Moon: Remix RPG Adventure with Joshua Goldie, Switch 2 Reveal, Earthbound in Shinjuku

[00:00:08] Welcome to Tokyo Game Life, a Tokyo-based video game podcast focusing on Nintendo and gaming culture in Japan's capital. Your host, Mono, here to bring you a slice of gaming life from Tokyo. Source Gaming's Joshua Goldie returns to the podcast as we chat about Love Delique's 1997 cult classic, Moon Remix RPG Adventure. We dive into everything weird and wonderful about the game and how its influence is still being felt today.

[00:00:31] And oh hey, Nintendo Switch 2 was announced and Joshua stays on as we chat about the next generation of Nintendo hardware. And that's not all as I take you inside the latest Earthbound pop-up shop in Shinjuku. Let's start with the game section and Moon with Joshua Goldie.

[00:00:53] Today in the game section, we're going to take a look at Moon Remix RPG Adventure, a 1997 cult classic that is just too good for one person. So I'm joined by a special guest. So guest, please introduce yourself. It's me again, Nantengex, the Nintendo Chronicler. I'm back this time for once talking about something that's not Nintendo related. Well, kind of. I guess its history sort of ties into Nintendo a little bit with where everyone went. But it's not a Nintendo published game for once.

[00:01:23] I do wonder if more people since 2020 have played it on Nintendo hardware than not. So I would maybe count it. Thanks for joining me yet again. You are on my Another Code Recollection episode, then the episode about Marvelous Another Treasure Island. And now we're going to talk about Moon. I think I joked off Mike that we need to get more and more obscure each time. So the three games we've talked about, rank them by obscurity, please. Another Code is definitely the least obscure of these, of those three.

[00:01:51] See, now it is a toss up between Marvelous and Moon. Moon has the advantage that it's been released worldwide. Right. Whereas Marvelous is like a funny Japan game, but it's a Nintendo game, which means Nintendo fans know of it, even if they've never played it. But I feel like Moon maybe is less obscure than Marvelous just simply because it is available worldwide and in English.

[00:02:18] Moon has ties to some popular games. How I found Moon was through a well-known game. So I might not be the only one who went down that path. Yeah. And Marvelous does have spirits in Smash. So again, like I said in our Marvelous episode, 25 million people have seen a Marvelous character. No Moon representation in Smash just yet, but you never know. You never know. Maybe it'll get added to Astro Bot instead. Because the original Moon was a PlayStation game, if I remember right. That game has loads of PlayStation references.

[00:02:46] So while Moon is not the most obscure game, it's still a fascinating one. And there's a lot to talk about and get into. I'll give you the honors. Tell us the premise. What is Moon RPG Remix Adventure? So Moon is a weird spin on the RPG formula. I mean, it's in the title, right? RPG Remix. The game starts off as a young child playing an RPG, a Dragon Quest-inspired RPG, on his Famicom,

[00:03:14] before getting sucked into the TV and entering the world of the RPG. And here he's not the hero when he's in. He is just a weird, invisible boy living in the world as the hero is running around slaying monsters. And as he soon discovers, it's not exactly as you'd expect from the hero's point of view. The monsters that he's killing are actually just regular innocent animals just going about their day.

[00:03:42] The hero is interpreting how people see him and acting like he thinks he has the right to act. In reality, he's just being a big jerk and a menace and nobody likes him. And so you're basically tasked with going around the world and cleaning up after the hero, trying to bring all the animals back to life that the hero killed, while also actually helping the locals of the land of Moon.

[00:04:09] So going around Moonland and helping the locals and trying to build a rocket to get to the moon so that you can meet the person who's been guiding you the whole time. Yeah, I beat Moon a few weeks ago after it's sitting on my wishlist for years. And I want to hear about your Moon journey. How did you first come across Moon RPG Remix Adventure? Sorry, Remix RPG Adventure. Yeah, it's certainly a name, isn't it? I sometimes just type in Moon, like when I'm trying to look it up on Google. And of course, that doesn't help at all.

[00:04:38] Even typing in Moon Game doesn't really help because there's quite a few games called Moon. So I always have to remember to type in Moon RPG, even though it really pushes itself as not being an RPG. It's almost described as the anti-RPG back in the day. But how I came across Moon? Well, there was a big game that led me to finding Moon, and that was Undertale. Undertale is heavily inspired by two titles, Moon and Live a Life.

[00:05:05] I remember really enjoying Undertale and reading about how Toby Fox is inspired by love to lip types, and was like, oh, what is this? So I took a look into it, and that immediately led me to Chibi-Robo, which was a series I was already very familiar with thanks to Nintendo. And I kind of just fell down a rabbit hole of that until I discovered Moon. And I was like, the aesthetics of this game, like, I know it's definitely nostalgia-driven because I grew up in the 90s, but I really like the pre-rendered graphics,

[00:05:35] use of sprite and 3D models. And I'm a big fan of animation and claymation and stuff, and so the animals were all made using claymation. And I was like, this is a really cool blend of visual styles. Too bad it's only in Japanese I'll never be able to play it. But then, so I sort of, like, forgot about Moon until... I can't remember exactly when it was, but I saw it was getting an English localization, and that was coming to Switch.

[00:06:03] And I was like, this is it, this is my opportunity to actually give Moon a go. And I'd already heard of Dandy Dungeon, which is another game by Onion Games, who are the publishers and owners of Moon now. So I was kind of familiar with their work already, so I decided to join their Discord and just sort of kept on top of it, of the release of Moon. And then when it eventually came out, like, four years ago, I want to say, I want to say 2021? 2020, yes. 2020, yeah.

[00:06:31] Then I picked it up immediately and loved every second of it. Yeah, for me, I honestly don't remember how I heard of Moon, but I think it had to be because of Earthbound, since the question most people have after playing Earthbound is, are there any other games like Earthbound? And Moon, while very different in terms of gameplay, does have a very similar off-kilter vibe that an Earthbound fan base would enjoy. And yes, like you said, Toby Fox of Undertale, he does cite this game many times as a major inspiration for Undertale. Yeah.

[00:07:01] And that's something you can very clearly see once you play Moon. Yeah, absolutely. But before we jump into everything that's weird and wonderful about Moon, we've got to talk about the people who made it, Love Delique. Can you give us an overview about who these guys were? So Love Delique, a company made up by former Square employees back in the mid-90s. It was founded by Kenichi Nishi, who most Nintendo fans will know as the Chibi Robo guy. And they're now making Co-Robo over on, well, it's been Kickstarted already.

[00:07:31] It's been funded, so Co-Robo, which will probably come out in like a year or two years from now. But he founded the company with a bunch of former Square employees, and they wanted to make different games. They wanted to take the games they'd worked on and turn them on their head and just make completely weird and brand new experiences. And obviously working at Square, they had a history with games like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy. I think Mario RPG wasn't out yet,

[00:07:59] so I'm not entirely sure if they worked on that one. But the point is they'd worked on a lot of JRPGs, so the first game they wanted to make was a twist on that. They wanted to take the RPG formula and flip it around. And this is what led to Moon. And Moon was a fairly popular title in Japan. It was a weird game, and in the mid-90s, I think Japan saw the West, and America in particular, as a country that didn't like complex games.

[00:08:26] They had perceived that the West only liked simple, basic games that you'd find in arcades and stuff like that. A lot of RPGs and text-heavy games weren't getting translated at all. And this all changed when Final Fantasy VII drops in the West and completely blew everyone's minds. But because of that, because Moon's quite a text-heavy game, because it's not a game with any combat in it, they chose not to bring it out over there. But it did well enough in Japan that they made a handful of weird sequels.

[00:08:55] Not sequels, but similar games. I guess other Love Dilic games. So UFO and LOL. And then after those came out, the companies split up, and they all went off to go make various new companies, one of which was Skip, one of which was Vanpoo, one of which was Punchline. And they all went off and made their own little Love Dilic. So Skip went and made Giftpia, which is a very similar type of game to LOL and Moon. And then went off to make Chibi-Robo and Captain Rainbow.

[00:09:26] Vanpoo went off and made the Tingle games, which are also very Love Dilic-like, and have a handful of other games. They petered away with Dylan's Rolling Western, and now they don't exist anymore either. And then Punchline made Tulip, which is another Love Dilic-type game. Kind of similar to Giftpia. And now it's Punchline are the ones that are now known as Onion Games. Founded by Yoshiro Kimura. Yeah.

[00:09:54] So he founded it with some former Love Dilic members, and they're the ones who now own Moon. And I think they own the whole Love Dilic library, like UFO and Lack of Love as well. I'm part of the Discord. I've been keeping up with Stray Children, which is their new game that released in Japan on Boxing Day. It has confirmed English release, but I don't think it's got a confirmed date yet. I think it's just sometime this year. So I'm looking forward to that. They've been talking about Moon was so successful, they were able to get enough money to do Stray Children.

[00:10:24] And if that's going to be successful, they're going to try and bring back Tulip, I think might be the next one. But he ideally wants to bring all of them back. UFO, Lack of Love, Tulip, and Rules of Rose, which I would really appreciate, because Rules of Rose especially is extremely expensive. I saw it in a CEX, which is like the closest thing we have to a chain retro game shop in the UK. And they were selling it for like £350. And they had three copies of it. Someone's mum has just donated these

[00:10:52] without knowing the value of what they had on them. Okay, we got to address the elephant in the room. How are you supposed to pronounce Love Dilic? Because in Japanese, it is Rabu Deriku. The name is based on Yellow Magic Orchestra's album, Technodelic. So despite being separated via spaces for each syllable, I think it is supposed to be kind of like Love Delic. In short, you can pronounce it Love Delic or Love Delic or Love Delic. Anything is okay.

[00:11:21] Listeners, you can pronounce it however you want. And I'm sure we will pronounce it both ways many times. So I just want to clear the air that they have a very weird name that's hard to pronounce in English, but we will call it whatever we want during this episode. It was an all-star team of X-squared devs, like you said. I wanted to run off some of their credentials. Kenichi Nishi, who worked on Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG, even though oddly this game came out pretty soon after Super Mario RPG. Yeah, it was shortly after, but Love Delic. I'm going to say this like three different ways now.

[00:11:51] I'm pretty sure they were formed before Mario RPG came out. It was about the same year. Yeah. And Taro Kudo, again, Super Mario RPG. And he also worked on Super Castlevania 4, which is from Konami. And Akira Ueda, who worked on Final Fantasy 4 and Secret of Mana. So a lot of alumni from 90s Square, one of the biggest developers in Japan, both in terms of success and cultural impact. And while they only made three games, we are still feeling the impact of Love Delic's developers

[00:12:19] due to all the company's ex-Love Delic folks made after they disbanded, which you explained. I think for Nintendo fans, Skip is maybe the most famous. Nintendo technically maybe owns a Love Delic-like in Gif Pia. I think they are the ones who... Yes. Nintendo are the ones who decide. They're the ones who decide. And Gif Pia, unlike Chibi Robo, which was originally going to be published by Bandai Namco, and then Nintendo decided to take that on themselves, Nintendo were fully on board Gif Pia from the start. They 100% owned that game. Yeah, you mentioned Kenichi Nishi. One of the founders of Love Delic.

