I have a few more creature collector RPGs, one of which has no Switch or Switch 2 port) that should be mentioned here:

(I refuse to call many of these games "Pokemon clones" because technically, they should be called "Dragon Quest V clones" because that game, despite being limited to Japan at first because of Enix's pull out of overseas markets until their merger with Squaresoft, was the first game to include "creature raising and fighting for you" elements, not Nintendo or Game Freak as they want the US PTO or the public to believe.)

1. Digimon Story Time Stranger looks to be a very solid creature collector turn-based RPG that has a long and storied history. Liam, I believe you even mentioned it here. I wouldn't be surprised if this game never comes to the weak Nintendo Switch 2 hardware given the console frame rate (it's actually 30 fps locked on PS5 and Xbox Series S/X and maxes out on PC at 144 hz) and its heavy CPU load compared to other options (the Switch 2 isn't as powerful CPU wise as even the Steam Deck according to analysis by some outlets). The demo had some issues on launch, like I mentioned on the article comments, that were fixed with a demo update (the infamous white screen issue) and it is really fun! I played the demo and can't wait for October 2nd/3rd! What a birthday present to me! 😂 It has a "Playable" rating on Steam by Valve (for incorrect controller icons, which I haven't experienced) and I can confirm apart from Denuvo's horrible "5 machine per 24 hour limit" (even for the demo), it plays very well. If the full game is anything like the demo, which I played through to completion (I finished it just now), then I can highly recommend it! This might be my favorite creature collecting RPG since Cassette Beasts, another game I really liked! It releases on the aforementioned October 2nd/3rd, 2025.

2. This one is also coming to all consoles, including Xbox Series X/S for the first time as well as PS5, PC, and Switch 2 (but not Switch), but Monster Hunter Stories 3 (and the entire side series for that matter) also bring some great gameplay and combat. This was especially apparent with 2 being a huge improvement from the original, and 3 looks to up the ante even further. (1 & 2 are available on PC and have "Verified" Steam Deck compatibility ratings on Steam by Valve and Platinum ratings on Proton DB and I can confirm they play well on even the Steam Deck!) Monster Hunter Stories 1 & Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin are currently available on Steam while Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection launches March 13, 2026 (for some reason, the release date hasn't been updated on Steam, but it has been confirmed by Capcom). (Also, fun fact, this series was co-developed in collaboration between Capcom, the developer of the parent Monster Hunter franchise, and Marvelous, best being known as the developer of the long-running Story of Seasons & Rune Factory franchises.)

Sorry for the long winded post, but I wanted to get my two sense in. I'm also so glad to see more franchises go past just consoles onto PC. (Well, apart from the one company who deserves nothing more than to be brought down. You know which one; the patent troll.)

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Update: My Steam Deck OLED did work, while I was able to get the Demo working on my laptop once I used Proton CachyOS and the latest update to the game demo, which appears to have been released in the last 12 hours. No other arguments were needed. It does seem to be a PC port locked at 144 fps and my PC could easily go past this with everything maxed out (it has an RTX 5090 laptop GPU after all).

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I cannot get it working. I tried several different versions on my laptop with an RTX 5090 GPU and the game screen was white and never loaded the game.

I tried several different Proton versions with no luck, but before I could try my Steam Deck OLED, I hit the "5 machine per day" Denuvo limit, and was locked out for 24 hours. On a free demo. What the heck!?

Here are the versions of Proton I tried without success:

• Proton CachyOS


• GE-Proton 10-15


• Proton Experimental


• Proton Hotfix


• GE-Proton 9-27

Then of course it locked me out.

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Quoting: BTRENah, it's a genuinely horrible disto. The telemetry that's enabled by default alone should disqualify them. The developers pull patches without testing them and break things (see the Asahi/Apple Silicon debacle but also past cases with glibc), they arbitrarily hold back packages for no discernible technical reason which has caused breakage in the past, use the --no-confirm flag with pacman to force reinstall packages with updates for no real reason, they've DDoS'd Arch's AUR multiple times, and are incompetent enough to not only renew their SSL certs for their site at least three times that I recall but actually recommended that users change back their system clock as a workaround! This isn't even getting into the strange internal issues with their treasurer resigning after objecting to a dev using donation funds inappropriately.

