New next gen animal crossing concept:

“Roaming Lands”

Or

“Forest Dreams”

Player is an “adventurer” and is a ‘founder’ of new land (with the funding for development by Tom Nook). Select tasks are only available for the ‘founder(s)’ from different consoles (ex; building placement, building relocation, building updates, making constructions, etc.) choose friends wisely!

Bigger community based on land selection- ability to have multiple people on selected lands. Same console accounts or accounts from different consoles can live on the same land.

Host console has ability to move other founder(s) out. If the land is reset with the other ‘founder(s)’ from different consoles on it, the next console in line that moved to the land is now host.

Can visit other lands with an RV similar to pocket camp. “RV park” similar to new leaf for those visiting. Your RV can be placed down like a building in new horizons or is one whole unit including your home. RV park includes Harv’s home.

OK Motors reintroduced for RV customization and building relocation after certain milestones are met.

More opportunities for diverse terraforming. Bulk crafting and new recipes. Terraforming and specific crafting type acquired after certain milestones are met.

Introducing clothing recipes! Available after Able Sister’s building is constructed and certain milestones are met. Clothing can still be acquired at the Able Sister’s shop and by villagers.

“Dream time” is a one hour time frame between 1am and 2am where the landscape becomes a “dream world”. New fish and bug species are found in this world. New flower variants and select fruit. New recipes available. No fallen trees, terraforming, item placement, or construction during this time. Villagers can still be visited, but have similar dialogue to dreaming in new horizons. Villagers wear exclusively night wear during this time. Seasons will alter the dream scape (ex; spring is “lifting dream”, summer is “starlight dream”, autumn is “drifting dream”, winter is “wonder dream”- also varies depending on hemisphere). Different dream days will have a chance (higher percentage when dreaming) for shooting stars.

Visiting Lands via Dream addresses available if player has a bed.

Diving will have a slim chance of finding “sunken treasures” item collection. Dream variants are a lower percentage of encounter.

“Lake diving” available if land has a natural lake with pier or lake construction with pier (see population growing for pier). To be separated from rivers by small underwater barriers.

Buildings can be constructed and relocated. Select variant customization can be acquired for an added fee from Tom Nook. The Nook’s Cranny has different stages, the owners will ask if you think they should upgrade. Say no and the option to upgrade will be available from Tom Nook.

Reece’s upgrade camper + upgrades available after certain milestones are met. (Reece’s popup shop)

Kicks apparel camper + upgrades available after certain milestones are met. (Kicks’ corner store)

Redd becomes a traveling salesman. Available every other week.

Katrina’s fortune telling camper + upgrades available after certain milestones are met. (Fortune tent).

Leif’s garden camper + upgrades available after certain milestones are met. (Leif’s greenhouse)

Post office + bank reintroduced.

Orville can set you up with “land discovery”, a small land discovery service to gather resources find “new lands” differing in season and in time (see Kappin’s boat service in new horizons). Villager discovery only available to lands with vacant housing space (2000 Nook mile fee).

Kappin’ reintroduces boat tours! Island minigames and select items found from island shop and diving (1000 bell ride fee per player).

Additional DLC content extending from Orville’s flight service and Kappin’s boat service.

Rare/uncommon NPC discovery available on random days.

*Future additions may be added. Just concept ideas from a dream I had. Constructive community additions welcome.

I've been having pretty hard time falling asleep lately, so while waiting for sleep I've had a lot of time to just play around with whatever crosses my mind that night. One of the things has been this consept of angels in one of my headworlds (the one that has Dama, Näkki and their friends in it). I think everything else here is pretty self-expalanatory, but a few details not mentioned here are that they reproduce asexually, they lay leathery eggs, their insides are mostly liquid in which the different sorts of cells/nanorobots/soul particles (it's not quite clear if they are animals, robots or spirits) float in and those "halos" of them are some kind of sensory organs. Oh, and they as a species seem to have some sort of mission that dictates pretty much everything they do (or at least are expected to do), but aside from themselves no one really knows what the end goal of that mission is.

Okay, I think my Christmas preparations are finally more or less back on schedule, so I can’t keep the Sword/Shield rant inside any longer! I’m sure this’ll get long, so sorry mobile users. =‘D

First the disclaimers: these are just my feelings about the games and I don’t present them as absolute truths. You better not come hunt for my head if you disagree, as I’m not going to do it for you either! Let’s keep everything civil here, okay?

