really think that if you refused to offer the switch, the average joe that just wants to give his children something to play videogames would buy a steam deck, tinker with it, install emulators and going through all the hassle of ensuring every game works perfectly for the device? That is ridiculous.
Out of the games you mentioned, Splatoon 2/3, Mario kart 8DX+DLC, Mario maker 2, Smash Ultimate and Luigi's mansion 3 are huge step-ups from its predecessors both in content and quality, even if people disagree with some details. Yes, they are creative because they managed to do things that their predecessors didn't, even if the predecessor laid the foundation. Same thing applies for other games you didn't mention, like Metroid Dread, Pikmin 4.
