(upbeat music) - This episode is brought to you by Experian. Are you paying for subscriptions you don't use, but can't find the time or energy to cancel them? Experian could cancel unwanted subscriptions for you, saving you an average of $270 per year, and plenty of time. Download the Experian app. Results will vary, not all subscriptions are eligible. Savings are not guaranteed. Paid membership with connected payment account required. (upbeat music) - The switch is dead. Long live the switch. Is what one might normally say with a console entering its eighth year in the market, but the switch is very much alive despite this long lifetime, and there have been a ton of games released for it. However, hopefully next year, we will finally have a true successor to that system. And in celebration of this upcoming new machine from Nintendo, we wanted to step back and look at the Switch's library as a whole and pick out what we felt were the most technically impressive games released for the machine. So to do this, I wanted to have a discussion, and I brought Oliver along with me because between us, we've covered a lot of Switch titles, and we have a lot of love for the little machine. So Oliver, welcome to our selection process. - Yeah, it might not be the most powerful machine, but I think it's actually seen its fair share of graphically sophisticated and interesting titles over the years. So it should be fun to talk about those today. As Rich would say, the Switch is often punching above its weight, but for this video, Oliver and I have selected a list of key exclusive titles for the Switch and sort of determined what our favorites are in terms of both the technical and visual presentation. Essentially, these are the games that we feel best represent the Switch, and this list is unordered. It should be noted, except for number one. We have selected what we feel to be the most impressive game on the system, which we'll get to at the end of this video. But for now, let's start with our first game. It's technically not in order, but I wanted to mention this one first because it was a launch game, if you can believe it. It's Fast RMX. Now this one from Shinen, an awesome developer here in Germany, this game started life on the Wii U, but it showed up for Switch at launch with some major visual improvements. And for my money, even today, all these years later, it remains one of the most striking and beautifully architected games on the platform, which is why it's on this list. And I think Oliver, you agree. I mean, it's not exactly F0, but that's sort of high speed, futuristic racing game, beautiful track, strong motion blur, all the stuff's there, but it's really punching above its weight again, as Rich would say. Yeah, it does have that F0 hero mode, too, where your boost is your life as well. So that's a fun little gameplay tweak they have in there. This is actually an interesting game for me because it's the very first Switch game I ever played. I downloaded it in the taxi away from the game stop because it was only a gigabyte or so in size, so it just blew me away. And my expectation going into the Switch was that it would probably achieve like 360 PS3 level visuals. And here on launch day was a game that just really exceeded those expectations, I think, in general, just in terms of its frame rate and in terms of the overall visual level that they were targeting. The sense of speed is just outstanding with the way that they have the motion to learn with the way that they expand the field of view when you're boosting away at speed. And the lighting looks outstanding and you have really high quality, I think, materials everywhere. And it all flies by to very consistent 60 FPS using dynamic resolution to keep frame times in check. And I think more than that, like each stage just looks really beautiful and has some interesting artistic design. Like you have levels with our Avatar style floating islands with like space station themes with ice themes, they all like interesting and have some variety to them, even though most of you're speeding by them very quickly, you know, they still have that interesting artistic character to them. And they have cool gameplay features like the jump pads and things like that. And it's just a very impressive looking title. And even though it is a title that is at some degree reused from Fast Racing Neo, right? It's basically the same game with six new tracks. The lighting looks quite different and the image quality is quite a bit improved. They don't use that odd interlaced rendering setup like the 640 by 720 rendering setup on Fast Racing Neo that looked kind of a little bit strange at times. And I think it's just a really, really impressive looking game, especially for a launch title, like it's still one of the very best looking titles in the platform, certainly one of the best looking racing titles in the platform, even today. - Yeah, and it really showcased a lot of stuff that we weren't so sure we'd see on the Switch right away. Like, get a really nice, the PBR rendering pipeline. It's doing screen space effects galore. And all of this is done at a super smooth 60 frames per second as you noted. But I think one of the key things that really separates it is just the expert level camera placement and the way they handle the sense of speed. Like getting the car, well, not car, the vehicle, the way you position a vehicle on screen, the sort of dead zone you create as you move the vehicle left and right, the height and field of view of the camera, all these things are really, really, really critical for a racing game. And somehow, just like the way they pulled it off here looks so good in combination with that motion blur that it genuinely just elevates the game to the next level. And it's something that they grew from because their original Wii game, I guess just Fast Racing or whatever it was, it did not have that at all. The camera was not good. It just felt cheap, like a budget game. This looks genuinely high-end. And it's like, if triple-way racing games are being made today, you know, track-based games, I feel like this would be in that category. So, yes, if you've not played this game, I have to recommend you check it out because it is a stunner even now. Absolutely worth playing. So, yes, Fast RMX, it's the first game we've named today. It's awesome, but let's move on. The next game on our list then is one that I think sort of, it felt like it came out of nowhere and it's perhaps unsurprisingly giving their pedigree, but it's Metroid Prime remastered. It's a stunning game. The original Metroid Prime was arguably one of the most technically impressive games in the GameCube, delivering a perfect 60 frames per second with impressively detailed visuals, textures, geometry, whatnot, and then comes along this remastered. And with a name like remastered, there's this confusion over, oh, this is just the GameCube game running in a higher res and whatnot. But this is as much a, this is what I call a visual remake, if you will. This occupies the same territory as blue points, Demon Souls or Shadow of the Colossus on PS4, where it's the same base game below the surface, but fundamentally the entire visual setup is 100% new. They redid everything and they did it at a level that's so high and so impressive that I also would say that this is one of the most impressive games on the Switch. And Oliver, you're the one that originally got to cover this, but we've both played through it and I think we agree, this is a stunner. - Yeah, I think that like the most impressive aspect for me is probably it's lighting because it has some really impressive looking, big lighting with a really good impression of light mounts and ambient shadowing across the environment. It's just super impressive and it looks better, I think, in terms of it's lighting in a lot of games on current gen consoles. The materials look really good. There's, you know, very obvious distinction between different material surfaces. When you compare it to the original game, I think it follows the artistic design of that game and general color palette pretty well, but the revised lighting and models give it a very different, overall level fidelity, obviously, and a totally revitalized appearance. While still being quite recognizable as Metroid Prime, like I think they probably, almost better than any other visual remake I can think of, certainly in line with like the very best out there, like the blue point games that you mentioned, it's just delivering an experience that's recognizable while just being so improved in terms of fidelity and not too afraid to take new artistic choices, but for the most part, cueing to that original work. And it just looks really, really impressive, I think, in that respect. Really interesting because I believe Blue Point was formed by people that had worked at retro studios during the Metroid Prime era as