[00:12:48] He is working on Ko-Robo, the Chibi Robo spiritual successor. So these people are still out there. That's one thing I really want to emphasize is that Love Delic didn't disappear. They're still around under many different names. There's definitely a lot of other games that Love Delic people have touched that many people may not have realized. For example, Taro Kudo, he worked on the Thousand Year Door remake. Not the original game, the remake. Taro Kudo for Paper Mario is more known for being the director of Sticker Star and Color Splash, the two games that people don't like

[00:13:18] from the Paper Mario series. Right. And Vanpool, which you mentioned, if you've ever played a Kirby game in the past 10 years, Vanpool had their hands in it. Yep. Including the Return of the Dream Land Deluxe remake from last year. So, okay, we've laid the groundwork. There's a lot of groundwork to lay, but let's get into Moon Remix RPG Adventure. You load up the game, first of all, amazing title screen. Maybe one of the best ever. I don't want to exaggerate, but it is amazing. Then you start playing Moon,

[00:13:47] or do you? What did you think about the very first segment of the game? It definitely surprised me, because I'd obviously seen a bunch of screenshots about Moon, and I knew it was meant to be sort of a play of RPGs, but I hadn't played the game. And so when you boot it first up, it is just a Dragon Quest parody, like straight up. And at the start, I was like, this is an RPG. This doesn't look anything like I was expecting it to. But as you get through and start seeing how over-exaggerated everything is,

[00:14:17] I started to be like, oh, I see. I think it's the first turn when you leave the town and then it fades out and then sort of fades to a scene later. I was like, oh, I see what they're doing here. This is the Dragon Quest parody. I'm going to be playing Dragon Quest for a bit. And again, it made me think of Undertale again, how Undertale saw its first section before you leave after fighting Toriel. That whole first temple section is structured like a typical RPG. Right. It tries to teach you combat.

[00:14:46] It's got RPG puzzles. There's very little NPCs to interact with. Like that whole section is like baiting the player to assume it's a regular JRPG so that when they get to the actual outside area, they continue it even after they've met Sans or even after the Toriel fight. I could immediately start connecting those two dots and seeing the inspiration again because I was like, I see this is baiting me into think it's an RPG. But in a second, it's about to completely twist on its head. I know it. And I was right.

[00:15:15] Yeah, this was such an interesting way to start the game, especially once you see it play out again during the real story. And once the game starts for real, can you give us an overview on the actual gameplay loop of Moon? Moon is a, I would say, an adventure game. You run around in it with a viewpoint of a typical JRPG, Zelda-like, the sort of top-down isometric. But you don't have any kind of attacks. It's all just talking to people, learning about what they do,

[00:15:44] and trying to collect the spirit of animals that the hero has killed. The hero will kill animals and you have to figure out a way to get their spirit to appear so that you can collect it. And in exchange for collecting the animal spirit, you get love. You need to get a certain amount of love for things to happen in the game, but also to increase your own stamina. Because Moon is one of those titles that has an actual day-night system that all the NPCs in the game

[00:16:13] sort of abide by. Very Majora's Mask-esque. Yes. Which, in a funny way, could almost be seen as a love to lurk in its own right. But yeah, it has a day-night system that all the NPCs work along, and it's really just sort of about living in this world, learning what, the NPCs' patterns are, trying to discover animals, and then when you do, try and discover how you'd form their spirit, whatever weird, specific criteria they've got. Some of them are straightforward, and some are

[00:16:43] very obtuse to learn. The more love you get in the game, you level up by going to sleep. You start off at your grandma's house, and then eventually get your own house on the other side of the map. And if you go to sleep, it tallies up all the love you earned that day, and then you get experience from it. That increases your stamina, and you need more stamina because there are certain events in the game that require you to waste a lot of stamina, and if you don't have enough, you will just die.

[00:17:13] Right. Tulip does the same thing, if I remember right, as scenarios that require you to have enough health to survive long enough. It's almost like how they benchmark their progress. I feel like they want Moon to be an open world game, and it definitely has that vibe. There's no real barriers or restrictions to where you can go, other than how long it takes you to walk from one place to another. Eventually, I think you do unlock fast travel, but at the start you don't have it,

[00:17:43] so it's very much just slowly plodding along, finding animals, speaking to NPCs, and earning love. Yeah, I would liken it more to a point-and-click adventure game in a way. Not the input method, it's not quite like Marvelous, but you are solving puzzles by investigating objects, and then using objects at specific places or specific times, and the game has absolutely no combat at all. It's all puzzle solving and dialogue, which again, this is a game made from X Square developers. They worked on Final Fantasy,

[00:18:12] so for them to not use a battle system at all is such an interesting pivot from what you would expect. You would think they would say, oh, we're going to make our own version of Final Fantasy or our own version of Dragon Quest. They did pretty much the opposite, like you mentioned before. It is described as the anti-RPG. Yeah, just like, what does everyone really like about RPGs? All right, let's not do that. I think the big focus on Moon, I think, is actually properly exploring the world of RPGs. That's pretty common nowadays.

[00:18:43] RPGs are so massive. One might even say they're a bit bloated, but it gives players the opportunity to just live in a world and learn who the NPCs are. Sometimes you've got social links for that, like in Persona, and sometimes it's just very robust side questing. Moon is one of the first titles where it wants you to be in one of these actual worlds almost as an NPC in it, and just live day by day. You can get food and stuff, and then you need to eat food to keep your stamina going so that you

[00:19:12] don't just pass out. very farm sim-esque mechanics in there. But yeah, it's a very chill game with a lot of really good vibes. I think that's a big part of the appeal to it. You could put on ambience from this game in the background and study to it. It's that kind of title. I think the biggest RPG element is that you do level up as you collect love. When you go to bed, you are leveling up, which you receive by doing quests that revolve around helping characters or reviving slain animals.

[00:19:42] And as you level up, you can stay awake for longer and longer as one of the main mechanics is the day and night system. And it is like a big deal. Once you go, I think you start maybe a half day as you're level one. But then when you get to three quarters of a day, it's legitimately like a game changer because you feel like the world has opened up so much. And then by the end of the game, if you reach max level or almost max level, you can stay awake for like six days straight. So it is pretty crazy just like how much it escalates. And yet it goes

[00:20:11] even a step beyond the typical day night cycle because there's also days of the week. Yeah. So what did you think about how the game implements its calendar system in general? I think it's really cool. It definitely has downsides though, because there are certain scenarios, certain side quests where it's like this guy on a Thursday evening will do this. And if you miss it, you have to wait an entire week of in-game time before you can attempt this side quest again. This kind of time

[00:20:40] management is always prevalent in games that have an in-game clock you have to follow. Usually the times are either much shorter. So again, Majora's Mask is only over three days. And if you mess something up, you can just reset back to the first day easily. Or it's like everyone does the same thing every day. So farm sims are kind of like that. Those also work on their own calendar system with weeks and months. But most of the time characters will do the same routine again until you've seen

[00:21:10] whatever the next step in their side quest is. They might only do it on certain days, but usually it's not just one day of the week. Usually it'll be like three times a week they'll do this. So you have opportunity if your time management skills are bad. Whereas in Moon, if you miss one of your scenarios, you kind of just have to sleep for an entire week to get back to that point and try again. But it is a very cool mechanic. I do find it very cool how they came up with entire to-do lists

[00:21:39] and stuff for people to do over the entire week. Everyone's got their own sort of actions. A lot of the time they are just standing there like the flower shop girl or the baker spend the day in their shop and then close up at a certain time. But you get others like the knights and some of the people in the techno city and stuff that have a bit more robust on their schedules. I think it helps when you're exploring because you might go to an area like that cat restaurant all the way in the east. Sometimes the waitress

[00:22:08] will be outside at a stand in a completely different outfit and then sometimes she might be inside serving as a waitress and then sometimes she might just be at the techno city working as an idol. And it's like it entirely depends on what time of day and if you don't know what her routine is you might go up there one time and see her like this and then come back and see her in a completely different form and then see her elsewhere. It's changing every time I come over and I'm sure back in the 90s this was mind-blowing

[00:22:38] for people who played it. Yeah, I'm trying to think about what other games would have done this at the time. Harvest Moon was a few years before but I can't think of any JRPGs that had something like this beyond the basic day and night system and having the time of day and the days of the week yeah, it allows them to give every character their own daily or even weekly schedule. Yeah. Like you mentioned before a character will work in the day then they'll go to bed at night but say on Coins Day they'll go to the bar. This really makes the world feel dynamic and lived in

[00:23:07] and it did remind me a lot of Majora's Mask which came out a few years later. And I guess we should pivot into the world of Moon. How would you describe the titular Moon world or is it just beyond description? So the game sort of lures you into thinking it's a typical RPG world like the first area you land into is a typical RPG town with a king and a castle but the further you get into the game the just more bizarre it gets. By the end you have like an entire techno

[00:23:37] metropolis with nightclubs scientists building a rocket ship and then there's just really strange locales like the American house which is just an American style house that exists on its own after a fireworks pit and before like a shack if I remember right and it's not connected to anything else it's just there with the family living in it and you get a few instances like that where there is just

[00:24:06] a random building of some kind that doesn't fit with the theme of a JRPG at all and that just makes it stand out in your mind a lot. It's certainly a bizarre world is the world of Moon. The game has a lot of great elements but I do think the world and how it operates is what made me connect with Moon. You want to meet so many different instantly memorable characters in this very strange pastiche of a JRPG world and one thing I think was smart is what you touched on

[00:24:36] is that they didn't go full-blown parody. Yeah, there are tropes and moments from a JRPG that they do parody especially early on in the game and the game as a whole is kind of a commentary on the hero's journey you see in a lot of JRPGs but the locations in the game they're not jokes on places in typical JRPGs even the starting Castle Town which like you said is a JRPG typical town is very distinct because it has a lot of things you wouldn't see in a typical JRPG the characters in the world feel so unique

[00:25:06] which really helps Moon develop its own identity instead of it just being a mirror of a 90s JRPG now this is a very loaded question but do you have a favourite location or place in Moon? The Techno City is definitely like a big standout one because it's right at the end of the game and it's so different from anything else that happens at any other location but I actually think the most memorable one just because of how trippy and bizarre it gets is the Mushroom Cave area like there's not a whole lot there

[00:25:35] but there's a couple of like really unique side quests that take place there and a really weird NPC the old Mushroom Man because of what those actual side quests do where I think you have to eat the mushrooms and they all have different trippy effects the cave itself has such a cool visual style that I just remember it quite well I'm leaning towards the Mushroom Cave for that memorability factor yeah that was the one I also wanted to pick the Mushroom Forest even though the name Mushroom Forest

[00:26:05] sounds very generic how you interact with it how it looks is not what you would expect and it has awesome music I do like the area you mentioned before that's west of the tropical fields there's the giant firework it's like a Japanese style firework that you can enter and then you need a family inside the firework the American house that's literally called American house that's like a 1950s kind of leave it to beaver-esque like situation going on there and it has again awesome quests that are associated with it

[00:26:33] and the next screen is like a Japanese windmill or like an old hermit shack yeah old shack is what I remember it yeah and then under that is a secret bunker of these like radical people and yeah there's a lot of places in Moon that feel like everybody at Love to Leak just wrote down one cool place and they just put all of them in the game in these little areas are creatures or animals as they're called in the game who have been slain by the hero not you you're just an NPC

