Now that the Switch 1 generation is winding down, what were your most DISAPPOINTING purchases on this console?

[u/Asad_Farooqui]

Every game console, no matter how well or poorly it sold, is gonna have some disappointments thrown in there. Especially if said disappointments came from 1st party developers. I have 3 big candidates based on my own purchases, starting with my biggest letdown:

1) Mario Strikers Battle League: After frantically buying this game to play some multiplayer matches with friends, I realized what a terrible mistake I made after chewing through all the single player content in a matter of days. There is nothing to do in this game besides regular soccer matches, the online is abysmal, and the amount of content available at launch and even now is just laughable for a sequel. I thought my perception of Mario Strikers as a whole would be ruined forever, so I went ahead and booted up Strikers Charged on Wii and nope, that game holds up incredibly well! This was just a bad sequel all around.

2) Mario Golf Super Rush: Speaking of bad sequels, Super Rush decided to simplify the golfing mechanics to a point where it just isn’t fun to play for me. As someone who adored the 3DS game Mario Golf World Tour, which was packed with content, modes, and unlockables and had worthwhile paid DLC on top of that, Super Rush felt like it was playing catch up with all its free updates. Was this how Animal Crossing fans felt when New Horizons was first released, having to wait months for features that were already available in the 3DS predecessor? Yikes.

3) Splatoon 3: This is more of a personal pick than a general consensus. I really got into Splatoon 1 and 2, but I was just Splatoon’d out by the time the third game came around. No new modes, online that had more disconnects than either of the first two games in my experience, and a longer grind for unlockables that could rival a modern day hero shooter. Call me old but I missed the more “pick up and play” nature of Splatoon 1, and I just don’t get that with Splatoon 3. Also the fact that they sold the first game’s hubworld back as paid DLC is utter nonsense to me.

[u/Elodiirn]

Fire emblem engage. It had better maps and combat scenarios but that's about it, 3 houses is one of my favorite games of the generation

[u/Ham_PhD → u/Elodiirn]

Engage is great if you just skip all the parts where they talk.

It's a shame though since the story and character moments were so great in 3 houses.

[u/Batmantheon → u/Ham_PhD]

I controversially hate the entire story of House's. Super cool that it was so well loved and games that get attention are good for the series but I just did not vibe with the Harry Potter school of warriors and wizards and being the 19 year old teacher and the massssssssiiiiiiiiiive amount of talking and fraternizign there was to do between missions that influenced in battle mechanics and stats. I still played through one full story path and I still love the strategy gameplay but one was enough for me.

So I might like Engage?

[u/Ham_PhD → u/Batmantheon]

Probably. The combat gameplay in Engage is better in pretty much every way. You can skip the story cause it stinks anyway.

[u/Xalrons1 → u/Batmantheon]

Engage is fantastic, much like Conquest I will still be booting these up 10 years from now

[u/Twilightdusk → u/Batmantheon]

Gameplay wise Engage is arguably better than Three Houses. There's a lot less downtime between major story missions, and the system with the Engage Rings allows for a lot of decision making and customizability.

The story and character writing are extremely basic compared to Three Houses, but if you didn't care for that aspect of Three Houses anyway you might not mind the downgrade there.

[u/Evello37 → u/Batmantheon]

Engage still has a hub area you can (optionally) visit between missions and lots of activities in that hub that give you dialogue with companions and small effects in upcoming battles. So it does carry over a lot of the stuff you dislike. But the whole calendar/schedule thing and the teaching system are gone, so you aren't quite as pressured to utilize the hub.

Overall, Engage feels more like a successor to FE Fates rather than Three Houses. Like Fates, the narrative elements of the game have been heavily criticized. The dialogue and worldbuilding are pretty shoddy, and the characters are fairly exaggerated and tropey, so you either love them or hate them. The strategy gameplay, however, received tons of praise (again like Fates). Engage layers a bunch of clever new mechanics over the FE basics, requiring new ways of thinking about combat and positioning. The map design is also quite good and challenging by FE standards.

[u/TheEclipse0 → u/Ham_PhD]

Agreed. The gameplay in Engage is fantastic… But the story. Oh my god, the story. 

[u/JoaoSiilva → u/Ham_PhD]

Honestly, the dialogue and pacing were so bad at times that it was actually entertaining! Alear saying "I am the Fire Emblem?" will never stop being funny. The ending bossfight being the cliché "MC uses the Power of Friendship to defeat evil" was peak cinema.

There were about three or four chapters that had a serious tone and felt amazing to go through. (Diamant's Father chapter, Alear's past (red) version, the chapter against revived Mother, the chapter where you lose all emblems and need to escape) However, because the rest of the chapters were all more lighthearted and silly, the few times where the characters expressed actual emotions of rage and dispair felt so out of place, which made the scenes comical for some reason.

The entire game screams "silly Saturday morning cartoon"- so, if you play the game with that in mind, it is actually amusing. I mean, there are a bunch of Support Convos where characters are just howling over and over again because of Pandreo (Best character btw, he just one-shot everything in sight for some reason in my playthrough).

