 Hey everyone, welcome back to Nintendo Prime. We actually have a bevy of stories to get to today. Let me see, we've got Mario Stryker's updates. We've got platinum games likely making a bunch of games for Nintendo moving forward outside of the usual, you know, wonderful one-on-one bayonetta. We got some updates, unfortunate updates on eShop. That's never good. Also, by the way, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 actually had a really, really big update today. And nobody seems to be talking about it. So we're gonna talk about it here because Xenoblade Chronicles 3 literally comes out next week. Can you guys believe we're like a little bit over a week? Oh, we're also three days away from Live Alive. So let's not forget about that as well. Now, editor, cue the intro. That's right, folks, we brought back that intro. If you guys are really loving this content, loving this news, I would appreciate if you would subscribe to the channel. I actually have a brand new giveaway going on down in the description and in the pinned comment as well because of the graciousness of Grid Studio. I'm gonna be actually making a video on one of their products soon. But what I wanna actually show you is what we're gonna be giving away because of them. And that is this beauty. And what you can see here is the Grid Game Boy. And what this is is actually a decommissioned, no longer working Game Boy put into an art piece like this so you can actually hang on your wall. And you see they got Tetris in the background here and they got all the different components of it taken apart with associated descriptions, even all the way down to obviously the chip level here. So you can get a good look at some good old childhood memories or maybe you just want some retro goodness in your heart. You can see this has a value of 269.99. It's actually normally $300. It is 30 bucks off. Obviously you can go buy one if you want or you can just go to the link down in the pinned comment or the description to enter. I only really ask that people are subscribed to the channel. That's really the big one. There's gonna be other ways you can enter. You can follow our other podcast channel and our Twitter accounts and everything else to get some extra entries. And we'll probably be running this giveaway I think from now through August because I'm not sure when my video is gonna drop on this product specifically yet. I'll be able to show it to you in person here in a few days, but yeah, I think we'll get a head start on this giveaway because it's just such a cool item. And yeah, let's get right into the news. Well, Platinum Games has decided to hire someone very, very important to their company. This person has 27 years experience working at Nintendo and who are we talking about? Well, we're getting this news over from Silicon Era and we're talking about Platinum Games as hired Takayo Yamane. Now I didn't know much about this person. This is a picture of him because I've been in Nintendo of America and I only really see Nintendo of Japan employees like Shibuya Moto and Furukawa and Awada and all that. But then obviously Nintendo of America employees. So he's actually the former managing director of Nintendo of Europe. As the company's new chief business officer he was hired as a business officer. In a teaser video for an upcoming interview with Famitsu Magazine. So there's an interview coming up. Yamane noted that his joining would mark a significant change for Platinum Games. Yamane is a popular figure within the Japanese video game industry before joining Platinum Games. So this is literally what he was just doing before he was hired here. Yamane worked at Nintendo for over 27 years holding various high-level positions during his tenure. This included serving as vice president of Nintendo of France until 2007 and then the managing director of sales at Nintendo of Europe for 18 years. When asked why he decided to join Platinum Games Yamane stated that he felt required in order for Hideki Kamiya and Ashusi Inaba who just became the CEO to make their dreams become reality. In the teaser video, Yamane gave Project GG, a Project Platinum Games originally teased in 2020 as an example. Furthermore, Yamane noted that the game was incredible with Kamiya hinting at some sort of new direction for the company's creative projects. Back in February of 2022, the company announced a change in structure with Inaba becoming the company's CEO. Since the change in leadership the company has released Babylon's Fall which did not do very well but they did also announce the release day according to Yamane is hiring will signify a new era for Platinum Games and yeah, we'll have the full interview here tomorrow. Now what I find interesting in looking at this is there's a lot of people speculating that this means like Nintendo's about to buy Platinum Games. I don't think that's the case. I know Platinum Games has actually openly talked about how they're open to the idea of companies presenting purchasing proposals to them but not that they would actually take any of them. I honestly think this just means the relationship between Nintendo and this company are going to get even tighter. We do know that they wanna take a different approach with games and I think this is because they've had a hard time seeing success. Obviously Babylon's Fall was an attempt at a new approach at making games for them that just totally bombed out but then Bayonetta III has the potential here to go on to become the best selling Bayonetta. We obviously know their last games like Astral Chain for Nintendo Switch also did really, really well. So I can see where this hire from Nintendo is actually just gonna encourage Platinum Games to work even deeper and closer with the big end. Not to be acquired by Nintendo but to understand that their games actually perform best. The kind of games they like to make perform best when they're exclusively on Nintendo platforms or at least console exclusivity. I have no problem of course if these games are on all platforms but I do think when you focus in on an individual platform you tend to get better advertising and a better push by the platform holder which helps the game perform and I feel like we have seen this now or Platinum Games has attempted to do multi-platform games several times to really