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manygalaxiesinone · 4 years

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Pokemon... We need to talk.

((Hee ho dood! Prinnyfrost reporting for duty! So, remember in my previous post where I mentioned that the only way I would play Sword and Shield is if one of my brothers end up getting the game for me because I refuse to spend a penny of my own pocket on it and not to be surprised if that was the case?

Yeah that happened. Earlier this month, one of my older brothers decided to get the games for both me and him mainly because it’s been many years since we last actually played one together and now would be the chance to do so again since we both have a Switch. Fair enough I suppose. After all the last time we actually played together like this was on the DS.

As in the original DS...

with Digimon!

I was still reluctant to play the game despite that due to a mix of the controversy of this gen’s games as well as loosing interest with the series as a whole, but if you knew my brother as long as I have, you’d know that it’s a tad difficult after he’s set his mind on things like this, especially since I don’t play with him often in general because I’m a salty little shit. Though now that I have played for quite some time, I feel ready to talk about what I think about it and it’s...

just okay overall I suppose. There are things I like about it and things I don’t like. I can’t really say I’m disappointed because I didn’t really have many expectations to begin with, but at the same time I can’t really say it’s a breath of fresh air either after years of playing other main series Pokemon games.

I got more excitement out of Let’s Go Eevee than this game, though to be fair it was mainly out of pure nostalgia because it’s a remake of Pokemon Yellow, the very first Pokemon game I’ve ever played back when I was a kid. Then again, I guess the simple fact that it managed to do so where I was happy for actually spending my own money on getting it makes it more of a success. Not that much though, since it has its own flaws, but you get the idea.

Before I go into everything I’m not fond of (and trust me, there’s quite a bit), let’s start off with everything I actually enjoyed about Sword and Shield.

I am sort of fond of the wild area. Looking at it kinda gives me Breath of the Wild vibes (and despite on how much I’m personally not all that fond of the game, that is a compliment, trust me). It’s a nice little open area to catch Pokemon at your leisure and it just looks damn beautiful to me, though I do wish there weren’t so many specific pokemon that you can only catch in this area in only specific sections and only specific weather conditions,

I’m looking at you Clefairy.

I also like the designs of the new Gigantamax forms. They all look pretty interesting and having some of the moves be changed to be a bit more unique depending on the form is interesting, but that’s all I can say about it since Dynamax as a whole is pretty much just the trainer going

...and that’s it. No type changes and like I said, the more unique skills are barely that unique at all, especially compared to certain Z-Moves that only certain Pokemon can do. It’s an alright addition to the series, but I won’t really consider it a replacement for mega evolution or Z-Moves.

I do like how the title for the championship became more of a contest between trainers. I mean it was already a bit like that before, but not quite as emphasized as it is here. It was actually exciting, hearing the crowed roar in the stadium outside of the actual Pokemon Stadium games. It’s been quite a while since I felt this amped up on my way to facing the champion in a Pokemon game, probably since SoulSilver.

Finally, as for the characters, they’re alright. Some I liked like Nessa, Marnie, Bede, Piers, Sonia, Leon, Allister, Oleana, and even Team Yell to some degree. Yeah, while I don’t find them nearly as entertaining as Team Skull, I do like the fact that Nintendo kinda knows that their baddie teams haven’t been all that threatening lately, so they don’t really bother in this game. Just make them a bunch of people from a town cheering on someone in hopes of getting a better life as a result. That’s pretty neat. Unfortunately, I can’t really say the same for everyone though. I’m not all that fond of Hop, the rival of the game. I don’t outright hate him, unlike my brother. I do like that despite him being the nice rival, he’s still full of himself, so sure that he’ll be the next in line to become champion after his brother Leon and thinks we’re the second banana on this journey. I’ll admit, that did give me an urge to kick his ass, show him who’s the real star of the show, but aside from that he wasn’t that interesting to me. I personally would’ve preferred either Marnie or Bede as a rival over him, but that’s just me.

Chairman Rose started off interesting to me at first, but that heel turn near the end just made me sigh. I had a feeling it was going to happen when I first saw him, but I thought “nah, it couldn’t be.” What really irritates me about it isn’t how he plans on using the “darkest day” to solve a crisis he sees coming in the future. After all, Jin Kazama kinda did the same in Tekken 6, but the fact that he was so impatient to get started on it. Like Leon said, he could’ve just waited another day after the tournament to help reduce the lives that might’ve been loss from this. It’s not like he had to carry out his plan on that specific day or wait a whole bunch more years or something, but no. Let’s risk the lives of many people right now in order to save the city from the potential energy crisis that’s estimated to occur many future generations from now. That and after you defeat him, he’s all like “eh, it’s all good. Go clean up my mess.”