[00:27:04] another guy who is the quote-unquote hero of the story of Moon a major gameplay mechanic is reviving these creatures via touching their souls what did you think about the animal catching mechanic and which of the 50 animals is your favorite ah this is a hard question because there's so many of them and a lot of them are just so tied to the side quests that they come they come with I've sort of got two one from a story perspective or mission perspective and one from just a design perspective

[00:27:33] before I go over them I guess I'll talk about the actual mechanic of it it's effectively just the collectibles of this game Moon if you really want to break it down is a collectathon and the animals are what you need to collect but it's more about the journey than the destination it's how you collect them some of them require proper puzzle solving and real like thinking outside the box and then some just require following story beats and side quests

[00:28:02] and helping out other characters you sort of want to try and get all of them so you can level up as much as possible in the two that I like they're actually both associated with the American house the design one I like is the value boy because it's just a very funny design it's just a burger tray with legs like a fast food McDonald's tray with legs with a burger and a drinks on top it's such a stupid looking design the animal I like the most is the Geiger because it's probably the

[00:28:31] most significant story wise next to the slime it's one of the first ones you see in the anti-moon game at the start you play as the hero you have a fight with it and it clones itself you kill it with fire magic and when you actually play the game you get to play that scenario out from the NPC's perspective you realize this monster is just the house pet they have and you end up like getting like a throw rug

[00:29:00] and then putting it over you and then like setting it on fire and then like swapping so that like you're there and the pet's there and that explains the double part of it and then you kind of swap out the pet and so pretend to be killed by the hero so that he thinks he's slain the monster and then leaves and it's like it's super interesting because it also makes Geiger like the only animal in the game that you rescue and get his spirit from who doesn't actually die in the game true

[00:29:30] so there's just a lot of memorable moments around this weird mollusk looking tongue dude that makes him one of the more memorable animals in this game for me yeah that whole quest was definitely one of my favorite parts yeah I want to mention that they do an excellent job of making the hero very scary yes because his design it looks like he kind of looks like a crusader knight you don't really see his face and I was doing some research and originally the hero did look like almost like a clone

[00:29:59] of like the dq3 hero he was a very Toriyama esque hero but instead they made him look like this almost like a monster and like the disparity of his graphic between the moon game that you play and then like the actual character yeah is so different and he has a really awesome creepy theme and the way he just like kills the animal it's just it's so sudden and it really puts in perspective if somebody just used like a fireball out of nowhere it would it would be scary if you were not the one delivering it yeah because

[00:30:29] it's just like oh he just totally just destroyed this animal that was just standing there because yeah from his vision you get the whole jrpg screen it's like this long drawn out battle but from the actual like animals position he just walked up and like stabbed them and then they didn't do anything back and then he walks off like he's done something it's the shift from how long a fight takes from an rpg to the suddenness of actual reality that i think

[00:30:58] quite hits quite hard yeah it's so effective and i think in terms of actual gameplay the animal catching mechanic is my favorite mechanic because yes it's so grim to just see these bisected animal corpses strewn throughout the world and each one has its own little puzzle associated with it and oftentimes you don't really need to go far compared to a lot of the other puzzles in the game it's pretty straightforward it's just in the same screen you could probably revive the the animal and as we'll get into very soon a lot of the puzzles

[00:31:28] in the game have crazy solutions so i do like that the animal ones are a bit more like mini puzzles and they're all made out of clay like this claymation and i want to say that i believe everyone at love to leak got to design or make an animal featured in the game and it must have taken a lot of time because each animal has its default form it has a dead form it has about an animation or two so we're talking about like a hundred variations here if you add up all the animals and of course you've got

[00:31:58] the iconic catch claymation graphic when you have a soul yes that's that's awesome i immediately love that and once an animal is revived an alien comes and it takes it away and gives you money and the alien also has a really cool design and if i had to pick a favorite animal i really like ovon who is a giant eggplant with sticks as legs and this is probably the biggest animal in the game and it kind of comes out of nowhere and that's a very memorable moment because you save like a mini version of

[00:32:27] it and then maybe 10 seconds later a giant version of it comes like crashing through the screen it's so wild and i also like gajiro in the haunted house he looks like a little boy with a hat and the way you catch him is that you have to wash your hands in the bathroom before you touch him oh yeah so yeah a lot of very weird things you need to do to catch the animals and yeah doing weird things is the bulk of the game because as you mentioned you level up by getting love via completing missions and helping

[00:32:56] people and these are all done through solving puzzles now one of the main criticisms of moon is that it's very obtuse what do you think about the puzzles in the game are they obtuse or are you just figuring out everything on your lonesome or what i mean they are there are some that are pretty straightforward if you're familiar with how rpgs or adventure games of this work but then there are some because of the day and time mechanic that are very much like being in the right place at the right time

[00:33:26] and trying to figure out what the solution is from that and then there are a few that are just difficult like the bird watching one that was one of the last ones i did it's just really annoying you have to wait for a very specific bird to fly by and it's just like why i feel like it's because it has been a while since i played this game so i'm just trying to remember all the ones in my head that sort of really stood out i know there's the mission where you have to follow

[00:33:54] tau into the woods to get to a secret area and you have to make sure you're not seen and then there's the one with the baker where you discover the baker's secret which might be one of the most disturbing things in the game to be honest yeah but i remember that being a rather obtuse little hidden part and then of course there's the knights on thursdays the elvis see looking what i think he is yes freddie mercury yeah freddie mercury that's it where you have to go into a specific room on a certain

[00:34:24] evening of a day just to find freddie mercury singing and watch his performance there are a lot of obtuse ones the game is designed in a way where it wants the player to walk around explore and happen upon these events without knowing about them in advance they stick out more with the player if you didn't know about the freddie mercury thing and you impulsively decided to follow him into a room you get this entire song and dance number that

[00:34:52] leaves a strong impression in your mind i feel like that's why these are a bit more obtuse some of these puzzles want players to stumble into them rather than actively seeking out to do them yeah you mentioned earlier about on this specific day you gotta wait and do this which is true but the game also has hundreds of puzzles there's so much stuff so even if you have to wait a lot of the fun of moon is like okay i'm awake for a day and a half this time what can i do in a day and a half or okay it's

[00:35:22] this day and i know this person goes here i should do that love mission so it is almost kind of pikmin-esque in terms of what do i want to accomplish during this day and yeah that's also a big appeal of moon to me when the game hit switch there were a lot of reviews that said i don't know where to go or i don't know what to do seven out of ten uh which is fair because i do think the game is so open in how you progress and there's no mission log or anything like that there's no waypoints so you really do have to talk to the right guy and think carefully about what

[00:35:52] actually progresses the game i will say the game's puzzles the answers are often there sometimes you don't realize it until you do it but there are certainly a lot of hints towards how to reach the ending of the game at least yes now some of these hints are housed on these slabs that you can only read by using them at a machine which admittedly is hard to find but i do think a lot of the puzzles are very clever and fun to engage with there's one again we're going back to the haunted house where a painting eats you and then you have to give

[00:36:21] the person inside the stomach of the painting some food they age every time you give them food and they want different food every time so that's just like oh i have to think about what does this person want and how do i get it and yes also at the haunted house there's an animal flying around and the only way to get it is to go to the castle on the other side of the map you have to look at the house via binoculars on the top of the castle and then the animal will notice you and then fly to the castle so there's just so many crazy solutions to puzzles in the game

[00:36:50] yeah you'll definitely get stumped and you can always just refer to a guide but i do recommend players try to do as much as possible without the guide because the game is all about exploring it's about talking to characters learning their stories and figuring out how to help them all the characters are so different from each other and i'd argue there's not a single boring character in the game so i want to hear who is your favorite character in the world of moon so i feel like the easy answer for this is yoshida he's easily

[00:37:19] the most important recurring character in moon and he's just a funny little snarky bird that's very supportive of the player i remember one of the big scenes that really stick it sticks out in my mind is the kind of random history lore dump you get outside your house one day you basically have like a school session outside the front your front door the minister explains the law of the world and yoshida is there commenting on everything there are just other random

[00:37:49] npcs who are also there asking questions about it because it's such a random event that takes place that i think that's why it sticks in my mind yoshida is just your buddy right he helped he helps you in the hot air balloon get to the island and offers advice other than him cliss who's the idol girl and the papa from the american house are probably the two other npcs i remember papa has a very weird design that i almost want to say is a caricature of what they think like a

[00:38:18] 1950s american is and then cliss just the idol girl she's just very memorable moments with her and she obviously sings the credit song as well which i think is one of those really good song for me safe pick but my favorite it's got to be who is this very colorful bird and he's one of the first characters you meet and he explains the time mechanic of the game yeah nobody else does and the game doesn't do it at all you got to talk to this bird and pick this very specific option to even learn about the time mechanic of the game and he's he

[00:38:48] gives you some other hints as well so he's definitely one of the more useful characters you come across and at first i thought he was just a background character because there are normal birds that fly away so i didn't notice him at first but then i thought oh this bird looks different from the other birds so let's try to talk to them and his love quests are just so interesting he takes you to an island like a completely different area and the scene where you fly to the island is really cool and it's in quote unquote real time he says like oh it's going to take a day and a half to get there it does take a day and a half which admittedly the first

[00:39:18] time i did it i did die because he doesn't ask you are you ready to go now he just takes you and i didn't have a day and a half left so that was my first like death was because of yoshida but i do forgive him because that the island section is really fun and yet like you mentioned he says he's going to college like his lessons at your house i guess that's technically an extension of his college so he's deeper than you would expect and a second place i have to pick adder who wants to become a god and he has maybe the greatest mini game

[00:39:47] in moon where he changes his face and you have to guess oh yes or go in order of which face did he make or which one didn't he make he just has like his home is awesome his design is awesome his mini game is awesome just such a memorable moment in the game and yeah pretty much every character in the game has an awesome design and now something we haven't even touched on which i think is one of the game's biggest strengths the soundtrack how would you describe the ost of moon and what is your favorite song so the ost of moon is

[00:40:16] very ambient like it does something that quite a few games from that era actually do i've had digimon world on my mind recently which is one of the most obtuse games ever made but i love it but that also has an incredibly ambient soundtrack and i think this is just a thing for the ps1 at the time it's just a lot of bird sounds a lot of wind sounds but then some locations have actual music that fits and then you also get a cassette

[00:40:45] player you can get cassettes or cds and it lets you listen to your own music you can find around and you can decide what music you listen to on what screen i think that's a really cool feature and there are some very bizarre songs on that cassette player so you can really like decide how you the vibe of the game is that you want to feel at that moment you don't necessarily have to tie it to what the developer themselves thought would be best which is really nice to have and it just gives you something

[00:41:14] else to work towards trying to get all the cds or cassettes in the game in terms of what my favorite song is i've got a sort of an actual answer and then like a sort of answer i won't count i was gonna say cop out answer but i don't think that's quite right i really like claire de luna which is the song that plays outside of grandma's house but that is also like my favorite piece of classical music which is why it's a bit of a cop out it's not an

[00:41:44] original song for the game but it's like one of the most relaxing melodies and it has a very somber feeling especially given the love quest for gramby right the tone of the song influences the tone of that whole scenario like going to gramby's house and when you do it early in the game she mistakes you for her grandson and gives you clothes and gives you bread and cookies and stuff but then

