Ring Fit Adventure Fitness Log Week 3: The Kingdom of Sporta

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Most of the Kingdom of Sporta, anyway.

My scaly wrists are feeling pretty sore typing this out, but yes, it's our third edition of KoopaTV's Fitness Log Fridays.

This goes through Days 9, 10, 11, and 12 of Ring Fit Adventure, and according to the in-game exercise log (reproduced at the end), I've played it for longer and more intensely than Week 1 and Week 2! I'm going to tell you my impressions as I'm playing Ring Fit Adventure, the good and the bad, and the play-by-play through this very unique role-playing game.

Starting Monday night at World 4: The Nation of Sporta. I had the difficulty level set up to 19 for the week, to continue to challenge myself and look impressive to the folks I'm about to spend my week with. You see, Sporta is no mere nation. It is a kingdom, full of buff, fit, muscular people. They wish to fight back against Dragaux, who has done little more than fly in. I'm tasked by the local Sportan Commander to scout out the Sportan Waters. There's actually all sorts of collectibles here that you can Ring Pull, like wildly growing strawberries. But we're stopped by a non-traversable river.

Eric Swalwell's #Fartgate Spirit Battle

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Don't do this to your family on Thanksgiving.

In honour of the very American holiday of Thanksgiving, established around a century and a half ago, KoopaTV has decided to dedicate today's article to a very American fellow: California Congressman (and very failed Democrat presidential candidate, being the first to drop out) Eric Swalwell!

Of course, at KoopaTV, we're not going to bore you with some puff piece about a politician. ...Though there are some puffs involved, of another sort.

Warning: This article contains cursed imagery and fart jokes. In fact, there already just was one.

Spirit Details

Name

Eric Swalwell

Series

California Democrat Party (real life)

Class

Novice

Spirit Type, Ability

Support

Down Special ↑

Galarian Starter Evolutions Officially Revealed

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Nice to know who they are, eventually. My thoughts.

Let's suspend our knowledge for a bit that we all know Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield are already released. We can even forget that I said I'm not getting it.

The Pokémon Company International just revealed, as of this morning, the first and second stage evolutions to the Galarian starter Pokémon we first met back when Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield were introduced back in February. You remember Grookey, Scorbunny, and Sobble, right?

Meet their evolutions (and some less interesting details about Snorlax forgetting to play Ring Fit Adventure): 

I'll go through each evolutionary line separately and give my thoughts, but I'm telling you upfront: I'm still a Grookey supporter, and I didn't need to see these to have that affect my opinion.

Why Would You Join the Pocket Camp Club?

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Some folks still play this, for some reason. Perhaps not for much longer!

Full, upfront disclosure: My experience with Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is about as limited as watching the Animal Crossing Mobile Direct two years ago with the rest of the KoopaTV staff, and watching someone play the game for a few minutes during Thanksgiving 2017. The key verb there was “watching.” I never played it. Still, I think I'm qualified to commentate on this news, because with any announcement from Nintendo there's both an audience of existing consumers, as well as non-players who might just become interested based on the information. And I do have non-mobile Animal Crossing experience so I have a reference point.

Right after making some very controversial changes to the Gulliver's Ship feature that greatly distorted the established resources→reward ratio (as well as making it more difficult to rid oneself of duplicate inventory), Nintendo announced two new $3 or $8 per month subscription services for Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, collectively called the “Pocket Camp Club.”

(The new update also made Gulliver's Ship better.)

There are two membership options. The Happy Helper Plan, and the Cookie & Depot Plan. I'm not sure if you can subscribe to both, though let's briefly discuss why you'd subscribe to either optional plan.

Sad Excuses for Black Friday Sales, 2019

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - There's likely going to be many more examples.

I would like to tell you a tale of three companies’ bad Black Friday outings. You might not view them as objectively bad in a holistic sense, but we're KoopaTV, and we can spin the story how we want.

First example is the important one, as far as KoopaTV is concerned. CAPCOM is having a Black Friday sale on select games... and what they don't tell you in their headline, is select games on select consoles.

I suppose I should share CAPCOM's caveat:

“By the way, this is a growing list! Keep an eye on it as we’ll be adding more deals as they’re made available.”

But for now, they have Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy at 33% off ($20.09 from $29.99)... but only on Xbox One and PlayStation 4. That's an inferior discount than August's CAPCOM Publisher Sale 2019. Most of the other sales are titles on Xbox One that I didn't know were even ported there, like Ōkami HD.

