Fortune’s Weave Impresses + Ocarina of Time Get’s BIG News!

All right, everyone. We are giving away a Nintendo Switch 2 right now. You can enter through the link down in the pin comment or the description. And man, we got a, you know, a bunch of really interesting stories to bring you today. Uh, the first one deals with Fire Emblem Fortunes Weave. The reviews are out and it looks like it might be a game of the year contender. We'll have to wait and see. There's a lot of big games coming out this month. A lot can change between now and like mid November or end of November when they no longer allow entries for Jeff Keelley's Game Awards, but it's looking like it might be worthy. So, we're going to have to talk about that. Uh there is a new uh Zen Grip, if you guys know that studio, the new Zen Grip coming out uh said studio, sorry, company uh that makes a grip for Nintendo Switch 2. they are releasing or have released or taking pre-orders, whatever, for a new mystic edition. You can guess at what that one's related to. Uh, next up, hey, Nintendo decided to add an update to the shop listing for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarine of Time remake, and it gives us some new details on the game in terms of how it's going to perform and function on your TV. So, that's really interesting. Oh, we're not done because uh guys, there is oh, how do I even say this, guys? There's new footage. I don't really know how else to put it other than that. There is new footage of Ocarina of Time. And while the footage itself may or may not excite you because it shows off one thing, again, just like yesterday, the music. Oh my gosh, the music and the audio. It's like oral bliss to my ears. So, we got to talk about that one. Uh, next up though, uh, that's not the only Zelda thing we have going on here because Hideki Kamiya, you might know him as, you know, used to work at Platinum Games. Bayonetta is kind of the big thing Nintendo fans might know him for. He's responsible for other games as well. Beautiful Joe in the past and all of that. He's very abrasive on social media, especially on X. He uh, doesn't hold back and he had some well, let's just say he doesn't like The Wind Waker. We've actually known for a while he doesn't like the Wind Waker. He did something I think that's just kind of notable and funny. Um, it's just it's Kamiya being Kamiya. There's a reason I don't respond to anything he says on X because I would be banned just saying hi to the guy. So, uh, pretty interesting there. Uh, more than that, guys, we have the Super Smash Bros. director, Masahiro Sakcharai, coming out and talking about originality uh, in video games and how if it goes away uh, they might ultimately die a very slow death. very interesting uh words from him. We got to go over that. And then, hey, we had a friend of the channel, Player Essence, point something out that I hadn't noticed because again, um not really purchasing video games at the moment. Hopefully, we'll be able to do so in early 2027. But, uh something sold out that is kind of surprising some people. And look, in general, the excitement around this game is very interesting because we've never really seen this level of excitement for this particular franchise. So, we got to talk about that, guys. So, uh without further ado, let's go ahead and get into uh Fire Emblem Fortune Weave reviews. All right, folks. We're going to head over to Metacritic since this is what the industry standard is. Open Critic shows basically the same scores as well. Uh Fire Emblem Fortune Weave is chiming in at 89 based on 59 critic reviews uh at the time of recording. Anyways, this is the exact same score Fire Emblem 3 Houses received and it is tied then for the second highest rated Fire Emblem game with Fire Emblem Awakening being the highest at a 92. But let's go over some of the reviews because guys, they love this stuff. I mean, one review was actually using it to call it a masterpiece versus like Wolverine that just came out on PS5. Like slop. Kind of wild. We're not going to get into that debate because I actually still am excited to play Wolverine. I haven't had a chance yet. Anyways, uh Omlettech comes in here and says, "Without a doubt, Fireball Fortune weave is one of the games that will define the Nintendo Switch 2 generation." That is some strong words right there. Featuring classic gameplay with just the right amount of new features, it delivers an addictive experience that will make it 100 plus hours worth of play time fly by. While its encrypted multi-ro narrative stumbles a bit, it falls far short of making the overall experience anything less than spectacular. Pretty crazy stuff there. We can uh scroll down. IGN actually gave it a 10 as well. I don't know why that's not listed on here yet, but Vuke says, "Fire Emma Fortunes Weave is the most ambitious game in the series to date, and it executes that ambition with almost effortless elegance. It tremendously is well written, very cleverly