[00:42:13] the further into the game you get she gets sick and starts to be unwell and it feels like she's dying and you've got to do a side quest to like you've got to take care of tau for her it gives me very similar vibes to grandma's side quest in the wind waker where she also gets really sick and you have to heal her up and stuff but the claire de luna song playing over the top of it almost like my feelings about the song changes based on what's happening with gramby like it's very relaxing at the start but then it hits really somber

[00:42:43] and dark it's cool i really like that song but for an actual song in moon i'll pick one of the cassette songs for this one i really like i'm waiting for the night it's one of the vocal tracks in the game and it's also a very chill and relaxing song a little haunting almost at points but it's got such a good melody to it and yeah i just i just really like it the music they're called mds or moon discs you can see it on the menu it's like the cd player and

[00:43:12] again if you have any nostalgia for the 90s your heart strings will be strong because yeah just the look of the cd player looks amazing and all the art on each of the songs looks incredible there's such a huge diversity of tracks that i would argue they fall under the umbrella of indie it's hard to describe i think ambiance which you said is a good way to describe the overall theme of the soundtrack of moon but there's so many genres represented there's rock there's folk there's pop electronica there's a shamisen song yeah

[00:43:42] but they all contribute to the moody dreamy atmosphere and vibe of moon and the soundtrack is so good that i think it does kind of help mask some of the more frustrating elements of the game such as limited fast travel and the fact that you often need to walk long distances or wait for the time to change but the time passes very quickly because you're locked into the atmosphere of the soundtrack and also you could not listen to the song at all i just think like the normal sounds of the game are also very atmospheric it has great sound design

[00:44:12] overall and yeah they're on the moon discs and like you said before you can program the ost via the moon disc player something i think i've never seen this in a game before but i did hear that other loved leak-esque games have the same mechanic like maybe gift pia but i thought why doesn't every game have this same idea because it's so smart it's really cool the only other game i can think of that does this is valhalla the visual novel adventure game that's basically at the start of every in-game

[00:44:42] day asks you to set the jukebox up and then you just put in seven songs in the order you want them to play over the course of the day okay because you run a bar in that game so it makes sense that it's just the bar background music and you almost forget what music like you sort of put on you just sort of start putting your favorites on each day that's the only other game i can think of that has this mechanic yeah the songs i picked might be different from the ones you picked my favorite songs like anything from the

[00:45:11] thalonious monkeys which is love deluxe in-house music team they have a few songs on the ost all of them are great there's also keramago which is the pop song that this makes and yeah it will stay in your head forever yeah keramago was very close to being the song i picked for this but i re-listened to the ost and when that waiting for the night came up i was like ah yeah i really like this one actually yeah there's no wrong answer you could pick literally any song and you would have a great case about oh this is the best song in moon i think maybe

[00:45:41] warp wet woods this one to me it almost feels like the canonical song of the game it's the one that captures the game's atmosphere and mood the best in my opinion and my immediate thought after playing the game is is there a vinyl with all these songs or is there some complete ost somewhere because now this is my most wanted item i did search and there are like some cds or yeah there is definitely an actual cd that came out for it but i don't know whether there's a vinyl i need a deluxe

[00:46:10] 32 song set vinyl or something if they make this i'm getting it day one so onion games i want to put that out there and okay without diving into spoilers of this 28 year old game it has a very memorable and unusual ending what did you think about the final segment of the game and the final choice you have to make yeah well i messed it up the first time which was punished by the the actual amount of time it takes to get to the final thing because the point where it

[00:46:39] saves the game point of no return is at least 30 minutes before the end of the game and 30 minutes of not doing much i actually i i remember this quite well because i i messed up the first time i did it and i was like i'm gonna have to sit do this thing again so i set it up walked down to the my local conbini got snacks and a drink and walked back and it was still going it's definitely it's the hurdle that requires as much stamina

[00:47:08] as possible i i think it's a really interesting way to end the game because you i'm trying to say trying to figure out how i would do this without spoiling it you almost feel you're trying you're gonna subvert something i guess it's just the thought you have as a player doing everything you've been doing especially compared to how the rpg part started at the beginning of the game you almost think you're gonna subvert everything that happened there and you

[00:47:38] kind of don't and then the real answer to like solving the games the real answer to ending the game is just extremely meta but it's something i've seen a few games in modern times do but not to the same extent that moon does it's it's one step behind just straight up turning off the console to end the game like it's a very meta ending and i kind of like it when i realized what what it was trying to say and what it

[00:48:07] was doing i was like oh that's kind of cool that's an ending that's gonna stick in my mind now yeah the last segment is quite long but it is very visually amazing i don't want to spoil what you see but you see some awesome stuff i don't want to spoil it but yeah save the animals please on or what happens in the last area very unexpected and i think the decision and how it ends is pretty powerful and it does tie in thematically with what the game is trying to express it would feel very weird if it just had some traditional ending is an

[00:48:37] ending that will stick with you maybe not in the way you expect i'm trying to think of like the tears of the kingdom ending oh that was so epic so satisfying moon is like i don't say as satisfying but almost as satisfying but in maybe the opposite way yeah manages to be as satisfying while doing the complete opposite of what something like tears the kingdom or final fantasy 7 or anything like that would do now as we mentioned love to leak uh is spread to the wind but onion games who published

[00:49:07] this re-release of moon and is made up of ex love to leak staff uh notably uh yoshida kimura uh they recently released stray children which is sort of pitching itself as the spiritual successor to moon and it came out in japan just a few weeks ago hasn't hit the west yet but i'm sure it will so you said you're in the discord so i guess you've been following it pretty closely would you say that it's almost moon 2 or how close to moon is definitely what it's trying to be so i've been following it and watching the trailers but i kind of

[00:49:36] want to go in as blind as possible i don't want to know anything about the missions or world or characters that i'm going to find in it but from what i have seen from the trailers i've watched like i know it appeared in one of the nintendo directs it looks very much like moon ufo and lol and moon all have a similar art style to each other stray children is definitely following suit with them going for a very similar vibe and aesthetic to it i'm going into it expecting it to be

[00:50:04] very similar to moon at least in terms of vibes and gameplay i haven't actually heard how it's done in japan i want to say it's pretty high up on the e-shop charts i might need to double check it but i have seen it on the e-shop charts at least yeah because i really want it to do well and it is coming to the west it just doesn't have a release date yet i i do want it to do well because i love deluxe was such a niche thing back in the day and they've grown in popularity quite a lot over the last decade i need

[00:50:33] stray children to be successful to show that there is a place for them there because i think i think with the closure of skip and vanpool the love deluxe genre is uh very much carried by the indies nowadays um and it and that sort of makes it feel like it's a bit more niche than it really is undertale is unarguably the most successful love to lick game but i don't think people really think of it as a love to lick game because it has a battle system

[00:51:01] and most love to lick games don't so yeah i want to say yeah i hope stray children does well yeah i guess i could buy it now but i do kind of want to wait for the the english translation so it's more in the zeitgeist and i do want a little bit of a gap between moon and stray children i want to digest moon a little bit more and yeah i guess a major theme of this episode is that i love to leak and moon these types of games feel ahead of their time because the audience wasn't there yet but now these

[00:51:29] hands-off cozy games where you're just walking around and talking to people this is like its own like genre within itself where its own they think of all the like the farming games and cozy games and games focused on interpersonal connections between you and the characters in a town like animal crossing lovely got there first and even today moon it doesn't feel repetitive or doesn't feel like oh this has been done before you can tell that people have copied moon but

[00:51:58] it's hard to copy the vibes the aesthetic and what moon accomplishes so even today i still think it feels so unique and yeah in the meantime i guess i need to play ufo and lol yeah i saw that game informer gave tulip a three out of ten yes if i played tulip today or if people play tulip today they would probably think oh this is actually good or maybe if not good oh i can see there's good things about it or it's interesting yeah i think you could find its cult audience

[00:52:27] i'm waiting for tulip to get official re-release i actually played it for the first time a couple weeks ago right before christmas i only played the beginning with some friends and you can you definitely it's got the exact same vibes that something like captain rainbow and moon has but like i i stopped playing because onion games wants to officially re-release this so like i'm gonna sit and wait for them to do it so i can play it and support it and enjoy it at that time but it's good from from the little bits i played

[00:52:57] tulip is very strange but it's it hits all the right notes uh for a game like this what are the chances that nintendo announced a switch to and a launch title is a remake of gift pia zero percent i would love it i'll say 0.1 just to put that out there in the ether i think chibi robo the original is more likely to get a remake than gift pia gift pia is frustratingly one of those games that doesn't have an english translation and doesn't even have an english fan translation the

[00:53:26] only way someone who doesn't speak japanese can play gift pia is that there you play the original game and then i think someone has like written the entire script on their website for the game so you'd have to have like two screens and one screen is the game then the other screen is like the repository of the entire script in english and then just try and match up the dialogue options across both as the only way to play in english at the moment which is a shame because gift

[00:53:56] pia set from what i have seen and heard it's a very fun love to let so fingers crossed one day maybe if a chibi robo remaster or switch to port or something does well they'll look to doing gift pia next and so yes you love moon and honestly i really loved it every now and then a game just hooks you and it's hard to explain why i started playing moon and i just kind of blew through it because i wanted to be in that world and keep exploring it is a little hard to recommend wholesale

[00:54:24] because it is an old obtuse puzzle game where you're just kind of walking around so it's not like bellotro a game i think everybody would like you have to be on its wavelength but i think if you like what the game has to offer it's really going to connect with you so that was our look at moon remix rpg adventure josh once again thanks for coming back on the podcast where can people find you so you can find me over on blue sky that's where i hang out now at nantendrix and of course on youtube

[00:54:53] i've got both the nintendo chronicler and source gaming channels that are both doing different things nintendo chronic close are more focused on nintendo games and right now i'm going through the 2024 overviews of nintendo i've done my games the 2024 video i've done my nintendo in 2024 video there's one more 2024 video that might be out by the time this episode comes out you'll have to see and i'm going to be focusing on mario because it's his 40th anniversary this

[00:55:21] year so look forward to that on source gaming we're going to be very switch to focus because that's going to be the talk of this industry for this year so we're going to be doing a lot of that and i've still got a backlog of interviews from when i was in japan last summer that i still need to work through but one of those is with kenshinishi i've been saving that one for when we get a bit more ko robo news so i can sort of time it but look subscribe to source gaming and look out for that it'll eventually drop

[00:55:51] oh yeah i'm definitely looking forward to that oh by the way do you remember we saw exclusive moon art at hoshi yes i remember all right so yes listeners links to everything will be in the podcast description so check it out joshua nantinjax goldie once again thanks for joining me and it's a pleasure always happy to be on whoa whoa don't go anywhere just yet josh because the biggest nintendo news item of the decade just dropped the reveal of the nintendo switch to a device that will probably sell more than

[00:56:21] about it now josh the big question did you think nintendo switch 2 was going to be announced this week i have foresight to be like all right think what's coming up nintendo going to announce soon donkey kong is like they can't wait until after xenoblade x because that's the very end of march it has to be before the end of march donkey kong is the only other thing so i think they might just try and get it out as soon as possible heck they could have got out before donkey kong i really thought well it supports they've done all the marketing for it already i