So... How was the game? (I’m gonna talk just about a single game as I’ve only played Sword, but I have no doubt this all is true for Shield, too.) Eh, I had my fun with it - it IS a Pokémon game after all. There are some great aspects that I even loved! Battle musics are the best part, as there were several tracks that sounded good as all heckaroni and set the mood perfectly. I found the graphics to be easily good enough, as they never bothered me and some scenes even looked really nice. Characters had a ton of potential, but in a true Pokémon game fashion they were of course pretty simple caricatures of what they could’ve been - still not bad at all! A couple of characters even went through a surpsiring amount of development throughout the story! Same with the region, as it had a lot of potential and I adored the Arthurian vibes used in it, and the region’s variant of Pokémon League as a “sport tournament” was also an interesting consept. I have my bone to pick with Dynamaxing, but the things I were worried about in advance were actually proven to be wrong. I feared that the mechanic would be overused and feel just plain stupid, but the game surprised me by explaining it decently enough (If Pokémon can shrink to fit into Pokeball why couldn’t they also do the opposite?), using it sparingly in the main story and making the instances when it was used just really cool. So yeah, the game absolutely has its good side! But of boy, the bad side is... Truly something else.

Where to even begin with... I guess I just say this right at the start: the game is unbeleavably unfinished. Corners have been cut in every possible way you can think of, and even in ways that will surprise you. For example what do you think about a city where you aren’t able to access any single other building aside from Pokecenter? Or about the only two caves of the games that are just straight corridors instead of mazes? There are no puzzles, no HMs or anything that would replace the vast majority of them (only fly and surf are present in the most boring way ever seen), no cities where you could even pretend to get lost in, no stationary special Pokémon waiting to be challenged (like Sudowoodo in gen two), no... Anything. The game is just void of any extra content aside from going from place A to place B - and even that is executed in such a horrifying way it makes me want to shake my head in despair. You are constantly on a very, VERY narrow railroad and you are not allowed to take even two steps to check out anything else than what you are meant to see next. The game has other absurd limitations, too, like just plain hard limits on what level Pokémon you are allowed to catch in each part of the game. You see a Pokémon that’s on higher level? Nope, you can’t throw a ball at it. There sure is the wild area where you are supposed to be able to do what you want and go wherever you desire, but the level limitations are present also there and aside from Pokémon, there isn’t really anything in the whole big place to see or do. I have heard some people have loved exploring the wild area, but I personally can’t understand what there even is to explore! A few items scattered here and there and wild Pokémon - and oh, the Max Raid Battles. The fucking Max Raid Battles.

I was extremely cautious about Max Raid Battles from the very beginning, because they sound like something straight out of PoGo, and I was not wrong - they capture very well the feeling of trying to win a Raid on your own because you have no one else to do it with you! You can challenge the Max Raid Battles with computer allies, too, but especially on higher levels the allies are just ridiculosuly bad. Most of the time you would do better if you were there on your own, but that on the other hand is impossible; you have to have a team of four players in the battle. You can try to recruit other real players to participate in the battle, but I have managed to get someone to come with me literally once. One big reason for this might be that the game doesn’t explain how do you even join the battle, and it is far from self-explanatory! Other online functions aren’t much better, and the game doesn’t even have a GTS - the only thing that allowed a lone player like me to have a chance of completing the Pokedex. We have had GTS since gen four, for goodness sake! Now we are left to make 1243255425 wonder trades (/surprise trades) in the hope of getting all the version exclusive Pokémon to the other version. It’s plain unbelievable.

But oh, I’m not even done with Max Raid Battles yet! Because you know what? Even seeing one is RARE. For the last week I’ve seen one per day, and all of them have had extremely uninteresting Pokémon in them. You can use a certain item to make one appear, but that is more gambling than the slot machines in the old games ever were. First you make a dice roll to decide if you get a normal or rare battle - if it’s normal, haha, good luck, there’s almost never anything interesting there! In rare battles there might be, but they are, well, rare. And truly rare Pokémon in them are even more rare - and rarest of them all are the reason why I have negative feelings towards Dynamaxing even if the story made good effort to sell the idea to me. The thing is you can Dynamax any Pokémon, but some species have a special Gigantamax forms with special appearances and attacks. But not every Pokémon of the species can do it - far, faaaar from it! The Gigantamax form Pokémon are the rarest things you can find from Max Raid Battles and they are rare enough to make me feel desperate even thinking about the odds of finding - and then catching, as you only get one throw - one! There are a few I would love to have, but I’ve found a shiny Pokémon and caught Pokerus before I’ve seen a single one of the Gigantamax Pokémon I’m looking for in the wild.

