Bayonetta 3 stands defiant in its absurdity

Hello, Chris here with issue #306 of Switch Weekly — your Nintendo update. I hope you are doing well.

Another week, and another wrinkle in the ongoing Bayonetta 3 drama. We now seem to have a clearer picture of what has gone on in this messy voice acting spat. Details around pay have been clarified and corroborated — it's now somewhat obvious that Hellena Taylor wasn't wholly accurate with her initial account of how things went down. Many called into question Taylor's personal political views and was using that as some form of justification for her not getting fair pay — now, irrespective of how questionable you may find an individuals political views, that doesn't stand in the way of them being paid fairly. However, now that we can safely assume she wasn't completely honest about things, it's given this story a whole other weird angle: Taylor has since doubled down on the initial allegation, and encouraged folks to donate any "boycott" money to a list of charities, one of which is an anti-abortion group. It's one thing to ask fans of the series to boycott a game on fair pay grounds, but it's another to then ask them to donate that cash to a shitty charity. Any goodwill she may have had has now quickly dissipated. Anyway, as a result I've made a donation to the U.S. National Network of Abortion Funds. I imagine now that the game is finally out, most of the energy here has been spent — either way, it's the last mention of it I will be making here at the top of the newsletter. Turns out the game is good! Reviews are in the issue below.

In other news, car salesman Elon Musk finalised his purchase of internet doomscrolling hotspot Twitter this week. I've been on the service a long time (since 2007) and have made many friends and professional connections on it over the years — it's a site that I use a ton and makes up for a huge part of my time online — for better or worse it's the first thing I check most mornings. Why am I mentioning it here? Well, I use it every day to find great writers and folks in the Nintendo space to share their work here in this very newsletter. There's now some fear that things are all about to change — as such, I wanted to share this excellent piece from Nilay Patel at The Verge, which does a superb job of outlining Musk's very new reality.

Now, next week we've got around 30 games landing on the Switch. The full list of what is hitting the eShop is below for you as ever.

Finally, just a scheduling note: I'm going to have to make some boring web host changes over the next week or so, and as such, there may be some disruption to the newsletter. I'm hoping to avoid missing any issues, but consider this a heads up if you don't see Switch Weekly land in your inbox next week.

Huge thanks for reading.