I’m Samuel Roberts, I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, you’ve been on holiday in Devon. How was it? Did you watch The Lord of the Rings, Rings of Power, whatever the fuck it’s called? How was your week off? I have not watched Lord of the Rings. We enjoyed several evenings of slightly passive aggressive discussion about what to watch on TV, as we discussed in the thriller episode, trying to find a film for all the family, quite difficult. Try and bruise again? No, we actually, in bruise related, we decided to go to the cinema to see The Forgiven with Ralph Fiennes, which is directed by the brother of the other McDonald, not Marty McDonald, the other one. So cut from a similar cloth, kind of dark comedy, whatever, except we left the house really late and it became apparent on a very stressful drive that we weren’t gonna get to the cinema on time. Everyone had a massive row in the car about whether or not it was possible. We ended up abandoning it and going to the seaside instead. This is a nice change because it’s always me throwing my family members under the bus to the podcast. So it’s nice to, you know, Yeah, it was just, the drive was really stressful. And I thought at the end of it is this film, which is like known to be quite sort of divisive and is probably going to be another in Bruges-esque adventure. And I just thought that on top of the stress of the journey, it just wasn’t doable. So we went and ate a massive ice cream instead. So that’s still, that’s a classic Matthew Castle day off thing to do. So I’m pleased you got a nice ice cream. So I’ve been, I Matthew by comparison have been working this week. I went to Gamescom the week before. Actually, two listeners did email in for the last episode. We just missed out due to time, asking how my Gamescom was. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the names of both those listeners who asked, but thank you for asking. They’re asking what it was like on the PR side versus the journalist side. The answer was a lot more preparation and slightly less work when you’re there. Just hope, praying to God that your journalists turn up and that that’s basically what it is. But I got a really, my first cold in three years there, basically, and it just absolutely kicked my ass. And it just made me think, if I did get COVID, I’d probably be out of action for like three weeks. You just wouldn’t hear from me. The podcast had become like a one-man affair. You just like monologuing about fucking Chibi-Robo or something. But yeah, so that’s kind of what I’ve been up to and playing loads more of Arcade Paradise, Matthew, which I’m upgrading from a seven to an eight based on the last conversation. Yeah, it’s good. It’s really good, actually. It’s got some good little storytelling twists deeper into the game. Right, I must be right near the end now. Yeah, it’s been very satisfying. So just to return to the Gamescom thing. So there’s no like inside skinny, there’s no secret stuff that journalists wouldn’t know about, like secret tunnels or something. No. Let’s think. What was there? There was the first day where I tried to get in one entrance and they said, no, this is Devcom, not Gamescom. You can’t go in here. And they said, you have to go to the south entrance. Went to the south entrance and there was no way in, as far as I could tell. And they were like, oh, it’s five minutes around the corner. It wasn’t. It was like about a 12 minute walk and I got lost. Getting in is still a pig. Yeah, it is. So I eventually found out the optimal entrance. At one point I just, I had a little break and I just went and I was going to go to the show floor. There were way too many German teenagers and I just sat and ate a hot dog instead. Like one of the most disgusting hot dogs I’ve ever eaten, but only four euros. There’s no inside skinny really. We were like inside a media lounge, the media lounge, which means that you had like food and drink all of the days, which is actually really handy. On the first day they brought lasagna and I was like, oh my God, I’m so not used to eating anything, but like, you know, a pretzel and German candy when I’m doing Gamescom, so this is quite an upgrade. But yeah, there wasn’t really. I thought like, oh, maybe there’d be a window for me to go play other people’s games on their booth, but you realize that that would just be annoying for them. So I didn’t even bother asking. I was like, quite fancy playing, scorn. They’re only next door, but yeah, didn’t want to stir things, Matthew. Oh, I’m sorry you came away scornless. Yeah, well, you know, it’s nothing, no inside scoop, other than you can just see some stands being built and that’s it, really. Yeah, so yeah, it was pretty good. Honestly, hanging out with sort of your own developers is like the big, exciting thing where it’s like, oh, I’ve never met these people before, but we talked on email constantly and you kind of feel very invested in their success and wanting people to like the game and understand the game. Must be weird hearing them say the same thing like 40 times in a row. Well, they would like vary it up basically. So you’d sort of rehearse it and then they would like, they would add sort of their spin on it. It’s funny as well, because one of them, one of the devs was really, really good at coaching people through the game. And I realized when I tried to coach people through the game, I sounded like an annoyed dad and I just couldn’t shake off that vibe. And I thought, do you know what? I’m just going to keep my mouth shut and watch because they do a much better job. So that was my games come that I came home and had a cold Matthew. Yeah, really exciting. So we come to this episode, Matthew, which is you’ve been playing Splatoon 3 and I thought this would be a fun opportunity to talk a bit about what a recent Nintendo series looks like in terms of when Nintendo launches a new series now or works with a new developer to bring a series to Nintendo platforms. What’s the thinking? Obviously, it’s our educated guesswork as ever with Nintendo, but examining in case study form, I suppose, what these different series represent in the overall tapestry of recent Nintendo, which I thought would be quite a fun theme for an episode. And if it’s not, it doesn’t matter because it’ll be over in 100 minutes. So how are you feeling about that, Matthew, discussing Splatoon and also digging into more recent Nintendo fare? Yeah, yeah, it feels like a fun way to pad out a Splatoon 3 review. And yeah, like, it’s definitely interesting, the kind of, you know, what does make it and what doesn’t. And the fact that, you know, with Nintendo, you’re talking about, you know, probably like the most legendary roster of game characters and game series in existence. So the idea of like, what does make the cut and what is allowed to join that roster is, yeah, I mean, a bit of a bit unknown and, you know, buried in secrecy. But there’s definitely some information out there about some of these series we’ll be discussing, which I think will let us kind of have a bit of a grasp about like, where this stuff comes from. Yeah, so I’m kind of curious though, Matthew, you reviewing Splatoon 3 itself is quite interesting because you’re not what I consider like a competitive games guy, but I’m assuming this is more appealing to you because Splatoon is a bit softer than reviewing Call of Duty or something like that. So what led to you sort of taking that on? Were you just kind of curious? Did you just want to play a big Nintendo thing this year? Yeah, I think so. I mean, like on a purely like the crudest level is, I still do the freelance work and like the Nintendo freelance, it’s the stuff I do the most of. So basically, if there’s anything Nintendo-y, I’ll tend to go after it, because I’m quite greedy in that way. So rather than it being Splatoon, it’s more like I like to play these Nintendo games. I’ve never written about Splatoon. Like it’s always been one that kind of arrived at the end of O&M. Like we played the E3 demo when it was first announced, and then the mag basically shut. And so, you know, I wasn’t on magazines when Splatoon 1 came out, when Splatoon 2 came out. So yeah, just an opportunity to dive into something and work out like what I actually think about it and try and share some words. A bit of a foolish move, if I’ll be honest, because when you write, I’m finding it very difficult to write about because it doesn’t really behave like a normal Nintendo sequel. But we’ll get to that, I’m wrestling with it a bit about exactly what the most useful angle on it is. It’s funny because I feel like as your podcast co-host, I’ve seen you go through this cycle with about 10 different games now, where you’re like, oh, I’ll take on this review. Oh, I regret taking on this review. Oh, I have no idea how to fucking write this review. And I’ve seen you repeat that arc several times. I think you have the same panic with Xenoblade a few months ago. So, this is not new territory for Matthew Castle. I’m grateful, because I get great podcast content on it. But I’m just worried about you, buddy. Well, Xenoblade, just because I played so much of it. This one was, I was thinking, what does a great Splatoon review look like? I’ve read lots of decent Splatoon reviews, but I didn’t have any particular memory of ever reading anything about Splatoon where I’ve been like, wow, that was so fucking good. And I’m not saying like, oh, I think I’ve got something so fucking good in me. But it did, it did, you know, it’s kind of an interrogation of like, why, you know, why is this game harder to write about than a Mario or Zelda? Or you’re right, it may just be that I’m now just, I don’t know, a bit past it and struggling with everything. I’m just pressing. You’re in your late thirties, come on. It’s not like, you know. Yeah, but there’s only so many, yeah, yeah. But maybe you haven’t got like the same sort of zip you once had, you know, but. I mean, I’ve seen that fucking Francis Ford Coppola’s making his Vanity Project for like, in his seventies, for like 90 million or something. I mean. Yeah, but like, there’s been 30 years of what he’s been doing up until this point, you know. Like, I don’t know which of my reviews is like the fifth re-release of The Godfather Part III, but I’ve definitely done that. Yeah, or what’s the other one? Is it Jack? Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah, so, yeah, I don’t know. You just want to cut, like, you know, not to be too down about it, but you’ve got new exciting voices, you know, coming up through the ranks, and you kind of want to be able to sort of hold your own and have fresh takes and still have relevance when you’re talking about these things, but… You’re a five-star, buddy. That’s no concern. No concern, though. I always enjoy reading your writing. So, yeah, so let’s dive into it then, Matthew. What is different about Splatoon 3 versus the first two games? Oh, this is gonna be a hard review to write. So, you know, maybe I mentioned this last week when I was talking a little bit about the preview thing. The tricky thing with Splatoon 3 is that it’s probably like the most straightforward sequel Nintendo have made. You know, it isn’t a grand reinvention. It doesn’t really have any big mechanical hooks. You know, people might say, well, every Mario Golf and Mario Tennis is the same, but they actually have like, they tend to be built around like a signature something, whether it’s like a new kind of power move or this new kind of crazy mode, like in the last Mario Golf, the whole kind of running off to the ball and all that kind of stuff. And this just doesn’t have that central hook. If you were like, what feature are you going to put on the front of the box of Splatoon 3 that kind of really captures the big new thing about it? Like the front of the box is just some characters from Splatoon spraying ink, as they always do. And that’s because it doesn’t have anything, it is fundamentally the same game as one and two. But that’s okay, you’re allowed to do that. It’s a piece of sequel craft, more in keeping with what we see from non-Nintendo companies. It is new maps in a multiplayer shooter. It is a few new weapons. It is the very thin line between expansion pack and all new game, which I would say hovers over a lot of annual iterations of games. So I think that’s why it’s kind of tricky to really like pin down, because it is like the closest thing. It’s the most like conservative Nintendo mainline series, I would say. Or be it set in a ludicrous universe, which to look at you’d say, well, there’s nothing conservative about a world where, you know, human, half human, half squid creatures spray paint around these bizarre, you know, maps while strange kind of rock music kind of infused with sort of gibberish fish noises plays out. You know, like it is fundamentally a very strange thing that Nintendo have made a very conventional next edition of. Okay, that is a tough thing to write a review of then. So wasn’t there like one new mode, there was sort of a three-way tactical thing, Matthew? What’s the sort of like, yeah? There are new features. What I would say, instead of having like a major hook, like everything is tweaked a little bit to the point where actually the number of tweaks there are and the number of adjustments there are are actually quite substantial. It’s just that they’ve tweaked everything 5% rather than adding anything outright new, I would say is the broad take. Yeah, the most obviously new thing is what was in the sort of beta last weekend or few weekends ago now, which was they did, you know, Splatfest, which is in-game sort of event where everyone competes to answer a question. So in this one, it was what’s best, rock, paper, scissors. Everyone picks a team and then for a fixed period of time, all the battles and all the victories that they take part in and accrue go into like that team’s pile, I guess. And then at the end of the period, which is the weekend, it says, you know, the best team collectively was Team Rock or Team Paper or whatever. That’s, you know, they’ve been doing that in Splatoon 1, Splatoon 2, and it’s a big kind of, yeah, like festival atmosphere. It’s a very fun way of like gathering everyone together in a kind of playful Nintendo way. The twist this time is that halfway through the Splatfest, the team that is leading becomes a defending team in a new three-way turf battle, which for those who haven’t played Splatoon is the kind of quite common mode where two teams compete and you win based on who paints the most of the arena. So while you are trying to kill each other, it’s fundamentally about, you know, efficiently covering as much of the arena in ink as possible. In the three-way battle, you have a team of four who is the leading team, and then you have two teams of two who are kind of like trying to fight them for this sort of device, which if they seize it, it splats paint everywhere and gives them a huge advantage. So while the attacking team is double the size, while the defending team is double the size of the two attacking teams, like they’re obviously being attacked on two fronts and have this device that they very carefully need to protect. I thought it was great. That I actually really love that mode. And I’ve only been able to play it in that beta test because the review session has been kind of private and there’s only journalists in it. But as an actual mode, I really liked the kind of focus on the attackers of a more focused objective in that they’re trying to go after this particular thing and you’re trying to defend this thing. Also just like the visual chaos of it, having three colors instead of two, it’s obviously a lot more kind of exotic. It’s just a sort of fun twist that heightens it and introduce a good wrinkle halfway through the Splatfest. And in fact, I was enjoying it so much. Part of me was thinking, oh, it’s a shame that the only time you’re ever gonna get to play this is during Splatfests. Right, yeah. And I don’t know if once the Splatfest calendar empties, which it does after a few years, they held these things for a couple of years, that they’ll introduce it into the more general modes or whatever, I don’t know. But that’s quite a big event and they’ve obviously put a lot of effort into making something a bit different for the mode of the game, which probably has the most consecutive eyes on it. So it kind of makes perfect sense. But they have done other things, like there’s a few tweaks to some of the rule sets for the non-Turf War games. I think the weird thing with Splatoon is a lot of people think it’s just Turf War. And if you go into the ranked battles, that’s where the more objective based game types are. And there’s actually, I think there’s four in there, which are the same as they previously were. But there’s a lot more going on under the hood if you really get into Splatoon. But I think a lot of people just hang about in Turf War for a few weeks and then maybe kind of fuck it off. Guilty. Yeah, right. Well, you have to get to… So the big problem with the review session is obviously, it’s an online focused game and the servers aren’t populated because it’s not out there yet. So they held like a private schedule of times where they were like, if you play it this time, this is when all the other journalists will be playing and there’ll be like people from Nintendo to kind of pad out the numbers. And they did this across two days, but to get into the ranked battles and try that side of the game, you have to be level 10, you have to have leveled up, which isn’t a huge undertaking. But if you’ve only got a day of quite fixed times when you can play, it was basically like, I had the fear all day Thursday, it was like, I’ve got to get to level 10 so I can try out these modes on Friday when the sessions open up. And I got there and like, they never ever ran those sessions, like no one was in them. Which I guess is because not very few people actually made it to level 10 in the first day. So yeah, it kind of blew. Can you even review the game, having not seen that? Because I always struggle with this when I was a commissioning editor, like you can’t put a verdict on the true online experience, can you truly review it? Like that’s, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, it will be mentioned in the review, you know, and, you know, I’ll ask if I can kind of amend it with further thoughts. I don’t think it will like revolutionize the game, but you do want to test it. But yeah, it was a bit annoying having worked quite hard to like make sure I was ready for it. Yeah, and it was a weird review session anyway, because the only other people playing were games journalists. So normally that’s quite good fun, because most games journalists like me are shit at games. And so you can actually have quite a good time when you do okay. But like there were a couple of like uber nerds in the mix who were like very easily dominating certain matches. And I kept seeing the same names across two days. I’ll be like, oh, not this jerk. You always know who the jerks are, because they’re the ones who name themselves after the outlet they work for. And it’s like, it’s like, oh, fucking grow up. Just give yourself a funny nickname. Don’t do this like branding in here, you know. That’s a great like, that’s a great subtweet for this podcast, because only the people who name themselves that will know it’s them. And like, and they may or may not listen to this podcast. If they don’t, someone they know might tell it and then it gets back to them. So that’s a great well done, Matthew. That’s good passive-aggressive. The thing is, because I’m a huge baby as well, I was, you can change your nickname whenever you want. And I thought, well, they’re playing it and they’re capturing it for their channels. So I could call myself anything to appear in their footage. So I thought I could call myself like their outlet sucks. And then that would be in all their gameplay. Oh, that’s a, please tell me you did that. I didn’t do that, but I did, I called myself something weird. I called myself Dr. Bad Splat. Oh, God. Yeah, because I thought, well, that will be weird. You know, like I’ll be able to see that in other people’s footage and that will make me laugh. Sounds like a failed kind of DJ from the early noughties, to be honest. But I ran into Chris Schilling in the middle. I’ll tell you upfront, Chris does not call himself like Edge Chris. Chris is like sound, but I know him from his general online username. And so we were exchanging sort of DMs about playing that. And you know, I was joking about trying to call myself something obnoxious to appear in other people’s game footage. But I didn’t have the guts to go through it in the end, because I thought that is just so passive. That is so passive aggressive. And while I don’t like these people naming themselves after their outlets, it’s just so childish, you know? That said, if you do see Dr. Badsplat in any videos this week, you’ll know that the person who recorded it is probably the one Matthew was dissing. So that’s something to look forward to. I’ll tell you what, Matthew, I actually did have a good story along these lines. This guy used to work with GameCertium Rick Porter. I think it was his last ever gig on the Tips magazine. He told me that he changed the custom license plate in True Crime Streets of LA to like Shithead or something, but the editor who he didn’t like only noticed when it was going to press and all the screenshots had to be redone because you could see it in each one. And I thought, just a relevant story there. Sorry, I completely derailed you there, carry on. No, we were trying to test some EA Wii games online when I was back on NGamer. And we were trying to call ourselves variations of NGamer and you had to create an EA like Gamer tag or whatever their name for it was. And everything we put in, it would say, oh, that’s already taken, you can’t use that. But then would suggest the same nickname with the word dog on the end, as in D-A-W-G. So it’d be like, you can’t be NGamer, but do you want to be NGamer, dog? No, no, don’t. But I just thought that was just very telling about, I don’t know who EA was aiming their product at, but that was their natural go-to. It’s like, well, you probably want to be that dog, I would imagine. Yeah, how many people would have been out there with different variants of NGamer? Very unlikely, I think. They probably thought, that name’s not fun enough, have you considered dog? Our market testing tells us that dog is very hot right now. It’s like, yeah, it’s too square without the dog, and it may upset our cooler players. So please stick dog on me and certainly feel at home. Yeah, so Dr. Bad Splat, I didn’t do particularly well, because I kept getting destroyed by these smuggos with their outlet name in their names. They know who they are. They probably don’t listen to this. They’re probably being too successful on YouTube to listen to this. Oh, narrowing it down further, very good. So, yeah, but it was fun, like, you know, it is a good game. The thing I do like about Splatoon is that it’s like a very Nintendo shooter, you know, which sounds obvious because Nintendo made it, but like, everything about it is like very playful and kind of harmless. There’s nothing unpleasant about it, you know, it’s not real world guns. You’re firing ink instead of bullets. It’s very safe, but it still has like a nice snap to it. Like when you blast someone and they die, it’s satisfying in shooting someone in the head in Call of Duty, I would say, but it just doesn’t have the same kind of like malice or menace to it, which I really like. And also the fact that, like, the interaction between the squid and the ink, the fact that the thing you’re trying to spread then enables you to move faster because you can swim in it, I think is just one of the most elegant kind of sort of feedback loops in like any multiplayer shooter. It’s kind of everything you do aids your team, you know, whether it’s the basic point collection of painting the arena or creating more of the arena, which is like friendlier to your team because you can walk in ink of your own colour. It’s the fact that you can play that game more as an inker than a fighter and