There's a certain console missing there that this site tends to focus on. But it's a growing list.

Update 11/26/2019: They added Steam games to the list, including Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy for only $19.79, or 34% off. That's better than August.

Update 11/28/2019: While CAPCOM is not acknowledging this, the Ace Attorney games are on sale on Switch and 3DS right now until December 4.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy is 33.33% off or 60% off depending on system.
Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is 50% off.
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice is 60% off.
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies is 70% off.

But I don't think Best Buy's Black Friday sale will be a growing list. They went and paid for #BestBuyBlackFriday to be a trending tweet, starting yesterday morning. (Sunday.) What's on offer?

Normally-priced (MSRP) Nintendo Switch Lite, for $199.99!
(There's hundreds of other items, too, but how is this justifiable?)

Ever since I announced to the world that I'm a trillionaire, a lot of people have come to me asking me to buy them things. Knowing that I'm very... frugal (some say stingy), they justify their requests with “well it'll be on sale on Black Friday.” Except some of those same people are asking for Nintendo Switch (Lite) systems.

Silly. Nintendo doesn't put those on sale. They just put their old (read: discontinued) Nintendo Switch systems as a Black Friday deal by having it at full price ($300) but it includes a full game download code of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. And hey, that's the best-selling game on the Switch, so I guess that's arguably enticing. Still not really much of a deal...


You can probably take it as a bad sign that Ludwig is writing a filler article about Black Friday on a Monday, but you can and also should blame these companies for starting their sales a week early. Meanwhile, KoopaTV has begun its latest giveaway contest process since November 1. You should participate.


CAPCOM is putting their games back on sale less than a month later.
Nintendo eShop has Black Friday/Cyber Deals in 2020, too.

Ring Fit Adventure Fitness Log Week 2 | World 3: A Shining Jewel from the Heavens

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Our first town... and smoothies.

Yup, it's another edition of KoopaTV's Fitness Log Friday!

I played quite a bit of Ring Fit Adventure this week, and for the second edition of my fitness log, I wanted to go into greater detail about the gameplay experience of Ring Fit Adventure. If I focus on that, I might like the game as a game more and less as an exercise tool. That means I was writing contributions to this article while I was playing the game each day.

Let me know what you think of my thinking on this, and enjoy. This means that I might be spoiling the game's events a bit, though. It's fairly linear so far, so my experience may be like yours if you play the game:

November 20 2019 Democrat Presidential Primary Debate 5 ANALYSIS!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - This is a filler debate. Though maybe they're all going to be like that.

I will try to make this analysis fairly quick, since the debate itself was only a little over two hours long last night, with ten candidates. (Compared to three hours and twelve candidates in October 2019's.)

From left to right, we had Cory Booker, Tulsi Gabbard, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Andrew Yang, and Tom Steyer. Names don't ring a bell? Check out KoopaTV's 2020 presidential debate index, which has summaries of what's going on so far. The debate was moderated by MSNBC (a more overtly liberal division of NBC) and the Washington Post.

(MS)NBC is continuing their fascination with giving Cory Booker more time than he deserves.
As well as giving Andrew Yang no time to talk.

Let me state above the fold: MSNBC has a long and continuing history of trying to black out Andrew Yang's candidacy. Naturally, this extends to how they conduct their debate.

Crashing Market Crashers By Becoming a TRILLIONAIRE!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - ♪ If I were a rich man... Yubby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dum... ♪

All I still use my 3DS for is accumulating Gem Apples in Team Kirby Clash Deluxe, using it as a portable music player brought to me by Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon, sometimes playing Pocket Card Jockey, and accumulating Play Coins so I can hire more (superficially diverse) feline stock analysts for Market Crashers, which is a minor game at the Nintendo 3DS's StreetPass Mii Plaza. It's based around different publicly-traded companies offering their stocks on the market, and buying low and selling high in an action game format. Predictive button-mashing, with the help of the analysts.

I like the game because I like hoarding money. I've been playing it every day for years.

In fact, I have so much money, I just became a trillionaire today. Count the commas. (They'd be decimal points in Europe, which I never liked.) This coincides with the United States stock market indices reaching record highs in the past few days.