well. So there does seem to be some shared DNA between those two studios, but there's definitely something about this sort of visual remake that really stands out. And I assume that some of this, so it's technically like an evolution of the engine that was originally designed for Metroid Prime, but that's just how retro studios works. It was the same with their Donkey Kong games, right? But I suspect a lot of the tech here was being created for Metroid Prime 4. And this was sort of a great way to wind up and get ready for that by creating, recreating an already existing game using some of that tech, which is why I suspect, you know, given that it's gonna come out so much later, that Metroid Prime 4 would probably end up on this list if we recorded it then. But for now, we're sticking with Metroid Prime remastered. - Yeah. - Yeah. And just, man, what just what an awesome looking game. And you're totally right about the lighting. Like, to me, this is the type of game that really showcases that when you don't have the grunt to do real-time, advanced lighting and real-time GI and whatnot, sometimes just getting a really carefully artist-based sort of GI solution and get it, like figuring out how to make the lighting look a pleasing and attractive without the computational overhead can yield such amazing results, right? And this is definitely a great example of that. And to see all of that at 60 FPS, no less, in such a seamless, beautiful world, just an awesome, awesome release from Retro Studios in Nintendo, I'm really happy that it exists. - Yeah, I think like it's just a good template for obviously it's a bit late in the game now, but it's a good template for building out good-looking 60 FPS games on Switch 'cause you do have this reliance on pre-computed lighting. Not so much, like SSAO, TA, SSR, things like that, that we associate more with 8th trend consoles that are sort of variously suited or not well suited to the Switch, but certainly at 60 FPS, they're a bit of a tough ask. - Well, not only are they a tough ask, but they also tend to break down when produced at lower resolution. - Low resolution. - Fidelity, right? Low resolutions, you know, low precision, all this kind of stuff, when you add all that up, it just ends up looking messy and ugly. And that's actually, a theme of this list is actually that most of these games do not rely on those types of techniques at all, right? And because I agree, they're not well suited for the Switch hardware and trying to use them often yields ugly results, and that's not the case here. So, Retro Primary Master, we salute you. - Absolutely. (laughs) - Next on the list is a personal favorite of mine. It's Super Mario Bros. Wonder. Well, I say personal favorite, but that also holds true for Metroid Primary Master, we just talked about, I love that game. But Super Mario Bros. Wonder is my goodness, just, this feels like Nintendo getting revenge for all those years of people being, such as myself being irritated with the rather generic and ugly presentation of the new Super Mario Bros. games, if you will, because this goes and solves every single problem I ever had with those games, and produces one of the most visually striking 2D platform games I think I've ever seen. Like they specifically, like, there's a lot of familiarity with Mario, for sure. But they do a lot with colors, color usage, shapes, parallax scrolling, with all the layers, the deep parallax scrolling, things that you typically don't see from Nintendo, and you certainly didn't see from Mario. The closest analog I could say would be something like Yoshi's Island, but that has more of a sketch look to it, versus what they're doing here. But as I pointed out in my review, one of the main key things they got right is, in fact, the key frames. The new Super Mario Bros. games use 3D models for Mario, and they, Mario himself just kind of limp when you move around, like the animation's not great. And that was not the case with the 2D sprite games. For Mario Bros. Wonder, they're still using 3D models, but they're able to, first of all, they do some animation decimation, so not every frame is like super clear. Like, it'll actually jump between major frames and key frames, similar to sprite animation, even though it is still moving at 60 FPS, and you can see things like his hat always update. But they basically picked these perfect key frames for all the special moves to ensure that Mario always looks its best while running around. And that alone, I think, makes a world of difference. - Yeah, I mean, I think the game is just super creative and fun, and I like the really stylized approach, like you mentioned, to the visuals. I think they found a design language that works for Mario games beyond just like that eight or 16-bit style, and then like the CGI style that we saw in a lot of like this, especially the new Super Mario games, which can look good, but you know, it does get a little bit stale, especially in those new Super Mario games, which have like the really smooth shading and just not super visually exciting. Here, it's a little bit more bold and a little bit more comfortably two dimensional with some of the foreground elements looking very 2D. And then this background's oftentimes have some more 3D elements and some more specular and look a little bit more interesting, but usually they're a little bit more bold, and they do some things also, I noticed, that aren't super like in keeping with what you'd expect from like a CGI presentation, like they use a drop shadow behind Mario in some cases. So they really are presenting it as sort of like this prestige of like here's some elements from the 16-bit games, like the decimated animation. Here's some like CG-ish stuff, but not super like grounded, more realistic lighting, but like having a little more fun with it, and they're doing all this creative stuff with the stages and the designs and the Wonder Seeds, and it's just a super creative and interesting game that is just an absolute joy to play. I was just playing it earlier, it's just so much fun. - I would say the way to look at it, I think, is like in the past when 2D Mario games are being made for their 8 and 16-bit machines, each entry had a defined unique style, right? Like that was the idea, it was like they would come up with a new visual style, a new visual language for Mario, kind of based on the hardware, and that was the case up through Yoshi's Island, where it was always kind of almost borderline just a revolution for the Mario design, and then you get to 64, and they kind of embraced this 3D style, and that actually looks awesome for 3D, but whenever they return to Mario in a 2D perspective at that point, they kind of just, it felt like that progression stopped. Like they kind of just settled on, well, here's kind of the 3D Mario CG-ish look, but brought into a side-scroller, and it didn't feel like there was any attempt to revolutionize or evolve from what they had been doing, which is out of step with how Mario used to be. This is the first time I think that they've actually produced a Mario game that genuinely takes a leap forward in terms of visual design, and presents something new and different that we've not seen from them before, and I think that is super commendable in this day and age. - Yeah, and I love like the little still-stick flourishes too, like how you get that text, salivation text, telling you to excellent or great or superb, almost like you're playing a rhythm game, you know, and then the touches, like the quiz shows and things like that, I think you're just doing a lot of really interesting stuff that you wouldn't expect to see at all from Mario game, and that's quite something, 'cause there have been so many of them, but this is doing some really clever things that we have never seen before, and that's not just in terms of visual design, it's just everywhere throughout the presentation and the gameplay. - Agreed, so that's why it's on the list. It's just awesome, it's a beautiful game. I think it's gonna go down as definitely a top five switch game for me in general, just as a game. I think it's that good, it's really, really well done. So let's move on. Next up on the list, it's the Revenge of Shinen, they're back, it's their other major title, it's not their only other title, but it's The Tourist. This one has a tiny caveat, because technically, this one is not exclusive versus the others. It did come to other platforms, but this was initially built and released as a Switch exclusive, and it's clearly a Switch target game, which is why we decided to include it anyway, bending the rules just a tiny bit, if you will, but it has such a unique look and just an awesome style. Essentially what they did was they used a program called Magic of Voxel to create sort of like these voxelized 3D models of scenes, and then they were able to import this stuff into their engine, and