[00:56:49] don't think dropping the announcement of a switch to before donkey kong would actually damage its sales in any way but they waited till the day it came out to do it but i figured that this is probably a good week for it just get it out i was also sort of hoping that it would be this week i'm so sick and tired of switch to leaks and rumors in the build-up to this week it was all sorts of things was going on the ces where genki was taking that

[00:57:16] 3d print of the switch to there or these like leaks behind the scenes of people like here's like a cut the corner of the dock that someone has sent a photo of to me here is the joy cons like here's the here's a mock-up of what they look like can we just see it now please there was definitely a big rumor that it was coming this week and you know what they say 10 millionth time the charm somebody had to get it right eventually after guessing every day of the past four years and this week it did make a lot of sense

[00:57:46] because i was getting a bit worried when wednesday night and we had no pre-announcement then thursday morning passed and again no announcement even at 11 p.m jst when they typically tweet something there was still nothing we had to wait a few minutes after that but it happened finally so i want to hear your thoughts what was your knee-jerk reaction after watching the trailer for the successor to the nintendo switch nintendo switch 2 i was really relieved to finally see it and i was

[00:58:14] also kind of surprised at like actually how similar it was to the leak the joy cons have that orange and blue design to them kind of an inverse of what the switch one joy cons had where their outer shell was colored but the insides were black this is like out outside is black but the insides are colored and there was like a mock-up someone had done the week prior that looked exactly like that when i saw that i was like that's cool but it doesn't quite look like something nintendo would necessarily do

[00:58:42] like it feels like a sort of thing i'd expect like a third-party custom manufacturer to do and then it definitely but no i was wrong it actually just looks exactly like that so when they were when i was watching the trailer and it was all coming up i was like oh this is this really is just the mock-up that we saw last week fair enough yeah i think the big story is that yeah all the leaks were true i try not to focus too much on them because

[00:59:07] i'm more interested in how nintendo pitching the switch too so yes if you uh knew where to look you could definitely find a lot of information beforehand but even though we knew a lot of it before nintendo still presented a lot of the items in a really interesting and different way yeah and to me it really felt more like a teaser trailer even more so than the original switch trailer which leaned really hard into showing the concept of that device but now we all know what a nintendo switch

[00:59:34] is so instead they focused on how it's different from switch one but still kind of in an abstract way and they definitely didn't get into everything and i guess we should just go piece by piece boom the screen is bigger is this something you wanted from the switch 2 i mean i'm of two minds of it i always bigger screen is nice you get more clarity when in handheld mode with that but it kind of makes it less of a handheld i totally understand why people didn't want this to

[01:00:03] be bigger because the switch itself is already quite big and it's difficult to carry around if i take the switch with me it's in a carrying case in a bag it's not like the game boy or ds where i could act quite literally just slide it into my pocket and keep it around that way just making it bigger does also make it harder to be so i'm sort of like the two minds of it yeah big screen is nice even if it's got the bezels back

[01:00:29] i'm so used to my oled now and out the bezels it's not as portable and it now won't work in stuff like labo vr for example that requires you sliding in the switch so a bigger switch just won't work with that not that i play labo all the time or anything like that it's just a thought that came to mind yeah it is kind of a fine line between oh what's the perfect size and what's too big i want to say maybe asus or some company maybe recently they put out like a promo image of their pc handheld and the

[01:00:57] screen is 12 inches and the promo picture is the funniest picture i've ever seen somebody holding a 12 inch tablet almost uh pretending to play some game so there is a fine line between oh you've gone too far yeah but i i play in handheld mode a lot so honestly the bigger the better and i'm i am satisfied with the oled size so i do wonder if going bigger is going to be a bit too much or will it just be perfect and blow my mind so it's something i kind of need to see first before i

[01:01:24] can decide yeah i think the only thing that makes me okay like with this compared to the oled because i in the oled size is quite nice i've got a steam deck as well and that is bigger so i'm sort of like used to playing with that and that's like a chunky thing that's barely qualifies as portable yeah it has made me used to bigger sized device which so the switch 2 will probably feel quite natural when i eventually get it yeah and it's rumored that it's not an oled screen honestly

[01:01:52] most people probably won't notice because it'll be so big and so vivid and so bright and the resolution would be better so i don't feel like it's a step back so yeah bigger screen after that they revealed that switch 2 has a usbc port on the top of the console is this something you were hoping for and why do you think nintendo decided to highlight this because the having only a usbc on the bottom was stupid the switch is meant to be played when you're holding it or on tabletop mode

[01:02:18] but if it's on tabletop mode it can't charge so if you ever wanted to play in tabletop mode and charge it you'd have to like somehow try and suspend it on top of something it was just really clunky and a very obvious design flaw i understand why the usbc had to be at the bottom because of the dock but it made tabletop mode more more annoying to play than any other mode so having an option for

[01:02:46] it on the top so you can plug it into the top is just way nicer even for holding it in handheld mode if it's at the bottom you have this wire going below you and that's just not as comfy as it coming above and away from the player so yeah i think it made a ton of sense to have usbc be on top of the switch too glad it's there to me it's something i never really thought about and i wonder if there's some data where 85 of switch owners want a usbc on the top i rarely play in tabletop mode and i don't

[01:03:16] really charge my switch when i'm playing it handheld so this is something that doesn't really affect me but i guess many others do want this in my nintendo in 2025 predictions episode of the podcast i did predict that nintendo will likely release unique peripherals that will utilize this top usbc slot so i think there maybe might be another reason why they highlighted it if they're going to release other things that you can put in there besides just charging and after that we got a more flexible

[01:03:43] kickstand that's more of a u-shape how is your kickstand holding up mine's well i have an oled and the oled kickstand is actually pretty good this is effectively the same size as the oled kickstand it just doesn't have the because the entire flap opens up on the oled whereas this is just like a tiny bit of it so it feels a little it looks to me like it's a little more flimsy but it probably has the same amount of strength and flexibility as the oled one does yeah they've been to pretty much all the

[01:04:10] way back so they were really showing off you could use it almost flat on the table and again this feels very much like the usbc it feels like a very tabletop mode focused feature yes and yeah maybe everyone listening to this podcast is like you fool i play tabletop mode every day but i imagine it is ranked lower than handheld in tv mode but the kickstand was certainly a weak point of the original switch though the oled is a good upgrade i also have an oled and i never had any issue with the kickstand

[01:04:38] but i do think it's funny that for the oled kickstand they're just like let's fold the entire back out instead of this one little leg and this one yeah he's using less plastic it does look weaker but i guess it's not so yeah i can't imagine they'd make it weaker and it's if anyone who didn't buy an oled and has a switch one it's definitely an upgrade because the kickstand on that is a flimsy little thing it was noticeable that for this demo video they didn't upgrade from the oled they used the

[01:05:05] switch one the launch day switch one yeah and comparing it to the launch day switch two so they want to make those additions more pronounced and so after this we got the new joy cons and they're notably bigger with a new color scheme what do you think about the size and the look of these new joy cons yeah it's hard to judge when it comes to size until you've actually held it i think i have a distinct memory of when the switch originally came out that i felt like the joy cons were a little too

[01:05:34] small for my hands but over the last seven years i could become accustomed to because i tend to play the switch with joy cons more than any other control scheme so i've just gotten used to it so them being bigger might be weird at first but it's probably something i will get used to it will probably be more comfy in the long run there's certain little design changes especially i know we're

[01:05:59] up to there yet but when they when they show the wrist straps attachment that just makes it look a lot more comfier to hold so i think it's probably going to be better overall the switch two ones and i do like that the analogs or not analog sticks the twin sticks they've got a little indent in them for your thumb it looks a lot more a lot nicer to rest your thumb onto it and move it around that way

[01:06:26] so i i like this i think it's an overall improvement to the switch one joy cons yeah i like the screen for me bigger is better i'm a pro controller guy but when i play handheld mode i do use the joy cons so having them bigger and more adult size is a huge plus for me the inverted color scheme is really interesting as well and they went with kind of a paler blue compared to the switch blue yeah and almost like a salmon or like a peachy orange color for the other joy con so they are mixing up the

[01:06:55] aesthetic a little bit i've been low-key obsessed about if switch 2 is going to have a new main color but they are sticking with the red in the logo but these new colors make the system differentiate a bit from the original and i wonder are the joy cons nintendo releases after this just going to be black with different colors for the insides and under the stick or will there also be non-black joy cons what do you think i assume there's got to be non-black joy cons like i like the aesthetic of it but you

[01:07:22] these aren't as like stand out as the regular joy cons if every single joy con you had is black with just a little highlight on the edge and underneath the stick i don't think they're going to appeal to as many collectors who buy joy cons to have a rainbow of controller options and i feel like if they do limited edition ones like they always tend to do those have designs on them like the pokemon what joy cons and all that so those will probably be whatever color they need to be to match that game

[01:07:52] so i don't think they're going to stick with black i do think that at launch these will be the only colored joy cons if you remember the switch one you had the option of getting the black joy cons or the red and blue joy cons but i have a feeling that these will be the only style you can get we'll see when it comes out it's just my gut feeling right now yeah it would be funny if they're always black and the only thing that's different is the small ring of color underneath the joy cons i don't know

[01:08:20] if people are going to pay 80 bucks so they could have a purple and green tiny little uh circle under their sticks the docking area of the switch also has the colors it is kind of funny that if you do have different color joy cons down the line they mismatch unless nintendo sells like a sticker that you can put in there but yeah beyond the colors we also saw the joy cons attached to a base and then they kind of raced around on their side with a strap trailing behind them almost like a mouse tail if

[01:08:48] you will uh josh why do you think they did this i think this is a sneaky little tease to what the main unique feature of the switch to joy cons are but i've seen a lot of people online already be like oh the switch 2 is just a better version of the switch it doesn't have any unique selling points to it nintendo's lost its way with its not having a gimmick and i get it but people felt that

[01:09:14] way when they jumped from the wii u to the switch as well they felt like the controller there was a group of people who felt like the switch didn't have the same sort of unique factor that the wii u had had and the wii had had but i think that's pretty premature because the 3ds didn't have a massive amount of new gimmicks either it had like gyro aiming and then the 3d that basically everyone stopped using

[01:09:38] after two years but what it did have was a bunch of cool little software related gimmicks with the gyro aiming and the ar on the camera being like the two main hardware ones and i think the switch 2 is going for a similar thing and its primary new hardware gimmick is going to be this mouse feature because you never really think about it when you've got the joy cons but there isn't any reason like the current ones if you turned it on its side and moved it around it does kind of feel like a

[01:10:07] very thin mouse the position of the buttons at the top the r and rl buttons the triggers rt even work like a left and right click and you've got all the bunch of little side buttons on the edge of the joy con which could be used for extra mouse so you get them fancy mouses that have like a bunch of buttons on the side yeah so like it does work it has that right shape for it so why not right i think there's

[01:10:35] i think the only argument against it is if it is someone would need a surface to put the mouse on so maybe it's something that you can't just immediately swap to or your player will have to know in advance but i think if you know enough in advance you could probably have a little setup like a coffee table or maybe the mouse technology will be good enough that you could do it on your knee or something like that hard to know until we've got it in our hands but yeah i think that's them

[01:11:00] giving a little tease at what their new gimmick is and i'm happy to see it this is probably the most interesting feature highlighted in the video the joy cons can be used as a mouse which is a very bold and daring addition to a console it is a very nintendo-like innovation and i'm also yeah i am wondering how is this going to work like does this only work in tabletop mode or when i'm laying on my couch am i supposed to rub the joy con on my leg how do you think nintendo is going to frame this