designed, and one of the most engaging and enjoyable experience I've ever had on a Nintendo console. That is, damn, that kind of praise." Let's go to uh the uh lowest reviews here. We'll go look at all of the reviews. Oh man, it doesn't want to load. It's all right. When there's a will, there's a way. We got it to load here, guys. So, we'll scroll on down. Actually, I wanted to check out IGN's cuz I hadn't read theirs yet. Wow, they have quite the summary. So, uh it says, "Fire Emma Unfortunes we built upon his strategic arts in a way I couldn't have anticipated. It's never satisfied to make me grow only as a battlefield tactician or only my ability to manage my time between skirmishes wisely, but both in perfect harmony. Every time I turned around, I was being given more challenges to face and more tools to master in order to overcome them. The many unique twists of each hero's story path had me eager to see all the ways those journeys differ from each other, making the grand culmination in the final act hit so damn well. Planning out my expeditions across an imposing map became an unexpected highlight that not only hooked me, but rewarded my persistence by continuing to expand all the ways I could direct my armies as I tried to stay on top of newly emerged threats. The scope of both its formidably challenging battles and intricate management systems would be wildly ambitious for one path, let alone spread across four. Yet somehow Fortunes weave only gets better and better each time you guide its captivating heroes into the coliseum and far beyond. Man, this is a massive praise. But we got to go obviously to the lower review scores and see what some of them are saying because obviously we need to be fair. You know, the high scores love it, the low scores don't. So, let's get to the lowest score we see here. Right now, I was seeing a lot of eights. Got some sevens here. Uh, so TBDs, those are not those are places they don't do scores. So, the lowest right now is a seven. So, let's read uh which one of these these outlets seems fairly legit. I don't know. Let's read Gffinity here. Says Fire Emblem Fortunes Weave is a visually stunning departure that trades the series beloved tactical combat for heavy JRPG exploration. While the core grid battles are brilliant, they often get buried under clunky real-time dungeons and tedious open world busy work. It is an ambitious, beautiful experiment, but strategy purists may find themselves left out in the cold. So, they probably wouldn't have like three houses either because this is obviously a more social uh direction for the series. So, okay, they kind of wish it was probably more like Fire Emblem engage. Uh, let's check out XGN here. It says, "Fortunes weave uh takes us along for an epic journey that drags along in the final stages. Showing the story from four different perspectives is an ambitious choice that mostly pans out, but the game lacks polish in other areas. Okay. Uh, and then we see game cult here and the other seven says, "Even though it's probably the most generous entry the series has attempted, Fire Emblem Fortunes weave is a contradictory object. On one side, you'll find a broad three-act structure that finally diffuses the multiple route problem through fine writing, incredible, endearing characters, and some of the best maps in the series. On the other hand, this is a game that doesn't dare commit to its own choices, constantly apologizes for its major design decisions with options Perma death you can bypass. Oh my gosh. Okay. Okay. I gotta dude. Okay, guys. Guys, perma death has been an optional thing in Fire Emblem for many, many entries at this point. To complain about it at this point because they're basically offering difficulty options, I think is wild. Um maybe they've never played prior Fire Emblem games, so I don't know. Let's let's continue to read those. It is their take here. um perade death you can bypass a halfop optional hub a skippable second act that only drain them of meaning the whole thing chopped up by time-consuming repetitiveness during the free time phases for anyone with the time or the patience to deal with the optimization chore that serves as its backbone fortunes weave still remains a very fine entry in the saga in fact it's good because the foundations already were but there was so much potential here that you couldn't help hoping for something more concise and more precise more sure of itself all right let's take another one that's more in the mid-range maybe in eights here. Uh, Nintendo Life, they're an outlet you guys might know. It says, "On the whole, Fire Emblem Fortune Weave is dense, deep, and really rather delightful. It can sometimes feel like a bit too much of a good thing with the pacing slipping in the later chapters thanks to an unnecessarily complicated protagonist hierarchy and some grindy map management. But the battles have never felt better, and there's no knocking the sheer amount to do. It takes a lot for a game to hold my