essentially what you have is like, it's almost Minecraft-ish, but far more detailed, because each individual voxel or volume pixel, it's like a 3D pixel art basically, takes up much less space on the screen, so you can create these fine details and patterns from the visual makeup that ends up just looking very unique, and it's a style that we've not really seen embraced all that much in games, I would say, but there's definitely a lot of Magic of Voxel and voxel-style art out there that I think I was very happy to see this brought to a game in real time, and of course in Shinnen tradition, it's full 60 frames per second, it's doing a lot of cool little effects, and there's things like surprisingly great shadows, the lighting is really strong, like they often place these strong spotlights in a scene, where you'll have long dark shadows from the geometry, there's even just, because it's voxelized, they're able to do things like the foliage, for instance, the grass is made up of all these little wiggling rectangles that ends up looking super dense, and just really cool and unusual, right? - Yeah, I think it's just a very unique kind of look, it almost reminds me of that term people used to describe the Star Wars models and stuff like that, where it kind of looks greebled a little bit, that's gonna list little details to it. You know, it's that commitment to the rectangular look that really defines this game and makes it look interesting, and I think quite unique. It's just a radically different kind of visual experience from not just other games, but other shin-end games in particular, like you would not expect the same studio that made Fast RMX two years later would be producing the tourist, just a totally different kind of look, and it, yeah, it has a very detailed real-time lighting with lots of dynamical light sources, very clean shadows, like you said, even though long shadows look super clean, even like the, I don't know, the indirect lighting looks kind of pretty good to like, you get some ambience. You can't be lighting in there too, and you get that like shift kind of look with the depth of field as well, and then also like, somehow in this kind of shin-end demo scene style, miraculously, it's like 200 megabytes, which is just insanely, like this, I mean, you know, like obviously, they don't have like a ton of texture art in there and stuff like that, but it's still like ridiculous that you have a game that looks this good and it's consuming like, you know, a third of a CD, just, it's just pretty insane for a modern release. It's just super impressive, and yeah, it's 60 FPS dynamic res, like all the all the shin-end work, and it looks really impressive on the Switch. It is available on other platforms, of course, and on like, isn't it on PS5? It's like 8K, is that correct? - Yeah, it runs a native 8K internally if you do the 60 FPS mode. - Yeah. - It also has a 120 Hertz mode as well. - Yeah, but I don't think you're really missing out. I mean, anything on Switch, I think it looks really good. It's cool, you've been built to really work well on Switch. On other platforms, it looks a little bit cleaner, but I don't think that's really that important to the way the game appears. I think a little early jagged look works with the Voxley style, I think it's all right. - It absolutely works. And the thing is, you mentioned about the style, and this is something I love about shin-end, is you look at all their games and they're just constantly changing up what they do completely. And there's, they even, there's another game called The Punch-win that they released on the Switch during its lifetime as well. It's a Pixar 2D game, absolutely brilliant puzzle game, just so, so good looking and so fun. I played the heck out of that game. And when you look at these three games, Fast RMX, The Tourist, and The Punch-win, they're all completely different, like visually, like there's no commonality between them at all. And I love that. So I love what these guys do. And that's why we just had to, we had to include this on here, 'cause this, I feel like in the past, the early days of shin-end, they made technically impressive games that maybe weren't always the best playing, but I feel like it's the Switch generation. Right, where they really got it, they really got the gameplay part down in addition to the look. And I feel like they're just making truly stunning games. And they're so quiet, humble, and they just doing their thing. They're just here in Germany, small, small, tiny little team, just cranking out crazy little games like this. It adds super small file sizes. There's like ROM collections, or even like individual games released, like emulators on Switch, where you're downloaded, and it's way bigger than the entirety of The Tourist. Yeah, and it's like, it's been, I mean, it's coming up on five years since The Tourist, so you'd expect that, I mean, especially given their prolificness, there might be something else in the pipeline for maybe an early Switch do-head or something that'd be really exciting. I would love that. But that's gonna do it for this one, so let's move on to the next. So thus far in our discussion, the games we've mentioned have largely been of a constrained scale, shall we say. But open world games, of course, have become very popular over the years, and some of them are quite good. One of those games comes to us from Monolith Soft and Nintendo, and it's Xenoblade Chronicles, the third. We had to include this one on here, because it is, I think, one of the more technically accomplished and beautiful attempts at bringing a large scale, open world experience, to the Switch. A system which, of course, is this little portable SSC with a very limited amount of power that it can draw from, and it does so at a relatively stable frame rate. It's obviously 30 versus 60, like many of the others we've, I guess all of the others we've talked about thus far. But what we get instead is an extremely richly detailed world. Great looking characters, finally, for Xenoblade, which is not something you can take for granted, if we're honest, and just an immense sense of scale. So I've played through this. I think you've obviously played this as well all over. What are your thoughts? - Yeah, like you said, it's a very different kind of game and I think it deserves a place in this list just because it's doing something that's quite unsuited for the Switch in some ways. But it's doing some stuff that's quite impressive, I still think. It's a game that relies a lot more on real-time lighting, but it has a big open world that looks quite good, and it doesn't have anything like tube-trusive pop-in or anything like that. The environment's interesting. You get a pretty nice draw distance out in the environment. You get a nice procedural cloud system. Lots of things that really make an open world game, I think look quite good in the Switch. - All the metrics galore too. - Exactly. And I think a big part of the reason why it would be on this list is because of its rendering setup because Xenoblade Chronicles 2, which also looks very good on Switch. This actually has pretty decent image quality for a Switch game that's as technically ambitious as this one. It has a temporal upside-point system that according to a presentation they did, I think a year or two ago was actually inspired by the temporal up sampler used by the call duty titles. So that's quite interesting. And you get a really clear view of the environment at rest. There's a little bit of breakup in the image in motion, like you might expect, but it delivers a pretty credible 720p image, portably 1080p docked. Obviously the internal resolutions are much lower. You get a really nice level of image quality for a game that looks like this and is trying to do this much in terms of scope. Now unfortunately you do pay a little bit in terms of performance, in terms of the scale. Like you often are running at the 25 FPS to 30 FPS range sharing combat. It's not a super-performing game. - It's 30 enough I would argue for this sort of game. Although saying 30 enough doesn't sound great doesn't. - Yeah, but it's got such a big scope and you're dealing with like a six-person party and stuff like that. It performs well enough. - It's not a super twitchy game either. So I think it's mostly, it's mostly okay. It's mostly okay. - I agree. And yeah, good point about the image quality because this is where Xenoblade 2 was really let down. The image quality was very, very poor, specifically in portable mode, where it was arguably the worst looking image quality I'd ever seen in portable mode. - Sharpened really badly. - Match only potentially matched by Wolfenstein 2, which was also pretty rough in portable mode, but that's also a very demanding game. So this is not, I wouldn't say this is the most beautiful game on the list, but I would say it's still a very nice looking game. And the