 ♪ All day long, I'd biddy biddy bum, if I were a wealthy man. ♫

The developers at Good-Feel never intended people to play the game for so long after the first ten billion, where you got a 24-karat gold statue of your Mii. But they did incentivise it a bit at the results screen with big bags of money that eventually become gold-coloured when you're in the hundreds of billions. So what happens when you're at a trillion?

Well, the money stack stops moving. There are no more accumulated bills in the money pile. Once you're at a trillion, the game stops showing any graphical representation of that and refuses to make the giant money bags symmetrical. Sure, the money counter (presented as a variable numeric text) keeps going up. But there's no satisfaction from there visually being no more cash to go around.

Where is it going? Perhaps we'll find out in tonight's presidential debate. The Democrats attack the wealth of millionaires. The Democrats attack the wealth of billionaires.

Will the Democrats start updating their rhetoric to confiscate the wealth of the trillionaire class as well? ...Or will they overlook the trillionaires and I'll be immune?

Which scenario would YOU rather have: The government take my money and waste it, or me continue to offer KoopaTV Loyalty Rewards Program prizes funded from my own figurative pocket? ‘cause KoopaTV doesn't make any revenue, but we still have costs. This site exists purely to do good for society, no matter the price. That's better than what the United States government does.

(Seriously, have you looked at the prizes for the current round, round 29? Only a trillionaire could afford to give away that much stuff for FREE.) 


Ludwig will be watching the Democrat presidential debate tonight. Stay tuned for his analysis tomorrow (Thursday), and he'll be sure to mention any concerns about trillionaires. Ludwig supposes an irresponsible billionaire, millionaire, or even a thousandaire could afford to give out the KoopaTV Loyalty Rewards Program prizes, but you got to have a trillion in the bank to truly be well off enough to give away that money. You are free to comment in the comments section if you think negatively about Ludwig writing an article essentially to brag about money. He doesn't think he'll keep playing Market Crashers.


Ludwig watched the debate, and notes all mention of trillions in his analysis.

Why Pokémon National Dexers Failed But Sonic's Movie Got Redesigned

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - The right circumstances to affect change.

I just received this request from ShinyGirafarig, one of KoopaTV's long-time readers, which I'll transcribe here since our requests page is so popular that it no longer anchors to specific comments correctly:

“Is there a right way to ask for things from major companies?

Is there a respectable way for the target audience to ask for changes such as to make Sonic the Hedgehog more accurate in the movie? To add back all the Pokémon in a future game? Some other request? I keep seeing memes jokingly saying that "bullying worked" for why Sonic was fixed.

While there is always "vote with your wallet" sometimes bad products get sold because people did not know they would like a product after buying them and companies would get the wrong message. Or being able to actually boycott a product. A company can easily think they no longer like product when in reality the fandom does not like the direction it headed.” 

Some four years ago, I wrote an article—also driven by a KoopaTV fan request—called “The Effect of Fan Influence”. That article largely covers ShinyGirafarig's request, but rather than tell her I already wrote about it, I'm going to take my article's points as a framework, and expand on it using the two examples she brought up regarding how the Sonic the Hedgehog movie now has a redesigned Sonic the Hedgehog after fans demanded it to the movie's director, yet the National Dex concerns fans brought up with Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield were ultimately ignored for the final release.

Catastrophic: YouTube Culls Comments For COPPA

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Rated E for everyone? Off with your head!

At the beginning of September, Google-owned YouTube got wrecked by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) with a record-breaking $170 million settlement for boisterously violating the Child's Online Privacy Protection Act, henceforth known as COPPA. This act serves to prevent online properties—like YouTube—from knowingly collecting private information from kids, defined as those under 13 years old. That ended up being what YouTube was doing, collecting information on anyone (including kids) who viewed videos, and knowingly, too. Check out that press release for some quotes catching Google red-handed, including them telling toy makers Mattel and/or Hasbro, “YouTube is today's leader in reaching children age 6–11 against top TV channels.”

No one really paid any attention to this until last week, when YouTube sent an e-mail to every channel owner telling us that there is mandatory, important action we, YouTube channel owners, need to take, in one of three methods:

1. Automatically mark our channel (and every video inside) as not-for-kids. YouTube will continue to collect all viewers’ information who watch these videos
2. Automatically mark our channel (and every video inside) as for-kids. YouTube won't collect viewers’ private information on these videos
3. Mark each and every video individually as either for-kids or not-for-kids

If you mark this incorrectly and the FTC feels like prosecuting you, you can be fined up to $42,350 per violation—that's per video. (You probably wouldn't get fined over $170 million, though, if you happen to have 4,015 YouTube videos or more.)

