Nintendo has been in the news nonstop this past week for two entirely different reasons. Let’s start with the shit this article will be centered around: the update patch for Pokemon. For those looking for a recap, I’ll leave a link to my past article about the dismal launch state for the latest mainline titles that indicated a severe lack of polish for games representing the most profitable media franchise in history. Now for the new information. This week Nintendo put out a Tweet stating they were aware of the numerous issues that the game was facing on the performance side and that they were working hard to get fixes out fast. And fast it was. This past Thursday a patch was put out that addressed several bugs and performance-related issues plaguing the games. I’ll put their short statement below, along with a YouTube video I found from GameXplain showing off a bit of the improvements from the new patch.

Fans were quick to point out the game is still needing more tweaks, but that this was a huge and timely step in the right direction. It’s not often for Nintendo (or any huge game company) to listen to fan feedback and less so to address that feedback in a short amount of time. It’s clear they want to turn this launch around (Scarlet and Violet were some of the lowest rated mainline games in history in the series) and are making tangible efforts to do so. This is the kind of shit to make fans appreciate you and hopefully the kind of shit to make executives think “okay maybe next time we should give the devs 3 days for quality assurance testing instead of 3 hours”. While this was a huge win for them, it’s unfortunate that at the same time Nintendo has been under fire by the Smash community this same week. 

To cover this story properly would require another article entirely and it would really be quite off topic, so for now just understand that Nintendo has always done everything they can to NOT support their competitive communities, with Smash being the… heh, Ultimate example. They only officially license a few tournaments and don’t expect them to ever put up some money to encourage the competitive scene. This week was a breaking point where a HUGE tournament, the Smash World Tour, was shut down and all hell broke loose. Again I encourage you to look up the full story if you care about that type of thing, I merely wanted to include it here so that if you were not seeing many people praise Nintendo this week despite this update being much appreciated, you would know a possible reason for that. While one community was very grateful to the company this week, another came for its throat.

Mario just wants to beat some ass at EVO man.

I know a lot of people are still having fun with the Pokemon games despite their issues, so hopefully their fun will be an even smoother experience now. Sometimes I waver on the value of criticism and outcry, but moments like these remind me that sometimes change does happen if enough people click clack away on their keyboards so it’s still a gray area for sure. Are you playing the new Pokemon games? Are you ready for the inevitable PokeDoujins that will follow suit? Load up on Pokeballs, hop on your bike, and leave a comment in the tall grass below!