This has reminded me of something. Long before XBox introduced copilot as an accessibility feature, there were single-player RPGs with the ability to assign control of specific characters in battle to a second player. I’m specifically familiar with it happening in the SNES/Super Famicom games for the Final Fantasy series. Multiplayer wasn’t even advertised on the box until the PlayStation ports, although even Final Fantasy IX was only listed as 1 player despite also having this feature. It was just a menu option I didn’t understand until I read about it on that wiki. Did anyone else ever encounter this, perhaps in other games?
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All those pilot careers, but no international smuggler? 
My family got me a Nintendo Switch as an early Father’s Day gift last week. I don’t have to tell people here how neat it is to have such a versatile portable/TV console with two wireless controllers, but now I fully appreciate it. Thing is, I’ve had a PS4 for years now, so it’s the primary focus of my collection. It leaves me wondering, aside from first-party games, what’s there to get for the system? It’s likely to become a Nintendo-and-Nintendo-only Switch.
Not that it’s necessarily a problem. I haven’t touched my copy of Breath of the Wild yet because I know I’ll be settling in that world for a while, but New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe is keeping me occupied enough. Every new Mario game I play has me floored by the tightness of their design. The New Super Mario Bros. games have always excelled at creating challenges but giving players a chance, first by making sure extra lives are plentiful but later by providing the Super Guide…which someone like me simply cannot utilize because I’m stubborn. And the final battle with Bowser is amazingly satisfying.
Then there’s super Super Luigi U which distills that down further. It’s designed to fill you with anxiety with its shorter but meaner levels, slippery movement mechanics, and the fact that every stage starts at the 99 second mark and the friggin running out of time music. I love these games so much.
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Sometime around Christmas I hope to be playing this:
I’m loving how they dial up the already traditionally confusing worlds of FF by making lots of random folks sing and play instruments while staring at you. Bravo!
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If you go back to some of the older Mario games with Nintendo Switch Online, depending upon your preferred control style you might want to make use of the system’s controller remapping.
I also just heard recently that for N64 games (which you only get access to if you pay for the Expansion Pack subscription), you can hold ZR to turn ABXY into C buttons, otherwise it’s like the GameCube ports where you have to use the right analog stick for them.
You’ve heard of a gameplay showcase, but that one is a soundtrack showcase. If you haven’t listened to Masayoshi Soken’s work on FF14, you’re in for a treat.
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THANK YOU! I’m playing Ocarina of Time on the Switch right now and having to use the right analogue stick has been the absolute worst.
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Definitely do not give into the temptation to play Tears of the Kingdom. Play BOTW first - it’s a magnificent game, but I’m not sure there any going back to it after playing Tears. The quality of life improvements are incredible.
Do you have a gaming PC? Because if not, then there are a whole bunch of Indy games that I might recommend if you have not been able to play them on PC
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I heard about it while one of the Nintendo Life staff members was playing through Ocarina of Time for the first time and it sounded like important info to pass on, yeah. Super Mario 64 would probably be fine with an analog stick, but I would have preferred to have an option like that for Master Quest while playing the ocarina, instead of the C-stick.
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I finally cracked open Breath of the Wild, and I’m not loving it yet. Enjoying it, sure, but the vastness (even in the early area) and RNG dictating spawns detract from an experience I know I should like more. I was just begging for more arrows and another hog to show up. (The arrows didn’t, but the hog did once I decided to run around and do other things.)
I don’t generally game on my PC, so I’ll gladly take indie suggestions.
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What’s your preferred genre? Both in terms of gameplay and story.
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Feather is one I play mostly undocked on Switch to relax. Perils of Baking is a Super Mario World clone that’s been in my backlog, but I liked what I’ve played so far. 20XX is a Rogue-lite platformer with gameplay inspired by Mega Man X4/5/6, but far more lighthearted and it has online co-op. A sequel is due out in August with not just the option to play static levels, but they teamed up with Mega Man Maker. It sounds like you might only be able to create levels on PC, but they’ll still be downloadable.
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Story doesn’t matter to me in games. I just appreciate when they’re entertaining. As for genre, the only ones I tend to avoid are FPS, third-person shooters (with some exceptions), visual novels, and serious racers. I’m open to most others, with a focus these days on what tended to be popular in the 90’s (platformers, brawlers) due to the ease of picking them and putting them down amidst the distractions of children I’m supposed to be raising.
I keep forgetting about 20XX. Mega Man-likes tend to be of particular interest to me, with Shovel Knight being one of the most amazing of them. So I’ll add 20XX to the list, although I’ll have to compare prices between Switch and PS4.