There's no safe, easy answer, as demonstrated in this 2x2 matrix I made:

Ring Fit Adventure Fitness Log Week 1

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - It's the first week of me playing Ring Fit Adventure!

Welcome to the first of KoopaTV's fitness log series, as announced last week. I never figured out what a non-ironic fitness/workout/weekly I'm-going-to-lose-weight blog actually looks like, so I don't have anything to parody as a model. Given that, I'm just going to experiment with formatting and content. If you have any recommendations or things you'd like to see, let me know in the comments section. Normally, I'd write this sort of thing at the end of an article, but I feel like being upfront because it's easier to write this than the actual content. Not sure what I was thinking to be honest.

Week 1 Impressions of Ring Fit Adventure

Ring Fit Adventure pwned me on Day 1, and that was just doing all the settings. I had to select options such as that I don't do any exercise for someone of my age group, and that I live outside of Canada. I told the game my weight and age, and I guess I'll tell you the former number as well.

I'm 140 pounds as of Sunday night (November 10).
A lot of that weight is my shell and I can't do anything about that. But I'd love to get back to 130.

Playing Ring Fit Adventure, and this is a bad mindset I have right now that I'm hoping I'll lose later, feels like “I'm going to exercise and have fun with it.” instead of “I'm going to have fun and get exercise out of it.” I want to think of it as a game first. But I'm not. I also really, really want to play other games now, and I haven't played anything else on my Switch all week.

Buying Pokémon Sword/Shield? Why I Won't

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - You can do what you want with your own money, of course. (Or even my money.)

In preparing to write this article, I've been reviewing KoopaTV's coverage of Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield. For pretty much every official announcement from The Pokémon Company International, we published something about it. As I was hoping for, I don't think it was an information overload this time around.

However, I wasn't ever really hyped over Pokémon Shield, which is the version I'd pick if I was going to buy one. When they were first revealed and named in February 2019, I said I was optimistic about what was shown in the trailer, but worried about Junichi Masuda being the producer on the game. In the June 2019 Pokémon Direct, I said I was more interested in playing the game than I was before watching that—though I wasn't giving the game much actual praise in the article tone.

What followed were a lot of individual Pokémon and feature announcements that either didn't move the needle, or actually got me looking less forward to the game. The biggest controversy among the fanbase has been about the fate of the National Dex and Pokémon from past generations being put into the game. I'm on record only caring about that in the context of what it means for spin-off games, so that wouldn't be the reason for why I wouldn't buy Pokémon Shield itself.

I'm not getting it because, if it weren't a Pokémon game, I wouldn't even consider it. Pokémon Shield hasn't presented itself as a competent Japanese RPG in terms of what we've seen. Meanwhile, I have a copy of Dragon Quest XI S now that is waiting to be played after I was so pleased with the demo. I have other, better things to play.

If GAME FREAK is going to continue to operate on an annual release schedule, we're going to get a Galarian iteration next year anyway, which'll probably add substantially more content and fix a lot of problems. I'll re-look at the situation then, and of course, KoopaTV will cover the announcement. Alternatively, they'll remake an older generation, like the Sinnoh games, which I'm worried about how they'll handle it.

I haven't been very specific in this article. I know there is a tremendous amount of negativity surrounding the game with cut Pokémon, cut moves, bad story and characters, linear pathways, whatever. I haven't myself gone into specifics because I don't want to read non-official spoilers/leaks/possible misinformation. So, I gave a chance for Junichi Masuda, GAME FREAK, and The Pokémon Company International to impress me with an interview that's supposedly directed at people who “weren't hyped enough about these games”.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: Version 6.0.0 (November) Fighter Usage Stats!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - 6.1.0 might change everything, so I gotta specify.

They announced a version 6.1.0 of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate to deploy shortly after this article will publish, and that might affect the balance patches for characters. It isn't completely correct to deem this the November usage stats (especially so early in the month), though these do derive from the results of the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate North American Online Open November 2019, which had the grand prize of going to the Genesis 7 tournament in January.

