Got Cadence of Hyrule

If there's one good thing about holding out on buying a Nintendo Switch until now, then it's certainly this: the physical version of Cadence of Hyrule – Crypt of the Necrodancer featuring The Legend of Zelda. (Seriously, what's with that freaking long title?)

Actually, I completely forgot that this was coming out this week and was only remembered by Nintendo on Twitter. I suppose, that's one of the cases where their social media marketing did the trick. But the last time that I didn't really care about a new Zelda-related title was when Freshly Picked: Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland came to Europe. I still ended up liking that game, however, so let's see how this goes...

It has all the DLC on it, which is quite neat and something that Nintendo usually doesn't like to do for their games, unless they are porting them over to the next console. And that's usually fair, because if you go and offer Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: Ultimate Edition on Nintendo Switch for half the price of what the game and its DLC did cost you originally, then it's going to piss off the early adopters. But in this case it's about the same of what you would pay for the game and Season Pass digitally (though I did get it for cheaper, actually).

But I prefer having games with box and cartridge for my collection. The only exception to this might be games that you keep playing on a daily basis, e.g. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate or Animal Crossing: New Horizons, where it can be annoying to swap the cartridges again and again. But at the same time I still like having such big titles as a physical version.

And Nintendo Switch games feel very "collectible" to begin with. The boxes are so small that you always feel like you could have a couple more. This is my eleventh Nintendo Switch game and I don't even have my own Switch yet...! And cartridges are great to have as well. Discs are quite sensitive and can be damaged easily, so I don't actually like collecting discs that much, where I don't even have a DVD or Blue-ray collection, just games. But with Nintendo Switch games everything seems perfect.

However, when it comes to the overall design, Cadence of Hyrule is probably the ugliest piece in my collection. I'm not a big fan of the artwork of this game and the cover art with the purple background already feels kind of bland. But at least there is something there, which is more than you can say about the inside:

 

When I first opened the box, I was actually irritated, because it looked like something is missing... Luckily, it wasn't the game, but Cadence of Hyrule doesn't have anything printed on the inside of the cover and this looks very... empty. Every other Nintendo Switch game I saw has something printed on the inside – some artwork, some map, ingame instructions, something... But apparently something that's not sold for full price isn't really worth the extra ink for Nintendo?