biteho.com

How’s Nintendo doing from a business perspective? Quite well. The company today reported earnings for this fiscal year ended March 31, and times are (mostly) good. Nintendo pulled in ¥1.2 trillion ($10.7 billion USD), which is an increase from ¥1.06 trillion ($9.4 billion USD) for the previous 12-month period. In terms of profit, Nintendo made ¥249.7 billion ($2.2 billion USD) in operating profit, compared to ¥177.5 billion ($1.6 billion USD) the year prior.

Via Engadget, Nintendo sold 2.47 million Switch consoles in the final three months of the fiscal year, boosting the console’s lifetime total to 34.74 million (which exceeds the lifetime sales of the N64). The 2.47 million Switch consoles sold during the final quarter of the fiscal year is down slightly from the 2.93 million consoles Nintendo sold in the same quarter last year. For the full fiscal year, Nintendo sold 16.95 million Switch systems; that’s just under the 17 million that Nintendo forecasted it would sell the year, but it’s up year-on-year.

As for game sales, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate racked up 13.81 million copies sold, while Pokemon Let’s Go: Eevee and Let’s Go Pikachu combined for 10.63 million copies sold. Super Mario Party sold 6.4 million copies, while Mario Kart 8 Deluxe sold 7.47 million copies during the period (for a total of 16.7 million copies lifetime). A total of 23 different games, from Nintendo and others, sold more than 1 million copies on Nintendo Switch during the year.

Another bright spot for Nintendo was its digital business. Sales of digital games grew 95.4 percent to ¥118.8 billion ($1.064B USD); Nintendo called out Switch digital games as showing “especially good growth.”

Sales of the Nintendo 3DS, which is now more than 8 years old, dropped 60.2 percent to 2.55 million units during the year. The NES Classic and SNES Classic combined to sell 5.95 million units.

For more on Nintendo’s earnings report and other related matters, check out the stories below:

This review contains minor spoilers about mission structure and overall story direction. There are no spoilers for major narrative moments.

Around 10 hours into Days Gone, you’re thrown into a hunting tutorial apropos of nothing. The over-the-top libertarian character takes you out with a rifle and shows you how to track a deer, although you’ve already had a tracking tutorial. You’re then tasked with getting more meat for you and your buddy because your supply is running low, something you never have to do again. You also don’t cook or eat; you can only donate meat to camps around the map to earn a negligible amount of trust and money with them. After a little while, even stopping to get meat off wolves that attacked you doesn’t seem worth it.

Like many things in Days Gone, hunting exists just to be there, an idea that is picked up and then abandoned at random. Unlike hunting, some of those ideas are even good in the moment. But most aspects of Days Gone lack purpose. Its many narrative threads flirt with being meaningful and interesting but never quite commit, with characters whose actions and motivations don’t make sense. Riding a souped-up motorcycle through the world and taking out zombie nests and hordes is satisfying in the way that completing open-world checklists often is, but by the end, you’re left to wonder what the point of it all was.

The first act of the game–about 20 hours or so–sets up quite a few narrative arcs. Two years after the initial “Freaker” outbreak, biker buddies Deacon St. John and Boozer have become drifters doing odd jobs for nearby survivor camps and keeping mostly to themselves. Deacon’s wife, Sarah, had been stabbed at the very beginning of the outbreak; Deacon put her on a government helicopter bound for a refugee camp so she could get medical attention, but when he and Boozer arrived, the camp has been overrun by Freaks, and Sarah had apparently died. Deacon is understandably not coping with it well. Boozer suggests riding north and leaving the memories behind, but Deacon’s bike breaks down and is subsequently looted for parts, so one of your main goals is to earn trust and credits at the nearby camps in order to rebuild your motorcycle.

The motorcycle is central to everything you do in Days Gone. Getting anywhere, including by fast travel, requires your bike, and if you want to save while out in the world, you better be right next to it. Getting off your bike is a matter of both your entrance and your exit; you need to stop far enough away from enemies so they don’t hear you coming, but you also need to be able to run to your bike quickly if things go south and you need to escape. And, as you’re sneaking past Freakers to loot things like bandages and ammo, you also need to be on the lookout for a gas can and some scrap metal to keep your bike in top shape–if it breaks down or runs out of gas, you’re basically screwed. That said, gas and other loot do regenerate if you leave and return to a location, so you’ll never truly run out of anything so long as you put in the time to look for it.

