Ocarina of Time Update & Nintendo's Tariff Battle With... Customers!?

[00:00:00]All right, folks. We're giving away a Nintendo Switch 2 right now. You can enter through the link down in the pin comment or the description. The only requirement to enter is to be subscribed to the channel. And we got two really prevailing big stories for you here today. Uh we got a couple small ones to go over as well, including Splatoon Raider reviews. Uh but we got to talk about an update to a lawsuit Nintendo finds themselves in and how they responded to it. this one dealing with the tariff money potentially going back to Nintendo, which by the way, uh they also are currently in an active lawsuit against the US government over that, including thousands of others, and I know there's been some resolutions with some of that, but that's neither here nor there. They gave a response that has lit the internet on fire today, even though the response was obviously made to a court judge, though entire purpose of this obviously being they want the case kind of thrown out because they don't really think there is a case for them to be refunding money to consumers.

[00:00:48]But people did not like the way that Nintendo's lawyers stated it regardless of the fact that well, let's just get to the story, right? Let you guys judge for yourselves and I'll give my opinions as well. Next up, we also have a story dealing with Nintendo Switch 2 and Ocarina of Time.

[00:01:04]We actually finally have a new bit of information coming directly from Nintendo. And I find this to be really, really interesting. And this kind of coincides as well with some toy reveals that are going to be coming that we'll talk more about tomorrow because that's when we'll really get a good look at this stuff. Uh, but that being said, let's go ahead and get into the little bit of news we have before the two big stories. So, the first one here, we got The Witcher coming out here. So, it says, "Our path to Gamescom 2026 starts with opening night live on August 25th.

[00:01:32]Catch a glimpse of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Songs of the Past during the show.

[00:01:36]Mark your calendars to watch Opening Night Live August 25th at 11:00 a.m./200 p.m. Eastern or 8:00 p.m. CST." Now, if you guys didn't know, they are obviously releasing a brand new DLC for The Witcher 3. And they're doing this to kind of help bridge them all the way over to what they're doing with, you know, The Witcher 4. So, instead of having like oodles and tons of plot holes or a lot of stuff that happened between the games that, you know, you just find out throughout playing Witcher 4, they're going to be like, "Hey, how about let's have a little bit of a connecting story arc to where we're going with Witcher 4." And again, remember, Witcher 3 is on Switch and obviously because of that, vice versa, Switch 2. you should expect to see this DLC at least coming to Switch 2, if not obviously the Switch one as well. And then opening Night Live. Uh hey, look, last year uh we had like the Indiana Jones reveal for Switch 2. So there's some reasons to pay attention to that that we will be paying attention to. Uh more than that, Nintendo has uh decided to update the free roam track list for Nintendo Music for Party Kart World. Uh so here's the songs they did add. So Mario Kart World, free roam and Kart Super Circuit. They added Peach Circuit, Shy Guy Beach, Riverside Park, Bowser Castle, Cheese Land, Ribbon Road, Yoshi Desert, and Rainbow Road. Then Mario Kart World in the Free Rone area with Mario Kart Double Dash, the Luigi Circuit, Baby Park, Dry Dry Desert, Mushroom Bridge, Sherbet Land, Bowser's Castle, Rainbow Road, and the staff credits. So, there you guys go. Uh, you guys might already be aware of that if you've checked out Nintendo Music today, but if you haven't, there it is. Uh, next up, we got Splatoon Raiders. That is the big release this week. And no, we're not going to have a lot of discussion around Between Raiders this week cuz that'll be next week's podcast where we do a pseudo review discussion of the game, but reviews did drop today.

[00:03:15]And I always like to look at this for major Nintendo releases and it is sitting still. Even now, it didn't drop.

[00:03:21]It's been at an 80 on Metacritic all day. Seems to be a general consensus.

[00:03:24]So, this is a really good game. Maybe not quite as good as traditional Splatoon, but it obviously varies. So, let's go into some of the critic reviews here. Uh obviously at the top here we're seeing things like Spatoon Raiders from Pocket Tactics saying Spatoon Raiders uh of Fish Alley returns a seal of approval as a fantastic game in the franchise.

[00:03:43]Whether you go it alone or help get from other players searching for loot, mining ore has never been so fun thanks to the amount of weapons and gadgets you can equip to blast enemies out of existence.

