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Friday, July 28, 2017

The New Nintendo 2DS XL, Hey! Pikmin, and Miitopia... Plus...

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - More! I want more! More! Hahahaha!

There isn't much good about today. Well, it's the two-year anniversary (or, rounded by a weekend) of Miiverse being ruined with its redesign. Miiverse has never been the same. (It got demonstrably worse.)

But I have nothing much to say about that that I haven't been saying for years now, so let's look to the current day. Today, Nintendo has multiple releases for their Nintendo 3DS family: A hardware revision in the New Nintendo 2DS XL is the biggest attraction. I'm not sure how much marketing attention Nintendo is putting on it, but in terms of specifications, the New Nintendo 2DS XL is the best 3DS family handheld they've made yet.

I'm not entirely sure who the target audience is supposed to be. 2DS owners looking for an upgrade? Customers who have never owned a 3DS or 2DS of any sort before who suddenly are interested? (There won't be much of those.)

Meanwhile, Nintendo is releasing Hey! Pikmin (read my impressions of its demo here) and Miitopia (check out its E3 2017 log here) today as well. Those games range from boring to mediocre.

I guess I haven't written about Miitopia in detail yet. I played the first demo (to my understanding, the second demo, the Casting Call one, isn't particularly... interactive or representative of what the game is about, gameplay-wise). It's a generic multi-party-member turn-based RPG, where you only control one party member. The others are controlled by AI.

The game rewards grinding because you get more “sprinkles” (renewable healing items) based on the number of enemies you kill. That's a different rate of growth than leveling up, which is based on experience points obtained by beating stronger enemies. 

Miitopia amiibo functionality costumes Bowser Koopa in-game arcade tickets
The in-game Arcade tickets using incompatible amiibo are ABSURDLY game-breaking in terms of the in-game economy.
The compatible amiibo just give you underpowered costumes.
 
In short, Miitopia has a weak and easy base gameplay system, which is broken further by generous rewards by using amiibo. Hey! Pikmin is similarly broken by amiibo functionality.

I guess they would rather advertise the New Nintendo 2DS XL's built-in amiibo functionality than make balanced gameplay systems. Neither Miitopia or Hey! Pikmin have paid DLC, after all. The amiibo serve that role.

By the way, in the Miitopia demo, I set the characters to be myself, Rawk, Kamek, and Vortexica. The implied homo-erotic interactions in the inn between the characters makes me uncomfortable. (...Maybe we need more female staffers.)

I guess games where everyone gets shipped (or there are polyamorous relationships — Rawk got jealous of my friendship with Kamek for some reason, creepily watching us from the window...?) has a side-effect of encouraging equal gender representation? I dunno.

I'll just keep playing my Nintendo Switch and leave my 3DS alone until Culdcept Revolt. ...Assuming I'm actually interested in that. (More on that in another article. Probably.) 

Oh. Today also brings the existence of that new movie called “The Emoji Movie” which is also a bad thing. I have nothing I want to say about that, other than that emojis (or faces in general) and Miitopia are closely related.


Ludwig discourages you to have anything to do with the game releases out today, along with The Emoji Movie. If you'll deal with Miiverse, then Follow him at NNID PrinceOfKoopas. No one reading this probably needs a New Nintendo 2DS XL, but if you do, then by all means, get one.


Culdcept Revolt has finally released in October, but Ludwig is unsure if he's interested.

2 comments :

  1. Well, it's probably also a narrow target demographic, but I only got a New 3DS so that I could play Hyrule Warriors Legends and was never interested in the 3D, so I'll be switching to the 2 as soon as I can.

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