still really contribute to the team, or the fact that, you know, they can spawn on you. If you hold the ground up front, you become a valuable kind of spawn point for the rest of the team. I really like that. You know, that’s a little like, that’s a little bit sort of battlefield in the way that kind of if someone can sort of hold on where they are, other people can kind of group on them and aid them out. But it’s just everything has this like fun sort of Nintendo twist on it, which I really, really like. And it is, you know, I played two solid days of online, had a really, really good time with it, you know, and you think, yeah, this is, this feels like it’s worth £50. But once the online test finished, I was playing more Splatoon 2 and you’re thinking, well, yeah, this is kind of the same thing. I’m having as much fun arguably. So that’s where it’s trickier to break down. I suppose that is the ultimate question then, Matthew, do you think we needed a Splatoon 3 or could this have been an update to pay for a Nintendo Online’s description? Yeah, I mean, like I think on the whole, like enough is tweaked and added to it. Like in terms of like everything has this like new layer of polish, you know, even like the lobbies, which before was just a holding screen, is now like a physical location with stuff to do and to kind of poodle around and the way they’ve tied the modes together with this kind of catalog, which is basically like Splatoon’s version of the Battle Pass, I guess, which is like everything you do earns points in this catalog, which is like working its way through unlocks, you know, regardless of what mode you played, where before that wasn’t the case, you know, there was that A, that thing didn’t exist, but also like the kind of horde mode, which is Salmon Run, which is like four of you versus just armies of these Salmon invaders, like that had its own kind of progression system, but it wasn’t tied to the rest of the game, but now if you choose to play that, you’ll still be making progress in the overall catalog, so the whole thing feels like a lot more coherent and rewarding. I think where I’d hope to see like the most change, and where I think this could have maybe like earned its standalone status a bit more, is in like single player, which in this series, the single player mode, is like a series of small self-contained obstacle courses. This version of it is definitely the best version of it, like there’s probably like twice as many levels as there were in 1 and 2, so it’s a bit more substantial, probably like 6-7 hours of stuff to do. Ends with some absolutely like, just a really fun big boss battle. Well, listeners of this podcast want to know, there’s a particular boss battle format I like, and that may happen at the end of Splatoon 3, I couldn’t possibly say to an NDA, but uh… Well, that and Kirby in the same year, that’s… Yeah, worth seeing through to the end, it’s definitely that. There’s also a, there’s a boss, there’s a really fun callback to a really shitty Mario level, which people will know when they see it, again, I won’t spoil it for you, or you get to that yourself, and yeah, it’s interesting, the single player campaign takes a lot more cues from the DLC that they did for Splatoon 2, which was a single player expansion of like 80 stages that were just very zippy and inventive and had lots of quite wild concepts in them. It’s still a bit of a pick and mix of three minute levels and three minute ideas, so there’s something slightly unsatisfying in just when you’re getting into something, it’s over and then you’re testing something new, but the ingenuity of those three minute bursts is definitely a step up from 2, which I think they learned during the DLC. It’s also a little bit easier in that DLC, which was, I thought, rock hard. So it’s just a bit friendlier, you’ll have a good time with it, but given the variety of weapons, moves, sub-weapons, which the single player does a really good job of showing off, these characters are capable of sustaining a big third person action game experience single player mode. It doesn’t have to be these self-contained areas. One of the new items they’ve added is a hookshot type grapple, and basically when you’re zipping around the handful of levels that use it, they’re as good as… That’s like Nintendo have made a better version of that 3D Bayonet Commando. They could have made a bigger game just of that. You’ve got the hookshot and a load of guns. I would have had a whale of a time exploring a larger landmass or having a more narrative pull on the whole thing. And it just feels like one step away from being a game you might buy for just the single player mode. And then you have this great suite of multiplayer stuff. But as it is, it’s like everything kind of edged forwards a couple of steps rather than any one thing making a major leap. Yeah, I feel like this is one of those types of games where no matter how hard you try, the single player will still always feel like an accessory to the multiplayer. It’s because it’s so obviously built from the ground up to be a multiplayer experience just in terms of all the mechanics and stuff. It’s a bit like Smash Bros in that respect, you know? Maybe it definitely lends itself better to single player than Smash Bros does. But there’s a similar thing of like, well, multiplayer is the thing, you know? Yeah, it’s just weird because you have this suite of special weapons which once you’ve painted X amount, it charges up a bar and then you get like 10 seconds of like you can turn into like a crab tank or you get 10 seconds of a jet pack where you rain down like death from above. But what the single player mode does is it builds levels around those and then takes the timer off. So it’s like, here’s a level where you’re at a crab tank for three minutes and you’re like, this is really satisfying being this thing. Like this handles beautifully. It has its own like move set, its own logic, its own challenges, you know, but you only ever get to test it for 10 seconds in multiplayer. And that’s the thing, it’s like, its ideas, they are like bigger than what they’re currently used for. And so it’s quite odd to me to sort of go like, you know, wow, that level where you had a jet pack for three minutes was crazy fun. Well imagine the rest of this game, you only get it for five seconds, so, you know, eat your vegetables. You know, you’re like, ah, like that seems mad. Like you’ve nailed, you’ve done what most people can’t do and what Nintendo are good at. You know, you’ve made something which feels nice to move as and control. You know, they are so good at just satisfying, yeah, animations and movement gimmicks. It just seems very odd to limit them in the way that they do, but, you know, Nintendo Gun and Nintendo, I guess. So here’s something I wish I had asked at the start of this episode, Matthew, when I, because I didn’t see the questions you put in this plan until a bit later, but if you’ve never played Splatoon 1 or 2 and you’re new to the series and you’re thinking about 3, what do you think makes this a specifically Nintendo shooter? Yeah, I mean, it was probably, you know, what I was saying about the fact that it’s fundamentally like very playful. There isn’t like, the air of like death doesn’t hang over it, which I would say hangs over all online shooters, you know, it feels more like, you know, a custard pie fight or a water pistol fight, you know, it feels like playing as kids, even though you’re getting destroyed like over and over again. It’s just so bright and colourful and it is a beautiful game and it is, I would say, a slight visual step up. Yeah, like, for me, I think there’s also like, like a little bit of sort of built in broadness to the weapons, like nothing in this game is so precise that it can ever become like a true like Twitch shooter, say. Yeah, it’s not Valorant, you know. No, no, it’s the anti Valorant. I would say it’s in that broadness, there is still an element of like luck, which I think is key to like and inherent in it to so many Nintendo games. And I think Nintendo themselves would say, in fact, like a bit later on when we talk about ARMS, there’s some really interesting stuff with that game about where they position it in a genre which can be about extreme precision, you know, versus like Mario Kart, which is something where like luck and randomness is just a big part of the appeal, or they see it as a big part of the appeal and for me, like finding a way of sort of adding that slight kind of sponginess without it feeling unsatisfying is like the Nintendo art. Yeah, it’s also that like, like you said, that conceptual elegance, like how good it feels to like swim through the ink, how good it feels to like fire paint, like those very basic interactions from from that point upwards, it’s all, you know, it’s all just easy to understand, tricky to master, but feels really good in the hands. Yeah, definitely. Here’s another question I had, Matthew. So at this point, obviously, they’ve got Splatoon 1 and 2. I was curious, do they carry any content over into this one? Like do some maps recur, like favorite maps or is it like a fresh slate of stuff completely? No, it’s, I think it’s, I’m pretty sure it’s six new maps and six returning maps at launch. Right, right. And they might add more later, I guess. Yeah, they will add more and they’ll be free, you won’t have to buy them. And they’ll, you know, they’ll add them at regular intervals. I think, I think they’re working on like three month intervals. Like the catalogue, which is like the battle pass, that has three month seasons. And there’s mention of like, in those seasons, you’ll also get like new weapons, new levels. So I would imagine there’ll be like quite a regular kind of introduction of things. A lot of the levels they brought back are levels from Splatoon 1 that weren’t then in Splatoon 2. Oh, nice. Yeah, the shape of it is that it’s very, very similar in the relationship between Splatoon 2 to Splatoon 1. You know, like it only adds two new weapon classes in the same way that Splatoon 2 only added two new weapon classes, which really doesn’t sound like very much. But you don’t really notice, you know, I didn’t feel like you massively noticed that with 2 and I don’t think you massively noticed that here. You know, if anything, you know, you’re probably going to gravitate, if you are a returning player, you’re probably going to gravitate towards the stuff you liked anyway. So the idea of like reinventing the wheel seems unnecessary, you know, if you liked the big frickin paintbrush before, you know, here it is again. It’s also got quite a good, a nice new unlock system where you earn like these tokens to unlock the guns, but you can use like a few more tokens than you normally would to unlock something that’s like much later in the upgrade sort of tiers. So like as a level five character, you can unlock a weapon which unlocks at level 27 if you spend more tickets. So if you’ve got a very precise thing in mind that you want, you can get it very quickly, which feels like a good middle ground to kind of appease returning people. Hmm, yeah, very good. Well, I think like that, that does make it sound more appealing, the idea that there is like months of stuff planned basically, and that it will become a fuller package. Yeah, definitely. I hope that they, you know, they’ve talked about paid DLC, which, you know, if they do follow the Splatoon 2 model, would be single player again, you know, given that the multiplayer material is free and like baked into buying the game, but I hope that they put it straight on the Nintendo expansion pass. So I think last time they actually sold it for a bit and then they added it to the expansion pass later. That might be because the expansion pass didn’t exist originally when it first came out, so that’s maybe the justification. But like, I actually think that the Nintendo Online Advanced Expansion, or whatever the hell it’s called, the one which gives you all the DLC for like Mario Kart and Animal Crossing, is actually quite a nice way of doing a subscription type service in that you buy, like you are