[01:11:29] feature the mouse con feature i think there'll be certain there'll be some games that it's the main control scheme early on like i was saying this um to some friends but i'd really like to see creative games come back like mario paint this is the opportunity to do it right you have a built-in mouse now so you can guarantee that everyone has one you could release mario maker 3 or a new mario

[01:11:57] artist game and have it be controlled with the mouse mouse in the right hand and the joy con in the left hand like it would be a normal joy con and just have a pc like setup on your switch and that'll be the main gimmick it's used to highlight it but in other games like metro prime 4 for example you could still play that normally with the regular joy cons using the stick and all

[01:12:22] that but if you wanted to you could do it in mouse mode and control the shooting the aiming stuff with the mouse instead and then you have it as an option nintendo would let their teams and third parties decide whether or not they want to have mouse capabilities and on the box for each game there'll be like a little like because you know they already have it at the back which shows controller support like this functions with the joy cons and the pro controller it'd be like this

[01:12:51] functions with the mouse control scheme on the back switch is all about play your way and saying hey you can now play switch games with a mouse that's definitely a brand new way to interact with the system and i've been playing roller coaster tycoon classic on the switch the original roller tycoon games and it's great but yeah the game was designed for a mouse so having mouse controls as an option for some titles could legitimately be a huge game changer yeah but i also kind of wonder again

[01:13:19] how are we supposed to use it do we use one joy con as the mouse and then hold the other joy con to press buttons or will there be games where you use two mice what do you think there could definitely be games that use two mice i wouldn't put it past nintendo but i think it's the former that right hand or whatever your dominant hand is that's the mouse and then your other hand holds the joy con like normal if you ever played like a ds game that heavily used the touch screen

[01:13:46] to control and move around just imagine you were using your right hand for the touch screen and then your left hand was holding the ds itself and most likely had the thumb over the d-pad yeah and one on the back it would just be like that again except instead of a touch screen that this hand is using a mouse instead it's going to feel a lot more natural than people are sort of joking about it right now i feel like yeah and i am very interested to see how they're going to explain

[01:14:16] this and i definitely think nintendo will have some mouse focused game around launch to highlight it maybe mario paint 3 aka mario artist 2 but i am very curious how they explain the mouse the mouse cons i think that's a good name so nintendo you can steal that name for your controller unless they have some sort of like crazy other name for it which i'm sure they do and oh also in the video i like how they kind of kick off the little holders at the end that look just so cool yeah after that we

[01:14:43] see another new feature the joy cons now dock to the switch in a similar fashion to the switch being connected to the tv we also get to hear the replacement for the switch snap the switch clap what do you think about this new docking feature and the new sound so my first thought was that that little um thing you're plugging into feels like it might break but actually upon reflection it's kind of like in

[01:15:07] the old days we used to plug cartridges into slots if the switch is the cartridge and the joy cons of the system it's let's say you just sort of plugging it in like you used to do back then and that never broke so i think it's probably fine it's probably quite sturdy um i think what's not been highlighted here and it's something you'd only really know if you were following more of the leaky stuff is that it's

[01:15:34] also using magnets to connect itself into the switch dock yes there's a physical connector which i think is the thing that's registering that so that the switch actually registers it's got a joy con connected or not but it's also using magnets on the top and bottom to keep itself in place and that's what's making that clap sound if you watch the trailer more closely with that in mind you see sort of like

[01:15:58] how it snaps in to position like as if like the magnetic field has taken hold and pulls it in i like the clap i was wondering with magnets how are they going to change up the sound because that sound was pretty iconic to the nintendo switch's identity so how you'd connect the joy cons to the switch they would need to come up with a new sound and i think it's a good one i think it's a good sound yeah the clap is cool it kind of reminds me of tears of the kingdom which also had a lot of

[01:16:26] clapping in its sound design it's not as instantly catchy as the snap but i think it will eventually catch on yeah and the new attachment method i think it's clearly an upgrade and many people are worried that this is just going to break but i'm sure nintendo has tested this yeah millions of times and again i'm not sure exactly how it would break unless i guess the fear is that if you're not lined up with

[01:16:50] the joy con and you push it into it it's going to snap off or if you drop your switch it's going to snap off i feel like maybe if someone tries to pull the joy con out yank it out or pull it off like that with a bit of a twist it might snap the connector but there's a clearly a button on the back that you have to press down to pull out uh yeah technically a new button but yeah i think it's going to be okay i would like to see how people break this unless they're sticking a knife into

[01:17:17] that little area i'm sure it will be just fine probably less at least less broken joy cons than you know people who accidentally inserted the wrong joy con somewhere if you want a good workout put your joy con in the wrong area oh yeah try to take it back out that's definitely broken more joy cons yeah so at least an improvement i think we can all agree on that and yeah going back to new buttons one thing nintendo didn't highlight is the mysterious button on the bottom of the right joy con if you've

[01:17:46] been following the leaks this is allegedly a c button i've seen rumors that the c is for cast like you send a signal from the handheld switch to the tv so kind of like the wii u or the c is for community where all your friend functions are or c for chat or c for campus which is supposed to be like an online hub any guess about what this button is and why do you think nintendo purposefully hid the c so it's

[01:18:11] clearly going to be the other main gimmick of this console if the joy con that of the mouse con is the big hardware gimmick this c is the big functional software gimmick now i like the cast option that's my favorite one because i just like the idea of a reverse wii u where you could cast to the dock and have a screen both in handheld and on the tv i think you could bring back wii u games and ds

[01:18:38] games and 3ds games that relied on having two screens and bring that back into the fold because that's really the only thing that you struggle to port over to the nintendo switch ecosystem so i was hoping for something like that and it would require a button to turn that feature on and off because you wouldn't always want to play games like that like if you want to take it out with you you're gonna need

[01:19:00] to turn that casting off so a button makes sense evidence wise going through everything that we do know about the switch to the campus chat thing is probably more likely whether it's called campus or not i don't know i'm not 100 sure how in depth this campus thing is because it's definitely a code name but from what i've gathered so far it really is just like group chat stuff like that it's basically like

[01:19:29] a discord voice chat that you can turn on and off and you can communicate with friends and share your screen with friends i don't know how in depth this social community feature is but nintendo has been trying to work on some sort of community feature ever since they got rid of their twitter integration they've been slowly working on something behind the scenes to replace that this could be a part of

[01:19:52] that it could work in a similar way to the playstation share button that share button also takes camera shots and stuff but it brings up the menu that lets you share screenshots and share video with your friends the c button could in theory do something a bit more in depth with that almost like steam chat as well where it brings up an overlay over the top of the game with the with your channels and all that

[01:20:18] pressing that button could do that so the one on the left joycon is just taking pictures purely or video and the one on the right brings up this overlay where you've got a voice chat and you can cast your screen to your friends devices so that they can watch i guess a social hub just with a bit more menu based because i know some people saw campus the name and thought it might be something like mitomo an actual social game where you and your friends walk around i don't think it's going to be

[01:20:46] anything that in depth it has to be able to run off the console's ram and while the console is going to have more ram than the switch had because it had a very measly amount of it i don't think it's going to be that intensive it's going to be a lot more streamlined um but it they've it's clearly going to be a big feature because they went through the effort of airbrushing it out basically yeah so that was so odd that's just a square button i don't even if you put the c from the least we know

[01:21:16] it's a c but still nobody is 100 sure what it actually is and then even if it is this campus feature we still don't know anything about it so hiding that it is a c is so odd to me well i have an idea for what the c button is okay this is what i want it to be c the c button is for captain toad you press it and then you're launched into a captain toad level and then you can just play that at any time yeah they add new captain toad levels like once a week or something that's it i think you

[01:21:45] cracked it i haven't heard anybody say that rumor yet so i want to start it and we also see the dock it's rounder i don't think we need to talk any more about that something in this trailer that i've seen people debate is the ir camera oh yes you do see the bottom of the joy con where the ir camera would be like it's sticking out like it doesn't look like the ir camera's there anymore and i've seen people say the ir camera feature has been cut from the system i don't think it has i

[01:22:11] think it is still there i think they've just chosen not to highlight the ir camera on both of them because why would you if you were going to remove the ir camera feature entirely why would you still have the markings of where it was it's not like the left joy con the current left joy con has a marking so it mirrors the right side it's like a flat and so i don't know why you wouldn't just do that if the ir camera was gone but also we know that this is backwards compatible with the

[01:22:39] switch one they showed it off at the end of this trailer and on their website they have a list of official games that it's backwards compatible with and like warrior where move it is on that list warrior where movie uses the ir camera so like you can't really be like oh yeah this game is backwards compatible up to a certain point and then you can't play it anymore because you can't get past the ir camera level i wanted to just say that i'm pretty sure the ir camera is back and it's now in

[01:23:04] both joy cons so that you have an option for it well you're not seeing an actual switch 2 in this trailer you're seeing a 3d model of a switch 2 that they've made in whatever 3d graphics program they use that's how they can get it spinning around in white space and doing all of this other crazy stuff with it there's so they can choose not to include the c button and they can choose to not put reflective

[01:23:31] surfacing on the ir camera space because it's just not a feature that they are bothered about highlighting okay yeah finally we see a game a game that looks like mario kart now nintendo didn't say this is mario kart it could be splatoon for all we know but to me it looks a lot like mario kart so what are your thoughts on the five seconds of mario kart we saw there's a lot to be excited about here i can say for one thing it's not mario kart 8 there's actually a lot we can take from just these few

[01:24:00] seconds of it for example the races now up to 24 people which is double what mario kart 8 deluxe could do i joked with my friend that this is what that mario kart's gonna be going forward every game they're gonna like double the amount of races till you till it just becomes an mmo there's more races the tracks are look way bigger and if you carefully look through everything it looks like the lap changing feature

[01:24:25] that was somewhat introduced in the booster course pass but poorly is going to be a much bigger part of this game like so what i mean is every lap the actual route you take across the course will probably be different roads will get blocked off so that you can't go other ways and the route changes just to add variety every every track and also like graphically we're seeing the the new mario style the one

[01:24:52] applied with when the mario movie and we saw a little bit of wonder donkey kong's the obvious standout here oh yeah he looks very different but even like mario and peach if you have very like they're very subtle but they are different they look a lot closer to the nakai 2d art that everyone really likes yes they're trying to get the models as close to the official mario art as possible now

[01:25:19] and there are little neat animation quirky animation things going on like when mario goes over a little jump and he goes whoo and donkey kong does a similar thing it just looks really cute the cars have a bit more of a scrunkly scrapyard design compared to the more futuristic looking carts that mario kart 8 went for presumably what mario is driving is the default cart for this game and if you compare it to carts of

[01:25:46] prior games it definitely looks a lot more buggy buggy is in a good way not buggy in a glitchy way oddly dk is probably the biggest talking point his design is a lot of people say it's the movie design but it is different from that it is like an update of his more modern retro design yeah or it's a modern update of his retro design and it is close to the promo art of dk they've been putting out recently

[01:26:11] yes i i do really love this redesign he looks more bubblier and rounder uh bowser also looks closer to the 2d art yeah so i do like them leaning into adapting the 2d art into 3d for me i thought the trailer was pretty strange when i think of mario kart i think of people zipping around these crazy courses at mock speed and using items but here they're just kind of driving fairly peacefully on a

