 Another Christmas, another year without Metroid Prime 4. I don't know why I'm trying to put this tree topper on when the camera cuts off. It doesn't matter. Hey everybody, so it's been a heck of a year. Well, we've had a lot of Nintendo Switch games released and oh boy, we talked about them all. Pokemon Legends Arceus, wow, that was great. Then we went on to games like Mario Strikers Battle League and that was a time. But there are some Nintendo Switch exclusives that have released this year and I didn't get a chance to talk about them for one reason or another. And not all of them are bad. There's one game that I didn't really like in particular and that's why I didn't rush to make a review. There is another one that I really loved though. Oh, it's so good. Oh man, so, so great. So why didn't I talk about that one? Time mostly. I'm gonna do an off the cuff video right now and kind of review these games but more from memory. It's been a little bit since I finished both of them. However, I'm not that old. You know, I don't have dementia yet. Let's start spicy with some Mario and Rabbids Sparks of Hope. I bought the Gold Edition which cost more money. I guess because it comes to some kind of season pass. But all I got so far was some skins for guns which does nothing. And I actually don't like the skins. I prefer it normally. Oh, and don't even get me started. It's the only present under the tree. I feel like if I peeped just a little bit. No, Dala! Dala, what are you doing? Oh no! Oh, she opened it. A satisfied grip, Dala. This is the only thing I wanted for Christmas. It's really the only Nintendo Switch accessory you could need. Do you want it? Well then I guess I'll have it. I heard about the floating fit. You see they have these rubber inserts on the inside. So when you slide your Switch in, it floats in the grip. But no part of it's actually touching the plastic. Look, it's the ergonomic feel of this grip that makes it so comfortable to hold. I hope I've bought this for us, got a good deal. Because right now on the website, by bundling, you can get up to 30% off. Yeah, 30% off and free shipping. In fact, they're doing expedited shipping for free. So you get it in three days, Dala. Three days! Christmas is coming up fast. The best part is, you can use code BEATEMUPS and get an extra 5% off. I mean, I love the satisfied grip. I have a pink one that Kim uses. I went with that, the Fire Diablo Red that just came out. And they have these quality cases too that keep everything nice and secure. You can fit the grip in there. Look, I have another grip. I have too many grips. Buy them, please! The satisfied grip is the one and only Switch accessory you will ever need. And the one and only Christmas gift you will ever need. So go to satisfy.com. Thank you for sponsoring the video. This is, I do this every year. I take a little peek and then I just carefully place it back in the wrapping. And nobody knows any difference. Now I want to say, I love strategic turn-based games. It is a guilty pleasure of mine. And I got Mario and Rabbids Kingdom Battle and fell in love. The animation, the art style, the characters, even the story I thought was quirky and fun. There's like a weird human protagonist that creates this alternate universe dimension teleporter thing and all these Rabbids get sucked into it and spat out in the Mario universe. And from there, you literally explore the Mushroom Kingdom with the regular Mario character lineup and also a bunch of Rabbids who have kind of been fused with the Mario characters. There were a couple of standout highlight moments through the story, like the orchestra rabbit who sung, which was so out of left field because at that point everything had been text-based dialogue other than Mario going woohoo. Going into Sparks of Hope, I was expecting the sequel to be bigger and better than the previous game and they did do a lot different. See, what I really liked about the first game was that it was set in the Mushroom Kingdom and as you walked around and explored the Kingdom, you would find enemies around and it would trigger a battle in that area. The world that you were exploring became the battlefield itself and it was so seamless and I just was blown away by that mechanic as I was playing. In Mario and Rabbids Sparks of Hope, they did away with that. In fact, you're not even in the Mushroom Kingdom, which is fine. I wouldn't want them to do that again. But instead, you just go to several different planets and they're all their own biomes. I have no nostalgia for these biomes. I have no personal attachment to them. I'm just in an ice world and now a desert world and that's fine. I don't mind exploring these worlds but they did away with the battles happening in the adventure. Rather than stumbling around a snow world and finding enemies and battling them right there and then, they turned it more into like a JRPG old school mechanic of hitting an enemy and then it triggering a battle in a completely different area and loading into a brand new place that was pre-built and designed for a battle. I found this really weird from the start and I did not like this change. This almost feels like a step backwards in game design to me. It's kind of like how the new Pokemon games now you're having the battles with the Pokemon where you find them in the world. Can you imagine if they did that backwards? It would feel like a step back. In fact, I found that the battle stages became super repetitive. They only designed three or four different battle stages per biome. So almost every battle that you had in each biome felt super repetitive. That felt really cheap to me. It became very mundane and boring and I ended up trying to avoid battles most of the time. And something else that didn't help it feel kind of stale was just like the