more likely to buy a full priced Nintendo game than you probably are a full priced Xbox or PS PlayStation game. So you buy the base game, the thing that you want to keep, and then the temptation to stay subscribed is like the extra gubbins afterwards, which is like the flip of how everyone else does it. But I think it’s smart, I’ve come to really like it, you know, the idea that, oh, for this, you know, whatever it is, 30, 40 quid, you get all this extra stuff to the games that you already own and all that you’re probably going to buy because, you know, you do buy Nintendo games, don’t you? Yeah, you do. And like, you know, as a freeloader on the Catherine Castle, like Nintendo Switch family plan, like, I’m delighted with this Nintendo strategy, Matthew, it’s going great. But no, I do agree that it’s like a good chunk of stuff you get. And also, the kind of like Venn diagram of like games supported on there, you’re bound to have like at least one or two of them in totality, like you just, you know what I mean? Like, there’ll be someone who plays Mario Kart or someone who plays Animal Crossing. These are like broad mega hits. So the more stuff they add on that side, the kind of the better. And then at the same time, they’re saving stuff, maybe more specialist stuff like Xenoblade, you start to go pay for it and stuff. And I can see that. I can see the logic that Kog’s wearing there. But I agree that Splatoon would be a good fit for that. So fingers crossed, you know? And if it is another dose of single player, like I’m up for it, you know, like the single player in this, like I say, while it has that bittiness, which I don’t really appreciate, but what’s in it is good and you’re like, oh, the team really knows how to kind of have fun with the mechanics available to it. And if, you know, I would love to play like another hundred levels of this, you know, I’d quite happily do that. So I’m kind of hoping, I’m hoping that is the model they go with. Okay, great. Well, in which case, Matthew, buy it or dump it? Are you going to recommend it to people? Yeah, well, by the time you listen to this, you’ll have read the review, which I haven’t written and I haven’t scored. Like I think I’m really torn between three stars and four stars. Right, right. You can’t go in the middle. No, it’s a classic three and a half. It’s either four stars, but take a star off if you’ve never liked Splatoon, it’s not going to convince you. Or it’s a three stars and add a star if you love Splatoon, because it’s more of that. Yeah, and people get frustrated with scoring systems. It’s a classic, it’s like an 80% that it isn’t a four stars. Oh, my mind is so fucking frazzled by years of this bullshit. Oh good, we get to the root of it. That’s good. Well, nonetheless, for people who want to read Matthew’s review, I will retweet it on the Back Page pod Twitter account. I’m sure Matthew will share it too, but you can read his great writing. This week, I’m going to retweet it, that would be for you. That sounded sarcastic, but it really wasn’t. I support you. I’m telling you in advance, it won’t be my finest work. Amazing. Unless Andy Robinson is listening to this, in which case I will do my best work as always. Do you know what, actually, the first thing I remember hearing about Splatoon was in a cab coming back from E3 in, I guess, 2014, where Andy was in the cab with us and he just said, so Splatoon is like, they turned the Mario Sunshine flood gun into like a multiplayer shooter and it’s amazing. That’s what I remember him saying about it. That has stayed in my memory after eight years, so, and here we are. If only I could come up with amazing insights like that, then you’d also be remembering this, what is bound to be a very forgettable review in five years time. Last paragraph saying that, like, it is a three stars, but if we were reviewing in a percentage scale, it would be at 80% and I know that sounds crazy, but it makes sense in my head. I’d love a review that actually ended like that. I’d be like, fair play to you, you maniac. Oh, very good. All right, Matthew, let’s take a break and we’ll come back and talk about some more broader Nintendo newer game stuff. That was it, I’ll take you there, but it makes sense. Welcome back to the podcast, Matthew. I did forget to mention the results of the PC gaming noughties draft. Oh, that was decent of you. Yeah. Sorry about that. Yeah. I’ll just mention it very briefly. I won and you lost. I don’t want to cry about it. It’s actually the first draft I’ve won in four drafts, I think. So I really did need the win. How are you feeling about that one, buddy? Like, I expected to lose because of the whole Half-Life 2 Death Ex combo, but I didn’t expect to lose by quite as much as I did. I feel like some people, they threw me a bone going like, oh, this one game was good. And they’re like, well, no, they were all good games. Like, I really don’t think I shit the bed with that. So yeah, you know, what can you do? No accounting for taste, I don’t know, like, do you like, sure, you want to play Half-Life 2 for the fucking 10th time, I get it. But, you know, whatever. I thought your list was very good. And like, I was actually surprised by the result too. I thought it might be an even split because when I did grab Deus Ex and Half-Life 2, I did think I’ve got this in the bag a little bit. But by the end of the list, I was there thinking, actually these are pretty balanced. And like, if you’re a certain type of shooter fan, you might say that your picks are a little bit more interesting than mine. You know, Freedom Force is maybe a less obvious pick than… Yeah, I sort of regret that one a bit. Oh really? Freedom Force is really good. It is really good, but I just… I felt a little bit how you must have felt about the Alpha Centauri, where you’re like, this is really good and you just don’t know it. And like, that is frustrating because people are like, you know, like there was no talk about it. People didn’t even dismiss it. They didn’t even know it was worth talking about when it was. So, yeah, that was… I kind of felt… I felt a bit of that frustration that you must have felt. Well, I’ll say the results have cancelled each other out, basically. I got Cain’d and then you got Cain’d and then back up. Which I just think, yeah, they cancelled each other out, makes the whole exercise completely pointless. But it was very entertaining. We had some laughs along the way, you know. I don’t think we’ll do any more PC drafts. No, because it gets spotty in the years after that. For me personally, because I can’t afford a PC in the late noughties. I could maybe do 2010s, but then by then it becomes a lot more homogenous with consoles. Yeah, and the thing is, where it differs isn’t necessarily the genres we are amazingly shit-hot on. Definitely not, even more so than me, but I have no opinions on grand strategy or whatever. And that’s what PC has that other things don’t have. So it’s just wasted. Or MMOs. Or MMOs or MOBAs, which I don’t know much about. That’s it. I only really want to talk about RTS games and first-person shooters, which will be very obvious now to anyone who’s listened to both of those drafts, but those genres become more console-focused and, well, RTS has disappeared in the late noughties, sadly. One thing I’m not having is the couple of people who say, like, it’s a bit too FPS-focused, your drafts. As if FPS wasn’t the dominant genre. The most important genre of this period, the most popular, the sexiest, the one that got everyone excited. It just was. I cannot comprehend someone who’s like, why are you talking about FPSs from 2000 to 2005? Well, that’s just, it’s just obvious why we’re talking about them. Yeah, we did get one question about that, actually, Matthew. I’ll just read it very quickly, then we’ll get into what we said we’d talk about. But this is some Serrano on the Discord. So as someone who’s not that into FPSs, the double slot for the genre on the recent PC Drafts came as a bit of a surprise to me, as well as the key position of Half-Life 2. Obviously, this is my own eccentricity. It’s a huge genre, and Half-Life 2 was a massive step forward. Just not one that I feel had too much force in my own gaming history. What’s the biggest development such classic game that could vanish from history without you noticing? Thanks to the podcast. Now, that’s a much more diplomatic way of saying it, right? But one person on Twitter definitely said, was more shitty about it. And I was like, I mean, come on, these were like mega genres. And also you and I, we’re not like the biggest shooter people, you know, like, like, firmly not, but we are people, we are fans of shooters, you know, with good taste, I would say. Like, that’s like our whole angle on this is fear. No one lives forever, too. You know, Medal of Honor, Outland Assault, Call of Duty 2. These are all great first person shooters and not in a kind of like drinking Mountain Dew, Bro, I Just Snipe 2 kind of way, which is… It’s before the genre becomes that. Exactly! So, they’re good. So yeah, did you have an answer to that question, by the way? Biggest developments as president? I mean, like, literally any MMO. Like, if World of Warcraft never existed, my life would be exactly the same as it is now. Well, that’s the thing is, so many MMOs have vanished from history. Like, they’re gone, like, you know, everything from The Matrix Online to, like, Star Wars Galaxies is talked about now like a folktale or something, or City of Heroes, and I never saw it. It’s all true, all of it. But yeah, I had no truck in any of that, so yeah, I’m happy with my first-person shooters and my Brian Reynolds games that no one votes for, so that’s fine. Okay, onwards with the podcast, Matthew. I look forward to drafting again, probably in a couple of months. So, I thought this would be a good conversation starter, Matthew. We talked about Splatoon. The most, you know, the big, highest-profile, sort of like a new, quote-unquote, Nintendo series, 2015, obviously, but that’s pretty new for a company like Nintendo that’s been around for decades. I wanted to start a conversation about when Nintendo makes a new series or works with a new studio, is it filling a gap it doesn’t already have, or is it about building experience around their newer hardware that it needs to kind of bring the features out of it, or is it both? I kind of wanted to go through a bunch of case studies and talk about why did Nintendo want this as a kind of like addition to, you know, Mario, Metroid, Zelda, Ice Climbers, all this stuff that existed for many, many years. And it’s quite interesting because I think when you look at a broad spread of their most recent stuff, they do seem to cross over into more genres where Nintendo doesn’t have as much heritage. Do you think that’s fair to say? Yeah, I think so. They basically embed a couple of Nintendo mega brains on external teams who are good at making something and then they kind of sand off sort of rough edges. Is the general gist of it? Yeah, as the man who’s like plugged into every Iwataras article going, it’s basically like the best living archive of them. I look forward to picking your brains and some of this stuff. So we’ll go through one by one and talk about where they kind of slot in, I suppose. So, actually Matthew, I’m going to ambush you with one I didn’t put in the list here, because I did just remember it from our first conversation. Chibi-Robo, I think that was 2006 that launched. What’s that all about in the pantheon of Nintendo games? I regret this line of questioning, sorry. I’m a bad friend. The Gamecube era is like a period where Nintendo is sort of opening up and you are beginning to see them work with surprising people. You know, whether that’s like Mario is allowed to be in an EA sports game or they are working with sort of third-party developers. They feel like they are a bit more open to things, but still very like Japan-centric. I’d say in the Gamecube era, you know, I’d say outside of like retro, retro next level games, it’s, you know, quite seasoned Japanese trusted studios who they have some kind of relationship with. I’m