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While thinking about indie games I remembered Skellboy, which has been in my backlog so long that they added co-op in the Refractured edition. The music is also catchy, without or with lyrics.
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I swear, every freaking time. I bought Inscyption on the Switch sale last night and today it’s announced in PS+.
- Portal 2 will never not be a perfect answer to this question (although possibly just a little too technically difficult yet for 8 going on 9?)
- Personally my young’uns and I got great mindless mileage out of the Halo split-screen co-op back in the day, e.g. Halo 4. Yes it’s a gun-based shooter but more “laser-y”, not “blood and guts-y” if you know what I mean
- My kids adore a two-player platformer called Battleblock Theater but it’s a bit mental for me
- And I’ve heard great things about (but not played) It Takes Two
- Oh, same as last for the Overcooked games
Good luck, happy gaming 
Edit: Or you could just play possibly the greatest two-player game of all time, Micro Machines, online in the browser! (Needs a bit of initial messing around with keys and you have to share a keyboard, unless you have a PC controller or two)
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Awesome! Thanks!
I’ve never played any of the Portal games, but I do have a couple versions of Halo kicking around. My wife won’t be crazy about it, but they could be worth exploring with her.
It Takes Two looks perfect. I’d probably end up more frustrated than my daughter, which is great because I can process my emotions better and won’t flip out.
This is shaping up to be a great summer with her 
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With It Takes Two just make sure before going in that you have a talk with her about how it’s just a game and Mommy and Daddy are not fighting or thinking about getting divorced
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This is an interesting article initially about the derogatory use of the JRPG label (for a time) but then further about Japanese games and aesthetics being less popular for a while. Particularly startling to me was the dMc presentation that I completely, and thankfully, missed while that game was in development. The game itself was honestly not bad, but I’m glad to see Ninja Theory’s homophobic posturing was all for naught. dMc promised a sequel that never happened, and since then we’ve seen the release of DMC4: Special Edition, an HD collection, DMC5 and its special edition, and a beta for a mobile game.
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Ugh. Webb said that? Sessler’s not much better in the voice-over of the Baten Kaitos: Origins review. G4 was pandering to a lower common denominator than Tech TV before I stopped paying attention to X-Play, but I guess it got worse. This “Ho hum, another RPG on the GameCube, here’s a 3 out of 5,” also was not the tone Sessler had back when the show was called “Extended Play” and he (or the review writer he was presenting on behalf of, at least) loved Phantasy Star Online Episode I & II.
That article linked to IGN quoting Hironobu Sakaguchi and Koji Igarashi pointing out that turn-based RPGs were less popular for a time, but Metroidvanias kept growing. Also, a JRPG doesn’t get that label in my mind because of its aesthetics, as the Polygon article seems to conclude. I certainly never used it in a derogatory way; again, as Igarashi and Sakaguchi pointed out Western RPGs had to catch up to them.
“I think that one of the main reasons for that is the fact that consoles like the NES and PlayStation were very specific hardware,” suggested Sakaguchi. “This made it easier for Japanese developers to master the hardware, as we could ask Nintendo or Sony directly in Japanese. This is why – I realize it might be impolite to say this – Japanese games were of a higher quality at the time. As a result, Japanese games were regarded as more fun, but when hardware became easier to develop for, things quickly changed.”
“Japanese developers had been developing skills specifically for console games, but in North America and Europe, there was a long history of PC culture,” Igarashi said. “By the time there was no longer a big difference between developing for console and for PC, Japanese developers could no longer rely on their specialty as console developers, and had to master PC development,” said Igarashi, positing that this was the major reason Japanese games started falling behind.
Sakaguchi added: “Many Western gamers grew up playing Japanese games. When games by Western studios started to improve, they felt new and fresh when compared with the Japanese games those players were more familiar with. I believe that in entertainment, freshness is extremely important.”
But, putting aside JRPGs or reviewer biases, I don’t think Polygon covered how the consumption of video games shifted dramatically. What Happened? covered how Capcom came to choose Ninja Theory for that Devil May Cry reboot after that shift.
Thanks for the link to “What Happened?” I would be interested to know more about that.
This was all new to me because it was during a period when I wasn’t consuming all that much games news. I also never used JRPG derogatorily. To me it usually implied an epic-scale adventure with a party of heroes, more often than not using turn-based combat. All of which were things I enjoyed more than the single character, dark and serious, action-RPGs the West was putting out at the time – usually on Xbox or PC, so I didn’t have access to them even if I had wanted to play them. But I guess there are too many people out there who enjoy mixing their game preferences with their xenophobia a little too much…