While I'm not going to Genesis 7, I'm very happy with my own performance. I finally got in the top 32 within my region—a solid 31st place. My diagram in the Online Open August 2019 article isn't FAKE NEWS anymore. The ladder only being three hours instead of four helped a lot, as did the revised stage list. (I still want Fountain of Dreams or Dream Land, though.) You can read about my journey in the comments section in the article hyperlinked in the previous paragraph. A whole lot of Bowser play. I lost immediately in the bracket round to a Mario player, however. Curse that plumber.

The actual winners were King Chris (who moved to somewhere else in Canada since he won the September 2019 tournament, apparently?), Wisdom (Duck Hunt from Missouri), Annoying Orange (aka Frawg) (Bayonetta from Nevada), and John Numbers (Wii Fit Trainer from New York, and the legendary Nintendo competition protagonist).

Anyway, once again (see September 2019's here and August 2019's here) I aggregated the ladder rounds across all regions of North America for this tournament. This time, there were 6,788 registrants and 3,225 players who played at least one match, for an average 47.51% participation rate. That's significantly less than the participation rate in August and September, and if you want a marketing lesson, it's because the automated/manual reminder e-mails telling people they have 24 hours until the tournament starts never went off/were never written. This caused about an ~8% drop in participation rate (again, defined as the number of people who play out of the number of people who registered—not the raw number of people playing) because people forgot they signed up for the tournament, and splitting the regions up over two days (though a given player will only play during one day) may have also confused people about when they had to play. This time, there were 36,824 games played. Despite the drop in the %, it's a raw number improvement from September, but still not as good as August's numbers.

Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) Movie — New Design, Same Disrecommendation

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - This doesn't fix any other issues you might've had.

Remember that Sonic the Hedgehog movie that was supposed to release in November 2019...mere days ago? Paramount Pictures wants you to forget that was ever in the works—they have put the YouTube trailer of that movie in private view mode. I thought it was a funny gimmick where I wouldn't be able to screen-capture Sonic the Hedgehog's old movie design in that article because he kept moving too quickly for the print screen button. I didn't know two days later that the movie's director would tell everyone that Sonic would get redesigned and I should've saved a copy of the old design for the record.

(Fortunately, other people stole the trailer and uploaded it on their channels without marking it as private, such as this one. I wonder if it'll get copyright claimed.)

Then that redesign got the whole movie officially delayed to February 14, 2020. That's still the official release date, as seen in this new trailer with Sonic's new design: 
 

Nintendo Investor Q&A: No Defined Remake Policy

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Plus, scary China stuff.

You might vaguely remember that I published good Nintendo financial news here a week ago, related to their quarter ending September 30, 2019. Good news is less memorable than bad news (unless Nintendo doing well upsets your feelings or your investment strategy), so I understand if you found the whole affair underwhelming. Regardless, Nintendo's president, Shuntaro Furukawa, took questions from investors and answered some of them.

The last time Nintendo held a Q&A briefing with investors was half a year ago (that's two quarters ago), where I commented:

“No matter who has been the president in the past several years, there's no new information presented in these Q&A sessions. I hope next time, the investors go back to asking silly, amusing questions, because Nintendo management sure won't say anything useful or entertaining. It's the anti-KoopaTV.”

Guess what? The questions were pretty relevant, and Nintendo management was still unhelpful.

Investors generally wanted to know about the Nintendo Switch Lite, which has sold about two million systems. What kind of people are buying it? What's driving their behaviour? Are they more or less profitable than a regular Nintendo Switch customer?

New KoopaTV Feature: Ring Fit Adventure Fitness Logs Series

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - That's right. I'm documenting my training.

I hope you read my article from Tuesday about the reformation of the Olympics team, TEAM KOOPA. We have a dual purpose: win for the glory of Koopa Kingdom, and eliminate Mario and Cappy, who will also be competing at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic games.

However, it's been a while since I've really done much physical activity, and almost four years since I've trained for the Olympics. That was a disaster. Not the physical act of training, but the whole session and being attacked while in a foreign hellhole land.

But I do need to still get in shape. Fortunately, Ring Fit Adventure has released at such a good time. It's perfect to get my body the way it needs to be so I may fence properly. With a sabre, not with a faux border wall.

Anyway, after failing to buy Ring Fit Adventure at a proper store, I just ordered it from the Internet (after waiting for it to stop being sold out). It came. Here's me with the box:

Well, here's me on the box... It's, uh, 3D box art of Ludwig vs. Dragaux!

