Nintendo Lays Down the Law – This Week in Games

Welcome back, everyone! It’s the week before the Tokyo Game Show, so there’s very clearly not a lot to talk about. Yep, this is definitely a slow column, I tell you what; no big surprises happened this week.

… Oy…

Let’s talk about fighting game etiquette…

The release of Marvel vs. CAPCOM Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics has resulted in a wave of people jumping into Marvel vs. CAPCOM. Not for no good reason: Marvel vs. CAPCOM 2 is one of the crown jewels of the fighting game community, a game beloved by aficionados for almost twenty years that has nevertheless developed its own weird Galapagos situation.

See, if you’re an MvC2 player, you’ve been playing that game for a good long time—either as part of the original wave of players from back in the day or as one of the newer players from that short period when Marvel Vs. CAPCOM Origins was available. There’s just a body of knowledge you’re going to have that a lot of newer people don’t have. There’s also the matter of gameplay balance; the raw power of characters like Magneto, Storm, Psylock, or Sentinel compared to literally any other character in the game is pretty stark. Most newcomers might log in and try to use any of the other characters—Morrigan, Tron Bonne, maybe Jin Saotome, or Strider Hiryu—and get summarily rocked. It’s a major issue for newcomers. There was also the phenomenon of noted fighting game champion Justin Wong crashing games and introducing a lot of players to his boot heels. So, what can we do?

This one’s a little challenging to discuss because as much appreciation as I may have for fighting games, I’m not by any means great at them. I’m the poor schlub cursed with choosing favorites in fighting games that I wouldn’t have the dexterity to properly use if I had twenty fingers (KoF‘s Ángel, Skullgirls‘s Parasoul, Virtua Fighter 5‘s Jacky…). I’ve never really taken part in tournaments, and I don’t think I ever beat my buddy Kevin at Soul Calibur 2 back in middle school. I am simply someone who appreciates fighting games from the sidelines, both in what they represent as a means for “player expression” (consider: the kind of time needed for a player to lab their combos with their favorite character), and what fighting games have created as a community. There are a lot of cretins in fighting games, but there are a lot of great people, too—and there is something to be said about how far someone who wants to take part in fighting games can go by just putting in the work and respecting the process—again, special credit to Lily Pichu, a relative newcomer to Tekken who nevertheless schooled Katsuhiro Harada (inspiring countless other women also to try Tekken in the process). There are a lot of people who’d love to find that magic solution that makes fighting games a snap for newcomers to join in—you wouldn’t hear Warner Bros. complaining if more people decided to play Mortal Kombat 1.

There has been a lot of ink spilled for a long time about fighting games themselves needing to be “more accessible,” which can be taken in a lot of ways but only really succeeds in a few others. Tools like auto-combos do a lot to help newcomers (as well as players with dexterity issues). Games with a ton of “gamified” modes like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate‘s World of Light mode or Mortal Kombat‘s Krypts also encourage people who might be too scared at playing online just to pick a title up to play on their own (and get some practice in the process). Outright “simplifying” the game and its mechanics or flattening characters to make everyone more uniformly “approachable” doesn’t work—there were a lot of furrowed brows with Mortal Kombat 11 and Mortal Kombat 1 given how little opportunities there were for player expression with the mechanics or characters (“kombatants”?). I’ll leave this part of the formula to the experts. I don’t pretend to be an expert in game development, nor do I pretend to be an expert in the psychology of conveying game mechanics. I do believe that there’s a worthwhile claim to be made about the cultural angle.

Games with a “competitive” angle tend to have players with a “bootstraps” mentality, which is how you get a lot of newbies getting bullied out of the community. This is something a lot of people have had to fight hard to push back against; a combination of, let’s be honest, a lot of show-offs without any empathy or who generally want to gatekeep the community. It can take a long time to develop the skill to be proficient at a fighting game, and there’s no shortcut to that—which separates it from something like PvP Pokémon battles since the only real barrier between you and a meta-friendly team is just time (the games have only made it easier to farm EVs, and teambuilds are available everywhere). Thankfully, as I mentioned, many people want to push back against that; some folks understand that communities stagnate without new blood, and it’s a lot harder to sell a game to the same handful of people instead of a wider audience. So being newbie-friendly can be as easy as having basic etiquette with fellow players; think of that Mexican King of Fighters cabinet with the “PROHIBIDO USAR A RUGAL” sign. Maximilian_Dood made a good point a while back about noticing that most players won’t use the usual Magneto-Storm-Sentinel/Psylocke teams unless they see the other person is.