attention for as long as Fortunes Weave. And with a bunch of content still waiting for me, I'll be happy to pour even more days into it. So guys, obviously uh people are loving Fire Emblem Fortunes Weave in general. Seems to be a fairly good uh game. Great game. And guys, an 89 is that is sort of like where you want to be to be considered for game of the year. Same rating as Pokeopia. So again, both of those games have a shot to be uh voted for game of the year. Acarine of Time later this year probably has a shot. GTA is a shoe in guys. We'll see. I don't think three Nintendo games are getting into the Godi uh you know Jeff Keily's God awards. That would be wild. We have seen it happen for Sony though. And maybe this is the year Nintendo gets three in, but ultimately everyone's probably losing to GTA. It's kind of a foregone conclusion, but we'll see. I highly doubt Rockstar had GTA 6 as the game they dropped the ball on. All right, guys. We're going to go into some Zelda stuff. In particular, we're going to start with the Zen Grip 2 Mystic Edition uh by Satisfy. So, they have this going right now for $64.99. You can see that this is the Mystic Edition, the adventure ready armored travel system for Switch 2. The Zengrip 2 Mystic Edition delivers the most compact, durable, and thoughtfully engineered travel experience for the Zengrip ecosystem that's ever offered. Now, okay, we see that it's $65, but here's the thing. Obviously, for that 65, you're getting the the the cover, right? We're not arguing about the cover you get with it because this doesn't come with most of the grips. It's usually a separate thing you have to buy. So, you're getting the cover and you're getting the grip. It's very obvious, guys. This is a Legend of Zelda inspired grip, uh, while avoiding copyright, right? They can do all the triangle stuff they want because triangles can't be copyrighted. But even like this is clearly a Triforce symbol here, and this is clearly like a mock of the uh, Family Crest, but done in a way where Nintendo can't claim copyright. I kind of wish that like companies like this would just be able to partner with Nintendo, but Nintendo is notorious for only partnering with very specific companies. Uh, so it is what it is, guys. But it does look nice. Uh, we got some other looks at it here. You can see with it in the grip, the Switch two in the grip, and then you can see obviously the top cover for travel. You can see on the back they're using these brown style grips. Again, getting that brown in you're seeing from the Nintendo Switch 2 Special Edition. In fact, I think that's the whole point of this is to pair this with the Nintendo Switch 2 Zelda 40th anniversary edition because I do think they actually might look quite nice together. Uh, and remember, you can dock this. This is dockable with the Nintendo Switch dock without taking it off. I just wanted to note that about these grips. You can see there's a little bit of game storage there just to add a little little extra something. Um, and there you go. So, yeah, guys, I think it's probably a pretty decent product. I might reach out to them to see if we can maybe check it out. Uh, I am working on an accessory videos for the holidays. Sort of a shopping guide, a buying guide for people looking to add accessories this holiday, which might be something people are looking into, especially with the way prices are going right now. Plus, there could be a lot of good sales. We're not going to go over the sales, per se, but I am going to go over my recommendations for different price points and also just different types of accessories you might want. Like, there's a lot of grips out there. And no, there isn't one grip that satisfies everyone. I know we just talked about the satisfy grip. Let me tell you, that grip does not work for people with small hands, or at least most people. My fiance has small hands. It's very uncomfortable to hold. I have meaty hands. It's fairly comfortable to hold. Um, but there's other options as well. And so I want to go over everything in that video and hopefully we can get our hands on that one cuz that one might be one that people really want to know about. All right, guys. We're not done with Zelda because we got to get into the Ocarina of Time. Nintendo has updated the page. So, this is the shop page here in North America. And look, uh, we're not looking at anything that's new here with the screenshots of the videos. This is all stuff that they've previously shown. Obviously, I think it all looks fantastic. But, uh, as we go down here on this page, you see there's a lot going on on it. We're going to go down to the actual specs down here and we're focused on well, first off, it's 27 gigabytes. I don't know if I've ever officially um put that out there. I think this makes it technically the largest file size Zelda game to ever release on a Nintendo platform, but still it's 27 gigabytes. Supports TV mode, tabletop, and handheld. No surprise there. It also