first game. There's only eight enemy types. A couple of those enemy types, like for example, Goombas or Bomb Arms, kind of disappear after the first world. I mean, they pop up here or there on harder challenges, but for the most part, you never really find Goombas in these battles. So eliminating two or three of the enemy types right there, you're down to like five or six that you're battling consistently. There are some deviation in those five or six, but it mostly just comes down to elemental types. Like you have your enemies that lob attacks from a distance and they can be an electric attack or a water attack, but essentially it's one for one. It really doesn't feel that different. I don't know why they did away with some of the enemies from the first game. They feel like they could have reused some of the older ones. And I gotta be honest, the story didn't really leave much of an impression this time around. The Mushroom Kingdom goes to Chaos, and then Mario and the gang set out to try and find out what's going on. There were several boss fights at the end of each world. A lot of them did boil down to the same repetitive style of this enemy is going to sit at the very back of the map, and you have to try and get there battling the same eight enemies you've been battling the entire game. And when you finally do get there, the map's gonna change, and then you're gonna have to do it again two or three more times. When you do it the last time, that's just the battle over. That wasn't very exciting. There was one battle that I really enjoyed. It was set on a giant circle, and you had to make the enemy crash the ground, and then break through it and fall to take damage. That felt a little bit more creative, but those moments were very few and far between in this game. I'm boiling it down to just being a very repetitive and unrememberable experience, but I will say the one thing that did impress me is I did really enjoy how they shook up the gameplay this time around. The first game was a very cut and dry, so you had the full grid and movement squares, and you could only go a certain distance, and then you had to do this action, and then that would cancel your turn. I did hear a lot of people found that game pretty hard near the end because of that. Personally, I enjoyed the challenge, but I do understand those complaints. You can tell this time around, they listened to those complaints, and they tried to find a way to shake up that gameplay and make it different, and they really succeeded here. Rather than having a set amount of squares or spaces you can move, you just have a move radius, and you can move around it as freely as you want in your turn. It did make things really easy though, because on a whim, you could move any character around on a turn as much as you wanted, making it really easy to position a character for a team jump, for another character, or dashing into enemies. They also added a ton of things so that attacking didn't necessarily mean the end of a turn. Also, with the new element of the spark, rabid things, this new blend of the two universes that I do really like, the more you collect and attach to your characters, the more abilities you can give them. Now for the most part, a lot of these boil down to two different things, powering up your weapons in a certain way, or AoE attacks in a certain way, like there is an electricity version of both of those. You can do a giant radius of electricity, or you can do electrical shots that will zap enemies nearby. Each of these do do different things in a way, like a splash attack will push enemies back and they'll take more damage, especially if they fall off a cliff or something. But you do have some really cool sparks that you can find around the world if you explore enough and do challenges, like sparks that will summon enemies that work for your team. This is crucial. They can take extra hits for you, or they can go and attack enemies for you. Then you have ones that make you invisible, you have ones that revive allies, so it really is worth exploring and finding all of these sparks, and they add even more depth to the gameplay. In fact, my favorite combo to do is to activate Mario's hero site where he'll attack something if it moves, and then you go up to something and you slide under it as Mario kicking it up in the air, and then Mario's hero site will go and shoot it as he slides. That's like Devil May Cry level of sick. I had fun with it, but I definitely didn't have enough to make a whole video about it, especially when so much of what I had to say wasn't exactly positive. I don't think I would have any more fun replaying it now than I would replaying this one now. Moving on on, up, up, but moving on on. We have Bayonetta 3. I kind of felt like this game got swept under the rug real quick, which is a shame. I always feel like this series is grossly underappreciated. All three Bayonetta games blend into each other so seamlessly. They still look like 360 games. The visuals really haven't been improved. A lot of people are talking about how the hardware is holding back games like Pokemon, Scarlet, and Violet. No, Game Freak just doesn't know how to design a game, and the performance is very clear, reflective of that. If you want to point to a game that the Switch might be holding back, I would point to Bayonetta 3, where the developers clearly know how to work with the hardware and get a game with this much action and visuals playing at a steady frame rate. But at the same time, you can tell in all of these environments, like the cities especially, they are just so bland and bully. Lacking of character or shadows, lighting, assets, really anything. They're just very serviceable at the least. The good news is you don't really spend any amount of time in any area for too long, which