Ring Fit Adventure comes with everything it says it'll come with, by the way. The game box and cartridge, the Leg Strap, and the Ring-Con.

Ring Fit Adventure's unboxed contents.
Joy-Cons and Ludwig not included.

So what's with the article title? New KoopaTV feature?

I'm going to document my progress with Ring Fit Adventure—and therefore my overall fitness training—on KoopaTV on a weekly basis. We might even call it Fitness Fridays.

Though there'll probably be circumstances where I HAVE to publish something else on that Friday.

You all in the audience can keep me accountable. In fact, maybe you all can get inspired and contribute stuff of your own. We can take your guest submissions, after all. Hopefully, Ring Fit Adventure is as intrinsically pleasing to play as I think it conceptually is, as opposed to something like Wii Fit.

I'll tell you right now that I'd love to lose ten pounds. What's my starting point? Stay tuned for the first edition of the fitness log to find out. (Just don't expect me to start fitness until after Sunday—for the very immediate future, I need to train in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.)


Ludwig theoretically is going to be doing this series until the Tokyo 2020 Olympics happen, or until he meets his fitness goals. Alternatively, it's possible that his obsession with portraying Ring Fit Adventure in a positive light is totally misplaced and he will absolutely hate the game and never want to play it again. It's also possible that writing these fitness logs will be really repetitive both to write and to read, so Ludwig will be trying to keep things as fresh as he can. Your feedback will be important! Wendy might also do this, maybe.


Here's the first fitness log for week 1!
Awkwardly enough, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics got delayed to 2021.
Ring Fit Adventure has an unlockable Extra Fitness mode after completing the main Adventure Mode. KoopaTV will tackle that in 2021.

Pokémon's Personality-Morphing Mints

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - This has got to be abuse, right?

There are two ways to view this trailer of Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield news:

1. Pokémon are friends and great the way they are, independent of their battling abilities
2. Pokémon are tools for battlers to attain personal glory

If you view the world the first way, this is abhorrent. If you view the world the second way, you'll be very pleased with just how easy and accessible GAME FREAK is making it to get a competitively-viable team in-game, as opposed to having to breed (and abort—if they're merely “released” how come you don't see them in the wild after?) a lot of Pokémon to get the perfect nature:

Consolation to the first way of thinking: According to the official site, the Nature doesn't change. Just the stats behind it. So when the Pikachu in the trailer smelled the Modest Mint, they still keep their Sassy Nature—but instead of Sassy's Special Defence ↑ Speed ↓ trait, Pikachu has Modest's Special Attack ↑ Attack ↓. (Sassy is competitively a horrible Nature for Pikachu, but it's one of the best personalities you can be blessed with.)
 

Ludwig Reacts to Sakurai's Terry Bogard Stream

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Late and alone.

I was never going to be able to watch Masahiro Sakurai's livestream of Terry Bogard facing the fury in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate live at 8 AM Eastern time today. Terrible timing. I got things to do then.

So I have to watch the video-on-demand, and once I get past that, I could unlock access to the rest of the Internet, which surely is discussing nothing but this livestream.

So I'm hyped to watch and react to every moment of this, not because I care about or even know who Terry Bogard is, but I have a lot of Discord notifications to check. Let's go...
 
Watch Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – Mr. Sakurai Presents “Terry Bogard” from Nintendo on www.twitch.tv

Team Koopa at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - I'm looking to end this war.

Surely you have heard this by now, right? Mario & Sonic at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games has released today on Nintendo Switch in partnership with SEGA.

As you can tell by the title, the actual Olympics occur in 2020 (starting at the end of July) but right now it's 2019. What's happening now is our formal declaration and training period.

You should remember the same thing happened with the 2016 Olympic games at Rio de Janeiro. Team Koopa had an announcement and a training period. Except the actual training was a massive disaster and we had to evacuate Rio before the actual Olympics began. Rio, for its part, was (and probably still is) an unlivable hellhole.

Tokyo is different!

And we have tremendous reason for being there. The 2016 Closing Ceremonies that promoted the Tokyo 2020 Olympics was Cappy's formal introduction to the world. Team Koopa knew it was coming, which was why we were involving ourselves in the Rio de Janeiro 2016 Olympics to begin with.

KoopaTV has basically wiped out Cappy's companion, the Nintendo Labo, as a dangerous threat. Now we're going to finish off Cappy itself, where Cappy started. Mario himself will be there too.