not actually amazingly sure of what the deal is at Skip, which is the Chibi-Robo people. I feel like we should ask Ash Day when he’s on the podcast, because he’s like Mr. Chibi-Robo. I don’t know if they would say Chibi-Robo is specifically a Nintendo in-house character, per se, because it didn’t come from them specifically internal teams. Sorry, that’s an unsatisfying answer. He’s not in the Smash Bros roster either, right? But I think he’s referenced elsewhere, I think. Yeah, and they keep making these games, but they are a little funny about when they talk about Splatoon, they’re like, oh, this is the first new Nintendo character since Pikmin. This is the first Nintendo character in 14 years, which I think kind of glosses over some characters who, for whatever reason, you know, like, Jam with a Band has like that sexualized bat lady after a pat, which is a thing which happens, but they just don’t seem to want to talk about that. I don’t know if that’s because the game is not hugely popular or because it’s just a bat with massive breasts. It’s just a bit weird to put it up. Who could really say? We’ll ask Ash about that, but I find it interesting that that series has persisted. It hasn’t been a game on Switch, but certainly the latter part of the 3DS life cycle, you still had that Zip Lash game that came out, which I don’t think was that well reviewed, but it was sure a thing that happened. It’s a super cute thing. I’ve just got to put my hand up. I’m not knowing a vast amount about the developer on that one, but a lot of these things, as people going to Nintendo with pictures, you hear that in a Watara sort. They sort of go there and say, we’re thinking about doing X, and sometimes Nintendo go with it, and sometimes Nintendo throw a franchise or an idea at them. That’s what happened with Luigi’s Mansion, say. They just tell next level games, you’re making Luigi’s Mansion 2. It doesn’t come from anywhere in particular. Yeah, I think that’s what happened to Retro Studios back when Metroid Prime happened, right? It was me and Moto threw them Metroid, and then, yeah. They’re just saying you’re doing that. Yeah, and then it was basically like a bloody run to the finish when you read about the making of it. All right, Matthew, let’s take you into more familiar territory. So, Xenoblade Chronicles. Nintendo is intertwined with the history of the JRPG. Obviously, the SNES and the NES, this is where Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy started. The SNES is arguably where the JRPG was perfected, maybe, if you may believe that. There’s certainly a massive range of them. You may also believe it peaks on PS2 or PS1, or there’s some discussions there. But Nintendo’s own footprint in making them is arguably quite limited. You’ve got Earthbound, Paper Mario, and obviously Pokemon, I suppose, it kind of counts. But generally speaking doesn’t have a sort of dyed-in-the-wool JRPG in a way that I would say Earthbound and Paper Mario aren’t quite. Xenoblade Chronicles is very much on the hardcore end of that spectrum. So why don’t you talk about how that fits into the overall tapestry of Nintendo? Yeah, I mean, the read here is a big Takahashi thing. Rather than a specific hole that needs to be filled, it’s Nintendo working with Monolithsoft when they’re owned by Bandai Namco, being involved with them when they’re making Baton Kaitos, things like that, having an established relationship and realizing they have access to a creator who is not being allowed to really make what they should be making, and Nintendo seeing that they can offer a place for them to make… If you could make your dream game, what would it be? And if we could give you the resources and the time to make it, what would it be? That’s always been my read on Xenoblade anyway, that it was a kind of a creator-led thing rather than… I don’t think Nintendo have to worry about a lack of JRPGs on their platform, because they’ve got a good relationship with Square Enix, plenty of these things are there, they have their own RPG-ish series in Pokemon, I guess. But I think this is more about just utilising what is clearly a mega-brain that hasn’t been used properly before. There’s also an interesting element where you wonder if there’s maybe a kind of mutual learning that goes on with building open world games, just because obviously you have them, Monolith, contributing to Breath of the Wild, and so you do wonder if having them is maybe instructional, like it’s useful to learn that discipline a little bit. Is there anything in that or am I reaching that? Yeah, I think Monolith turn up in credits for so many Nintendo games. They’re clearly an absolutely massive studio now. They’re multiple studios spread out in different places. I think a lot of stuff gets outsourced to them. Yeah, they clearly work in a particular space. Whether that’s their company cultures are quite similar, their values are quite similar, I think. Well, they become quite similar, because I think the difference is they’re constantly a studio who are sprinting to the finish line and never quite making it. And then Nintendo finally give them the permission to treat it more as a marathon, and that’s what unlocks their potential. And through that comes this very healthy relationship where they are well placed to help with open world design. But they are credited with lots of assistance on Splatoon 2 and 3 as well. They are there, they are involved. I think they are seen as a very safe pair of hands. Right, right, yeah, for sure. OK then Matthew, so moving on to Splatoon itself. Nintendo didn’t have a multiplayer shooter of any description. Some dipping in the water, I think, a little bit here and there. Did Metroid Prime Hunters have a multiplayer mode? I think it did. But anyway, was this them ticking that box, do you think? Was that the goal of Splatoon? I honestly think Splatoon came about as a… I mean, I don’t think it’s ever been explicitly said they were trying to make an online shooter. I think the way Nintendo works, this is a bit of a generalisation, is that they have a vast amount of prototype going on in certain directions of, you know, we want an online something or other. That’s definitely true of ARMS, which we’ll get to a bit later. The actual genesis of Splatoon is more a Wii U, trying to make something very Wii U-centric. The original pitch of it is the map is on the TV screen and you control a character in 3D on the gamepad. And the idea being that while you can see what you’re doing on the gamepad, if someone looks at the TV screen, your movement is masked because as you’re painting, you’re kind of camouflaged from above. Does that make sense? Yeah, so it actually starts off as this weird kind of like dual-screen camouflage idea. They make it with tofu, like anthropomorphic tofu blocks. Oh, like Rezzy 2. Yeah, it’s really odd. White tofu and black sesame tofu, apparently. Shooting black and white kind of goo at each other. Very cursed. Yeah. Eventually kind of like, they make a prototype of that. People like it. They take it up the line. People like, we don’t think this could be tofu. That’s weird. They become rabbits for a very long period of time. And basically they’re wrestling with how to show, basically how to have the dual forms, which eventually they settle on. A human when you’re shooting, but then you turn into a squid that swims in the ink. They have quite a long troubled period of that transition, of like, what’s happening when the thing disappears in the ink? How does it camouflage itself? Does the rabbit just sort of sink into it? Does it slide into it? Is the rabbit the same color as the ink? So it’s just hard to see on it. There’s a lot of these kinds of discussions and it’s when they sort of go a little bit crazier. So the actual kind of story of Splatoon feels like they present it anyway as just Nintendo’s internal development process, kind of doing what it should do, which is something which is led by, here’s a fun idea, and then trying to find the kind of visual design or the visual hook that allows that kind of idea to happen, which has always been like how Miyamoto designs, you know, its form follows function always. You know, you don’t design a cute character and then try and find a game for them. So, you know, I don’t know how much of that is just kind of like designed to continue the myth of Miyamoto a bit. The fact that they are making a multiplayer shooter suggests that like that is the broad top line. Like you are making something with a multiplayer element, which I think is like how broad these projects start rather than, you know, you are making a multiplayer shooter. It’s like we want to make a multiplayer something. It uses the Wii U in this way. How do we think this works? I actually think that weirdly the thing that really works with Splatoon is like the visual start of it and it’s a very young feeling, very kind of contemporary game. You know, it’s all about fashion and music and kind of street culture. Like, weirdly, it is the bits that would be added last in the Nintendo process which feel very important. It feels like a game which sells itself like equally on identity and kind of gameplay, which Nintendo would normally bulk at. And I don’t know if that’s just like Young Blood coming up in the company and they managed to sort of shift the dial a little bit on that. But it’s, you know, wildly popular in Japan this game. I think it is really tuned into something over there, whether that is this sort of fashion youth element, or the fact that it is the friendliest shooter. It’s hard to kind of pin down exactly, but it is noticeably more popular in Japan than it is anywhere else. Yeah, I think the way to kind of appreciate how good Splatoon’s visual design is, is think how easy it is to fellow kids these kinds of characters and this kind of world, and think about how many games get ripped for doing that, for trying anything like that, or like anything in pop culture that seems contrived in that way. So the idea you can do that and succeed without anyone really questioning it is just a testament to how good those character designs are. So yeah, I think it’s very, just very, like it’s very powerfully appealing in that way. I can see why it works. Like just even slightly duller looking, and it may not work in quite the same way. It may not be the phenomenon that it is. So yeah, it’s a really interesting wrinkle for a Nintendo game to have this kind of fashion element to it. I wonder what the kind of collective thing is for this sort of genre of… Like I’d also put in like personas in there. This thing of like, I don’t know, the games that kind of tap into sort of contemporary Japanese youth culture in a really satisfying way, which obviously does gangbusters in Japan, but also is like fetishized by the West. And so this stuff really works there too. Yeah, 34 year old weebs. There are more examples of this. 34 year old weebs enjoying it as much as Japanese children. But I do wonder what like Miyamoto makes of Splatoon, like of that side of it. If he’s like, great, or just, if they like it, they like it. I’m not saying he’s out of touch or anything, but it’s so unlike him. It’s the bit of Nintendo which is like closest to reality. Like it feels like the barrier between what’s happening and what’s going on in their game is at its thinnest there. Like even the games they’ve made, which purport to be set in the real world, have like this fake sort of veneer to them. If you think of like the style savvy series where you run like a fashion boutique or whatever, it’s very kind of clinical and safe. It’s a notably like Nintendo take on like what the world is like. New Donk City, Matthew. New Donk City. Yeah, I just, I don’t know. Oh, like The World Ends With You was another one I was thinking of. Yeah, I was going to mention that. Yeah, it’s just this sort of, yeah, it’s such a, you know, it’s just like I just don’t think you necessarily associate like deliberate aesthetic necessarily with Nintendo. You know, they have a visual style and a visual charm, but something which is so sort of obviously kind of cool. Is it cool? I don’t