supports save cloud data backup, which I don't think anyone expected it not to as a single player game. All right, but as we go down here, this is the stuff that's interesting. So, we already knew it supports amiibo because they're launching amiibo for it next year. Um, it supports surround sound, lener PCM, so that's really neat. But these are the features that people are excited about. HDR support, which might not shock anyone. Most of Nintendo games on Switch 2 support HDR. But this is the one that's awesome because again, these are features available on compatible TVs. It also supports variable refresh rate. So, if there are FPS dips or whatever in this game, we have noticed it does seem to be running at 60 fps. We might not actually notice it in gameplay. If you're using a TV that supports variable refresh rate, this TV behind me supports it. Uh, my monitors support it. So, I will get to enjoy this in docked mode, just like in handheld mode, which obviously has variable refresh rate as well. All right, we're not done with Ocarina time because we have one more story here. Some new footage, but really I want you to hear the audio on it. So, I'm going to unmute everything, get it switched over. where it says forward roll and dash. Press the A button while walking to perform a forward roll. You can also dash by holding down the A button. It's convenient for long distance travel. All right, so as we full screen this, just listen to this audio. 27 or 25 seconds of footage. Yeah, guys. Oh, man. Oh, man. Does it sound so damn good. So, yes, folks. This is really cool. I am so glad they continued to share clips like this, especially because in the showcase they showed us, they had a lot of talking over all of the audio, so it was really hard to hear how good sounding the music was. And yeah, I do think it's neat that, hey, if you want to still spam A to roll, it will go just as fast as the new Sprint. So, you could do either or. I like that it allows the nostalgia kick for those that want to roll everywhere to still be there and have it be perfectly viable. But also for those that would rather just run and run at the speed or sprint at the speed of a roll, you can now do that. So I love that. What I don't love is this next story and it's really just because of how weird it is. So Hideki Kamiya does not like the Wind Waker. We're going to start first with a summary post on this and then to show you one evidence of proof of him doing it because again Hideki Kamiya does not have a filter and we have to be very careful about showing his feed because he says a lot of things that actually would break YouTube terms of service. So we got to be careful there. But hey, we're going to go to a summary post. This one's by Pirate Nation. It says, "Hideki Kamiya is once again making it very clear that he really, really hates The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. The Bayonetta and Devil May Cry creator called the Gamecube classic a piece of and went after some of the things he dislikes about the game, especially all the sailing, changing the wind, and searching for treasure." That obviously triggered Zelda fans. And Camila started replying to everyone, insulting every user while defending his opinion. He even hit X's posting limit after replying to so many people. So, he paid for X Premium to keep it going. Wind Waker might be a beloved classic for a lot of people, but after more than 20 years, Kamiya still cannot stand it. I mean, Kamiya, look, say what you will, I don't, you know, it sucks that he doesn't like the game, but man, the fact that he's such a savage about this and and he literally paid for X just to keep responding to Zelda fans that were like, "You're wrong. We don't like you." Uh, okay. We're going to show you just one instance of this because it's so hard to show a lot of it because again he's breaking toos with a lot of his tweets. But here it says uh the audacity is responding to the sue guy to hate on Wind Waker when it clears Bayonetta completely. This is why Zelda will keep getting games and Bayonetta won't be getting any newer games you old bastard. Wind Waker better. Your entire catalog is mid. He responds, I'm not comparing the two and thinking about which one's better or anything like that. Although he really does hate the Wind Waker. So let's just be completely clear here. Very obvious he prefers his own works. Anyways, and I'm not asking for personal opinions from worthless bugs like you either. Goodbye. And he he blocked him. Like that's what Kamiya does. You basically say hi to the guy. You can be nice to him and he's still going to block you. You basically if you respond to him, you're probably going to get blocked. So I never have responded to him or quote tweeted him or anything. I just let the guy be and we talk about it in videos because I think it's quite hilarious. Again, you can argue this is a non-story. I'm just a gamer. I love Zelda. Okay, he doesn't like Wind Waker. I'm not going to