Is this going to solve the problem completely? Not by a long shot. A newbie using Wolverine can still get rocked by someone using Servebot. That’s just what the skill gap does in a fighting game. But the community can still do a lot to make sure that newcomers at least don’t get discouraged as easily, especially when it comes to these older games and the hitherto-walled-off communities they have of experts who’ve been playing for decades. In the comments to last week’s column, we got into a rather involved (but good-natured!) discussion about game preservation, and I think this is an angle of game preservation that isn’t really discussed: the actual know-how of playing a competitive game. Part of that is easy: online servers go down, so it’s pretty common for die-hards only to encounter other die-hards at exclusive events. And that’s not something you can just program a solution for into the game. At that point, it’s just a matter of community and how embracing it is to newcomers. Marvel Vs. CAPCOM fans have waited a long time for the game to return, and Marvel Vs. CAPCOM has a massive reputation courtesy of years of discussion from fans. I think this is another part of the equation that people will need to begin to factor in when it comes to preserving the games they love: the aspect of newer people being able to appreciate the game, especially on their own terms. Remember: most folks got into Marvel Vs. CAPCOM back in the day didn’t necessarily have to worry about experts with decades of experience stomping on them.

It all boils down to being nice to folks. Our games live and die off of people being able to play and enjoy them. And as much as folks might insist that fandom shouldn’t be a reason to dislike something, there’s nothing quite like a bad encounter that spoils your experience with something purely by virtue of association. So in a lot of ways, it’s on people who love a game to also help put the word out (respectfully) and maybe even help onboard newcomers. Maybe that’ll mean there will be new players who enjoy a game differently from how you do—that’s just the way the cookie crumbles! I’d rather someone enjoy Etrian Odyssey for different reasons than I do than there not being new Etrian Odyssey fans, period.

So if you’re playing Marvel and you see a new guy, give ’em a fighting chance. If we wanted to live in the real world, we wouldn’t be playing a game with two Wolverines.

Overlord Mobile Game To Get Released in the U.S.

Part of the problem of not keeping up to date with a lot of light novel-based anime is that I’m not always sure what’s still popular and what isn’t. I know a lot of people really love Overlord but considering the gap between seasons, I never know if it’s still popular with folks or if it just has a lot of really dedicated hangers-on. But folks seem to still love Overlord and the story of Ainz Ooal Gown, the infamous all-powerful lich who just wants to be left alone. In that vein, like several anime in Japan, it has its own mobile game—and it’s coming to the U.S.!

So far, Lords of Nazarick seems to offer the usual mobile game offerings: roll a gacha to get one of several themed characters (I can only imagine there will be a chain of SSR-rank Albedo variants in different outfits), PVP and guild modes, the works. It’ll also be brought through Crunchyroll Games, which has raised some consternation from folks. A lot of fans are still quite bitter about the fate of Princess Connect! Re:Dive, whose American version Crunchyroll canceled (while the Japanese game is still up and running). The other mobile games offered by Crunchyroll don’t seem to have the best standing, either (that I can tell).

The real thing that makes me quirk my brow is the idea of making a whole mobile game off of a single anime property. I can understand doing that for an anime property that’s just that big, like on the level of Dragon Ball or One Piece. Those games have massive, massive worlds with hundreds of characters; they’re practically a gacha paradise. And you know some folks will whale hard for the chance of rolling Mr. 9 or Android 8. There was also Sailor Moon Drops, which I really loved; while not featuring a gacha system, it was still reasonably fun (albeit sometimes crushingly unfair) and made its money off of in-game items and cute outfits for the Sailor Senshi. Also, Kotono Mitsushi voiced Usagi. A simple puzzle game with aesthetics resembling those of the anime it’s based on can do plenty.