not much success. Even the original Bayonetta didn't sell well enough for Sega to wanna continue to fund it. So Nintendo swooped in and that's why we've had Bayonetta II back on Wii U and now Bayonetta III on Switch. So I think this is just signifying a deeper partnership about to be happening. Obviously the guy at 27 years working in high level positions at Nintendo clearly gonna have a deep connection there and his respect among those in Japan is great. I don't foresee this being anything other than good news for Nintendo Switch and future Nintendo platforms in deepening that relationship. And obviously Platinum Games is probably trying to find out how they can get to that next level instead of just being this company that sort of makes those middling games which really sucks because those middling games are sometimes better than these mega sellers that are out there but they just can't seem to break through and I bet you this hire is going to help with that. So I wish Platinum Games luck and I look forward to see what else you guys have coming down the pipeline. Obviously Project GG but beyond that I wanna see what future things are happening after Bayonetta III. Well next up we have an update on a very unfortunate story and that is the closure sort of of the Nintendo eShop. Now Nintendo actually announced this a while ago that for the Wii U and 3DS in particular that we were gonna not be able to purchase games at some point in 2023 in March and that we would not be able to add funds to purchase games at some point this year. We didn't really have exact dates just rough estimated months and today Nintendo has given us those exact dates. So let's take a look at the news right here. Getting this off a Nintendo life although it came from a Nintendo UK tweet and you can see in the UK tweet it says updates for the discontinuation of the eShop for Wii U and 3DS family systems as of August 29th, 2022. You will no longer be able to add funds and then as of March 27th, 2023 purchases will no longer be available. By the way, they're still going to be allowing you to download games that you've already purchased but as it says, I thought if I could still be able to download those purchases from the eShop after the closure date for the foreseeable future which is the good news but that also means they're just gonna randomly close it down. So on one hand I do applaud Nintendo for actually being open and communicating this and not just leaving those dates floating out there and then a random date during those months things change. I also question what Nintendo is doing. If you remember they took out the DS and Wii eShops entirely. They were just offline for months and then randomly came back online and Nintendo still hasn't really commented on any of that and at least there'd be an honest here. Look, we know these shops are not gonna be up forever. We know they're eventually gonna go away. It's just, it's always a little sad to think of what an end of an era truly is and at this point in the digital world I do think the true end of an era for a platform is when basically the shops are useless. It's already hit that point on Wii and DS and it's now about to hit that point on Wii U and 3DS really next month but let's say you add a bunch of funds, okay then fine, March of next year. So it's gonna be really unfortunate to see the end of those eras. I know the Wii U maybe isn't as big a surprise given it's sales flop and I know the 3DS is technically the worst selling Nintendo handheld. This is just numbers. Doesn't mean 3DS was horrible, just technically was the worst selling of their handheld platforms. It's still kind of weird to see the end of an era. I know neither one of the platforms are even being made anymore or manufactured but still game support was still happening and now that's going to be ending and that's just unfortunate. Next up we have an update for Mario Strikers battling. Now technically this update came from here on Twitter but I'm just gonna throw up the video here for you guys that you see here and you guys can enjoy watching the new stuff. What did we basically learn? Well, they're gonna be adding Daisy and Shy Guy as playable characters but more than that they're gonna be adding a brand new set of armor, a set of collectible things that you can unlock called the Night Set for Everybody and then they're also gonna be adding the Desert Rune as a playable stadium. Now they're adding this update in two days on 721 but more than that they also promised that they're gonna be doing essentially similar updates two more times before the end of 2022. Now what's interesting is the sort of debate that this has sparked online and I'm actually gonna go over to Super Metal Day 64 our good pal to see his response to this because it is quite interesting and I feel like this is a sentiment a lot of gamers have so let's take a look. So it says Nintendo is basically saying that they will finish development on Mario Shackers Battle League by the end of 2022, enjoy the $60 beta until then. And I think that this is a very interesting sentiment that a lot of gamers are having about this update because it did feel a bit lacking in content. There were very few stadiums. They needed more playable characters. There wasn't a lot of armor to unlock. It's very weird to see that this game is gonna be more content complete by the end of this year. They might even move in more free updates next year but by the after these next two updates it'll feel like a more content complete game. It was also really weird they launched and then you had to wait nine days before clubs began when clubs was one of the big pushed selling features of the game. I know clubs are up now and they seem to be running fine online play. Seems to be fine. The single player was a little bit shallow. It's just a standard bracket thing that you go through through cups and yeah, the second time around it's much more difficult to unlock armor sets but it really wasn't a ton to unlock in the first place. So even though the difficulty ramped up it's weird just like it's also weird that you can't do full 4v4 in your clubs. You can mostly go as 2v2 in the clubs where there's four characters and you kind of switch between them instead of they're actually being 4v4. It's weird but hey, Nintendo does weird