At the beginning, you do jobs for two camps: Copeland’s conspiracy theorist stronghold and Tucker’s hellish forced-labor camp. Copeland’s has a mechanic capable of upgrading your bike, while Tucker’s has a well-stocked weapons merchant. Your starter junk bike gets about a mile per gallon, and you can’t store a gas can on your bike or your person, so you either have to return to a camp to fuel up or constantly scrounge for gas cans out in Freaker territory. This makes wandering around and doing things in the open world frustrating at first, so you do a lot of throwaway missions for the two camps to start.

Many of these early missions consist of cookie-cutter bounty-hunting and rescue jobs in which you go to a place, track a person using your apparently psychic Survival Vision to highlight footprints and other clues, and then kill some bandits or Freakers. Some of these require you to take the target alive, which often means chasing them on your bike and shooting at their tires with your pistol. If you happen to run out of gas or ammo, or if your bike is already weak and breaks down after a couple of bumpy turns, you auto-fail these missions and have to start over. You also accelerate with R2 and shoot with R1, which, while not horrible, is clunky and awkward.

One early scene involving a drug thief kicks off a series of missions like these that, once completed, has no bearing on the rest of the game despite initial appearances; once you track down the stolen drugs you have to choose which camp to return them to, but there are no consequences either way, and then the situation is dropped entirely. The only result is getting some trust and credits with one of the camps–I chose Copeland simply because I wanted money for a better fuel tank. A lot of the story missions going forward, as you discover a third, more narratively relevant camp, follow the same structures as these earlier missions. But the focus on Tucker and Copeland specifically amounts to hours of nothing in the grand scheme of the story. Tucker’s forced labor doesn’t come back to bite anyone, and while Tucker and Copeland don’t seem to like each other, doing work for one camp doesn’t affect your relationship with the other. Once you get to the third camp, Lost Lake, Tucker and Copeland cease to matter at all, not least because Lost Lake has both a better mechanic and better weapons.

Once you upgrade your bike a bit, though, the world opens up. No longer bound by low gas mileage and a weak arsenal, you can head further out and more handily take on enemy-controlled areas around the map. You clear ambush camps by killing everyone present and eliminate Freaker infestation zones by burning all their nests. In addition to trust and credits, clearing an ambush camp nets you resources to loot, a map of the area, and a new fast travel point; destroying an infestation zone allows you to fast travel in the area. Unlocking the map and neutralizing threats is satisfying in the way that cleaning up clutter bit by bit is, and you can see your work pay off in your bike’s upgrades. However, there’s little variety between each ambush camp and infestation zone, and they get repetitive early–especially because Deacon dry-heaves and whines about the nests smelling horrible at each one.

The real motivation to do all of this is twofold. Early on in the game, Deacon’s best friend Boozer is attacked by a group of Rippers, a doomsday cult with a number of bizarre rituals. The Rippers singe a tattoo off Boozer’s arm and leave him with third-degree burns, so Deacon’s purpose in life is to keep Boozer alive and healthy. This mostly involves finding sterile bandages and the one mission where you gather meat for him. On top of that, though, Deacon sees a helicopter belonging to the government agency NERO, which had been involved in the initial relief effort, flying overhead. That gives Deacon a bit of hope that Sarah might still be alive, since he’d put her on a NERO helicopter after she was stabbed, so you start stalking the NERO soldiers and scientists to investigate further.

There are a number of flashbacks to Deacon’s relationship with Sarah before the outbreak, bolstered by his hope that she’s alive. They’re largely awkward cutscenes interspersed with short sections of walking slowly while Sarah and Deacon talk about surface-level topics, and they don’t ever provide a convincing reason why they’re together. Deacon is a biker and Sarah is a “nice girl” scientist, which is fine, but “opposites attract” isn’t enough to make their relationship compelling. It’s romantic in that Deacon hasn’t given up on Sarah, but the main takeaway from the flashbacks is that they’re physically attracted to each other and that Deacon doesn’t talk about his feelings.