Then there are these two annoying brothers that come bug everyone after you beat the champion. My brother hates them and so do I. A pair of annoying snooty wealthy trainers that says “well well well” too much that think they can get anyway with anything.

Seriously, just looking at these two makes me miss the Paradox Brothers from Yu-Gi-Oh!.

And now here come the things that I’m not particularly fond of. And no,before anyone says it, it’s not them removing half of the Pokedex...initially. If anything, having less pokemon makes it easier to fill up,

though I am still pissed off that the dratini line are among the Pokemon that were removed. No there are other things in this game that I couldn’t quite get over while playing.

One of which is a constant complaint I hear when it comes to not just this, but also other recent Pokemon games, which is the absurd amount of handholding.

Look, I don’t consider myself a hardcore gamer. Far from it actually. I’m not against the ideas of games having options to make things less difficult for newcomers who want to play and enjoy it their first time. At the same time though, my personal pet peeve for games are those that fail to make these changes just that, optional.

In the past, the experience share can be turned on and off if you felt like your party is leveling up too quick and you’re becoming overpowered as you progress. This is something that may help provide more of a challenge for players that seek them. This is a change, in my opinion, is welcomed for the series as it’s an optional easy mode for those wanting to get into Pokemon, but feel they should ease into things first. Also it makes grinding less tedious to deal with in post game. In games like Sword and Sheild; however the feature for pokemon getting shared experience is already implemented and there’s no way to turn it off.

As a result, I pretty much breezed through the game without too much issue except for raid battles later on in the game and the final battle with the champion Leon. I even practically destroyed my brother on our first battle together because of our party’s level differences.

Now I know what someone might bring up, the fact that the system in both Digimon Cyber Sleuth games make things arguably even easier since not only is the experience shared throughout the whole party, but you can you carry more digimon in your party than in pokemon, and the fact that there are items in the game as well as digimon with unique abilities that increase the amount of experience you get, which can all be stacked on each other.

Which is true. I even stated before that I managed to max out all of my digimon in far less time in my grindfest when compared to any pokemon game; however that doesn’t mean that the whole game was easy. After all, that grindfest I did happened in post game. During the game, there were still quite a few battles I ended up struggling with despite the higher earned experience and that’s down to a few reasons.

1. While you can potentially hold up to 11 Digimon in cybersleuth, each digimon takes up a certain amount of space when you include them in your party, and the higher ranking they become, the more space they take up. You can’t start the game right away with 11 mega leveled digimon since the only way to increase your party storage is to get items that specifically does so which can be found in areas you unlock as you progress. 2. Even if you do get your digimon to the required level to digivolve, chances are, it’s not the only requirement to fulfill. Certain stats such as friendliness, HP, strength, ect also need to be at a certain area before digivolving, which the digimon may not be able to once it reaches its max level, thus having to de-digivolve into a previous form in order to get stronger. 3. Even when your digimon have fulfill the requirements, in terms of this game at least, none of the digimon can digivolve straight away. You have to go inside this game’s version of the Velvet Room and select the option for your digimon to evolve. Even then, as stated before, you have to make sure there’s enough room in your party to include your digimon after it evolves, otherwise you’ll have no choice but to either bring it back to the previous form after all that work, or leave it in your farm or digibank until there’s more room made.

These reasons help balance out the easy as hell grinding to make sure the game isn’t far too easy for those seeking a challenge. It may not be a perfect setup, but it is a system I personally prefer over what Pokemon has now.

Speaking of the raid battles, I don’t have much to complain about here, except for one factor that ruins it for me. If you’re playing offline by yourself, good luck with these battles. It starts out alright, not too much trouble, but once you start going against the more powerful Pokemon, you’d better hope you have a friend to play with if you want to win these raids, because the AI here is pretty much pathetic. Their pokemon are so weak that they pretty much die in one hit unless they have a focus sash. Not to mention they sometimes bring pokemon that are completely weak or useless against the raid boss you’re going against. I recall one time when I was going against a Frillish and at least 2 of my party members have water types, one of them only had water type skills as well. I ended up failing it the first time because Frillish heals from every water attack it took, so no matter how much damage I was doing to it, at least one of my allies brought its heath back up. It may not seem like that big a deal at first, but once you die 4 times, and I don’t mean just you. Everyone share 4 lives and once you die, you wait a turn to get revived. Once you die 4 times, you’ve lost the raid battle and have to start over again, which is easy to do since your AI partners will more than likely get one-shotted and certain raid bosses can attack twice as well as use skills that hits everybody. I had to retry catching a gigantamaxed laprys so many times because of this that once my brother finally came home from work, I made him play the game with me so I won’t risk losing in 1 or 2 turns again.