But when you get to the stuff based on the flash-in-the-pan stuff, I wonder what the expectation is. Sure, someone who’s down for Albedo will get every claw game statue, canvas bag, or pack of tissues with her face on it. It’s just weird to me that folks extend this to a game. How long do they plan to keep these games up? Moreover, how do they plan to keep these games fun? How much can you really expand on a licensed property through a mobile game? I’d understand if this was an adaptation of Isekai Quartet, which not only features the cast of Overlord but also other liked properties like KONOSUBA and Re:Zero. You’re casting a wide net there.

Regardless, here’s hoping that Lords of Nazarick can at least do interesting stuff with the story and setting like DanMachi: Memoria Freese did. No word yet on a proper release date for Lords of Nazarick (it’s still in pre-registration), we’ll keep you guys posted.

There are a lot of games that people try to bring to my attention. I’m flattered that folks try to bend my ear (especially since from where I’m standing, I’m not particularly big or anything). And I do apologize that I don’t talk much about a lot of it; it just behooves me to talk about stuff coming from Japanese creatives on a website called “Anime News Network” (but thanks to one of my readers who taught me about the Riven remakes the other week!). But I figured we definitely needed to broach this one because there’s some serious talent backing this ambitious release.

You might have heard of Murder on the Marine Express, a kinetic novel from a Spanish development team about a high school girl and her friend trying to solve a murder mystery while out on a school trip. 1564 Studio is currently crowdfunding their newest title, a new entry in what they’re calling The Mysteries of Ranko Togawa; The Girl Who Wasn’t There. They’re much more ambitious with this title, as instead of a simple kinetic novel, 1564 Studio is attempting to make The Girl Who Wasn’t There a proper visual novel, complete with 20 different endings and a 15-hour-long story. They’ve also got quite a list of creatives working with them, including Brazilian musician Saria Lemes (Evertried, Starboy Adventures) and the artist Frogapples (who worked on some of the backgrounds for River City Girls 2). However, the real superstar name in this lineup is that of Izucchi… better known as Taeko Izuno.

While not terribly well-known, Taeko Izuno has a pretty extensive career. She got her foot in the door by working with Sunrise after graduating high school and worked as a character and costume designer for Ishimori Productions. Most notably, she worked on character designs for the Kamen Rider shows between 2014 and 2019 (Kamen Rider‘s Drive, Ghost, Ex-Aid, Build and Zi-O). Izuno has mostly been working freelance for a few years now and offered several character designs for The Girl Who Wasn’t There; kudos to her design for “Jennifer,” who, in true Japanese mystery-game fashion, is based on Jennifer Connelly from the 1985 Dario Argento film Phenomena. Nickle, horror game, “Jennifer,” twice, you know the old yarn.

As mentioned earlier, The Girl Who Wasn’t There is still being crowdfunded; at the time of writing, they’re just under $2,000 from their $16,800 goal (converted from Euros). I wish them the best of luck, and I hope you guys check the game out.

Freedom Wars Freed From Vita Prison

Being that we love tiny miracles here in This Week in Games, I couldn’t let this one pass us by—even if it’s a title I don’t know much about. See, I never had a PlayStation Vita. It’s a great console and a phenomenal handheld to pick up if you love RPGs (it remains the best way to play some obscure titles like Threads of Fate). But Sony did the poor console dirty and left it to die in the U.S. It has a great number of games stuck within its walls, like the definitive version of Vanillaware’s Muramasa: Demon Blade, but most folks overlook the Vita nevertheless. Well, time to put another one on the board! Freedom Wars is back!

Freedom Wars was a novel concept: a Monster Hunter-esque multiplayer game where you played as a prisoner tasked with hunting robotic monstrosities in a post-apocalyptic world in the hopes of shaving a handful of years off of your million-year prison sentence. The basic set-up for the game—giving characters a melee weapon and some manner of a firearm—wasn’t too different from God Eater, but the real novelty was in the Thorns: grappling hooks that you could use for both traversal and for grappling enemies. You could consider it the predecessor to Monster Hunter Rise‘s Wirebug.

In another twist on the Monster Hunter formula, players could also assign themselves to various Panopticons, competing with Panopticons (and other player teams) online for score and reputation. It’s a novel approach and a fun bit of asynchronous multiplayer—and one that’ll definitely be a lot better this time around since the Freedom Wars remaster will be available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Steam, and Nintendo Switch starting January 10, 2025.