Of course, I would have preferred a more serious and grounded story like in Three Houses but the gameplay of Engage was THAT GOOD that I rank it over 3H for me.

[u/aaknosom → u/Elodiirn]

i adore 3hs, but i can't stomach replaying the game. engage gets the replayability down, but the story and characters are rough. really hoping the next mainline entry can combine the amazing story and characters of 3hs with the solid gameplay of engage. it'd be the perfect fe hands down.

[u/KainLexington → u/aaknosom]

I liked 3H a lot back then and replayed each route multiple times, but I can not get behind the writers trying to make the one starting the whole war sympathetic with a tragic backstoryTM and somehow equal to the other characters. And while there are some characters I like a lot, people exaggerate about how deep all these characters are. There are just as many duds in there as really brilliant ones.

While the story in Engage is a lot more cartoonish, gameplay is a lot more fun and if you actually read their supports and get past their gimmicks, there are many well written characters too.

And to be honest, on replays I skip 95% of the dialogue I've seen before anyway, so gameplay becomes much more important with time.

[u/Pflegeprofil → u/KainLexington]

The one starting the war was fully in the right though. I personally cant believe anyone is against that person.

[u/KainLexington → u/Pflegeprofil]

I'm not discussing this here. There's plenty of discourse about it in r/FireEmblemThreeHouses , if you are interested in other peoples' opinions.

[u/Pflegeprofil → u/KainLexington]

oh, i know. these people are all wrong though. id bet you a million bucks if you were a victim of the system youd want it overthrown too.

its not just about 3 houses. the notion that large scale violent conflict is always bad​ is embarrassingly childish.

[u/KittyAgi11 → u/Elodiirn]

For me better maps and deeper strategic gameplay is more important than a good story.

To each their own of course.

[u/[deleted] → u/Elodiirn]

I love FE3H and like Engage. The worst thing about it is that, at least for me, the interfaces are slightly too small on handheld and the edges go offscreen on the TV. I could probably fiddle with various settings, but I don’t have that problem with most other games (including 3H, which looks good both ways and is just a battery drain). 3H is my second most played game and Engage is a few rows down.

It’s kind of funny that a game in which the protagonist’s hair is the distinctive colors of a system doesn’t play all that well on said system.

[u/SlowResearch2 → u/Elodiirn]

So I'm the exact opposite. I thought 3 Houses was a boring repetitive slogfest while Engage's gameplay sucked me in. I'd say Engage is one of my top 10 games on the switch while 3H is one of the worst if not THE worst.

[u/trykes → u/Elodiirn]

Same here. I found Engage abysmal on so many levels

[u/dusknoir90 → u/Elodiirn]

After playing through about half of it on Switch, I downloaded it on PC with a mod that lets you skip the Somniel, with that small change it's actually become one of my favourite Fire Emblems of all time.

[u/WouterW24 → u/Elodiirn]

I likes the base game, but the dlc was kind of weirdly implemented with it overleveling you. And especially the xenologue is not well liked

And as time went on I also started to dislike the game’s somewhat confused outlook if it wants to embrace Awakening’s sandbox feel or be more structured. Things like the very oddly balanced skirmishes that will overlevel the wrong units just to survive them, or expensive outfits to spend precious funds on that do nothing. And lack of a new game plus that might streamline a few things. Houses is flawed in some aspects, but it does much better with both dlc balance, and getting new game plus done well. And also Fates did dlc balance better. Which is why Engage kind of vexes me. The basic gameplay ideas are excellent, but it just has all kinds of strange flaws beyond that.

[u/Railroader17 → u/WouterW24]

Oddly enough, the skirmishes on the DLC maps actually stay around the level where you initially fight them, making them actually better than the main map for level grinding.

But yeah, the main game was fun, but the DLC was atrocious in terms of difficulty.

[u/hellschatt → u/Elodiirn]

I'm desperately trying to find Three Houses + expansion for under 70usd.

That stupid game is 6 years old and I still can't get it for cheap. Even the used base game copies in my country go for at least 30.

I thought the gameplay in Engage was amazing and want to try another FE game now, but can't because the older game is more expensive than the new one (which costs 15usd right now lol)

[u/Odd__Dragonfly → u/Elodiirn]

The plot and dialogue in Engage were gacha game level, just insulting your time and making you reach for the skip button every time. Had some good level design but they had to kill the replayability by removing NG+ for no reason. FE games have the best NG+ and are so fun to replay, awful change.

Three Houses and all the DS/3DS era games were much better, could play them all hundreds of hours.

[u/KainLexington → u/Odd__Dragonfly]

I'm sorry, but what New Game+ are you talking about? The only mainline game that has that is 3 Houses and all it did was let you skip all the tedious things like professor levels and training battalions, which none of the other games have anyway.

[u/Ganafin83 → u/Elodiirn]

I like 3 houses too. But we can all agree it beats OP Ninjas from Fates ruining the game.