There are still two major things I feel like I need to mention about the games, one of them being difficulty. Other than the odds of finding a Gigantamax Pokémon, there isn’t any sort of difficulty at all. Your Exp Share is permanently turned on so your team will sooner rather than later be overleveled enough to oneshot literally anything you meet. I spent a good while wondering why the heck was the option of turning the Exp Share off taken away, and I think I have an answer: it’s just one more symptom of the game being unfinished. The thing is almost every route in the game is really short and there are really, really few trainers to actually battle with. There’s also no way to re-challenge normal trainers (and barely anyone for that matter) so I think the Exp Share is permanently on to not make the game a ridiculous grindfest. But then no one actually tested (or cared) how balanced the exp gaining rate is and now we are at the opposite end of the problem. The game’s AI doesn’t seem that smart to me either, as every time an enemy Pokémon survives an attack due to miss or some other miracle all they do is use moves that raises their stats - like that was going to help them in any way! Catching wild Pokémon isn’t any more difficult either, and finding them is even less of a problem. The whole game is full of fully evolved Pokémon, including strong dragons and even things like Eeveelutions, just wandering around! And their catch rate is far from anything you’d expect from such monsters: most of the time I just threw one Quick Ball at them and was done with it. Such excitement. I also caught the version mascot Legendary into Premier ball in order to imagine for a little while that there was at keast some challenge in the game. Oh, and the game has literally two Legendaries in it, and I think the first one was likely an auto catch. Yeeeeey!

Then there’s the last big thing: the tiny-ass Pokedex. You aren’t allowed to have more than half of the existing Pokémon in your game, even as transferred from older versions like previously. This is one of three reasons why I feel like someone(s) at some point of the command chain of making Pokémon games is getting maddeningly greedy. The first thing is the pattern that latest games seem to be forming: SuMo 2 was just a pure cashgrab, Let’s Go games were clearly meant for bringing the cash of PoGo players to the main company and now we are getting a new gen opener games that are, like I’ve stated a thousand times, just not ready in the launch day. The second reason is also the reason why I believe SwSh was so rushed: it had to be launched in time for this year’s Christmas market no matter the consequences. They could’ve taken a few more months like Animal Crossing is doing, but that seemed never to be an option. And the third reason is the Pokedex. It would be easy to think that the Pokedex is just another victim of the rush, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. First of all we’ve known about the cut for a long time - it seems like there was never an intention to include all the Pokémon in the game. Secondly Game Freak has blatantly lied about the reasons of making the cut (”we need more time to build these Pokémon models”, when in truth apparently many of the models were just reused and polished versions taken from the last gen) so the real reason of not having all Pokémon available must be something they’d rather not tell to the players. Thirdly, and where this all comes together, is the launch of Pokémon Home. Now that the Pokémon many players have taken from game to game ever since gen three can’t be transferred to a main series game anymore, the only solutions are to either leave them behind or transfer them to Pokémon Home - a monthly subscription service. There was a similar service before, Pokémon Bank, but apparently they weren’t making enough money with it when people bought it, transferred everything they wanted through it, and cancelled the service after one month. So now they are making sure you can’t cancel Home, unless you want your, what, 15 years old Pokémon to simply vanish to thing air. They are boldly taking advantage of the same thing they have utilized in many advertisements recently - people’s nostalgy towards the Pokémon they have owned for so, so many years.

So yeah, that’s about it. There are other things that bother me about these games, inluding their story that has the most unbalanced pacing I might have ever seen and how it leaves so, so many questions open, but I think I want to start closing this rant at this point. Because it leaves things to the same note as what is playing most loudly in my head after finishing the game: I’m worried about the future of this franchise, and for completely new reasons than ever before. Previously I and many others have been worried about the direction of the Pokémon designs, increasingly gimmicky game mechanics and similar things, but all those seem such tiny worries compared to how badly things are now. Now I’m worried about if all the future games will be made short-sighted monetary gains as their main goal. Because that, my friends, would be what finally could kill Pokémon.