[00:03:52]Plus, you get to hang out with Deep Cut, which is always a fun time. Then you see Techraar Gaming here. They also uh gave it 100 and there's their full review.

[00:04:00]Anyways, the summary they had here says, "Splatoon Raiders is a wonderful solo reinvention of the popular multiplayer series filled with smartly designed missions and endlessly engaging progression systems, underpined by the franchise's fantastic shooting mechanics. It's a fresh and exciting adventure that should be in every Switch's library." So, then let's go down to some of the uh lower reviews, of course, because you know, you want to see both ends of the spectrum. What's the lowest reviews say? What are the highest reviews? And a little bit in the middle. And look, there's a lot of reviews, guys. 60s something reviews, but we're getting down to some of the lower ones, including uh this one by the Guardian, who says, "This is the biggest surprise about Splatoon Raiders. It is pedestrian. If you played one of dozens of modern cooperative action games, you've played this." Which is really interesting because Splatoon Raiders and the gameplay of Splatoon is not like most modern action games. I don't really get it. But hey, you know what? I haven't played the game. So, that is their opinion. Uh Daily Star over here said, "I never quite fully gotten to grips with the motion control." Ah, so this person struggled with the with the shooting. which by the way is optional.

[00:04:56]You can turn off the motion aiming, but whatever. Uh, so move the switch around to aim system on top of the thumb stick physical in-game character movement, but it does its job well enough in this title not be a complete nuisance. You can also turn it off. I don't know why they anyone who struggles with that, I don't know why they don't know. You can make it a normal twin stick shooter.

[00:05:11]Just turn it off.

[00:05:13]It's interesting when I see complaints about that when it's optional. Anyway, Stev Iver says, "Removing Turf War and transitioning to something pretty close to first-person shooter. Nintendo has taken what makes the franchise unique and discarded it. Man, people are just really trashing on this. Now, let's go up and read some of the more in the middle like our 80s here, right? Like digitally downloaded said, "I realize I'm not the target audience for Spoon Raiders, and I'm sure those that are the target audience will get a great deal of value out of the depth of its systems.

[00:05:38]And from Nintendo's point of view, it's a relatively lowcost project to fill the release schedule until the next big thing, Fire Emblem, comes along. I do however suspect that just about everyone from the diehard fans to me on the spectrum of Splatoon advocacy will ultimately wish that the first proper single player outing for the franchise were a bit more than it turned out to be. So even kind of a negative slant at the end but again we don't have the context of the rest of the review or there must have been some positives there. Uh that being said guys that's obviously some summaries. You know we're going to get our thoughts as a cast next week on the Nintend podcast. So, uh, let's go ahead and move on then to the next story. And this is now one of the big stories, one of the highlights of today. Uh, and we're going to be giving you everything, the complete story here.

[00:06:21]Um, because look, I'm a subscriber. I've been paying every single month. This is one of the reason I do is that GameFile, a website by Steph Dilla, does an amazing job, but obviously they charge to read their articles. I'm going to give you all the information from this article. We're going to go through it because this information actually comes from publicly available court documents.

[00:06:37]They're just a pain in the ass to sift through court documents if you didn't know. Uh so Stephan Tatilla did it for us. I'm going to link down below. Uh I encourage you to support his work like I do. I I pay 10 bucks a month because I find his reporting to be worthwhile.

[00:06:50]Nintendo says it has no legal duty to pass its US tariff refunds on to consumers. Ask court to dismiss a class action lawsuit accusing it of potentially unjust enrichment. So the thing here is Nintendo is suing the government because the tariffs imposed last year were not legally viable. This was this was turned out this year all the money the federal government collected from the tariffs imposed under Trump last year has to be given back to the companies. The companies are the ones that actually pay the tariffs at the moment their products come into the country. And then obviously what normally happens with tariffs and everyone's pretty aware of this is when you are imposing high tariffs on a company importing goods, they're likely going to increase the price of those goods to the consumers. So it usually ends up being a cost pass down to consumers. And Nintendo did raise the price of Switch One last year and they did raise the price of some of their Switch 2 accessories. But they are presenting a legal argument here to have the case thrown out. And I have some thoughts on that. So, let's see what they said. As we scroll down here, it says, "Nintendo is asking the court to dismiss a proposed class action suit that was filed this past spring by gamers who say the Mario Maker is breaking the law if it doesn't pass on its US tariff refunds to consumers.