environments they created are just awesome looking at times. There's vast landscapes stretching out way before you, the way they do. They do a pretty decent job with things like log management. Like yeah, you see grass and foliage pop in as you play, but it's not so aggressive as you would normally expect from a Switch game like this. Plus there's a lot of cool procedural stuff like the cloud system they integrated there, which I think looks great. Obviously part of the, one of the concessions they made, which is also true for every Xenoblade game, is that the world shadows are not dynamic. - Yes. - So yeah. - They're completely static. So even when the sun moves, the shadows never change. - Yeah. - So meh. - I also just think like, I was playing Xenoblade Chronicles Cross recently. And like the stylization of the characters, I think in this, with the kind of sell shaded look, is a lot preferable to that game. So even though, you know, the environment looks interesting, the character models also look quite good in this effort with a nice stylized eyes in the sell shading and cutscenes look, I think quite terrific. - I would say that the cutscenes generally look better than they ever have before the series. Like Xenoblade one was always weak in that area, very, very low quality character models. Xenoblade two was okay, but still the characters a bit strange portions. X or cross, as you say, just ugly. I think the character models are terrible in that game. I don't like them at all. This is the one where I feel like they finally found the right balance where they got the proportions right, the animations really good. And they do some fancy cinematic stuff, like the intro, which kind of reminded me of Lost Odyssey on Xbox. 360 where, you know, you're like zooming across the field in an initially and initially pre-rendered video. And it's able to very seamlessly transition into the real time and then just pop the camera behind you and you're playing. I'm a sucker for that. Xenoblade three, great game. Let's move on. Thus far on this list, everything we've talked about has been crafted using a custom in-house engine. But there is at least one game on this list, built using Unity at Super Mario RPG. I wanted to put this on here because I felt like this was another example of a game that did a very nice job of sort of realizing a classical visual style from a different era, the original Super NES game, which goes for the sort of pre-rendered CGI look, right? And they sort of brought that forward into full 3D in a way that is surprisingly effective and nice looking. And the fact that they did it in Unity kind of stuns me because outside of a select few areas were the frame dips. And they are, it's relatively scant, thankfully. It actually runs at 60 frames per second with really surprisingly high resolution output. So like this is a big step up for a Unity game on Switch and arguably one of the best examples of it on there. And in fact, I think most people would not guess that this is Unity based at all given how it looks, right? Like you wouldn't guess that at first. So that's something to be said for. And then there's another detail I wanna mention that's perhaps more superfluous, but it's important to me as that they use pre-rendered sequences for various things, both in terms of cutscenes, but also for special attacks in battle with the three party members together. All the videos, one, the actual compression is really good. Visual artifacts are minimal, but two, more impressively, they're encoded at 60 frames per second. And on a platform like Switch, which has small storage in terms of both onboard storage, but also the cartridges you use, they can be expensive to manufacture, we usually see video clips specifically compromised in a big way in Switch games to the point where they just look bad. Like YouTube videos from 10 years ago, bad. - Very often, yeah. - This is a case where the CG, not only is the CG quality, you have the video quality itself is so good that it actually is pleasant when it shows up. And to me, I thought that was pretty darn cool. - It's kind of like a pretty primary master in some respects where it does such a good job of translating the original. And it still looks, one thing that I thought was interesting is it still looks like super sharp and crisp and clean without a ton of post-processing. Like it does a good job of still looking visually sophisticated, like especially in the way that they've kind of handled the way that indirect lighting looks in some of the environments. Like with the sun bouncing off on the grass and stuff like that, or in that kind of lava filled rooms where you get like that orange glow, I think it looks really good. But it has kind of like this clinically clear look that still keeps it away from like that kind of CG look a little bit, which is again that kind of classical Mario style that we see so often. And this feels like a little bit, a little bit in the direction of something more clinical, a little bit in the direction of something more clear, a little bit more in the direction of something that looks more closely derived from like the 16-bit work on which it was based. But it just feels very grounded in it. They're doing a lot of stuff where like they're painting a lot of detail into the textures and stuff like that instead of relying too much on a geometry or having like super accurate materials. There's a noticeable difference in approach between something like this and Link's Awakening. I think you can just see by eye, but I think it actually flatters this game in some respects. And it targets 6K FPS, high native resolutions, again, like a lot of the games list. - It's also one that I would say arguably just looks better across the board compared to the original because the original game was designed at the time. It was during the CGI craze, right? So everything is sort of that 3D rendered looking thing that they've got going on. - That hasn't aged as well as me. - It hasn't aged that gracefully. I don't think it holds up that well. It was impressive at the time for the Super NES, but it's not the best looking. I think the new style for the remake is much better overall. So lots of mentioned things like animation are improved and because it's actually real 3D models, they can do many more frames. It just looks smoother in motion. And even like the little things like the transition into battles, like the animation, the effects they do for moving in between the world map and the battle, it's so much nicer looking and smoother than what we got in the original and the whole thing just feels so polished and well thought out. I'm really impressed with what they managed to deliver here. So yeah, I agree that's why it's on this list. Staying with the Mario themes then, another one that I wanted to put on this list is actually Paper Mario the Origami King. So the Paper Mario series, I think a lot of us have a love-hate relationship with it where the first one was pretty good. The second one on GameCube is very well regarded and received a remake, but it's a very nice game. But then most of the rest of the installments, I think are pretty flawed. And I don't think I enjoyed any of them until the Origami King. And this is the first one that I truly feel matches. And in some ways exceeds the thousand year door. One of the key features of it, I would say, is that it is an absolutely stunning game and definitely one of the best looking games in the Switch. They went all in on this Origami theme where the entire world, all the characters, everything looks like it's crafted out of this sort of, well, paper craft paper that you would use to create Origami figures. And just the way they treat that material and the way they do the animations, it's truly, truly stunning. Actually kind of reminds me of, I think it was Tareaway on PS Vita and PS4, remember that? - Yeah, yeah. - Where they just do a lot of like low frame rate animation to sort of give you the feeling of things being crumpled up like pieces of paper. But it's more like there's such a very variety in environments and places you go, so many beautiful effects. The nice water we you man would be extremely pleased with the water in this game. There's some awesome examples of that. And it's just the environments themselves are also quite sizable, despite all that. And the color, there's just so much to say about the visual quality here. The only caveat is that it does run at 30 frames per second only, but it's very consistent. The resolution is quite high. There's excellent. This is another example of really great sort of baked GI where they really managed to get that a feeling of like the color of the scene, reflecting off other parts of the scenery, creating very rich looking scenes as a result. And it's just a perfect example of what happens when you take, when you very specifically target your art style for this sort of hardware platform, what you can achieve. 