know. Yeah, well, it’s definitely cool to like people in the West who grew up in like, I don’t know, Stevenage or something. And they’re like, do you know what? It would be quite cool to have been a, you know, a rad teenager hanging out in Shibuya. Do you know what I mean? Like it’s, I can see this sort of appeal on that level. But it’s also, yeah, and then you’ve got like the whole like thirst thing with them as well, which I think is, I don’t think, I think people just do that themselves. I have nothing to do with any of that. Yeah, like the character, like already you could see, like the game has like an inbuilt Miiverse system still, where you can like post little messages and pictures and stuff. And there’s just so much thirst for like, you know, what is basically like kind of crustacean, like with a t-shirt or whatever. And you’re just like, come on. Yeah. Also, they kind of all look like kids, sort of. There is that. Yeah. But we don’t need to get into that. But yeah, it’s funny because these designs are maybe like 20% away from being like brats or something like that. And so the fact that they don’t appall on that level and like they are just so kind of like, I don’t know, they are so resonant with a certain audience and not off-putting if you are an adult is quite the feat, I think. Yeah, it’s odd because like Arms, which sort of comes from a similar kind of place and a similar time, I don’t… It’s visually brilliant and the characters are amazing, but I don’t feel like there is quite the same sort of buzz. They are definitely more removed from reality. They feel more like, they are like classic Nintendo, but they are very functional. What’s their purpose? What’s their mechanic? Is that the heart of their visual character? In a way that I think Splatoon is just a lot lighter on its feet. Well, that was a good, interesting little chat there, Matthew. I think we dug into why it stands out versus other Nintendo series, for sure. The next one I want to discuss, Matthew, we will come back to Arms, is Bayonetta. This is interesting because this is not a series that was published by Nintendo. This was a Sega-published game, originally, back in 2009. Yet, it’s now a series synonymous with Nintendo, arguably through force of will. It’s been forced into that to some extent. It feels like, in some ways, maybe Bayonetta was salvaged to help the Wii U’s fortunes in terms of how it’s perceived by quite hardcore players. But it’s another example, I think, of a game type not represented elsewhere by Nintendo. So what do you think the deal is with Bayonetta’s place in the overall Nintendo pantheon? Yeah, probably closer to the Takahashi end of the scale in terms of respect for creators. The fact that this Platinum relationship kicks off in the Wii U era, which is a bit mad and shapeless, makes it a bit harder to pin down, I think, because they have a relationship with a lot of these people back in the day. These are the people who are making the… whatever they call it. Is it the Capcom 5? Yeah, yeah, yeah. For GameCube. They have an existing relationship with a lot of these people, obviously a lot of professional respect. I’ve always felt like Nintendo, definitely with Bayonetta 2, felt like a lot more hands-off, and the wonderful 101 to an extent. I felt like Nintendo wanted the cred that they associated with these games, but didn’t really interfere, or really know how to interfere quite as clearly as they did with, say, Xenoblade, which has a lot of Nintendo finessing within it, I’d say. Bayonetta 2 feels very much like Bayonetta 1 to me. There isn’t a noticeable step up in terms of accessibility or ease of use or Nintendo teaching you how to play that game. It is every bit the sequel to the hardcore game that was made under Sega’s watchful eye. Even, again, due to the lack of clear what-it-asks about this, we work with Platinum because we respect you so much and you know what you’re doing. But as that relationship matures over the years, I think we do begin to get more hybrid games from them. Astral Chain, arguably, is a Nintendo and Platinum co-production. That feels much clearer in terms of the story, how it frames the world, how it eases you in. Even right down to the battle ranking system in Astral Chain is a lot less punishing than it is in Bayonetta. It still rewards skill, but it doesn’t ask for quite the same level of skill as those earlier games. So, yeah, these to me… I love that Bayonetta 2 happened and exists and it’s a real thing you can crow about. I think you’re right in that it’s definitely a reaction to how they’re perceived on Wii as just being very soft and out of touch with these kind of core games. Here’s something which is going to be visually spectacular. But I also feel like it’s harder to lump it in with the other things. I see the least amount of Nintendo care and attention in it of probably everything they published. Yeah, I think that’s probably fair. They may also just be in love with the tone of these games when you think about how Bayonetta is represented in Smash Bros. There’s not huge compromises to get Bayonetta in there. She is a very unusual character compared to the other ones in terms of her character design and her. Attitude. But then I wonder, post-Astral Chain, if Bayonetta 3 will have a bit more input. It looks to me a little different in places. It’s hard to say from the trailers, but I’m keen to see, is that just going to be another straight Bayonetta 2 sequel? Or is it going to have… They’ve talked obviously about the prude mode or whatever it’s called, where she won’t be as naked or whatever. And will there be anything else which shows some evidence of tinkering? I don’t know. I can’t see Miyamoto being a big Bayonetta guy. Simon Parkin should have asked him about that, Matthew. What a missed opportunity. You’re a big Bayonetta guy? It’s pretty cool actually that we’re going to play a new Bayonetta game in the next two months. That’s really good. I’ll try and review that one and get really stressed about that as well. That’s good. Look forward to hearing Matthew’s muddled panicky thoughts on that in a couple of weeks. It’s not a good advert for my freelance business this podcast. It’s meant to be the opposite. This is meant to be getting you work. Oh, amazing. Okay, we can be very brief about this one because I’m not that interested in it, Matthew. So, Ring Fit Adventure. So, obviously, a fitness game that uses the Switch in a kind of Wii style way, I suppose. It feels like it has connections back to those types of, quote unquote, casual, friendly games. Obviously, Wii Fit being the most obvious example, Wii Fit Plus. But it has this RPG shell to make it maybe more appealing to regular players who were quite wary of that sort of Wii software. Do you think that’s where this one sits? Do you give a shit about this? I haven’t had a huge amount of experience with it because I’m too lazy. Catherine has it and has played a fair chunk of it. This to me is where I hoped they would go with their more lifestyle-y games, for sure. I remember reviewing Wii Fit and feeling like this is just so sterile, it’s so lacking in playfulness that I think they’d actually missed the point a bit or they’d gone too far and they’d sort of bought into the kind of minimalist Wii kind of casual look and feel. And I remember at the time, you know, in the magazine we would often say this just doesn’t feel like a Nintendo we recognise, this just isn’t for us. And I actually think in terms of what it does, like, yeah, Ring Fit Adventure, like, ticks as many, if not more, of the fitness boxes than Wii Fit did, but just does it in a more kind of charming Nintendo way. I wonder if Nintendo themselves realised that just the whole kind of casual user bubble had just burst for them and actually what people wanted was just them to be their charming selves. You know, when Wii Sports failed to take off a second time on Wii U, that really kind of sort of sounded the death knell for this particular, you know, that particular strand of thinking, I think. Yeah, I suppose so, but then, you know, you could argue that Nintendo Switch Sports is like the third coming of that kind of game, you know. Yeah, but it’s made, you know, it exists in a more substantial world, like a fully realised place, it has its own kind of character. Like, that’s what they had to do. You know, they did to Wii Sports what they did to Wii Fit in Ring Fit Adventure, and it’s kind of paid off. I actually haven’t played a huge amount of that. I need to do that. Yeah, I kind of wish we played a bunch of that when I came round your house. Actually, that would have been fun. But what can you do? I feel it would be weird if you just came round specifically to play it. Just the two of us clomping around playing tennis. Yeah, that’s it. Definitely could do it in my flat because I live above people. Can you imagine like two 20 stone men just crashing down on the floor? Not good for either the structure of the building or the people living below, I would say. Tough break. Okay, so here’s an interesting one, Matthew. Arms. On the surface, this has the classic build a new game around the hardware mentality we saw so frequently on the Wii and maybe have seen less so on the Switch, perhaps because there’s obviously the Switch Lite which doesn’t have the detachable Joy-Cons. But this is interesting because this is a fighting game, but a very different one from Smash Bros. So where do you think this kind of fits in? And do you think there’s any appetite for a sequel on Nintendo’s side? I feel a bit sorry for arms in that it feels like the one Switch game that didn’t truly explode. I don’t think it ever made to 3 million sales on Switch, which is very low by Switch first-party standards. Splatoon 2 has sold 15 million copies. Geez. That’s why they’re making Splatoon 3, I should have said that earlier. Well, I also think this would have been the highest selling game on Wii U, or one of them. You know what I mean? Well, that’s it. Yeah. I mean, Splatoon 1 was like a breakout hit in Japan. It sold like 4 million on Wii U. So, like, it did have, like, previous form. I think ARMS technically comes from… I think the remit or what they were asked to do was to make an online game. That was definitely the original pitch for this. It’s the kind of core of the Mario Kart 7 and 8 team who make it. The kind of the head honcho or the big brain behind ARMS is Kazuki Ibuki, who is the director of Mario Kart 7 and 8. And, like, the way it’s told is they say, well, you know, Mario Kart 8 has this big online element to it. You know, you guys are very comfortable in using online systems. We want another online game, so start prototyping. And they make all kinds of prototypes. The one which sticks is he imagines a fighting game where you see the combat from behind the character and basically everything flows from there. You know, if you’re over the shoulder in 3D, all of a sudden, like, the distance between you and people becomes a lot harder to visually judge than it is in a side-on fighting game, which is where the idea of these long elastic limbs comes from. So this is like a classic bit of, like, sort of this follows this, follows this kind of design. Yeah, I do think this is them just trying to get into, you know, an online competitive space that they’ve never sort of tried before. There’s definitely a bit of that. Like, they don’t really talk about it in terms of, like, even though the motion controls are, like, vital to really, really enjoying this game, I don’t think it necessarily comes from that first and foremost. I think they just wanted an online sport that they could make their own in the way that Mario Kart had been so sort of, like, you know, rewarding for them. They wanted to sort of tap into a very similar thing. My favourite bit of chat around this game is the idea of… They talk about wanting to create a sports environment instead of a serious environment, which is what they sort of saw existing in pre-existing fighting games, which are very about, like, technical skill. You know, they wanted a place where it felt like people were entering an arena and, you