[00:08:02]Those consumers received exactly what they bargained for when buying price hiked Nintendo goods last year," the company said in a filing on Monday. In the case of Hoffer at LV Nintendo, that's the case you can look up to obviously see this for yourself.

[00:08:18]Plaintiffs are not entitled to a rebate simply because of intervening legal developments related to tariffs.

[00:08:24]Nintendo increased the price of Switch 2 controllers and the original Switch last year following the imposition of globe spanning US tariffs. Tariffs described by Nintendo's lawyers on Monday as sweeping and constantly changing, which I think is an understatement for the way it was going down last year. Anyways, anyways, this past February, the US Supreme Court ruled that the tariffs were illegal. A month later, Nintendo sued the US government. So did pretty much every business under the world and the government is working on settling all that stuff out. Uh anyways, that's a whole like another side to this is that Nintendo isn't alone. Like all these companies are trying to get their money back. Anyways, and in April, gamers fired the class action claim against Nintendo in Washington [clears throat] saying it would be illegally double dipping if it made money from tariff hike sales and then from a refund. The gamers sought relief for anyone in the US who bought price hike Nintendo items between February 2025 and February 2026.

[00:09:17]The common thread among plaintiff's claims is that somehow unfair or it is somehow unfair that Nintendo has not retroactively adjusted its prices for completed sales in response to the outcome of the tariff litigation, which is kind of what they're asking. They're saying, "Hey, we should get money back."

[00:09:34]So, you're saying, "Hey, we should retroactively adjust our prices." That is a little bit of an unheard of thing in the case of tariffs. Anyways, the company's lawyers wrote in today's motion to dismiss, but that is not how commercial transactions work. This is according to Nintendo. Nintendo or one of its retailers sets a price for each product, and consumers decide whether that price was worth paying. Those who bought Nintendo products received exactly what they bargained and paid for, a console, a game, an accessory, at a price to which both parties agreed.

[00:10:02]The money plaintiffs paid represents the purchase price of the goods they wanted and received. Plaintiffs are not entitled to a rebate simply because of intervening legal developments related to tariffs. Nintendo's lawyers argue that the plaintiff's position would force any transaction with any company to be subject to retroactive adjustments. And they're not wrong. In this request for its dismissal, Nintendo said it did not pass on the full cost of tariffs to customers, absorbing some of the tariff cost of the Switch 2 in particular. So, this is a key point you're not seeing brought up in a lot of today's coverage of this because it requires you to pay to get this information. So, like its market peers, Nintendo made the difficult decision to adjust some of its prices in response to market conditions, including cost of memory, labor, shipping, and tariffs.

[00:10:47]Unlike many of the market peers, however, Nintendo did not simply increase each product's price by the amount of the tariffs it paid on that product or impose an acrosstheboard tariff searchcharge. Instead, Nintendo imposed modest and selective price adjustments, and it chose to bear the cost of the tariffs on some of its most popular products of 2025, including the flagship console, the Nintendo Switch 2.

[00:11:11]Note that in the above section, Nintendo attributes a portion of the 2025 price hikes to causes beyond just tariffs, including increased costs for memory, labor, and shipping. The company says it would be arduous for it to calculate the specific portion of any price increase that were due to tariffs. that allocation is difficult enough product byproduct within a single company. The lawyers state Nintendo lawyers also argue that the gamers who sued could not have sustained a substantial injury, which is the grounds for suing from the price like Nintendo goods because there were alternatives. If a consumer did not want to pay the advertised price, they were free to abstain from purchasing the product or seek out competing products.

[00:11:49]I mean, that is true. It's an optional good. Uh, the company says it believes the Gamer case should be handled through a private arbitration, but has filed its more public request for dismissal in case the arbitration process is denied.

[00:12:01]Class action lawsuits have been filed against other big companies with similar arguments about consumers deserving the unwound tariff uh, revenue among companies facing a suit is Sony for its price increase on PlayStation. Right.

[00:12:13]Sony's being sued for the same thing.