Apart from the treasurer leaving issue, which may or may not have been accurate (which unfortunately we not know the full story behind because he died of cancer in early 2023), all of these are legitimate issues. That's why I currently use EndeavourOS, granted, it's not for beginners whatsoever, given it doesn't come with a graphical package manager by default and it often will let you do dangerous things on your system. I do use it because I'm a much more advanced user, I prefer Pacman to APT and especially DNF or Zypper, and it uses nearly stock Arch repos so the AUR doesn't break your system, and back in 2020 - 2021, there really wasn't a good KDE stable distro: Fedora KDE wasn't as good as it is now, I didn't know about OpenSUSE, and Kubuntu never worked for me (and neither did KDE Neon). Just make sure you know the command line for certain actions like installing and updating repo packages and be prepared to use it.

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Quoting: vgnmnkyI used Kubuntu years ago, before moving on to Mint KDE. Of all of the Debian and Ubuntu-based distros, a Plasma Mint one is probably the only one I would bother with, shame it doesn't officially exist.

Tuxedo OS. It's basically that Mint KDE but actually supported by Tuxedo computers (that may seem a bit shady given the driver upstreaming issue, but the distro itself works great).

Quoting: vgnmnkyI used Kubuntu years ago, before moving on to Mint KDE. Of all of the Debian and Ubuntu-based distros, a Plasma Mint one is probably the only one I would bother with, shame it doesn't officially exist.

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Personally, I wouldn't install the current LTS version of Kubuntu, not just because of the snap issue, but because it is extremely out of date and no longer supported by KDE upstream. I'd recommend Tuxedo OS, which does use the same LTS base but is much more up to date for the KDE apps and Plasma versions and supported by a hardware vendor, that being Tuxedo computers, so it's not a fringe distro.

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For those who are wondering, EA anti-cheat is actually broken on Windows too; F1 24 (which afaik uses it) actually crashes computers with a BSOD when the game is closed. Then again, EA is a garbage company and has been for some time.

As for other companies, somebody is obviously bribing other companies to not enable BattleEye or Easy Anti Cheat on Proton. Whether or not it's Microsoft or somebody else remains to be seen.

As for Riot, they've been owned by Chinese CCP company Tecent for over 15 years now. Of course they want control over your entire system, to spy on it and install malware at will. All of those games using Vanguard are banned in my household and any system I work on because it's malware. If you come to me asking for help with a system and it has a game with that on it, it's getting removed as part of the "cleaning process". No program should be running at the OS kernel level apart from the OS itself.

"Oh, BuT wHaT aBoUt ThE cHeAtErS!?"

Did kernel level anti-cheat EVER WORK!? It's a race to the bottom, no doubt about it.

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Quoting: TuxeeTim Sweeney is a prick. And I don't care for Fortnite in the slightest. I'm waaaaay to mature for that crap.

I agree. Fortnite is cringe. I have no desire to play it.

And don't get me started on Riot/Tencent...

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Quoting: RedWyvernThen perhaps give TuxedoOS a try, which next to Linux Mint is my recommendation for beginners.
This is simply Ubuntu LTS with Flatpak instead of Snaps and up-to-date KDE Plasma as the Desktop.

Yes, please use Tuxedo OS. It's everything the Linux Mint KDE flavor used to be before Linux Mint 19 killed it. I tried installing KDE Plasma on Linux Mint 20 and it broke the install. Now Tuxedo OS is not perfect; as mentioned, the default theme is much worse than Breeze, but that's an easy fix, and for some reason, when I tested it, I couldn't get the keyboard layout to switch to US ANSI QWERTY instead of German ISO QWERTZ, so my keyboard was basically unusable on the live ISO. That being said, I'd argue Tuxedo OS is more similar to the former Linux Mint KDE flavor and it's far better than Kubuntu because it actually ships Plasma 6.1, unlike Kubuntu 24.04, which shipped an EoL 5.27.10, which also uses an EoL Qt version, and there's no Snaps or transitional packages out of the box, along with Flatpak being installed with Flathub out of the box. If you want something like Linux Mint but with KDE Plasma I'd go with Tuxedo OS for now, as all of the other distros I'd recommend using KDE Plasma with are rolling releases (for example, EndeavourOS or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).

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Unverified Flatpaks disabled by default (and clearly marked if enabled).

They also are removing reviews for unverified Flatpaks. I don't think this is a good decision, because aren't deb packages unverified? 😂

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