A great price and Mario at launch will do wonders in turning Nintendo’s fortunes around.
Thar Be Some Leaks up in This Bitch
This week has a seen a swathe of Nintendo’s Witch leaks, which give us a much more solid idea of what to expect at launch. These leaks come by way of multiple anonymous sources from a Nintendo insider with a reasonably solid track record of accurate Witch leaks – so take them with a moderate teaspoon of salt, but do not be surprised when they turn out to be accurate. On last week’s podcast Lusipurr.com imparted the leaking of the Witch’s extremely palatable Canadian pricing, and this week’s leakage of the system’s UK pricing strengthens the notion that Nintendo plan to sell the Witch at an extremely competitive price.
Apparently one retail chain has set the base model of the Witch at £200, with a deluxe SKU priced at £250. The deluxe SKU will come with greater storage capacity and a port of Splatoon as a pack-in game. Previous leaks have suggested that a deluxe Witch SKU would come with a Pro Controller, but no news of that here – and different territories might devise their own Witch bundles anyway. At any rate the Witch Pro Controller will be available for purchase individually in the UK for £40. This suggests that US gamers will be paying between $200 – 250 for the base model, $250 – $300 for the deluxe SKU, and $40 – $60 for controllers. That is rather nice considering the ridiculous price that Sony’s abysmally constructed Dualshock 4s retail for.
Not like this.
Witch Games at Launch?
The week’s leaks suggest that the port of Skyrim which featured so heavily in the Witch reveal will be available at launch, which will come as a surprise to nobody. More surprising is the suggestion that the Mario game featured in that advert will also be available at launch, which is huge if these rumours prove to be accurate. This iteration of the Mario franchise will take its cues from Mario 64 by featuring a central hubworld through which individual levels may be accessed. Levels will be free roaming with multiple objectives, like in Mario 64. The game is also set to have a strong emphasis on two-player action, no doubt looking to capitalise on the Witch’s gimmick of having two break-away miniature controllers. This being the case however, it is odd that two-player Mario did not feature heavily in the Witch reveal trailer.
There is also another big Witch game planned for launch; apparently Mario RPG is set to make a return. This time however instead of having Squaresoft develop the game Nintendo have sought the expertise of Ubisoft, and instead of featuring cameos from the Final Fantasy beastiary the game will instead heavily feature Rabbids. This game will feature Bowser as a Rabbid – this is not even a joke. Lusipurr.com wishes that this was a joke. The game is being developed under the working title of Mario RPG: Invasion of the Rabbids; seriously, fuck Ubisoft. The Vivendi buyout cannot come soon enough. Apparently Nintendo will attempt to pass this off as a game they have developed with Ubisoft collaboration, yet this is emphatically a Ubisoft production – which is a fucking shabby thing to do.
If Nintendo were going to greenlight a turn-based Mario RPG outside of the Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi franchises, then why the hell did they not tap Nintendo-owned Monolith Soft on the shoulder to develop it? Hell, Monolith even broke off from Squaresoft back in the day, so there is that indirect connection with Mario RPG. At any rate Monolith is apparently hard at work on their game for the Switch, which is not expected to see the light of day until at least 2018. In addition to this an external studio is allegedly working on a Switch port of Xenoblade Chronicles X, which is a smart move given that its market penetration was severely constrained due to it being on the Wii U. With any luck the port will mitigate some of the more onerous requirements for progressing the game’s story.
Another game that will not see release during the Switch’s launch period is Zelda: Breath of the Wild, meaning that Lusipurr is right again. The game will now see release on June 16 for Switch, and on June 23 for Wii U. Obviously Nintendo do not need to delay the Wii U version by a week; they just do it to be dicks.
Regardless, with a $200 price-tag Nintendo’s Witch is shaping up to be quite the proposition – though good luck getting one at launch!
Hajime Tabata has fallen flat on his face.
Fractured Fantasy
Final Fantasy XV week is upon us, and Tabata is already cracking the sads because people who got the game early are posting videos on the internet. Apparently Square Enix have reached the conclusion that the best way to advertise the launch of their new game is by letting their lawyers off the chain for a spell, in order to go after Youtubers. That is fine!
“We’re currently looking into whether this kind of activities of spreading spoilers across the internet does legally constitute an obstruction of our business or not, and if it’s found out that it does then we’ll take legal measures to stop this being posted and take it down. We apologize for all the problems caused and all the worries, but we are taking solid steps to address this. It’s just not fair to spoil their fun of the people who have been waiting for such a long time, so please stop that right now.”
In other news the contents of Final Fantasy XV’s gigantic patch is now a known quantity. Readers may be forgiven for wondering why the game requires a day-1 patch when it was delayed by two months so that the finished version could be pressed onto game discs for the benefit of anybody without internet access, but Sqare Enix clarifies that the patch is:
“the result of some additional time for development since mastering the full game,”
Great, so the game has been fully mastered ahead of going gold and the patch simply contains a few entirely periphery tweaks and features. So, what features then does it add to the game? Well… it attempts to fix the camera, because apparently that shit shipped broken – and by all accounts the patch does not even succeed in wholly fixing it. The patch adds an in-game mp3 player so that players can listen to old Final Fantasy music as they battle their way across the overworld, seeing as though Final Fantasy XV does not appear to feature overworld music outside of battle. Finally, the size of the patch is explained in the fact that it adds additional cutscenes to the game on account of the fact that they could not fit on the game’s retail disc. In addition to this, changes to towns and the open world were made in order to fit the game’s scenario. Great. Good to see Square Enix ship such a finished and fully featured game to retail!