[00:12:14]They just haven't, you know, we just don't have any public responses from them yet from their lawyers. I suspect a very similar response will come from their lawyers as well. Some companies such as FedEx have vowed to pass their tariff refunds of 800 million worth to consumers who pay the increases, but Nintendo has not, nor has pretty much anyone else. And there was an update here where they changed the top image from Switch 2 to Switch One because the Switch One is the platform they actually did increase due to tariffs. All right, so my full thoughts on this are are as such. I look because the stance I have here, people are going to assume that I am just, you know, this big corporate cuck, which you know what, people already assume it anyways. So, I'm just going to say I kind of agree with Nintendo's logic. There's a line here that just it's true regardless of like if you just take this on on face value, it's really hard to deny what they said here. Um, you know, cuz they talked about how this is somehow like unfair or whatever, but it says Nintendo or one of its retailers set a price for each product and consumers decided whether that price was worth paying. Those who bought Nintendo's products received exactly what they bargain and paid for.

[00:13:16]Like that's it. That's like the end of the argument. You didn't have to buy their goods. There were other options on the market you could have bought. You didn't have to buy their stuff. And even then, you were buy you got something for your money. like your argument to try to get it back in my opinion is just not very good. Uh Nintendo not only admitted that hey we didn't even increase the price as much as we needed to to cover tariffs and we also didn't even increase the price on our number one selling like we are we got massacred in our profit margins and we chose to eat that like tariffs didn't change the cost of that.

[00:13:50]So, the amount of money like I I don't know if this this lawsuit realizes like the switch one or the switch two is not going to actually be part of this like even even if this somehow went the way of the consumer which cool consumers get a little bit of a rec. You're talking about like a couple bucks like do you understand like you're not going to get anything out of this. A majority of the money that Nintendo lost last year in tariffs were the sales of the Switch 2, which they literally have public announcements that they announced the price of the Switch 2 before the tariffs were even implemented and then they had the tariffs getting implemented and they still decided not to raise the price of the Switch 2. So again, this is one of those things where like we agree to buy something. I we receive something. You know, if if you know, you're saying, "Oh, Nintendo's going to benefit double." But benefit double from what?

[00:14:37]They're just getting back the money they paid in taxes. It's a tax return to them. I don't understand why we feel like we're entitled to it just because yes, companies do raise prices over this stuff. But this is this be I think I'd be a bit more understanding if this was like a need. Like if we're talking about a food item or something like that, I could understand maybe being like, "Okay, dude. If everyone's paying the increased prices for eggs over stupid that's completely illegal, then the people who paid that price should get their money back." I get that. We're talking about a non-essential good.

[00:15:08]We're talking about an optional thing you never needed to buy. So, I I just don't get why people think they're entitled to refunds. That said, I know it's shitty. This is not me not saying this isn't shitty. I think obviously the thing I'm mad about the most is that the tariffs existed at all. By the way, they still exist now. They're just doing a different law for it that probably won't get shot down this time. So, it's not as if the economic condition got better for Nintendo. you're asking them to retroactively try to figure out how much of a percent of their increase was due to that versus due to the rising cost of production. I mean, come on. It's it's pretty unrealistic on a consumer good to expect this. And I tried looking around.

[00:15:47]There's not really any like legal cases like this uh that have gone the way of the consumer because again, it is an optional consumer good. You never need to buy and you did receive a product for that price. I I don't know why consumers think they have a say about how a company uses that money. um you know when you bought that $450 Switch 2 whatever cut went to the retailer the rest of that money you know at Nintendo they get to decide what happens to it and part of that money was going to taxes that they now get back. So yeah I just I I think that this is probably much to do about nothing probably settled out of court but also might just be completely dismissed. We'll see though because this is going to be an important case because if it's not dismissed, remember there is a class action lawsuit against Sony right now over very similar things, but specifically targeting the increase of the console price, not accessories. So, we'll see. Uh, but this might be the one that's going to set the precedent. Like, if this gets tossed out, then I assume the other ones might get tossed out as well, at least for ones that deal with consumer entertainment optional products that people never had to buy and still found it worth the value at whatever given price. So, I just It's weird. It's really weird. It's kind of like It's kind of like me going to a store and buying a TV and then finding out the TV is discounted two weeks later and I want that discount price, but I shouldn't feel entitled to that. Now, if the store has a policy that allows me to still get a rebate and get that price point within 30 days or whatever, that is a thing.