sit there and tell him his opinion is wrong because again, it's his opinion and obviously if he doesn't like it, he doesn't like it. Nothing I say is going to change that. But man, watching him pay for X just to keep shit-talking Zelda fans, I I just I just find it humorous. Uh, one thing about following Hideki Kamya is it is quite humorous at times. Don't interact. Maybe even don't drop likes on his post. Maybe he'll find a way to to ban you from that. But just watch and enjoy from afar because the guy is I don't want to say unhinged, just unfiltered when it comes to his opinions on X. All right, guys. Now to get to something a bit more serious. Masahiro Sacharai, the Super Smash Bros. director, the Kirby Air Riders director, the creator of Kirby himself, uh he came out to say something interesting about the industry. We're going to go over to Nintendo everything for this where it says Smash Bros. director shares thoughts on originality in games, saying, "An industry that loses its originality will ultimately just die a slow death." So, Masihiro Sakarai, the legendary director behind iconic Nintendo games and franchises such as Super Smash Bros., Kirby Air Riders, and by the way, again, as I said, he created Kirby, and he revealed that the game designer award category at Japan Game Awards is being discontinued. Now, the award has been around since 2010 and recognizes games based on their creativity and innovation. Sacharai has served as the head judge while also helping select the nominees. During the Japan Game Awards 2026, he explained that the category is coming to an end as he was unable to find a suitable successor to take over his role. Basically, he doesn't want to be the head of this anymore. He wants to focus on his game development and his life. But hey, mad respect to him, but he couldn't find anyone to replace him. So, Sakarai also shared his thoughts on the current state of the industry, offering a rather harsh assessment when it comes to originality in games. I am going to say something pretty harsh, but originality doesn't really have much of an impact on sales. I actually think it ranks pretty low on the priority list. Everyone likely feels the same way, right? For example, with convenience store drinks, there probably aren't many people who go out and try every new drink that comes out. The more accustomed people become to something, the closer it gets towards being a standard. or rather I think people tend to want a taste that matches their preferences and meets their expectations. However, an industry that loses its originality will ultimately just die a slow death. I believe the industry exists today because of the people who pioneered new inventions and created new forms of enjoyment. The Game Designers Award will come to an end, but I hope you will continue to look out for novelty, originality, and the unique qualities that set a game apart. Thank you very much for everything. By the way, the final title to receive the game designer award at Japan Awards 2026 was Word Game, an interactive puzzle game from Team 9 in which words themselves represent objects, characters, and environments. Pretty interesting stuff, guys. Look, Masahiro Sakcharai obviously is pretty old school and been in this industry for a very long time. Hell Laboratories back in the day and everything before now he just works independent of course contracts most his games with Nintendo and Bandai Namco. That being said, guys, I just is the industry losing its originality? I disagree. I think there is a lot of original games coming out all the time. In fact, there's more games coming out than ever. So, it's impossible for there not to be original ones. But I do think that he has a point in saying like us gamers are kind of like we have our expectations and we know our preferences and we look for that rather than looking for something new, innovative that we've never seen before. I mean, Dragon Drive is a game we've never seen before and it didn't review well because people have a hard time with like new experiences and stuff. And you can argue the game is bad. Fine. But the point is it is a brand new experience, a new way to play games and it's not easy for everyone. It's hard to get into something like that. But then you see other things like I would argue Bolatro did some unique stuff, some new original stuff added to a simple card game and yeah it ended up being a massive success. So we see plenty of originality find success but we also see that a lot of people are looking for same old same old. I mean look how excited I am and you guys probably are for Ocarine remake. Is that original? Hardly. It's a remake of a masterpiece and I'm going to love it because I love the original but it's not an original game anymore. Right. So, I would argue Breath of the Wild threw some originality in there. Kirby Air Riders, uh, Smash Bros. obviously has had a lot of unique stuff in it. So, I think originality still exists even in existing IPs, but