'Cause I feel like this is a game you could release on anything. You could release on the PS5, PC, and it's gonna look great no matter where it's at. It's just beautiful regardless. - Yeah, I think it reminds me a lot of like a certain genre that we see with Nintendo pedals in terms of visual style, which is these kinds of crafted style games that are really looking for a certain medium or a certain selection of mediums, like the most recent one would be Yoshi's Crafted World. We also had Yoshi's Willy World, Kirby in the Rainbow Curse, Kirby's Epic Yarn, I think, going back to the Wii, but this is maybe the best of those, I think, or at least it's certainly up there, because I think the, like you said, the indirect lighting looks quite good in this title. It looks quite consistent throughout. I think they really do a good job of fleshing up that style and giving the game a unique appearance. - I agree. And I love the way they like integrate real-world objects in there as well in a weird way, like just like a tape dispenser. There's like different things that correspond to like cutting and taping and working with paper that they integrate into the visual style. And it's just awesome. It's such a cool little game. So, and I would say, I think this same engine is what was used to remake Paper Mario and Thousand Near Door. And I think that looks very, very good as well, but you can also tell that it was a remake of a more limited title visually. And as a result, I think the Origami King has just flat out the better-looking game all around, by far. Next on our list is what was functionally a launch title for the Switch OLED. It's Metroid Dread. I remember when this was announced, it kind of just felt like it came out of nowhere 'cause the Metroid Dread name had been thrown around since the early 2000s, I guess. And it was, you know, there was like a rumored DS game and there was a lot of history behind the Dread name. But here we go. It comes along. It's Mercury Steam, the creators of the Lords of Shadows games, Lords of Shadow games, which were also beautiful and interesting, but they suffered from a lot of performance issues. And then even when they remade Metroid II and the 3DS, that was still 30 FPS, right? This is the first game where I feel like Mercury Steam really absolutely nailed both the visual and the performance side of things. And they delivered a super sharp 2D side scrolling game built into 3D graphics. There's a huge density of geometry in here. The way everything sort of lit and shadowed very much from the perspective of the camera to look best from that side scrolling perspective is awesome. The fluidity of everything, the animation, the high frame rate, the transitions between areas are so fast. It just has that energy that you expect from like an older action game, I guess. The kind of stuff you don't often see in 3D with 3D graphics on the Switch. Plus, like many others, it runs at a relatively high resolution. It's native 720p in portable. I can't remember the doctor as it might be 900. But either way, it's still a stunning game. I don't know. You even played too much of this one though, I think all of it, right? - No, no, no. But based off of everything that I've seen, it looks very clean. It has this like very clean aesthetic, very science-fictiony to it. And it is high resolution. It does target 60 FPS, like you mentioned. I think it has some dips though, if I recall from your coverage in like the kind of close-up sequences I'm like, are they cinematic or what are they? - Yeah, they're cinematic stuff. Yeah, there is occasionally some minor slowdown, that's for sure. And what's weird is that it actually seemed to be variable based on the Switch. - Oh, yeah. - Like some older model switches had more issues than the newer ones, which was confusing, which makes me think that they were right, they were riding that line of performance very, very tightly. There's not a lot of leeway there. But thankfully, by and large, it is a 60 FPS game. And if you look at some of the later areas, just the amount of detail that goes into them, it really, really, really gets impressive. But one of the things I really love that I haven't mentioned yet is the water. There's a good amount of water in this. And it's the type of water that has sort of geometric properties to it. So as things collide with the surface, you actually see all the waves and ripples form. And they actually use this in some areas where you're like drain the water from one area and you actually see it's sort of real time drain out and move into another spot. And it just looks awesome. And also when you go underwater, they sort of bring that sort of murkiness, like this sort of like underwater fog effect that really makes it look thick and deep and kind of creepy, which is what you would want. And I think that adds a lot to it as well. Definitely the best thing Mercury Steam has ever done in terms of both tech and art design. And it really shows to me that when you get Nintendo involved with your company like this, you can really create magic. And it really shows the difference in the relationship because this is a, this is, I think it's an independent company. I don't know if Nintendo owns a stake in them now or not actually, but when they worked with Konami on those games, they did create nice looking games but they were very flawed, a lot of polish issues. They ran poorly. There was just major problems with them, right? And then you get that same studio, you couple them with Nintendo and you get something like this. So there's clearly some inner workings there and partnership happening that's allowing these teams to achieve their best. Yeah. I think there's something to be said for that. - Nintendo seems to have this very productive relationship with like these contracted third parties for exclusive titles, but always lend, it's like a certain Nintendo seal of quality to them, even if they aren't necessarily being developed by Nintendo themselves. They're always of that, usually of that kind of caliber, I think. - Our next title was released so early in The Switch's life that many people often mistake it for a launch game, even though it's definitely not. I'm talking about Super Mario Odyssey. One of the first games shown and revealed for the system, actually, but certainly not released at launch, but either way, despite its age, it's an impressive achievement. This is a gorgeous game that takes Mario's visual design in some bold new directions, combining realistic elements with heavily stylized cartoony elements and sort of jamming it together to create this weird combination that I think looks really striking even now. And most importantly, it runs at a perfect, well, near perfect 60 frames per second in both Portal and Doc's mode, despite its relative size, which was really a fantastic thing to see in a large-scale Mario game, because I think Nintendo pitched this as sort of an actual follow-up to Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine, right? And both of those were 30 FPS games, even if Sunshine was shown at 60 pre-release and it didn't reach it in the end. But yeah, I think the fluidity, the size of the world, the quality of everything in the style and things like the water ripples, the detail there, and just a lot of the color usage, it still holds up so well. - Yeah, I think it's a really striking-looking game at times. I think there's some really great-looking level designs in there, like some really fun and entertaining levels. Like, I especially like the Lake Kingdom, the Seaside Kingdom, the Sand Kingdom. - Oh, yeah. - There's some really interesting stages and some really creatively-designed areas. And it's the very interactive game. Like, I love how, like, how the water deforms around Mario, how you get, like, that squid-style power with throwing the cap on the little squid and then you're squirting water on everywhere. It just feels really good to control and play and the visual feedback is a big part of that. Else, really, like the way they blend in the 2D gameplay segments with his nastole artwork in there, the graphics. - Yes. - That's very cool. But I think the key thing, for me, with this title in particular, especially relative to some of those Mario titles that you mentioned, is that draw distances are very good, it's colorful, it's a big wide open Mario game, and critically, like, it does around almost a full of 60 FPS. I think the only real variance there is a new Dunk City, which is a bigger and more demanding level with lots of crazy stuff going on. And for an open-ended Mario game, that's really important. We did not see that in Super Mario Sunshine. We did sort of see it in the Galaxy titles, obviously, but those were more limited games, I think. They were not quite in the same scale as this. They were more linear. They were not quite as open-ended