[00:17:07]But if that policy doesn't exist, I can then I can't just then get pissed at the store and say they stole my money when I bought a product for an agreed upon price. This is what I mean. Like I consumerism also involves us being responsible for the money we spend. So like if you bought something, why do you expect to get money back for it just because the taxes changed on an end that you technically didn't pay because the taxes are paid upon entry into the country? So yeah, I get it. I understand why we blame all the companies. Really, the government's the one I'm not happy with. But it is what it is, guys. We don't want to get too political. Let's get to the Zelda stuff, though. This is where things get interesting. We have a couple Zelda updates. So, we know there's supposed to be a revealing of some brand new Zelda figures, 6-in PVC figures or whatever that are going to be sold in 2027. Today, we got a preview of it from Hasbro, just a small one, a little teaser. Uh, you're seeing the Hilian shield there. You're seeing the Masters are obviously are smaller. They go their their items Link probably holds. And you see Legend of Zelda. They obviously have it on a rock outside doing, you know, whatever. Trying to make a nice little little little shot here. This is by Hasbro. The hero's journey begins tomorrow. They're revealing three of them tomorrow. So, this is just kind of a teaser for that.

[00:18:16]I just wanted to throw that out there for you guys. Uh, and then the last thing on Ocarine of Time, and this is the one that has a lot of people talking today. We talked a bit about it last night, is that Nintendo uh has a summer catalog, right? In Japan, they have the summer catalog. You can get it at their stores, take it home, yada yada. It's usually free. Anyways, within that catalog contains some advertising. And it turns out Nintendo is starting to market Ocarina of Time. And how are they choosing to market it? Well, we have a little thing here. Genki, who lives in Japan, went ahead and grabbed the the new summer catalog, and it says the summer Legend of Zelda Ocarine Time remake page in the Nintendo summer catalog. And there is a slogan in it.

[00:18:53]The slogan says reborn across time. Now, obviously, you know, uh we have some people in our community that uh also speak Japanese and I wanted to and live in Japan, in fact. So, uh, one of them went on our member onlyly Discord server, which I do forget sometimes that we have a member onlyly Discord server.

[00:19:12]Um, so yeah, if you guys ever want to be a member, it's like $3 and up. You can hit join when you go to the profile page and then, hey, hook your account up on Discord and then you can get on the server. Anyways, we have someone who lives in Japan who gave a nice translation here and I want to go over theirs for alternative translations on this. So, it says Nintendo Prime. The link in the descript says, you know, here's a couple different ways you could translate this to English. So beyond time, so focuses on surpassing the limits of time, across time, which focuses on traveling through different eras or years, through time, focusing on enduring or lasting throughout history, or timeless, an adjective, meaning something never goes out of style or loses value. The yomigeru part they used is a kanji. So to be honest, there are other yomigo kanjis, but that's the one for everyone to understand and read.

[00:19:55]Universally known. You know, yomiro to meaning revive, resurrect, restore, or bring back to memory. Now, obviously, I find all of this to be really interesting as you deep dive in here.

[00:20:05]Beyond time, across time, through time, timeless, reborn, reborn seems to be the one word that's not disputed here.

[00:20:12]Reborn has been used universally with Nintendo, right? They've used it when uh in some of their tweets. They've used it in some of their other marketing material. And while they've used Reborn with other games, they didn't always use Reborn across the actual like language barriers. They are using it in Japan as well in their literal summer catalog.

[00:20:32]This obviously means something. And the thing is there's a lot of ways to interpret it. He said, you know, surpassing the limits of time or traveling through which we do technically travel through time with eras and years technically. um maybe enduring and lasting or hey, you know, never goes out of style. This is just look, we need to see the game, right?

[00:20:52]That's the big crux here. We need to see Ocarina of Time. We need to see actual gameplay. I do think we're going to get that next month. Look, we have to get it before the end of the year because the game comes out this year. So, I'm just going to leave everything at that. I know guys that we could speculate a hell of a lot more and it's kind of cuts the Zelda part short, but I'm just going to be frank with you guys. Uh, I got a live stream to get to and uh we could probably talk more about this there if you guys like. Thank you so much for tuning in and I'll catch you in the next video.

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