really comes down to the creators and it really comes down to obviously keeping things feeling fresh. Nintendo is one of those companies that's fairly good at that, but not every company is. Obviously, I haven't played Wolverine yet, but I am excited to try it out. I mean, yeah, it scored a 77, but I love tons of games in the sevens, and I love Wolverine, and I love Insomniac games, so I'm probably going to really enjoy it. But I have seen some clips. I have read the reviews. I understand that there are some things going on in this game that some of it appears to just be weird decisions at a development level with some of the water stuff, which is funky. And the rest of it just seems to be, hey, these are old, tired game designs that uh people are ready for something fresh and innovative uh with that style of gameplay. And Insomniac didn't really do that. They just leaned into what they're good at. And that might be good enough for me. It might be good enough for a lot of people. But it is showing there is a desire out there at the moment for even some of these big massive studios to start innovating a bit more, providing a little bit fresh experiences going on. And it does look like based on the reviews we had earlier for Fire Emblem Fortunes, there is some of that going on in that game as well. So again, Nintendo IPs, they tend to try to keep things fresh, but that's not the way it always goes in this industry. All right, our last story here is something that Player Essence pointed out and I've already verified, so we'll just show it to you guys right now. Metroid Ravenous. So, Nintendo keeping physical alive. Okay, I'm not going to, you know, argue with that. They're the only ones that are really pushing physical. Anyway, as you love to see it, Metroid Ravenous Special Edition sold out. Uh, so there's Metroid Ravenous Special Edition. You see the screenshot, it is sold out. Obviously, we don't know how many copies of that were available. The big thing you get with it is the amiibo, the exclusive amiibo and the steelbook. that's really what you're paying for. But is that worth the extra money? Obviously, that's up to you. But what I will say is uh Metroid Ravenous also led to Metroid Dread flying up the sales charts out of nowhere. And it's really interesting to see that because yeah, obviously there's a 30% off sale going on right now. That helps, too. But even with that, I don't think without Ravenous, people would be looking back at Dread. So, it is interesting to me because the hype around Metroid Ravenous is at a level that I don't know that I've ever seen for Metroid. and that includes the Prime games. So, I hope that Metroid Ravenous delivers. Uh, I believe that it will. We obviously know the studio working on it, the same ones that made Dread. So, it should be really good. It does look like it's doing some new things for Metroid. We'll have to wait and see how it all plays out. But guys, that's going to do it. That is the end of the video today. Obviously, as we get towards the end here, a couple things I'm trying to do different. Uh, really, the one thing I wanted to point out is I'm trying to switch over to the wireless mic. Uh, not because I think it provides better audio quality. It does not. Obviously, uh, this microphone here is a $450 dynamic microphone, uh, running into a $800 audio kit. Like, obviously, we get really premium audio, but I like to move in my videos, and you might see that. And some of my videos while I'm editing, I know that like I back away from the mic a bit too much, and my my volume gets low, and it doesn't feel natural for me to just stand here stiff talking into the mic. And I'm also not holding the mic. It's on a stationary thing because this is a set and I I want to use my hands. So, I'm trying to get this audio to sound good. Hopefully, I was able to do that in this video to a satisfactory level. Uh if not, maybe I can look into some other wireless audio gear because the bottom line is I want to get my freedom of movement back and I want to get the audio to be more consistent. Just ways I'm looking to improve these kind of videos. And then we'll save this microphone obviously for when I'm doing like voiceover gameplay stuff or obviously uh if we're talking about live streams, podcasts, and all that. Obviously, we're going to go to the highest quality audio we can for that. But when it comes to these videos, I like to have this freedom of movement. Let me know uh if this is working for you guys, if the audio quality is good enough because I'm always looking for feedback on the video and audio quality because I work really hard and invest I've invested a lot of money to try to make all of this stuff work well. Money only goes so far. I have to get better at using the equipment. And I actually updated all this firmware updates. Did some tweaking before we started recording. Let me know how it all sounds, guys. All right. Thank you so much for tuning in and I'll catch you in the next video.