The NERO arc is where things really pick up. Spying on the NERO scientists consists of insta-fail stealth missions. They can be frustrating before you unlock abilities to improve your stealth skills, but the conversations you overhear are legitimately interesting and answer questions that other zombie fiction often neglects. For example, you learn from one eavesdropping on a scientist studying Freaker scat that they eat more than just other people and each other–they also eat plants, and that means they’re not going to starve any time soon (like in 28 Days Later). Deacon quickly gets in contact with a NERO researcher who uses government resources to track down what might have happened to Sarah. Even though their relationship is confusing, it is a tempting mystery.

Abandoned Nero medical units and research sites contain more small details, including recorders that play snippets of scenes–a scientist studying a Freaker specimen, the moment a camp got overrun, or just banter between soldiers. Getting inside a unit is a matter of refueling the generator, making sure to find and disable every speaker nearby so the noise doesn’t attract Freakers. Finding each speaker can be a bit tricky at certain sites, which makes the moment you turn the power on more exciting and the realization that you’re in the clear more of a relief. And in addition to satisfying your curiosity, you’re also given the more tangible reward of an injector that improves your health, stamina, and bullet-time-like focus ability.

As you learn more about NERO and the Freakers, you’re introduced to new, more powerful types of Freaks, including a berserker and an all-female variant that screams to attract more Freaks your way. They don’t really provide new challenges so much as slow you down, and they feel like a stopgap measure to tide you over until the first horde-based mission around 40 hours into the game. That first horde mission is exhilarating–running around while using tight spaces and molotovs to keep the horde off you, eventually taking out hundreds of Freakers, is a well-earned victory. But that mission is followed very quickly by another one, and after a short break, you have two more nearly back-to-back horde missions that lead up to the end of the main story. Without any breathing room, the hordes are exhausting to deal with, and you’ll likely have to stop everything to loot and rebuild your stockpile of resources after each one just so you can progress.

Ultimately, though, Days Gone isn’t about NERO or Sarah or the Freakers. It’s about Deacon, and what he wants is what matters. Narrative threads are dropped as soon as Deacon no longer has a use for them. Copeland and Tucker only matter until Deacon gets to a camp that has better supplies. Boozer’s health is only important because it’s Deacon’s reason for living. Even the fascinating little details about the Freakers are useless to Deacon, who only cares about Sarah–but not what Sarah wants or needs, just that his “ol’ lady” might be alive somewhere. Every character is seen through this Deacon-focused lens, and as a result, they’re two-dimensional.

Deacon is selfish, and it’s simply boring that the game is uncritical of him.

Deacon does not learn anything over the course of the game, and the story is concerned with validating his actions and feelings above all else. When one character urges him not to kill anyone in cold blood, Deacon “proves” that murder is better than mercy. As Boozer nearly breaks through to Deacon about learning to let go, Deacon learns something new about NERO and clings to his hope even harder. Deacon also has a policy where he doesn’t kill unarmed women, which does not affect the story in any way and goes completely unexamined. There’s no introspection here; Deacon is selfish, and it’s simply boring that the game is uncritical of him.

I did a lot of things in Days Gone. I burned every single Freaker nest; I cleared every ambush camp; I maxed out my bike; I took out a few optional hordes just because. Like Deacon with Sarah, I kept going because I hoped to find something, to follow a thread to a possibly fascinating or satisfying or impactful conclusion. But at the end of it all, I’d only gotten scraps.

Avengers: Endgame made good on its name and delivered a ton of endings–and most of them were actually great, if tragic, satisfying conclusions to a decade of work. One of them, however, was not.

And it very nearly ruined the entire movie.

Consider this your spoiler warning.

Steve Rogers finished out his tenure as a main line MCU hero by not only wielding Mjolnir and surviving a truly brutal beating by Thanos, he also (apparently) volunteered to be the person to deliver the Infinity Stones back to their respective points in the timeline. You know, to avoid all the branched timelines that the Ancient One warned Bruce Banner about with the help of their handy cosmic infographic. Steve does this completely alone for some reason, which also doesn’t make a lot of sense, but we’ll let that slide for right now.

The real problem is that Steve doesn’t actually succeed at his mission. He gives the Stones back, sure, and returns the Mjolnir he’s been using to Asgard, apparently, but then he decides to take a detour and go live a full life with Peggy Carter somewhere in the past. This results in him showing back up in the present not by taking the quantum portal, but by walking (or maybe he took an Uber? Who knows) to a bench about 50 feet to the left of the portal, returning as an old man who has lived an entire life in the blink of the audience’s eye.