[01:26:35] straight road and i have to think this is a tease of a major feature of mario kart and i think just this whole video is one big tease i think this might be either a hub world or some sort of online open world similar to say burnout paradise or forza horizon where you can freely drive around and take on missions and do races what do you think about the track in the area shown yeah i've seen the forza

[01:26:59] horizon comparison a lot there's a lot of interesting parts there's a huge straight road you see them driving on at the end where they drive past the yoshi burger stand mario kart doesn't tend to do long straight roads because they're kind of boring to drive on just going in a straight doesn't really do much for you and i'm sure this is this is the mario bros circuit it's probably one of the early tracks but it's a long straight road unless they're actually moving way faster than the trailer makes

[01:27:29] it seem there's got to be something else going on here there's got to there's got to be some other thing that makes this exciting um but if just if it was just an open world hub and you're actually just driving around this track to different areas with 23 other people online that would explain it because you're not really in a race then are you you're just driving around the track so that you

[01:27:54] can have straight separating stuff and uh just speed along there is another interesting thing we see here that could be part of it if you go to the yoshi burger stand there's clearly something there something that's not an item box it looks like it's on fire almost and that's going to be connected to the new gimmick of this game i've seen some people suggest that maybe it's like nitro or

[01:28:19] something like that like you have like a fuel tank you spend to go faster and this is fuel you pick up on the track in addition to having items and that could explain straights because straights like this make more sense if you can barrel down it at really high speeds then you need really long straight tracks some people have thought maybe it's like the wonder feature from super mario brothers and it'll cause the

[01:28:44] track to change or go really weird and that could be it like imagine someone picks that up and causes the track to suddenly go from being a flat to a bunch of hills that you have to go up and down it'd still be a straight line but it would be way more exciting to drive across i've seen a lot of videos and a lot of csi zoomed in type of uh analysis and this is just my opinion it kind of looks like a bag almost think of like a paper bag that you have for like lunch my theory is that maybe it's a mission

[01:29:13] if you've ever played burnout paradise or for the horizon or crazy taxi you go to these places and then you get like mission and then you go off and do something so i'm thinking like oh if you drive into this bag maybe you need to take it somewhere or it activates some mission but again anyone's guess is as good as mine it could be literally anything but nintendo did put it in the video to show it off so whatever it is it's not going to just be like a blooper where you ink somebody's

[01:29:41] screen yeah it's gonna be bigger than that it's gonna be bigger than that and mission is certainly possible not to turn this into just a mario kart speculation chat yeah i do think the next mario kart is going to have a bigger emphasis on single player stuff i wouldn't be surprised if the mario kart ds challenge mode comes back where it gave you a bunch of single player missions they could certainly implement some of them into the races games like crash team racing and diddy con

[01:30:07] racing i've done that in the past you can do regular races but collectibles are in those levels that you have to pick up so there's certainly ways they could do it but i'm expecting more single player focused content in here and then as as well as more emphasis on online features like not a paid for battle pass but i'm thinking something similar to what the mario sports games did golf specifically where you could

[01:30:31] play online ranked matches like once a month and unlock stuff that way i could see mario kart doing that as well yeah having essentially a mario forza horizon that's honestly really cool but i do still hope we have the option of very quickly getting into a straightforward online race one of the strengths of mario kart 8 is that in about four button presses you're in a lobby with other people and you're telling them that you're using tilt controls so hopefully we still have that and now you can tell

[01:30:58] people you're using mouse controls hmm exactly what do you think about 24 player baby park uh chaos absolute chaos having 24 players means that if they bring retro courses back they're really going to have to properly change a lot of these courses these courses were designed mainly for eight players bumping it up for 24 is going to have to widen a lot of tracks and really there's you're going to be

[01:31:23] quite limited on what tracks you can pick but i hope that if they bring baby park back again they don't change anything to it because the point of that stage is pure chaos so having yes even more races on it and it's tiny tiny layout will just add to that complete and utter nonsense how do you feel about them just showing one game uh comparatively the original switch trailer showed off six games i was kind of hoping they would show off more games to be honest i thought when going into this we were

[01:31:53] going to get something similar to the switch one reveal where they had like we saw a new mario kart maybe the new 3d mario we'd see them playing breath of the wild as a way to confirm that you could play switch one games and then maybe we'd get like a third party game like elden ring or red dead redemption some big third party that people want to see on the switch two final fantasy 7 remake they'd give us a couple glimpses and that's all we would get but instead they just settled on giving us mario kart and

[01:32:22] nothing else which i'm given given it was the best-selling game of the switch one and right a lot of people skipped over mario kart tour so the last mario kart game they played was eight deluxe which came out in 2014 as mario kart 8 on the wii u i can understand them wanting to show off mario kart and i'm gonna guess that also means this is the launch title for the switch two i kind of wish we had seen

[01:32:47] a few more games but oh well yeah i would have liked to have seen just one more game one game that's on ps5 show elden ring for example is switch two more powerful than switch one i mean based on what we saw yeah from mario kart it's not super it's not super obvious so having mario kart show off that nintendo was ready to put software out and then also having some sort of big eye-catching third-party game that would have gone a long way in my opinion but we are getting more games at a nintendo switch to

[01:33:17] direct on april 2nd so were you surprised by the direct date so i'm from the uk so when that came up i was like oh boy february 4th we don't have long to wait stupid date layouts i'm not too surprised i think it's kind of funny that um it's coming out two months and two weeks from the date of reveal and the trailer itself was two minutes and 22 seconds long there is some setup going on here from nintendo

[01:33:46] play with this number it's just after the end of the fiscal year and also just after xenoblade chronicles x which is the last switch one game we have an actual date for at this point so i'm not too surprised that they're waiting till april the very start of their next fiscal year to get the switch to stuff running but i kind of wished it was earlier i kind of before this got announced that my

[01:34:11] expectations were switch gets revealed this week the week it got revealed then there would be a sort of breakdown presentation similar to what the switch one got in february where they announced a couple of games and went into more detail on what the actual console did and then there would be an actual launch game direct in april with the actual launch of the system itself being late may june time it

[01:34:39] looks like i was right for the most part they're just not doing that february presentation but it does mean we now have three months to wait to see anything maybe we'll get a switch one direct in february where they'll talk about more switch one games maybe metro prime 4 will get a release date then and i'm sure the pokemon day and mario day will be coming up at the end of february and start of

[01:35:02] march we'll have some more games in it like pokemon legends za it's a switch one game they've already announced it for switch ones but i'm sure it will get enhancements on the switch too so i'm sure they'll say if you play pokemon legends on the switch one here's what it looks like but if you play it on the switch two here's what it looks like and it's like textures are better and all that so i think we'll

[01:35:24] get some switch two news but having to wait two months and two weeks for more mario karts more third party stuff see maybe what the 3d mario looks like getting to actually know what the mouse control is like and what weird unique gimmick game nintendo has made to show that off at launch i'm excited for it and it's going to be a long two months yeah i watched a lot of reaction streams

[01:35:49] and it was funny pretty much every single streamer or person they totally whiffed on this direct screen they either thought it was in february or they thought that the switch 2 was launching in april yeah so nobody realized that oh this is a april direct maybe nintendo can just write out the date right april 2nd i think that would alleviate a lot of concerns but yeah april you might as well have said the year 2030 it feels that far away which does make me think that switch 2 is going

[01:36:19] to launch around may at the earliest and maybe june or even july i don't see it slipping past that though yes so what is your guess about when switch 2 is on store shelves yeah i think it's end of may beginning of june i'm sort of hoping it's end of june but that's purely biased because the end of may beginning of june i'm extremely busy i like i like order it and but i won't actually get to play it on launch day because i might not even be in the country i'm that type of busy at that period of

[01:36:46] time but it also makes sense when you think about summer games fest usually june is e3 month when everyone makes their big announcements so nintendo choosing to launch a console then you have to wonder if it's if it's at the end of june after all these presentations then everyone's going to still be talking about switch 2 launch games but if it's right before then all the third parties can start talking about their other switch 2 games you'd have the switch 2 out for summer games fest because

[01:37:15] i don't expect nintendo to do a presentation in june if they're already doing one in april but you never know right maybe they'll have maybe they'll launch the switch and then a month later that do a presentation showing off more games for it it really depends on how in depth the switch 2 directed april is going to be i'm thinking june is probably more likely but it could be

[01:37:39] the last friday of may is it's certainly a very viable option yeah i mean earlier the better for me i wanted to come out as asap so late may would be yeah a lot more tolerable than june for whatever reason the last week of may seems way earlier than the first week of june so a may release would be awesome that would my expectation is june so a may release would yeah exceed my expectations so let's

[01:38:04] go with that and people around the world can partake in a nintendo switch 2 experience where you can get your hands on the console including right here in tokyo it will be held at makuhari messe which is technically in chiba but it's the home of the tokyo game show which is quite a huge venue i already applied so hopefully i can get in uh what about in the uk are there any dates or where is it going to be it's going to be at the london excel which is where comic-con is usually held it's like a big

[01:38:31] event venue in london i've already applied to it it's like april 11th to 13th so i think it's a week after japan i'm not sure i know america gets it first in new york japan is actually later it's april 26 and 27 for japan right okay america so america gets it first i know paris gets it before london but then we get we're the second country in europe to get it um interesting something i've seen with this though that i i think a lot of people didn't realize is you're not getting a

[01:38:59] ticket you're getting like a lottery to then enter a raffle to then potentially get a ticket yeah that's the the very japanese post-covid system is somehow every company discovered a lottery system and now no matter what happens everyone is using it i'm a little surprised that it's also like that in other regions because japan is obsessed with lotteries so i just assumed the japanese version would be lottery and other versions would be whatever but yeah it's interesting that it's all

[01:39:27] a lottery system yeah they've realized that from people trying to get stuff the second it drops it went live at 2 p.m today and like it was fine in uk but i know on the new york on in america for the new york the website crashed because of too many people trying to get in on it i think it's just trying to avoid that going forward because now it doesn't really matter what time you get in as long as it's before the end date because it's all going into the same lottery you're all gonna have

[01:39:53] the same chance and that should make servers be more reasonable i just don't think a lot of people realize that because they're not used to lotteries like i saw people be like yeah i've got my ticket for this and i was just like there's not actually a ticket for the event my friend you'll find out at the end of the month if you've actually got a ticket yeah it seems like both the tokyo and the london venues are quite huge so hopefully they accept quite a lot of people i i kind of wonder

[01:40:19] is nintendo taking up all of makohari messe because it's hard to explain if you've never been there but it's huge it's where tokyo game show is so think of tokyo game show has hundreds of demo booths yeah and thousands of people i don't expect them to pick as many people as a typical day at tokyo game show because it would be insanely crowded but i would wait an hour or two hours to play switch so hopefully they get a lot of people in there so yes i'm praying i'm selected it is funny that oh

[01:40:46] japan is getting it quite late compared to a lot of other countries if i get picked and you get picked it will be old news by the time i get my hands on it for you at least and i have seen some people that say the last date is june 1st for korea and they say that rules out that switch to a launch before then but i wouldn't say so because i think no offense to korea but that is a fairly small market so i can see them having it on shelves and then having this demo event there in korea at the same