things. I do think that this is probably the better of the Mario Sports releases. Credit to next level games for that but at the end of that it's still not content complete. Three updates are cool and I guess Splatoon popularized the idea of these three updates but Splatoon also comes with a hell of a lot more content at launch. So I don't know. You guys let me know what you think about this down in the comments below. Our last story deals with some updates to Xenoblade Chronicles 3. That's right, that massive game coming out next week and no for once we're not talking about the special edition and Nintendo Snufu with that. We're actually gonna head over to perfectly Nintendo for this information. And it says Xenoblade Chronicle 3, all the details, pictures and videos from their official Twitter account. They've been, that's right. They've been drip feeding like crazy. So July 19th, this is the important one because this is the most recent stuff that we wanna get into. Today's updates share some details and some footage about the night and day cycle. Enemies in fighting unique monsters, tombstones and Asherah, one of the heroes. While exploring Aeonios, I'm sorry. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly. The clock never stops ticking but if you want to switch from daytime to nighttime, you're free to change the time from the main menu. By the way, it seems that some monsters only show up at night. Also, you can enjoy the mini scenarios of Aeonios and see how they change depending on the time of day or night. During your journey, you will sometimes come across enemies that are fighting each other. You can decide to take part in the battle by picking up a side and doing so when that your reward provided you win the battle. As for which side to pick, you need to pay attention to the rewards and how easy and hard it will be for you to achieve victory. When you defeat a unique monster, a tombstone appears at the spot where you felt it. If you examine it, you can choose the challenge that unique monster to a rematch. This might be a good way for you to gauge how much you've progressed since the last time you fought that particular enemy. Also, today's update introduced another hero, Asherah, voiced by MAO in Japanese. Her class is lone exile and despite being a defender, she fights rather aggressively in with her two-sided sword. She swings her weapon around and uses swift but powerful slashes to accumulate aggro. She can also counter attack when nearby allies are under attack. Asherah hails from Keeves where she's known as a battle maniac who loves nothing more than to head on the battlefield and attack enemy colonies. Many fear her because of her callousness for she is not afraid of death and cares little about the lives of her own. And then we have some new screenshots here, which are popping up, here we go. So you can see this sort of day-night cycle here. I can see another look at the world. You see, look at some of the oceans and water here and some of the enemies here in there that you'll be able to traverse a little bit. Another enemy back here as well, Snake. Next up, we see a battle sequence here, it looks like. Lots of battle stuff going on here. Probably a cutscene. We see a nice facial expression. Again, more battle stances and combat stuff going on here. Again, looks like maybe another cutscene potentially here. And we're back to the beginning. Next up, it says finally we get to see a part of a cutscene during Asherah where we can see how strong she looks, standing firm on the battlefield. Good thing she does not appear to be an enemy. And here's the video with all the clips from the update and we'll throw that up right now. So you guys take a look at that as we continue to talk about this game. So I find this to be really, really good stuff here. And Xenobit Chronicles 3 is really shaping up to be, I think, something special for Nintendo and special for Monolith Soft. This is clearly the biggest undertaking that they have ever been a part of. And it is something I think that they are about to absolutely hit a home run with. I think that's what maybe excites me the most about this update for Xenobit Chronicles 3 is the amount of detail they are putting into this game. Yes, it looks better than any prior Xenobit game before, although some will still probably argue for Xenobit Chronicles X's style from Wii U if you're a really hardcore fan. But I think that they have done everything they can to make sure that this is a masterpiece. And I really hope the sales and interest level in this game end up representing the level of effort put into this game. Monolith Soft has become one of the pillar development studios at Nintendo. They have multiple teams working on multiple games. We know they have a new IP in the works. They've had in the works for quite some time. We also know that they have separate individual teams that are helping out some of Nintendo's other franchises. As an example, they have a huge development segment of their studio helping out the Breath of the Wild 2 team. We know this because that segment helped out the Breath of the Wild team and they actually were hiring for that team specifically for Breath of the Wild 2 just a year ago. So we know that Monolith Soft has become a massive team and one of maybe the best purchases that Nintendo has ever made when they acquired them from Square Enix. So yeah, this ended up being a really good purchase for Nintendo and we're gonna start seeing the fruits of this, obviously Xenome Chronicles was really good, Xenome Chronicles 2 and Xenome Chronicles 3. I don't know if they're gonna continue Xenome Chronicles franchise or if they're gonna decide to move on to something else. I have no idea. All I know is that Monolith Soft was incredible and this game is shaping up to be really, really good and it's gonna be a game I don't think you're gonna wanna miss. If you've never tried out a JRPG but have always been interested in trying one out, this is the one to dive into. After all, this is essentially Nintendo's Final Fantasy and there's nothing wrong with that because Square won't actually give us the real Final Fantasies. That being said, I wanna thank all you guys for tuning in. I hope you really enjoyed this video and plan, oh man, I can't wait to catch you in the next one.