We even get a little flashback of Steve finally sharing his dance with Peggy back in the ’40s (or maybe the ’50s, after the war) in what is obviously intended to be a very romantic, fulfilling coda to his story.

Or, maybe it would be, if it worked at all either in terms of Steve’s thematic arc throughout his MCU tenure or by the rules that Endgame itself established.

Getting Technical With Time Travel

Let’s take a look at Endgame’s time travel logic first. As explicitly stated, by Endgame’s own rules, you cannot change the present, you can only create new timelines–i.e. If the Infinity Stones weren’t placed back in the exact places in the exact moments they were taken from, the MCU would be dealing with a bunch of branching timelines where various characters and entire movies either couldn’t exist or would be completely doomed. A few of those branched timelines definitely still exist–an alternate 2014 where Thanos brought his forces to Earth years earlier than he originally did, an alternate 2011 where Loki escaped with the Tesseract after the end of Avengers 1, and so on–but the ones that were taken care of, were handled by Steve. That was his mission.

But in the process of closing off all the potential branches, Steve apparently made a new one. Or, rather, he should have made a new one, but somehow didn’t. Steve changed his own past, and the past of Peggy Carter, by being present for those 70 years he originally spent frozen and marrying her–which, for whatever reason, allowed him to still exist as an old man in the main timeline he left–our present.

If Steve had actually created a branched timeline, he wouldn’t have been an old man in our present. His reformed existence in the past should have changed events to the point that the movie’s present day would be different not only for Steve but for everyone. We’d be seeing a different timeline all together.

In the interest of mitigating the confusion here (and make no mistake–this is confusing as hell) let’s break it down. There are two potential possibilities.

Possibility 1 is that Steve did create an alternate timeline that we just never got to see where he and Peggy were married, possibly went off and were superheroes together, stopped HYDRA from infiltrating SHIELD, rescued Bucky, prevented Howard Stark’s assassination, and negated the need for the Avengers entirely. In the process, he erased the entire life that he knew Peggy had without him, including her husband and the kids she had while he was in the ice. Poof, gone.

Then, happy and old, Steve miraculously jumped back to our timeline unassisted, which ought to be impossible, and for no real reason, just in time to pass the shield on to Sam. Seriously, why would he bother coming back at all if he was so confident that the present day world didn’t need him anymore? Why leave the timeline he made, especially if it really were so much better? What incentive does he have to go through the trouble?

What About Option 2?

Possibility 2 is that Steve did not create a branched timeline by going back, just lived his life as quietly as possible through the post-war years. That would make him complicit in the knowledge of all the horrific things happening to the people he loves during those years. This would also mean, in order for the timeline not to be fundamentally broken, that our version of Steve would have always been married to Peggy, even if he didn’t know it until this exact moment. This not only contradicts the entirety of the Agent Carter TV show and various parts of the MCU up to now (like Steve’s meeting with dying Peggy after he dethaws), it also means that Steve would be Sharon Carter’s uncle–and, uh, that’s pretty gross, even if he didn’t know it at the time.

Even discounting the potential for unwitting incest, there are some other major problems here. Remember when Steve said when he sees a situation headed south, he can’t turn his back? Remember how Steve’s entire origin story revolves around his inability to sit back and let a conflict run its course without him? How he doesn’t like bullies no matter where they’re from? How he literally submitted himself to a potentially lethal science experiment rather than not fight in a war? How he jumped into German occupied territory without an army backing him up just on the off chance that there was something he could do to help his friend? How he can “do this all day?” Started a war to clear the name of his ex-assassin bestie? Still acted as a hero even while he was an international fugitive?

In what world does Steve Rogers, even a beaten down and jaded Steve Rogers, just sit on his hands and let the future deal with its own problems?

The answer should be none of them.

And none of this is even touching the fact that the people who returned from the Snap were very literally dropped into a future when no time had passed for them at all–the miniature version of Steve’s experience waking up from the ice back in 2011. But apparently he’s totally fine with just bailing on a world experiencing a level of trauma that he is uniquely handled to help them through.