Here's who is coming to Tokyo for Team Koopa: 

September 30, 2019 Nintendo Quarterly Financial Update

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Eat glowingly positive sales numbers!

Well, I looked through Nintendo's financial statements for the quarter ending September 30, 2019. That's six months into their fiscal year, though the whole concept of fiscal years isn't terribly exciting for normal people. 

In terms of stand-out sales figures, 19.01 million people bought Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on the Nintendo Switch (versus 8.44 million on the Wii U), and there are 15.71 million owners of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Splatoon 2 is only at 9.28 million, a mere 260,000 units in 3 months. That's what happens with online-based games when all the new content is done. There's 41.67 million Nintendo Switch systems sold.

The biggest thing here is that 1-2-Switch is finally off the top ten best-selling Nintendo Switch games.
(New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe is at spot 8.)

Ring Fit Adventure, having released in October, doesn't appear in these results. We'll have to wait three months for that. But Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa said Ring Fit Adventure is a super important title for Nintendo this year, and spent more time talking about it than, say, Pokémon.

Interesting bit about the Nintendo Switch Lite: Nintendo considers it a huge success, but after its first week being launched, the regular Nintendo Switch was outselling it week-by-week. For whatever reason, 43% of Nintendo Switch Lite purchasers already own a Nintendo Switch. Not sure how so many people could be fooled into something financially stupid, but hopefully it's for members of the family and not for themselves.

Lastly of interest, the 3DS segment sold less stuff than the mobile one. That's not because mobile is doing great—growth was almost flat year-over-year, but the 3DS just collapsed despite Nintendo sacrificing AlphaDream for it.

At least the Switch is doing fantastic.


Ludwig's favourite game on that chart is still Kirby Star Allies, which he gave a full review of as a birthday present to himself. He wishes it would suddenly sell enough to warrant Nintendo disclosing updated numbers, but that probably will never happen.


The article covering the quarter ending June 30, 2019 is over here.
By comparison, the article covering the quarter ending September 30, 2018 discussed mostly Kirby Star Allies.
Don't like Ludwig's questions? How about these ones from investors?
How about some even greater positive sales numbers after the holidays?
Next year's September 30, 2020 article has many more games and many more Switch sales to discuss.

KoopaTV's October 2019 Review Newsletter

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - The October newsletter isn't one to fear!

Welcome to the latest edition of KoopaTV's newsletter! October 2019 sure feels like it went by quickly, yet it feels like I haven't written a newsletter in a while. (But I did, and you'll see it in the related articles at the bottom below the footer.)

October 2019 continued KoopaTV's string of solid months, though it was the first month in what's felt like a very long time without an Ace Attorney article during the month or an Enlightenment Movement article. Doesn't mean October was uninspired or not focused on developing KoopaTV canon. In fact, it focused plenty on that. Here's some EVIDENCE:

KoopaTV's Top Five Experiences of October 2019

Actually, there's a lot of articles that I thought were even written in October, so maybe it was longer than I thought. That actually makes limiting this to a top five fairly challenging and I had to spend a lot of time coming up with this chronologically-ordered list. Read these articles if you haven't already... and read everything from this month (and on KoopaTV in general) after that. Well, finish the rest of this newsletter first, because there's some stuff you'll be happy to see announced:

1. A Brave New World in Subnautica  — Kamek writes KoopaTV's second review of 2019, and it's about the indie open world experience Subnautica, which it turns out he's quite fond of.
2. October 15 2019 Democrat Presidential Primary Debate 4 ANALYSIS! — I usually (purposefully) avoid the politics-focused articles in the newsletters, but I think I did a pretty good job with this one in that it's issues-focused and not candidate-focused. You'll learn a lot about your choices here.
3. I'm Extremely Impressed With The Dragon Quest XI S Demo — Dragon Quest XI S is Ludwig's first Dragon Quest game, though for this article, his impressions are just based on the demo. ...Though he did buy the game after writing it! Features cows.
4. Yes In My Backyard: Dilapidated Houses in the City Trial — Ludwig tackles the issue of affordable housing while also going into a failed government programme instituted by King Dedede.
5. Luigi's Mansion 3 and Halloween 2019 — A wide-ranging article continuing this site's distaste for Halloween, plumbers, and the FAKE NEWS media, but also the taste for delicious candy.