We don’t get a lot of these happy stories about obscure and forgotten titles, especially on days like these when studios are constantly being gutted. I’m happy to call this a win. Freedom Wars fans, your time has come! For folks waiting for their forgotten game, don’t lose hope!

Bah, I think that might be enough for this week, we can move on to the quick tidbits and—

Holy Christ. See, when Monday came around, I was kinda worried about this being a slow week. With the Tokyo Game Show being next week, most everyone is just holding off their big announcements for then, yeah? Not much to compose a column over. But, uh… this little bomb got dropped on us all this past Wednesday, and I think it’s safe to say that everyone is either bugging or making tons of popcorn to watch the claws fly.

Pocket Pair’s Palworld has been the center of a lot of controversy since it launched in January. As a game, it has more in common with other survival-crafting games like ARK: Survival Evolved or Once Human. But Palworld found itself getting a lot of skewed glances over its creature design; the game quickly became “not your Dad’s Pokémon game!” featuring collectible monsters and the ability to give them firearms, use them as slave labor on a plantation, or outright butcher them for… some reason.

Also, a lot of those Pals looked like Pokémon after Emory and Oglethorpe slapped a mohawk and a wheelchair on ’em, like with the Fargate. Even Palworld fans I know who love the game don’t bother calling some of the Pals by their actual name and just refer to them (like the plant-monkey) after the Pokémon it resembles (note: the monkey-pal in question is “Tanzee,” I had to Google that). There was a big to-do from folks over whether certain Pals constituted copyright infringement, considering how heavily they were biting Pokémon‘s style. Even as recently as their latest Sakuramichi expansion, a lot of Pals are pretty blatant, what with Bellanoir basically being a goth Gardevoir down to the faux-French name. Nintendo announced that they were aware of Palworld (even if they didn’t mention it by name), and would “investigate and take necessary measures,” which many took as proof that Nintendo wouldn’t move to sue.

… Yeah, about that…

It looks like Nintendo and TPCI investigated and will be taking necessary measures because they announced that they’re now moving to sue Pocketpair over “patent infringement”!

Many gamers are understandably angry about this. “Why did Nintendo wait so long to sue?!” (Answer: a good legal case takes time and investigation to build.) “Why is Nintendo suing instead of making better Pokémon games?!” (Answer: lawyers aren’t game developers.) The list of questions goes on and on, but this really does feel like a case of Pocketpair flying way too close to the sun.

We really can’t pretend this wasn’t the case; Palworld as a game exists entirely within a conversation with Pokémon. TemTem, at least, took measures to ensure that it had a unique aesthetic that didn’t go anywhere near what Pokémon did (i.e., TemCards instead of “Pal Spheres”). Palworld is a completely different game, but it still hinges on the surface-level Pokémon signifiers (like Poachers standing in for Team Rocket or capturing other humans in Pal Spheres so you can butcher them along with Pals). The Pocketpair president hasn’t exactly helped himself either with some of his past statements, like declaring he would never be able to work at Nintendo because “he just likes to follow trends.” Intentionally or not, whether by design by Pocketpair or not, Palworld got to where it is by virtue of having the identity of “the Pokémon game GAME FREAK doesn’t want you to play.” And Pocketpair… hasn’t really done much to dispel that.

With that said: it’s notable that the things that Nintendo and TPCI are focusing on are patent infringements, not copyright. No matter how blatant some Pals may be, Pocketpair would ultimately have plausible deniability about its Pals; Nintendo doesn’t have a leg to stand on about design similarities. I mean, how many helmet-wearing bike-riding superheroes exist in Japan? Toei can’t sue over all of them to protect Kamen Rider. Now, patented mechanics? Yeah, Nintendo has some weight there.

Some folks theorize that the lawsuit hinges around Palworld‘s use of “Pal Spheres” and patents Nintendo owns for specific gameplay mechanics involving throwing objects to capture or summon characters to fight for you or specific mechanics for how mounts work, which are mechanics that appeared in Pokémon Legends: Arceus. People are misreading this as Nintendo somehow having a patent on games about collecting monsters, which is rather disingenuous (not to mention completely misreading things).