“He’s earned the right to be selfish!” You say? Sure. If anyone deserves a vacation, it’s Steve–but that doesn’t mean he’s going to take one. We’ve spent the last 8 years learning the ins and outs of this character in the movies, and the last 7 decades learning about him in the comics. Letting things just happen is fundamentally not something he’d do. It’s just not. He could retire, pass the shield over to Sam, and take a major step back, but there’s no way Steve is ever just going to give up the fight altogether–and this has literally happened in the comics. Steve’s even been an old man, but he still doesn’t stop participating in superheroic world. It’s simply not in his nature to quit–that would be like Tony suddenly deciding not to be an engineer just for the hell of it.

But say the goofy, esoteric time travel logic doesn’t matter to you either way–there’s still an issue. It has less to do with the mechanics and more to do with Steve’s place within the MCU’s meta-narrative.

Let’s Ignore The Time Travel All Together

For a second, let’s just pretend that we don’t have almost 100 years of comics to look at and focus exclusively on the 60-some hours of film we’ve been given. Thematically, Steve is a guy who has lost a lot in these movies. Arguably, that’s his most defining quality–he went into the ice 70 years ago, and he thinks a different guy came out–his words, not mine. The motif of being unable to go home again is repeated poignantly again and again and again–and through all of that, through everything, Steve has learned how to keep going. And that’s a good thing–or at least, it was a good thing. By moving on, Steve was actually doing exactly what Peggy Carter had hoped for him (“the world has changed, and none of us can go back. All we can do is our best, and sometimes, the best that we can do, is to start over.”)

Sure, there are a few beats in Endgame specifically where it looks like he’s finally hit his breaking point (“some people move on, but not us”), but that only means he’s been beaten down, not taken out. Hell, he even manages to summon up the force of will in the 11th hour to be worthy of wielding Mjolnir, making him only the third character and only mortal in the MCU to do so. That’s nothing to scoff at.

Steve may be defined by loss, but the power of his character comes from turning that loss into strength. Sure, he’s a super soldier, he’s fast and strong and can take a major beating, but his actual superpower is his indomitable will. If there’s one thing you can count on in the world, it’s that Captain America is not going to give up, even when things are at their absolute worst.

Except for when he does, apparently. Giving Steve a temporal get-out-of-jail-free card may seem like a good idea on the surface, but at the end of the day all it does is recant his entire journey. What’s the point of emphasizing the perpetual motion machine that is Steve Rogers–the constant assurance that no matter how dark things get, no matter how much you lose, you can still move forward–if the ultimate reward is getting to do the exact thing he was told he couldn’t do; that he spent his life and five movies moving beyond?

Which is to say nothing about the completely squandered pay off for every moment of his solo trilogy. Remember how important his “I’m with you till the end of the line” refrain was with Bucky Barnes? Hopefully you do–there’s officially licensed merch with that line printed on it. Fans got it tattooed on their bodies. It comes up a lot, and for good reason. It wasn’t exactly subtle as far as big symbolic gestures are concerned and it was a major part of not one, not two, but three individual movies. Funny how now it’s more like “I’m with you until the exact moment I decide I don’t want to stick around anymore.” Funnier still how that line, maybe the most memorable Captain America line of the entire MCU next to “I can do this all day”–another thing that was, apparently, not true–doesn’t get a single shout out or call back in a movie that is about 90% shout outs and call backs to memorable MCU moments.

It’s cheap, not romantic, and a needlessly dull edge to an otherwise powerful arc. The lesson that ought to be about processing grief and turning toward the future became a carelessly handwaved wink-nod at returning to the past, at which point Steve’s journey is no longer about the process of recovery, it’s a message about working really hard until you’re miraculously presented with a magic bullet to make all your hard work and effort no longer matter.

Which, frankly, sucks.

And, really, none of this is even touching on the fact that Steve and Peggy’s soul mate level connection was fostered over the course of, what, like a week back in 1945? Maybe he should have gotten over it. She definitely did. There was a whole TV show about it.

They both deserved so much better.

You need a javascript enabled browser to watch videos.

Please use a html5 video capable browser to watch videos.

This video has an invalid file format.

Sorry, but you can’t access this content!

You need a javascript enabled browser to watch videos.

Please use a html5 video capable browser to watch videos.

This video has an invalid file format.

Sorry, but you can’t access this content!