Also, the TRs. Who the fuck though this was a good idea? Bringing back the skill learning items that break after only 1 use and can only be obtained from gathering wattages or grinding in raids. Not only that, but only certain skills can only be obtained depending on what type of Pokemon you fight against during said raids. I got so many Tri-Attacks that I have no idea what to do with them while at the same time, moves like flare blitz, I’ve been holding onto for just the right Pokemon, because I have no idea when I’ll ever get one again. That doesn’t make the game fun, it makes grinding more of a chore.

I was among the people that were against the idea of bringing the damn bike back instead of riding around on our Pokemon like in both Sun and Moon and Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee. What the hell made bring back one-use only items that certain pokemon can only learn certain skills by using these things was also a good idea?!

Oh yeah that’s right, Nintendo or at least the Pokemon Company decided to turn the Pokemon games into a big mystery box from now on, with certain features being either added or removed with each release.

It’s kind of like what Jim Sterling said. The Pokemon business model has always been shit, ever since arguably Red and Blue, which even I have pointed out the issues in having multiple versions of one game when I made my “Everything Wrong With Pokemon: Yellow Version” parody sometime back. It’s only just recently that fans have been pushed to their breaking point to such a degree with the DLC being implemented with Pokemon that were previously removed.

Which brings me to...probably the most unforgivable thing about the game...the DLC. For those of you who still want to “catch ‘em all” like in Pokemon’s tagline, you may have to dish out some more cash in order to fill up your pokedex. And even then, if it’s like previous generations, the reward for doing so is probably going to be shit anyway, with either a certificate stating that you actually managed to do it, or an item that increases the odds of finding a shiny. Yeah, it just increases the odds, not guarantee. Anyway, for those who still want to get every single Pokemon available in the game, just be prepared to apologize to your wallet. You see on top of paying $60 just to play one version of the game or $120 to play with your brother like we did, or play through both versions of the game yourself to make sure you get all of the Pokemon, you’re still going to have to get the upcoming expansion pass which include Gigantamaxed forms of the 3 starts for this region as well as at least some of the pokemon that weren’t in the game originally, and chances are since this is Pokemon we’re talking about, some of the pokemon can only be found in one of the expansions while others can be found in the other version. I could be wrong, but I don’t think they deserve the benefit of the doubt at this point, which would cost at least $30 right now. I’m not sure if it’s $30 for both or buy one now and spend another 30 for the next one since it is a 2 parter, but that’s still at least $15 each.

Plus, with the newly announced Pokemon home it’s another $15 dollars to pay for the whole year, unlike the Pokemon Bank which was only $5 a year and the Nintendo Switch Online service in order to play online which is $20 a year.

And of course, let’s not forget the Pokeball Plus that you have to buy in order to get Mew if you don’t already have one when you got Let’s Go Pikachu/Eevee, which was initially about $50-$60 if I recall. Yes, you can use it as a controller once you got it, but I’m not sure if it’s compatible with anything other than Pokemon. Even if I’m wrong, I doubt anyone would pay for it outside of simply getting Mew

and the fact that Pokemon had something like it back during Heartgold and Soulsilver that came free with every copy when it first came out, so this seems really scummy to me by comparison.

My brother has pointed out that not everyone has to get the DLC and people can still get Pokemon featured via trading. Which I guess is true, but it’s still going to be difficult for those who don’t have friends playing the game to help them fill out their pokedex. Not everyone is going to help you trade pokemon in order to simply evolve the ones that can only do so by being traded or get legendaries that are exclusive to one version of the game and you can only get one of. Yeah there are surprise trades, but those are randomized. You still have to get lucky that someone else who traded a pokemon using this feature will end up giving you what you want. I’ll admit, I did managed to somehow get a freakin’ Zekrom using this feature in one of the previous titles, but I assure you that it’s a very rare opportunity.

Even if we did bring back the original GTS system, there’s always going to be quite a few assholes wanting to get low leveled shiny legendary pokemon in exchange for just a normal regular Pokemon that you can’t get in your version of the game like a mawile or something.

Not to mention even after getting the new slowpoke that came out in the new update sometime ago, you can’t even evolve it until you get an item that’s exclusive only to the DLC! That is downright shady as hell and now I feel bad for my brother buying me this just so we can finally play together in a Pokemon game after all these years.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t outright hate this game. Like I said earlier, it’s fine. It has its moments. Overall it is indeed another Pokemon game, but maybe that’s ultimately it’s main issue. The simple fact that overall when you consider everything, it’s JUST another Pokemon game, nothing more and nothing less. But hey, they’re still probably going to make money off of it anyway, so what do I know?))

#pokemon sword and shield

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