know, things could go wrong on the day. That would change the outcome, that not always the player who was the best player wouldn’t win 100% of the time, that someone could strike a lucky blow or that there was an error, a slight jolt of, like, randomness to parts of the game to kind of give it a kind of playfulness which they felt was missing from fighting games. So, you know, it starts with this very broad, make an online game, but I think as they enter the fighting space, it becomes more about addressing problems in the fighting space or what they perceive to be things they could move, you know, change a bit. Yeah, yeah. God, you’re so good at talking about Nintendo stuff, geez. This is, like, absolute gold for me as a host podcaster who didn’t have to carry this episode one bit. I’m having a great time, Matthew. I mean, I’m not, like… I’m a bit phony on ARMS. Like, I’ve probably played less than ten hours of it. Well, that’s still pretty good, you know. It never really kind of clicked with me, like, in a way. Like, I know a couple of people who really fell in love with this. You know, I know Chris… Well, Edge was really behind it. I know Nathan likes it, Chris likes it. Martin Robinson on Eurogamer wrote loads of really great stuff about ARMS. Yeah, it’s… I just wonder if, like, this… Is this it for ARMS? Like, I just wonder if the genre is fundamentally, like, too niche that even Nintendo couldn’t, like, break out of it. I mean, saying that, they’ve got Smash Brothers, but the pitch there is… There’s so many angles on Smash Brothers that make it successful. It’s, you know, put aside the fighting game. It’s just the Nintendo celebration of it all, and that’s enough for most people, I would say, or it’s the local couch play. The fighting game is, you know… It’s a noble thing to want to try and, like, tackle what you perceive as imbalances in a genre. Like, whether or not you can take the people who are used to those imbalances and succeed within them, like, whether you can bring them with you, like, that’s another thing entirely. Three million copies ain’t bad. Nah, it’s all right. It’s all right. It’s just, you wonder if, like, if it released a year later would it have been bigger? Because it’s 2017, right, so you’re smushed between Breath of the Wild and, you know, we’ve got Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey that year, right? Whereas, I don’t know, if this released in 2020, it might have been bigger, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, like, now Switch is just so massive that everything, everything has, like, a base, a higher baseline of success if it just appeals to, like, the core people who buy everything on Switch. But yeah, this didn’t have that, and I don’t know. I think, I think they overreg the motion stuff, even though it’s brilliant and key to it. Like, I think if you looked at it, you would have said, oh, this is a motion game, and this has been designed because this thing has motion controllers, which isn’t necessarily what people want, where I think if you’ve done it a bit later, they’ve, they’ve kind of, you know, like you say, like, I don’t think motion control, I wouldn’t say, is at the heart of Switch now. No. Like, it’s a key, it’s a great feature of it, but if a game doesn’t have it, you don’t mark it down. You know, you don’t think, oh, this isn’t, this is an unsatisfying Switch game. And maybe there’s a version of this, yeah, which is just, like, the messaging around it is, is just a little bit bigger, and Nintendo is able to tap into, look at these great characters and this great animation, this amazing sense of fun, you know, it’s, yeah, but that’s on them to do. Maybe they should just bang it on the Nintendo online subscription. Oh, that’d be a great idea. Why not try that with a full, probably, they probably think we do this once, people will think we’ll do it all the time. Yeah, that’s it. I was talking about this with Catherine earlier about Splatoon 3, about, like, why isn’t it just an expansion, you know, why isn’t it just endless expansions to Splatoon 2? Why not just patch Splatoon 2 with all the stuff they’ve changed for Splatoon 3 and sort of be done with it? But I think if you open up that, you know, or make it… I think we were actually talking about making it, like, free to play, and it’s like… I think you do that once. It’s very hard to come back from. Like, I think Nintendo is terrified of opening any kind of Pandora’s box and just changing things and changing how people perceive the value of their games. It’s a difficult one. Yeah, for sure. Interesting stuff. Well, next up, Matthew, come round for some arms. Arms and then switch sports. That would be a fun afternoon. A really sweaty afternoon. I’ll get a Dyson Airblade on that. Yeah, that’s fundamental when you’ve got two large men in one small room. So, next up, Matthew, the Warriors spin-off, so the Musou game. So this… I think it was 2014, the first one, Hyrule Warriors on Wii U? Yeah, that sounds about right. We definitely covered it on O&M. Yeah, and we’ve discussed it before in the podcast, where I talked a bit about a… age of… what the fucking Hyrule one? Hyrule Warriors, Age of Clarity, that was it. Yeah, that’s it. So I very much enjoyed what I played of that. I was curious why you think these were appealing to Nintendo. The first Musou licensed games that are popping up in the late noughties, I can remember reviewing a terrible Gundam one on Play magazine and giving it 34% or something. Probably upset some Gundam head out there. Possibly Jay Bayless, who knows. But I was curious whether you think these are like… Do these exist to pad out the release schedule a bit? Because they’re pretty high quality spin-offs. Or do you think there’s another reason that Nintendo specifically is interested in having these kind of like bat-a-hundred dudes action game spin-offs of their popular series, like Fire Emblem and Zelda? I think it’s a mixture of things. Like, the fact that these games, they’re so dependent on rich, iconic series to kind of tap into, of which Nintendo own many, and they’re something they’re very capable of making externally. There must be an element of, we are all hands on deck making a Zelda game internally. We cannot make another Zelda game, but the next best thing is this team who make this very particular game, which is about celebrating an IP of some kind. They treat these things very carefully. They’re used to working with probably quite difficult brands with quite high expectations. They’re good at managing these things. The game they make, whatever you think of the action, is very fan service. It’s a very easy visual win for a trailer because it’s full of all the stuff you love. This to me just feels like they basically had the perfect template for a game that was waiting for a partner who had mascots that were good enough to put in it to make it really sing and maybe an internal quality check that holds people to a high standard to maybe take off the rough edges that you might associate with these things and earns your Gundam game a 34%. Yeah, that’s it. They definitely came a long way because I do remember these games. They definitely had their fans even within games media. They were people who would go to bat for the Dynasty Warriors games. I do remember there were a couple of quite poor quality ones. Now it feels like, I don’t know about the regular series, but certainly the Persona spin-off, the Nintendo spin-off is very highly regarded. Look nice as well. That’s the other thing. These games used to look good, but now they do. So you do wonder if, like you say, it’s Nintendo sanding off the rough edges there. There’s still some times where I think these get a little bit hairy. Like Age of Calamity was like bucking against the system a little bit at places. I was like, oh, this is a shame. This is like, if the Switch had a little bit more heft, this would really sing and look spectacular. Yeah, for sure. Because they’ve emulated the art style of Breath of the Wild extremely well, considering. I think we’re going to say you emulated it and it looked amazing. No, I know how that upsets you, Matthew. That’s not what I’m about. Do you think there’s an element of panning out the release schedule a bit? Like these are, we don’t have a Zelda game for two years, but here’s a nice… Yeah, I think so. Yeah, they talked about more so Age of Calamity than the first Hyrule Warriors. That was just a bit of a cute bonus, but it came at a time where we had Zelda games out of the wazoo, and we must have done five different Zelda reviews in two years on O&M. They were making so many of those things. Yeah, but this came along. Breath of the Wild, at that point, people thought it was going to be a year away. Turns out it’s still three years away. And they talked about it like it was a really legit piece of the Zelda canon. They talked about it as if it was a mainstream Zelda game, and you had to get it because it was story-wise tied into Breath of the Wild and all this. I thought they really maybe oversold it, to be honest, in terms of how important it is to the Zeldaverse. But yeah, that’s very convenient for them. Side note, have you been seeing all the rumours about the, they think the Zelda HD Nintendo Direct is happening in September? Oh yeah, what for Wind Waker and Twilight Princess? People have said two years ago, like, this is happening, I can 100% guarantee that this is happening. And then it hasn’t ever happened, and you began to feel like, ah, this just isn’t going to happen. That would scratch a nice little itch. I think so, it feels like, but it felt like that two years ago, so that’s a redundant thing to say. Yeah, I’m with you, it’s like, these things probably exist, because they probably should, because the games are done, and it’s like free money basically. So yeah, but I also am sort of skeptical. I also saw some wild rumours about how loads of GameCube stuff is coming back in some form to the Switch. Right. Yeah, there’s a lot of re-examining of that era of Nintendo going on. Apparently, this is on like the old… These are in like the depths of Reddit. You don’t need to trouble yourself with these rumours, my friend. They’re like, are you ready for the year of Chibi-Robo? We hear one lone voice from Ash going, yes! I am! Side note actually, Ash is coming on the podcast next week. I saw him at a party in Gamescom, and he went, I could come on your podcast and get you cancelled, but also cancel myself in the process. And I found that very funny. I was like, I don’t think he can, but the idea of the mutually short destruction of like, I can’t tell an anecdote about you because it makes me look bad. That’s basically like where he was coming from, so that’s funny. I’m sure it’s just cancelling me for my bad takes, which are infamous. Next up Matthew, going really far back here, but Metro Prime, I picked this, I wanted to mention this because I think this sort of illustrates my point of the idea of like, Nintendo scouting genres it’s not already well covered in. And you know, Nintendo, you know, post-rare, though this isn’t really linked to that in any way, was kind of like the anti-FPS outfit in 2002. They weren’t like, they weren’t the FPS guys and this is a genre on the rise. And so Metro Prime is not strictly a first person shooter, but it is, you know, that’s a strong part of its DNA for sure. And I think that, you know, this is made by a Texas based developer, very, very different and it had gone through a lot of pain to get to this point. I mean, they cancelled three other projects before they settled on this. It was quite a brutal making of when you read about it. But I was curious, do you think this illustrates the overall point I make at the start here that Nintendo actively seeks out something it doesn’t already have when it tries to make a new series or a spin-off of an existing series? Yeah, you know, as a broad point, I think that’s true. I think the thing which came up in, you know, I did more reading around Splatoon and ARMS and both of them came back to like fundamentally whatever we’ve done, whatever decisions we make, you know, it all