as this one, with, like, all of the power moons to collect in the huge wide open worlds. There's an interesting approach they take to handling the portable mode in this title, where they appear to jitter to 640 by 720 frames to create a sort of, like, stitched together look for the final image, which resolves in stills to a full 1280 by 720 worth of detail, essentially. Because it has, like, a sharp look on the Nintendo Switch LCD. It's not something where you actually see some up-scaling artifacts. Instead, it kind of just, it has that, a bit of that half-res look in motion. And in dock mode, it's 900p and you get some up-scaling blur in that case. But you don't get any AA in either mode, which I think is probably a good choice for the style of game, because it looks really clear and it looks really consistent throughout. So, yeah, I think it's just a really striking game. It can be a really striking game. But I think, like, the key thing to me is that it's really bright, really colorful, the art looks good, the designs look good. And it's running at that 60 FPS update, despite the fact that you are getting those bigger, wide open stages, you are getting pretty good draw distance, and you are getting that more open-ended and kind of more playful Mario title that you didn't see as much in the Galaxy games, even though I think those are very good games, they're not quite on the same scale as this one. - Absolutely, absolutely. And for reviewing it, I actually went back to my original video and I was reminded how this was before we had access to the portable capture switch. And I was really curious to sort of measure this stuff. And I actually just filmed the screen and then went through frame by frame in New Dog City looking for slowdown that I could mark, which was not a lot of fun. But despite that, I did end up having a fantastic time with this game. And seeing it again kind of made me want to go back and play it again, honestly, 'cause it really is a beautiful, fun little game. And one that definitely deserves to be on this list. So, there it is. Let's move on to the next one. This next one is kind of a double whammy. We're putting these together because they are fundamentally very, very similar. But we're talking about the Legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom, and Breath of the Wild. This was a launch game for the Switch, Breath of the Wild. They obviously refined the technology with Tears of the Kingdom and they really pushed it out in terms of scope. But, and I think these games are beautiful and probably the best looking open world games in Switch. - Yeah. - The art style is extremely well suited to this sort of level of hardware. But I'll let you talk about the graphics in a second. But I think the thing about these games that really stands out to me is the level of interactivity and physical simulation happening. They really put a lot of effort in time into ensuring that systems just quote unquote work. It's the same mentality that drove a lot of like mid-2000s PC games when there was the sudden focus on making everything to sort of react and behave as you would expect. So physical properties, things collapsing and breaking, things starting on fire. All this sort of stuff was thought about back then and it kind of disappeared for a while. So it is kind of interesting and surprising that a game that goes really, really heavy on these physical interactions started life on the Wii U, released on the Wii U, and then we continue its legacy on the Switch. And I think that's something that really deserves to be sort of praised just because, like the idea that you can just walk up to a tree, chop it down, then light it on fire, and then the fire spreads to the grass around it. And then it falls in the water and then the fire goes out. Like these interactions, it sounds so normal and natural for like what, if you did these things, this is the kind of thing you would expect. But that's not how games tend to work. - Yeah, it's kind of like you tended to see, I feel like an older title. So you've been dating back to something like Far Cry 2, games like that, that really tried that. - That's what I meant by like the mid 2000s. - Yeah, yeah. - Like PC stuff, right? - Yeah. - Because it's as well. - Yeah, yeah, games that did try to give you a little bit more of that interactivity. And but by the time that Breath of the Wild came out, that was pretty de-emphasized and entitled like that. More development resources were being expended on creating a visually arresting open world, which is opposed to physically interactive ones. But with Breath of the Wild, definitely they pushed it out. And with Tears of the Kingdom, they kind of brought it to like ridiculous degrees with this very carefully tuned physics and all the fusion systems and things like this, creating vehicles, the ultra-hand nonsense that you could get up to. Just a very, very exciting and creative and interesting game that's doing stuff that you really don't see anywhere else, I think, in the industry, certainly in AAA development. But yeah, I think from a visual perspective, like this along with Breath of the Wild, both Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild, they're very good looking games. I do like the just general artistic approach to creating this low density environmental style. With the cel-shaded characters, it kind of works. I think it's maybe a better balanced artistic style than we see in something like Xenoblade Chronicles 3, which uses a more realistic environmental style. Maybe this is a little bit of a better approach, in my opinion. And they do a really good job of creating an interesting looking and convincing open a world with like good draw distances, good legibility from far distances, good real-time lighting, artistically interesting towns and settlements and things to look at and things to explore. Those are all critical in an open world game and they just do a terrific job of that in these titles. They nail that kind of macro detail, I would say. Interiors, maybe not quite as compelling, especially in Breath of the Wild, where you have these dungeons that are kind of copy-paced a little bit. And then the, you know, the shrines are a lot of fun, but artistically they're a little bit samey, obviously they're using the same assets over and over and over. But the dungeons in Tears, the Kingdom at least, are visually exciting, which probably they aren't in Breath of the Wild. If I had to kind of level any critique against these titles, in particular, I'd say that, you know, there's not too much of a visual improvement between Breath of the Wild and Tears, the Kingdom. There's not much of an effort to improve upon kind of the key pain points in Breath of the Wild. I think the image quality in Breath of the Wild and in Tears of the Kingdom, I could both use some improvement. And it's a little bit disappointing in particular for Tears of the Kingdom because you have a lot of development in terms of things like temporal upsamplers and just temporal anti-aliasing in general. Obviously, you see that with Xenoblade Chronicles 3, but that's not introduced into Tears of the Kingdom. It said they're like, "Hey, FSR1, pretty good." - FSR1, yeah, yeah. There's like a lot of shimmering in the shadow maps and stuff like that too, that could certainly be improved. And actually, an uncharacteristic to Nintendo fashion, they showed off this game using some pre-rendered footage presumably, which had very, very clean image quality, very clean shadow, super precise. Maybe people think maybe this is switched to footage, obviously did not turn out to be switched to footage, but certainly wasn't representative of something that you would have gotten on an original Switch, obviously, as the final game proves. And in Tears of the Kingdom in particular, you do run into issues sometimes with that double buffer v-sync because it does drop to 20 FPS in sequence deals, certain towns, certain areas with more physics objects in them, you can't get it to suffer in terms of performance, but it's usually not too bad. And Breath of the Wild is more faultless in that respect, I think, with respect to performance than Tears of the Kingdom. - Agreed, so, you know, it makes the list, but it's definitely just flaws. - Yeah. - But our next game is our number one game. So let's get ready. So this is the only game on the list that's technically in order. I guess there's no order because it's only one game, but this is, I think, our pick for the most technically impressive and also artistically strong game on the Switch. It's genuinely stunning that it was made to look at this good. They're doing so much stuff in here that you just don't see normally on the Switch. It's Luigi's Mansion 3. Kind of unassuming, right, all over at first, where you're like, you wouldn't necessarily expect this to be the stunner. - Yeah. - But boy, oh boy, when