There’s historical evidence of Nintendo not making moves against other monster-taming games like Dragon Quest Monsters, Monster Rancher, Keitai Denjū Telefang, Robopon, Shin Megami Tensei or Digimon. Heck, it should say a lot that Nintendo wasn’t trying to sue Level-5 over Yokai Watch—and Yokai Watch was actually outperforming Pokémon in Japan for a bit. Instead of suing, Nintendo studied Yokai Watch and what it was doing, and made motions to incorporate similar features into future Pokémon games, like the Z-Ring and Z-moves in the Pokémon Sun/Moon games. Also, note that all of the monster-taming games I mentioned have unique mechanics for capturing monsters: negotiating with demons, spawning monsters from physical media, hatching monsters from eggs, and gaining monsters following a random battle. I don’t like having to spell out how a lot of monster-taming games are significantly different from each other because it feels so pedantic, but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that people don’t play monster-taming RPGs.

And for folks bugging about patented game mechanics; yeah, that’s been a “thing” for a long time in the gaming industry at large. Sega patented the first-person view from Virtua Racer, and Namco patented the use of minigames during loading screens. Is it fair? Not my place to say. But it’s a part of business. If you’re gonna make that a hill to die on, you’ll have to put a lot of publishers on your hit list.

A lot of people buy into Nintendo being this lawsuit-happy company as a truism, which I feel stems from being so sore about Nintendo‘s draconian stances over how their IP is used. Is that fair of them? I don’t know, I’m not a game developer, and I’m not interested in making a fan game based on a Nintendo IP anyhow. I do know that if I owned an IP like The Legendary Starfy, I’d prefer having the last word on it and would defend my trademarks and ownership of it. I’m not going to pretend that Nintendo hasn’t shut down a ton of ROM hosting sites, but it’s also worth acknowledging that sending some fan developers working on a very visible Pokémon: Mystery Dungeon remake (that they don’t have the rights to) a cease-and-desist letter isn’t “suing” them. If anything, it’s giving them an out before they’re actually sued. In 2024, I think people who still make fan games or “fan remakes” of Nintendo properties should know full well that they’re not going to be the one project to soften Nintendo‘s heart and let folks make their own Mario game with blackjack and booze. If you’re the one using a screw on the lid of the Demon Core, you’re asking to get radiation poisoning in a criticality event. All this to say, Nintendo isn’t nearly as legally frivolous as people give them credit for. Nintendo‘s been building this case since at least February, and Nintendo wouldn’t pursue this if they didn’t feel like there was a genuine case.

I feel bad for Pocketpair because even though I don’t really like Palworld (and I do genuinely believe that they were doing the legal equivalent of going up to Nintendo and going, “Hey, is this annoying? I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you! Are you annoyed?”), I would have liked Palworld to get better. There is room for cynical rip-offs in the industry! And many of these cynical, edgy games can become breeding grounds for many big names. You wouldn’t have expected a movie like The Skin I Live In from a filmmaker like Pedro Almodovar after watching the horny insanity that is Pepi, Luci, Bon. Palworld might have been made in an attempt at polemics (“Let’s make a game for Americans with guns where you can make freakish characters in character creation!”), but at the very least, it was made in earnest. It’s just a shame they got so caught up in trying to stir controversy.

Ultimately, it’s way too soon to decide whether Nintendo has this in the bag or to start writing obituaries for Pocketpair. Nintendo hasn’t spelled out their case (because, of course, they haven’t, that’s just common legal sense), and we’re nowhere near any kind of verdict. The sky isn’t falling, nobody is getting lined up for a firing squad. This will be a rather interesting case to keep track of.

Let’s wrap up with some quick tidbits

That’ll do it for this week. Look forward to next week, because the Tokyo Game Show is going to be in full swing! A lot of Japanese studios are gearing up to dump reams of information about their new games (for crying out loud, Atlus alone has 17 games announced). Come to think of it, we’re coming up on a whole year from Success originally announcing that new Izuna game. I wonder if they’ll have news for us next week… At any rate: be good to each other, I’ll see you in seven.

This Week In Games! is written from idyllic Portland by Jean-Karlo Lemus. When not collaborating with Anime News Network, Jean-Karlo can be found playing JRPGs, eating popcorn, watching v-tubers, and tokusatsu. You can keep up with him at @mouse_inhouse or @ventcard.bsky.social.