is why I don't think they cared all too much about the environments in these cases. You're only there to beat a boss and then you leave. But this game does truly show the Nintendo Switch's age more than any other game I think I've seen. That said, the character models, a lot of the action and the enemies and all of that, they all look fantastic. Just the environments can be a bit stinky sometimes. Speaking of over the top action and anime and cartoony violence, this game has it all. It even has some, yeah, yeah, you put your kids to bed. Don't play this game with the kitties around. You might see a little bit of boobin' butt. I've always loved this about the Bayonetta series, not to sound creepy, but her bodysuit is actually made out of her hair. She can do some crazy things with her hair, like summoning these giant demons to fight for her or alongside her. But that takes so much hair to create that you can't do both. You can't have a bodysuit of hair and create a giant demon lady to fight for you. I mean, I'm not saying I want her to step on. I think it's a fun element that these games add. However, because this is Nintendo, you can select to choose whether or not you want this on or off. Obviously, if you turn it off, she'll keep her bodysuit on, even though it's not canon with the story. I mean, it makes no sense. How could you even play it that way? But also it does things like take the cigars and changes them into like candy canes or something. The last element, oh, other than the music, which is fantastic. But the last element is, of course, the gameplay. And it's more Bayonetta. I don't really have anything to write home about here or add on from the previous installments. It feels very similar to me to the previous game. The big main new element they've added into the third game is now Bayonetta can summon these demons to fight alongside her and you can control them. While you're controlling them and doing these massive attacks, Bayonetta is just dancing off in the background. It's an interesting mechanic because Bayonetta is still there and she can still get hit and take damage. And if you do, you lose the big thing that you're dancing the key. So you do have to be careful with your positioning, but also how you're using and attacking with the big creatures to make sure Bayonetta stays safe at the same time. At one point, you get a train, which is wildly inaccurate to control, but pretty funny that it even exists. When you're playing a Bayonetta game, you typically want to get the best score you can after every battle because you're ranked and rated on how you perform. And I do really enjoy how the game plays. The new element of these giant creatures, it's not my favorite. I would rather summon some crazy weapon or new combo, especially because the giants attack really slowly and usually just at one button press and then it has to reset and try again, which kind of breaks my flow. I try not to use these too much, but they are also very strong and overpowered. Oh, and they added a new playable character called Viola. The story here is really interesting without ruining too much. It goes into the multiverse, but they do it in an interesting way. Viola is traveling the multiverses, finding Bayonettas. I won't give away too much more than that because it is really a cool concept and I like how they handled it. But at a certain point, you do get to take control of Viola and use her and she plays completely differently to Bayonetta. She too can summon a big creature, but it's her sword that turns into that creature. And then the creature will start automatically attacking. It's a giant cat too called Cheshire. And you guys know how I love cats. This guy's very cute. But while Cheshire is out there fighting, you have no sword. So you have to bare knucklebox the whole time. And of course, when you're using the sword, you have a bunch of different combos. And in general, she feels very different to use than Bayonetta, which I appreciate. Anything I'll say is the gene missions in this game are like 2D side-scrolling stealth and it's awful. It's awful. It's so bad. Those parts are horrible. You have this fast-paced action game that's so sick. And every second is heart racing, blood pumping. And then you have these 2D, crappy, controlling, slow down the pace, so boring, crawling through vents. I just want this to end so I can get back to the game. But they're pretty short and very few and far between. I feel like this is a game where a lot of people might be asking, hey, is it worth me trying this one for the first time or getting into the series? I will always say yes, because I think anyone can get addicted and fall in love with this genre and this series. If you played Bayonetta 1 and 2, Bayonetta 3 is a no-brainer. If you've never tried any of these games, I don't think it even necessarily matters where you start. Bayonetta's 1, 2, and 3 all feel very consistent in quality, so you really could go right back to the start and start with the first game and have as much fun as you would in the third game. I really don't think you're missing out on too much. I mean, there are characters that get a little fleshed out and carry over between the three games, but for the most part, there's no ongoing story that you really have to know diving into this one. So yeah, play Bayonetta. If you've ever liked a hack-and-slash game, if you like over-the-top anime, crazy action, give it a shot. I think at this point, I have reviewed every exclusive that came out this year, and I'm working on Pokemon. I think I'm all caught up. If I missed anything, you can let me know. I hope you'll have a Merry Cri- What's that? There's one I'm missing? I don't know what it could be. I mean, Bayonetta and Mario. I'm working on Pokemon. I did the battle games, and I... Oh no.