you play this thing and you just see what they're doing with the lighting, the shadows, the model quality, the physics, like everything going on here, it's so beyond what we usually see on Switch that it does genuinely feel like a game designed for a more powerful platform that's somehow running on the Switch. - I think that it's doing a lot of things that we don't tend to see a lot in Switch titles. And that's part of what makes it so exciting, I think. Like you have these great materials, good quality pre-calculated lighting in there, but also a lot of really good real time lighting, which is something you don't tend to see a lot of with a shadow casting flashlight, SSIO, and even sort of an impression of bounce lighting from that flashlight when you're shining it around. - I know. - Which is just such a cool thing. You don't see that in very many games at all, not just on Switch, but at all. You don't tend to see that too much. And it just all blends together really nicely in the final presentation. The lighting ends up seeing very integrated and kind of very holistic and very interactive in a way that you don't tend to see with a lot of other games. And I think that blends really nicely with the way that the environmental interaction goes where you have this vacuum cleaner that you can use to suck up everything in the environment and inhale all manner of cash and gold bars and tablecloths and all kinds of different things. And the combination of that super interactive gameplay with a vacuum cleaner, plus the kind of physical plausibility of the flashlight and shining around the environment and getting this interesting lighting response, it makes for really a great base, I think to build a plausible game off of, a physically plausible game and to build the puzzle solving gameplay, which relies on the physics and build the kind of action gameplay which will sort of lies on the physics there as well. And it just ends up feeling like a really beautifully built in a well integrated world in a way that, I mean, you don't really see too often in very many other games. It's just a fun world to interact with and play with and see what happens. I also think their character rendering is top notch. Like the way that they handle skin shading in this is more reminiscent of an actual CGI movie as a versus what we see in basically every other Nintendo 3D realization of Mario and friends. You know what I mean? It has that soft like almost like, it's almost like a frenno effect, but on the skin where the light sort of softly plays off the surface of the skin in such a way, that it just ends up looking really, really full and nice. - Yeah. - And of course, it's the same as true of the clothing and like you said, the materials in general or top notch shockingly good in a way that does, it really makes it look like a pre-rendered movie at times almost, especially if you play in portable mode on like the OLED model. - Yeah, yeah. - Like it just really comes to life. The image quality is so good and everything's so vibrant and just it's stunning. Really, really, really impressive stuff. - And I also just love like the way that they have built all the different hotel floors and the levels in the game. - Yes. - Cause like the art looks amazing and each scene is lit in a really compelling and interesting way to kind of catch the eye and it just, it's just so good. I think that kind of builds up to another point which is that the game has an interesting approach to the way they've built the game which is there's no explicit player camera control. The camera just kind of tracks you through each scene. You don't have that kind of right stick camera. Instead, you get the flashlight movement mapped onto the right stick which I think means that each shot can be designed to look as good as possible from that camera angle and to keep that rendering budget pretty tightly controlled because if you look at some of the other games that you might see on Switch that are also visually compelling like Xenoblade Chronicles 3, it just totally the other approach, right? Or even in some of the other games we've talked about that are a little bit more limited, they aren't locking it down to that degree but because they do lock it down to that degree, they're able to build scenes that really maximize the Switch's hardware in like every single frame almost of the experience and it gives them a lot of that ability to really build something that maybe is not of the Switch so much as you might expect on a PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in terms of that visual quality, part of that is keeping that scope more carefully constrained, not in terms of it being like a small adventure but in terms of the camera control in terms of keeping everything very precisely managed. I love games like this actually that sort of manage the camera for you and I think it can be quite a difficult thing to achieve as well because you always have to make sure the action is both framed in such a way that the gameplay remains functional but you also want the game to look awesome. So getting this camera to sort of track around the environments while always framing it in a way that looks appealing, it's not easy but like you say, it does sort of mean that they only have to worry about what's on the scene at any one point, you don't got to worry about what's behind the camera because the camera will never look that way, right? - Yeah, exactly. Exactly and I think that some things easier, like there are a lot of mirrors to the environment. - Oh yeah, a lot. - I think that approach probably makes it much more plausible to render those mirrors which otherwise would probably be pretty challenging and there are like some things that I mean, if I was to just pick things out and it's kind of unfair but like, you know, the environments are like, they have kind of these rectangular designs sometimes so maybe that gives them a little more of a, some area to spare on the poly count a little bit. And yeah, like they're not pushing out like any like truly crazy techniques but they are achieving a lot in terms of the techniques that are there and in terms of what they're trying to do that you wouldn't normally see on the switch. And there are some interesting things and they're like using kind of geometric reflections all over the place like for characters throughout the scenes. They appear to be using some kind of geometric reflection system. And I know that at launch when we looked at the game there was some issues with inconsistent frame pacing which is actually an issue that we see fairly often with some of the more demanding switch titles or at least like in the in the Doom games. I know that there were some issues there that couldn't quite be cleaned up but here actually I did go back and I did do some performance capture on it and it is running into pretty stable 30 frames per second at the moment. A little some one off frame drops and things like that but no persistent issues with frame pacing unlike what we noted at launch. So that is an area where the game has actually improved since 2019. - Yeah. So shout out to next level games for their work here. They've come a long way from NHL hits pro. (laughing) I think a lot actually with Nintendo over the years I guess their first joint project was Mario, Super Mario Strikers, football game, soccer game. But I think not only have they done an amazing job here with the visuals but I think Luigi's Mansion 3 is arguably the best Luigi's Mansion game. I think it's the most interesting one of the bunch that they really figured out how to make a truly compelling sort of puzzle exploration game and the different floors of the hotel with all those different themes landed a ton of variety that I would say the other games didn't really pull off. You know, I mean, Dark Moon tried to fix that with multiple mansions. The original game was fairly constrained but this one is just so much more interesting visually in terms of like when you go into a floor and it's like, there's like covered with like grass and vines and everything's in the room and you're just like, what the heck? - Like one is like a movie studio, one is like this medieval themed thing. You go to the boiler room, you go to the basement, you go to like an art studio. - All kinds of different, yeah. - There's that flooded area where you're like going around on the raft and it's got all this beautiful reflect. - Oh, yeah, yeah. - Using the vacuum to sort of like blast yourself around in the water. - Yeah. - Plus the gooey-gee stuff. - Gooey-gee, of course. - That's, I think that's a great addition to the game and that's sort of like splitting the two characters to go achieve different things to let the characters through is a really smart sort of thing for puzzle based games like this. It works really well. So man, really, really, really solid game from these guys. So great