comes back to, you know, if Miyamoto has seen it before or if he thinks it isn’t like new or fresh or innovative, like it just won’t go anywhere. Like he’s just, you know, that is that’s what kills projects at Nintendo. If there is anything you’ve seen before, even if you’re doing it amazingly well, if it’s not deemed to be original in some way. And in that light, you can sort of see the pitch for a well, it’s Metroid, which you know, but in this very different perspective. And it’s going to sort of shift the FPS behavior more onto sort of exploration and less about Twitch shooting. You know, it’s going to be a true Metroid experience from a different perspective. You can see how that kind of resonates for sure. And there’s a whole generationally skip there where you can totally see the cogs wearing of like, okay, we managed to translate Zelda and Mario to 3D. That was really fucking hard, first of all, and took loads out of us. And Metroid is arguably an even tougher proposition with the sort of like skill ceiling and the types of abilities you have than either of those series. So translating it into 3D for the first time was a tricky, a tricky deal. And the fact that it became a first person shooter is actually quite, quite radical at the time, even though, you know, like I say, there’s some very big differences there. Okay, good. Yeah. So obviously this is meant to be coming back at some point, Matthew, but who bloody knows at this point? I am like up for this rumoured Metroid Prime 1 kind of proper remake, not remaster, like a, you know, from the ground up type deal. It seems to be what’s pitched, which I, in my head, I imagine is being like a Resident Evil 2 to Resident Evil 2 remake type leap. Or I would settle for nothing less. Yeah, I mean, you know, either way, this is still a handsome looking game by today’s standards, but I agree with you. It would be nice to see a little kind of like polish up of some of those animations on the enemies and the textures of the environments, make those worlds look really beautiful on the Switch. So, fingers crossed, that’s another thing. Another Nintendo thing that’s been rumoured for about fucking three years at this point, so we’ll see. Last up, Matthew, Luigi’s Mansion. You mentioned it earlier. So, kind of a weird one where, you know, launch of the GameCube will make a kind of survival horror riff, sort of puzzle adventure game, and goes dormant for years and years, and then a developer ends up making more, an American developer ends up making more of them. What do you think, what’s the story here? Because you know, you seem to know more about this than I do. Oh, I mean, the story here is that they have been like just given it for no apparent reason. I mean, literally, there’s a bit in the Wataraus interview where Bryce Halliday, who’s the director, let me just mention two and three at Next Level Games, he says, Kensuke Tanabe, who is, he’s kind of the Nintendo producer who works on like a lot of the kind of particularly like the American partnerships. So he works on like with Retro on Metroid Prime and Donkey Kong Country Returns. He works with Next Level and all their things. He crops up in a lot of what are asked whenever there’s an external studio. He’s like the go between. I don’t really know why he’s the go between, but he is. And yeah, apparently he says Kensuke Tanabe suddenly started doing something like a drum roll on the table and said, you’re going to make Luigi’s Mansion 2. I was so surprised I could barely speak. I just like the idea of like, this is what you’re doing now. Yeah, this is you being put on a new magazine after NGamer closes in like 2010 time, right? Yeah, but like not even a game smag. That’s like the head of future doing like a drum roll and they’re like simply knitting. Yeah, you’re running Imagine FX now, good luck. Yeah, but like their actual thinking of like why they thought they were a good match, never particularly apparent apart from, you know, this is just a good team. They seem very capable at this point. They’ve made Mario Strikers is their big thing. They go on and punch out as well. So they’ve kind of proven themselves, you know, being able to like work with Nintendo mascots, I guess like the through line from Mario Strikers to Luigi’s Mansion is like very characterful, very animation led. I wouldn’t say necessarily like super polished, but there’s a lot of like cinematic energy in Mario Strikers with like the winning animations and the entrance to the matches and the power moves and stuff, which you could maybe go, oh, they’re quite good at, you know, this kind of surface detail, which I think is very important to Luigi’s Mansion as well. Yeah, but like the broader Luigi’s Mansion thing, because it is a Miyamoto idea. Like, you know, he comes up with Luigi’s Mansion 1, seems to stem from… He always seems to talk about like film and television shows in relation to it. Of like, this is a game about like stories and storytelling and kind of in the sense of like a sort of setup and, you know, the sort of start, you know, start middle and end, the sort of setup to a gag, how storyline arcs work in TV and how that can be translated into a video game. You know, this is, they talk about this in more narrative terms than they probably do any other Nintendo series. Particularly from Miyamoto, who is not known for that. You know, you would think that the narrative framing of something is what comes after. You’d think Miyamoto would be like, I want to make a game about vacuuming. But it doesn’t seem to be the case. It seems to be more about the emotional journey of Luigi going into these rooms, how you reveal the ghost to him, what he does, what the comic payoff is. Seems to be the kind of thrust here. But that’s still, I’d say, like, that’s still old school Miyamoto process in terms of, he sees the idea is, I want to tap into this comic energy. And then I’ll see this idea through and it takes us to Luigi’s Mansion. So, like, there’s some of the kind of basic Nintendo thinking in that. Yeah, for sure. And then obviously, like, they would buy next level games, right? I think off the back of Luigi’s Mansion 2, is that right? They acquired them? Yeah, I’m not sure when they got acquired. But it was like, it’s interesting because they, you know, they were a work for Hyre Studio. They made, like, a kind of well-regarded Captain America game, I believe, as well. Back on the, back when, in the pre-Disney days of that published massacre. Was that the multi-format one? Yeah. I remember a PR telling me that was going to be like Batman Arkham levels of good. And they were being like, come on. They’re like, honestly, like, this is the one. And it was like, perp. Yeah, Captain America Super Soldier 2011. Yeah, next level games. Not the, they didn’t make the Wii and DS, 3DS ones. They did make, yeah, they did make the Xbox 360 and PS3 ones. But yeah, I think it did review okay. I think it got like, it got like sixes, basically. It wasn’t like, but it’s just really interesting that they are now like a basic in-house Nintendo developer. That’s quite a ride. There’s not many studios that have a comparable path to them within Nintendo’s, like, you know, range of developers. So quite interesting. Yeah, I think it helps that, particularly with Luigi’s Mansion 2, they work like very closely with Miyamoto, which I imagine, like, pleasing him is quite difficult. And there is definitely, the water ask is really, really good for Luigi’s Mansion 2, because it’s like the three guys from the studio, Miyamoto and then basically the go-between who sort of feeds them with stuff. And Miyamoto, he hears this thing where he talks about being like very big on, he’d tell them what was wrong, but he wouldn’t ever tell them how to fix it. He let them come up with the direction, but he would definitely say where he didn’t want it to go. That was like his big thing. And you can imagine, like, if you prove yourselves capable of working, you know, with, you know, with the biggest brain at Nintendo and to a satisfying level and sort of being able to deliver on what he wants, you know, you’re probably like quite a proven asset at that point. You know, like you get the idea that where things have gone south before with people and why Retro had such a bumpy ride is just like just people not seeing eye to eye for a very long time before they settled on the idea that worked. Yeah, for sure. I can see that. Yeah, it’s 2021 they’re actually acquired. So it was after We Just Mentioned 3. Yeah, which was super, yeah, really super polished thing. I mean, you know, very, very cleanly made, for sure. Yeah. Okay, cool. Well, those are those are the ones to discuss, Matthew. We didn’t need to go so granular as to talk about Boxboy, although, you know, nice little nice little series. But I like side note, I do I do feel like we’re missing like even, you know, even in like Wii, Wii U, 3DS, like there seemed to be some little experimental things happening on the side. And we’ve talked about this before, but the lack of like small Nintendo downloadable oddities, I think is quite obvious these last couple of years. You know, like they’re often like some bizarro prototype will make it through. And, you know, they’ll make that Sushi Strikers game or that one about the Armadillo, whatever. Dylan’s Rolling Western or, you know, I feel like what happened to those games, what happened to that kind of tier of sort of 10 pound downloadable 3DS games that they don’t seem to be making anymore. But, you know, it’s hard to complain when you’re getting what you are getting. Yeah, for sure. What was that weird? Wasn’t there like a weird Star Fox spinoff from Wii U, like a Slippy Toad thing? Like, is that a thing? Was it some kind of Slippy Toad’s relative thing? Did I dream this? That did happen. You might have dreamt… I’m thinking of Star Fox Guard. That’s what I’m thinking of. It’s a 3D tower defence game on Wii U made by Platinum and Nintendo in which you must protect various spaces owned by Slippy Toad’s uncle, Grippy. I knew I didn’t dream this. This is actually passed me by. 74 on Metacritic, Matthew. This is a tower defence game based on the Star Fox series. This is an actual thing that happened. Maybe you’ve just repressed some of your Wii U memories. I might. Maybe it was like, yeah, when it came out, was O&M being shut? Was I just like, I cannot deal with, like, there’s the risk of redundancies. I cannot deal with Slippy Toad’s bullshit right now. Oh dear. That seems like a good night to end on, Matthew. But yeah, it’s true we didn’t cover absolutely everything there. But I tried to cover everything that either became a series or got represented elsewhere. So we didn’t talk about Nintendo Land, for example, which was, you know, we have discussed on previous episodes, but ARMS at least has lived on in Smash Bros. Yeah, for sure. And I would say like the core of the Splatoon team, they’re all ex-Nintendo Land developers as well. So like if Nintendo Land had done Gangbusters and they needed to do Nintendo Land 2 and 3, maybe we wouldn’t have had the Splatoon. Yeah. Okay. Well, perfect, Matthew. So that was a fun, fun discussion. Thank you for your rich Nintendo thoughts as ever. As someone who monetizes those, I’m delighted. So very, very good. So people can read your review of Splatoon 3 on VGC, can’t they? And what can they find you on social media, Matthew? MrBassle underscore pesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts on Twitter. This podcast is supported by patreon.com/backpagepod. If you’d like to back us financially, you get two additional podcasts a month. This month it’s Best 7 out of 10 Games and Star Wars Movies Ranked. So a very good episode, a good couple of episodes in the offing. I haven’t recorded them yet, but I’m prepared to believe they’ll be good. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think so. You can follow the podcast, the Back Page Pod on Twitter. You’ll also find a link to our Discord there, if you’d like to join our growing community. Anything else Matthew, or should we just get out of here? Let’s get the hell out of here. Bye. Bye bye.