[01:41:15] time or maybe it's like a staggered release in korea where it's not a worldwide launch yeah that's what i was going for because i feel like it's happened before other places in southeast asia that aren't japan tend to get the system later like we're used to america europe and japan all having same release dates and then australia will either be the same or a day later i'm pretty sure places like korea and

[01:41:40] china and thailand all have like release dates for a month or two months after or in the case of china like sometimes like a year really staggered releases it's very possible that it could come out before june 1st my fingers are crossed but we have to wait until april to find out i think we can wrap it up now are there any final thoughts on the switch to reveal no it's pretty much what i expected going

[01:42:05] in i'm just happy that it's actually out there so people can stop doom posting and getting all hung up over what this thing might look like and what it might be like like that was really tiresome i fully expected this to be revealed even when when they didn't do that pre-announcement when i woke up and saw they hadn't announced yet i was like oh they're just gonna shadow drop it then i'd never lost

[01:42:31] confidence but you saw people in the build up to it on places like reddit and reset error going into absolute meltdown over the lack of a forward announcement as someone from the outside you can sort of look at that and chuckle a bit to yourself but it does get really tiring when that was going on for weeks ahead of time because i remember people in servers that i'm in saying about like oh it's going to be september we're going to see this in september and i'm like no i think september is too early

[01:42:58] and they're like nah there's no way it's not september and then getting super disappointed when it's not september it's just like you did that to yourself so i'm glad that we're past that stage now yeah there are people saying oh it's coming it's going to be announced in september of 2022 so we've been at this a long time any day now yes obviously for me the switch one reveal definitely a bit more mind blowing and memorable but i am glad that they showed it off we know what it is and we know when nintendo

[01:43:27] will say more there's still a lot of secrets and things we can speculate about which is fun at this stage that's really all i need uh so yeah i'm happy with the announcement i'm happy it's out there and i guess we all need to just play the waiting game uh so i'll go ahead and let you go but josh again thank you so much for coming back on and just in case people forgot where can people find you yeah you can find me on both the nintendo chronicler youtube channel and the source gaming

[01:43:52] youtube channel the source gaming one is the one i think we're going to do most of our switch 2 coverage for because that'll be the one where like i'm going to try and go to an event and i'll talk about time on there we've got other members of the team i know we've it's probably going to be out by the time this is at least in article form on our website but we're all sort of giving our thoughts on what on games we want to see at launch or at least within the launch window that should be

[01:44:18] exciting if you want more switch 2 stuff i would go subscribe to source gaming and check that out but if you want more mario stuff like the life with mario kart then go to the nintendo chronicler because i'm going to be doing more mario related stuff there for his 40th anniversary which is also this year so i'm fully expecting a lot more mario to to come our way on the switch too so yeah go check that out if you're interested in the little plumber awesome and the links to

[01:44:46] everything are in the podcast description so listeners definitely check it out joshua goldie once again thanks for joining me anytime this episode's feature is about the awkwardly titled mother no bazaar pop-up shop that happened a few weeks ago in shinjuku by bizarre i mean like a market

[01:45:08] and how did they spell a bazaar all caps b a z four a's then an r then two exclamation marks not three two make sure you remember this maybe a year or so ago i had a feature on the many many earthbound pop-up shops that have appeared in tokyo but this is a brand new one with a lot of new items in a new location so hey why not cover it on the podcast now if you listen to my past

[01:45:34] episode you know that most of these pop-up shops take place in hobonichi's event space in shibuya parko however when i heard that this was popping up in shinjuku i was pretty surprised i mean why not host it at shibuya parko like always well what i didn't realize until i visited the pop-up shop is that this isn't just a lone earthbound pop-up but instead part of a huge exhibit from hobonichi called seikatsu no tanoshimi which means the fun of life or the joys of life or something like that

[01:46:02] so not just the earthbound pop-up shop but dozens of other pop-ups selling lifestyle goods seriously it's wild how many different things they sold there there are mattresses clothing soup stock globes if you can put it in your house or eat it it's there the event was in the sumitomo building which is about a 10 minute walk or so from shinjuku station and probably isn't a place most tourists visit while it's spacious i was pretty stunned at just how insanely crowded the event was

[01:46:30] i had no idea it was this popular but man people do want their soup stock i was only interested in the earthbound pop-up shop which is way in the back of the venue oh by the way you didn't need a reservation or to buy a ticket to get in anyone can just pop in which is probably why it was so crazy crowded but after slowly walking with the sea of people to the very back of the exhibit i saw the mother no bazaar pop-up shop and yes the shop was also incredibly crowded i'm talking practically

[01:46:56] shoulder to shoulder there's no free movement here you're just going with the crowd and what if you want to go back too bad you need to circle around the entire store first who knew this 30 year old game that maybe sold a million copies worldwide was so popular there's a starman statue i've seen at pretty much every pop-up shop in front and some other fun decorations and art that line the walls of the shop i like the shelf with all the plushies including the mother 3 cast now a lot of these

[01:47:22] earthbound pop-up shops they might have one small piece of new merch or sometimes nothing new at all but this one actually had quite a few big ticket items the biggest one is a pair of special converse sneakers with mr saturn pixel art designs on it i like mr saturn but i'm not really super into converse surprisingly there was quite a big stock i kind of assumed these would be completely sold out either due to fans or resellers trying to flip them but you can also likely buy them online so maybe the incentive isn't there they have a pair on display so you don't need to dig into the box to

[01:47:51] actually see them another unique clothing item were jeff's glasses from jeans which is a japanese glasses brand yes they've recreated his glasses from the game there are two versions one based on the pixel art and one based on the clay figure so the pixel art ones are these angular blocky glasses that probably look extremely goofy when you're actually wearing it but i have to assume most people who buy them are just going to put them on a shelf somewhere i actually had no idea these things

[01:48:18] existed so i was pretty surprised to see them just sitting on a shelf another big item is the mother two branded tin lunchbox it has a big 3d logo of mother 2 on the front with the gigas attack screen from the game on the back i know collecting these retro style tin lunch boxes is a hobby for certain collectors but not for me but did i buy it of course my collection starts now i am leaning more towards practical items due to my living situation by which i mean my house gets smaller and smaller with every new piece of

[01:48:45] nintendo merch i buy so i need to get something i'm going to actually use and hey i can put some other nintendo merch in this box it can be like my gacha box at the very least but this is a very neat item and it is a great display piece another new item is a mother 2 umbrella which i skipped once you try out the clear umbrellas from the konbini there's no going back the secret of mother 2 book was also on sale here this is basically a book showcasing items from the exhibit of last year which i did a podcast episode

[01:49:13] about but now all that secret promo art and notes for mother 2 are on sale so you can check them out for yourself but also on sale was the real life cup of life noodles or inoshino udon in japanese these are special noodles from gunma that are based on an actual item from the game these sold out quickly when they were first released so i was surprised to see them back in stock and yes i did nab them again practical items items that can go into my stomach

[01:49:38] i had a bowl and yeah they're good the noodles are a bit thinner and flatter than other udon there's so many places in japan that are quote-unquote famous for udon and i often wonder how many times you can put a twist on udon but the answer is oh actually a lot i still think kishimen from naugoya is maybe the best udon maybe another new item that you can eat are the mr saturn chocolate coins these are chocolate coins as gold wrappers that you've probably seen before but mr saturn is on one side

[01:50:06] and the hot spring logo is on the other side the chocolate nothing special but not bad but mr saturn was on it so i had to buy it another major item was a saturn valley diorama which looks like a paper version of the town from the game this was pretty expensive about 100 bucks so i passed i was satiated by the mr saturn coins you can buy the little plastic mr saturn figurines individually though but even those are about 15 bucks each in terms of other new items there's some

[01:50:33] plastic onet tote bags and i want to say the keychain of the new era smash hat is also new so no not the actual hat that you can wear but a small keychain version of that hat so we are getting merch of merch now i've said it many times but i am always impressed about how itoi and the hobonichi mother project can create so much merch for this one singular game but it is pretty amazing that a store selling stuff from an snsjrpg can attract so many people earthbound definitely sticks in the

[01:50:59] minds of people who've played it i also saw some kid maybe 13 years old who was decked out in mother too much i have to wonder how did he play it on nso and loved it did his parents introduce him to the game is he just a big smash brothers fan and loves nests through that it is great to see that kids are still willing to check out retro games though i mean when i was a kid i was very willing to check out older games so i'm glad there are still weirdos like me being born every day last thing about the pop-up shop each shop at the exhibit didn't have its own register there was one checkout section

[01:51:29] for all the shops at the exhibit so you had to get in this huge line that literally extended out of the exhibit area but a japanese life hack these lines are always shorter than you'd expect i was able to pay for my goods after about a 20 minute wait which again seems like a long time but this line was practically out of the building so if you're in tokyo can you check out the mother no bazaar event no sorry it was only available for about a week but it seemed to be a huge hit so the next time

[01:51:56] hobonichi hosts this event i think there will absolutely be another earthbound pop-up shop and seriously we get pretty much at least two earthbound pop-up shops per year in tokyo so you'll have another chance that's all for the feature now for the news well switch 2 is the biggest news item and we covered that in depth but there are a few smaller things i want to touch on for one nintendo tokyo has new donkey kong merch

[01:52:23] this might not seem like a big deal but donkey kong has weirdly been absent from nintendo tokyo he's not even in the promo art with mario selda splatoon and animal crossing characters literally his only merch is a plushie or two in the mario section he's just sitting there next to baby daisy so he finally has some exclusive new merch and it only took five years maybe the craziest item is a donkey kong hoodie that is also shaped like his hair you can remove the hoodie part and just wear

[01:52:49] the jacket if you are a coward there's also a diddy kong jacket that's his vest and his furry arms so diddy kong on top and human on the bottom i can't lie this looks insane but i kind of want it there's also just a regular yellow donkey kong t-shirt that does feature his newer art design other weird items include a banana pouch a barrel backpack a barrel plushie a barrel canister that you can just put things in some keychains and a glass that features his new art as well

[01:53:17] honestly i am more of a donkey kong arcade fan than a dkc fan so i would like some more arcade centric merch but if you want a dk barrel you now have about a half dozen options also remember the square enix cafe in akihabara that i talked about before on the podcast well it's going away as it's closing on march 31st it does seem like it's going to reopen elsewhere but no details were shared the merch shop area still seems like you'll be open for a while i have to imagine what's the

[01:53:44] reason for this i mean this place always seems packed it feels like they are making the maximum amount of money one could possibly make it might just be a rent is too high situation and they're moving it elsewhere i want to say originally it was in shinjuku and then moved to akihabara but now it might move elsewhere but it is a fun experience for square enix fans so i hope they announce the future of the cafe soon notably artnia in shinjuku won't close or move or anything like that so you still have at least one square enix restaurant to check out which doesn't even

[01:54:13] include the dragon quest cafe or the final fantasy 14 cafe so yeah you've got options don't worry all right this episode was really long so let's wrap it up thanks as always for listening be sure to like and subscribe to this podcast on your favorite app leave a five-star review as well it really helps this podcast is also available on youtube so like and subscribe there as well i'm on twitter threads blue sky instagram just search for tokyogamelife or find the links in the podcast description if you like the podcast be sure to share it with

[01:54:41] your friends and on social media the next episode will be on february 9th see you next time matinee