work on that. And definitely, I think we both agree the most technically accomplished and just like a perfectly polished example of this on the Switch. - Yeah, and it really is kind of in a class of its own. I don't really think there's another title that kind of comes close to this in terms of achieving this much within the constraints of the Switch. Like some of the other games we've talked about so far are very impressive in their own, right? But this is like doing something that's very unique in terms of its artistic design, in terms of its scope, in terms of combining all these techniques in there and getting a game that does look like something that could have been a great looking game on a much more powerful platform. It just kind of is up there in terms of its overall visual design in terms of the way that it's built. It's just a super impressive looking game that kind of exceeds the Switch in some respects. You know, it does not look like it should be running on a Switch. - Yeah, and as you suggested, the fact that they're using, so using all these techniques is one thing, but the fact is that they've taken these techniques and made something that looks visually outstanding because a lot of times just implementing this stuff, especially on Switch, doesn't necessarily mean you get great results or that it will look that good in motion. But here everything has its place. They didn't just throw a bunch of technology at this game just because for technology's sake, right? They very specifically picked things that they wanted to use in order to enhance the presentation. And it all just, it's all addition rather than subtraction. And I think that works really, really well here. So great job, next level games. Now, before we wrap up, I just wanted to quickly mention a couple of three others that we had considered that didn't quite make the list. I actually want to start by mentioning Link's Awakening the remake, 'cause I'm actually a big fan of how this looks. And this game probably would've been on the list if not for one major issue as the frame rate, which seems to not necessarily be a GPU thing because when you exit a building, it'll be kind of choppy for a little bit. But if you just stand still, it settles after a short period and then it's smooth. So I think it's something to do with the loading systems, maybe there's something going on there that's really causing problems, but it's not as smooth as it should be, but it's still a beautiful game and up there on this list. - Yeah, and it's really like those, the fact they appear to have a Double Buffer Resync in there that makes it more egregious than it might always be, because they're, I mean, I understand obviously the imperative to have low input latency that's always to be very important, but in a title where you're getting these lurches between 60 and 30, 60 and 30, it doesn't quite feel worth it, right? - I would agree. - Yeah, like visually, it looks fantastic. You have like that tilt shift look, everything looks kind of plasticky and tacky and interesting. It's a fun looking game and I think it's really quite attractive, but that frame rate issue does kind of dissuade me a bit on itself for all visual presentation. - Another one I want to mention then is Yoshi's Crafted World, which sort of came up earlier when talking about Origami King, because this one actually also goes for that using physicalized objects to create a stylized world. And this is the only game that we've mentioned today that runs on Unreal Engine. - That's correct. - In that sense, it's pretty darn impressive because it's actually 60 frames per second on top of looking really great. The big caveat there though is that the resolution is pretty low from what I recall. I think I covered this back in the day. It's not a huge problem, but it definitely detracts a little bit. - Yeah, the resolution is a little bit low and like, you know, you could poke holes in it. I think like when you look at something like Paper Mario, the Origami King, just in terms of the indirect lighting, in terms of the image quality, it's coming to you there a lot better now. Obviously that's a 30 FPS game, not a 60 FPS one. - Right, right, right. - But I think like the commitment to that kind of materials based look is pretty compelling here. And you get a much more varied range of textures and models here than in some of the other Nintendo crafted style games, which tend to focus on paper or wool or clay or this is kind of trying to mix it all together. And I think that makes for a really exciting looking game in some respects. And it's also just like a really fun, breezy little platformer. It's a very entertaining game and it looks really pleasant and fun. It's just maybe it has some flaws that are a bit more significant than some of the other titles. - Yeah, so that's why it kind of falls just outside. It's still getting a mention, but falls a little bit short. Then one more dimension that you put on the list here is Mario and Rabbids. I guess both of them technically, I guess we can consider. These Ubisoft developed games were extremely well received. I looked at the first one. It's basically Mario, Rabbids and XCOM together. It uses the Snowdrop engine. They added in a bunch of their own features here to support this sort of visual style that looks really great. And I think it's an example of, you know, I mentioned earlier when talking about Mercury Steam and how cooperating with Nintendo can sort of have seemingly like a very positive net impact on how a game feels. I think that's kind of what we're seeing here because this has more of a buttoned up polished feel to it compared to your typical Ubisoft game. It's just very tightly put together and largely quite a beautiful game. And it's also the only Snowdrop game with this sort of like completely different look. It is a really nice looking game, Kingdom Metal, in particular, to start off with. It's very firmly in like that CG bucket from Mario graphics, I think, in terms of the way that it is designed, but they have really high quality assets. Everything holds up really well during gameplay. I think kind of like that we just mentioned, this is a game that benefits from a little bit more of a camera control because they have that isometric perspective. So they're keeping the rendering budget pretty tightly controlled and they actually are able to throw quite a lot of care into those assets that you might not see in another game. And I think it does a pretty good job of capturing that kind of pre-rendered Mario look and it does look very attractive. When you go over to Sparks of Hope, that game gives you a bit more freedom in terms of the camera control and it has a little bit of a bigger scope to it. But I think in Kingdom Battle, they are probably throwing a little bit more polygons into each asset. And then Sparks of Hope, it's a little bit more of a cartoony style that most looks a little bit more flat shaded. And to me, I think it's a very visually compelling game on its own merits. I think both look very good. But I think maybe that lack of camera control in Kingdom Battle just allows them to amp it up just a little bit more just in terms of that, getting that really high asset quality that makes the assets really shine. So yeah, I think both look quite attractive. I just think that they don't really distinguish themselves from something else left, yeah. - I agree, I agree. That's pretty much I think where we're at then in terms of list. I mean, I might also throw up like Pikmin 4's is a nice looking game that could maybe go on this sort of runner's up list. But I would say Pikmin 4 didn't strike me as much as Pikmin 3 did on the Wii U, honestly. So it doesn't really make the list and there's plenty of other great looking games, but I think all those titles we've mentioned thus far really represent the best of the Switch. And to me, it's really illustrates how it's not compared to everything else on the market today. It's not a super powerful machine, right? There's obvious limitations with the Switch, but these games show what's possible when you target this spec specifically and you build your aesthetic around it. And when you do it right, you can end up with something that looks both beautiful and runs very well. And I think that's the big takeaway here from these top to your Switch games. I guess it's gonna do it for this one. Thank you to everyone for watching. Do you agree with our takes? Are we insane? Are we too? Do we love the Switch too much? Do we hate the Switch too much? You decide, it's up to you. But either way, it was fun to talk about it. So thanks for coming on, Oliver. Likewise, thanks, John. We might do this again for some third party title support, we may even do a worst of list because that also could be interesting. It's own right. Who knows? You'll find out soon enough, but for now, thanks for watching. (dramatic music)
