people love to use ffxiii’s messy development as a reason to completely shit on the game but honestly the fact they managed to sneak in so many little details in the gameplay in a way that reflects the characters and story despite all the miscommunication between the dev sections is just impressive to me

baratrongirl replied to your post “Really do not understand why GameFreak took out the Hall of Fame...”

I'd be interested to hear what you don't like about Sword/Shield. For me, it's quite the opposite. I played the hell out of the 3rd and 4th Gens, then struggled to finish White and didn't buy White 2. Didn't finish SoulSilver, or whichever of X or Y I got, and became completely bored about 10 hours into Alpha Sapphire despite being all motivated to play the game with my original Sapphire team only now I know what I'm doing. Didn't even BUY Sun/Moon.

Then I hung out with my Pokemon friends over Sword/Shield launch weekend, watched them playing on the TV, and had to immediately borrow a spare Switch so I could play too. By the end of the weekend I'd bought the Switch and paid to download my own copy of Shield. I have a few issues with it, mostly relating to the lack of clothing options for male characters, but otherwise I'm finding it the blast of fresh air that I needed to get back into the Pokemon games.

I’ve heard a lot of people say something similar, that SwSh was a nice upgrade from the past couple gens. I started slipping around XY - didn’t wanna buy a 3DS and didn’t until Omega Ruby came out, since Ruby was the first one I’d played - and after I finished the Team Flare plot of X I just gave up for three years and only last year finished the 8th gym and the league. I honestly don’t remember much of playing OR. I think it was a weird kind of frantic nostalgia-fueled haze but I genuinely cannot comment on what I liked about that game. It’s a blank in my memory. Really enjoyed Sun and Moon, like Sword but get bummed the longer I think about it. But I did buy it because I did see a ton of people saying it was a change they were enjoying, quality-of-life upgrades, fun new features, etc. Different strokes and all.

My biggest gripe on Sword is that the world feels pretty empty. Besides the Wild Area, and its few secluded corners, though it’s really a straightforward place, there’s nothing to explore. The plot grabs you by the hand and pulls you to every location. There’s nothing off-the-way that you don’t go to for the main plot. There’s nothing like Kanto’s Power Plant, or Alola’s Power Plant - which I didn’t even realize was there on my first pass through, and then I was like “hey what’s this little place, OH MY GOD WHAT THERE’S MORE STUFF HERE.” The region is a linear loop. There’s no weird little caves that aren’t plot relevant that you get scrambled up in. There’s nowhere that’s locked until you beat the League, like the other half of Poni Island or those last upper bits in Unova or the Battle Frontier in Sinnoh. I had canvassed the Wild Area for everything by the time I went to the final tournament. There’s nowhere else to go. Sure I went back through the Wild Area to catch more stuff to fill out my Pokedex, but new places? Nothing. There’s nowhere to go back to once you can cross water except the little lake by the professor’s house. Not like in Sun/Moon where there’s bits on prior islands to go back to with Lapras. That cave underneath the starting island to go check out I’m thinking of. Galar is a pretty bare-bones region and the Wild Area doesn’t fully compensate.

Which ties to my other biggest gripe, which is, there are three legendary Pokemon in the game and one of them is the opposite version’s exclusive that you can’t get. Two legendary Pokemon! Two legendary Pokemon you can catch! And you catch them both in the course of the plot! There’s nothing like the Regi trio hidden by batshit puzzles, or Cobalion/Terrakion/Virizion tucked in out-of-the-way corners. No wandering Lati@s or beast trio. No Tapus or anything. You can catch two legendary Pokemon.

I think we really peaked back in Gen 3 with its visual Braille puzzles and Gen 4 with whatever the everloving fuck the Turnback Cave was on about. The weird locations that hurt your brain. I miss those. I miss the tricky caves you get lost in and spend time figuring it out. Galar didn’t have caves. The mines were basically a straight shot, yknow? When I’d like to go deeper and have more to explore instead of feeling like I’m taking a walking tour of the whole region.

And the DLC looks like it’ll deal at least with that point with more legendaries, which really grinds my gears. In all the discourse about whether or not the DLC is good or bad or neutral, whether the price of video games has needed to go up or the DLC is cheaper than a third version but some people wait for the third version, which I didn’t seek out said discourse but saw pass me by on Twitter, I saw no one mention that we’re paying to get more than two legendary Pokémon and I felt like I was losing my mind for a little while there. I feel like I’m paying extra for something that’s been in every game since the beginning of time, that being more than two legendary Pokémon that I can catch.

And my lesser little gripes: level balance of the game felt a little wonky with the wild Pokemon toward the end higher leveled than all the trainers except Leon, and the always-on exp share made it worse because when I dragged out the plot by catching everything in the Wild Area, my team got way overleveled for the back half of the game and I could curbstomp everyone that passed me. Team Yell were an egregious roadblock and while Pokemon has always had those, the prominence of Team Yell was exasperating. I prefer environmental roadblocks, like water and back when we used to have other HMs, those feel a little better than two dudes standing in the middle of a wide road.

And why, oh WHY, did GameFreak downgrade after XY and only have fitting rooms in boutiques instead of also in Pokemon Centers? I don’t want to fly to another town to change my clothes! Not every town has a clothes shop but everywhere has a Pokemon Center! I was crusading on this point through Sun/Moon and I will not be stopped until GameFreak puts changing rooms back in Pokemon Centers! (They will probably never do that but I refuse to stop. Forget Dexit; this is the real issue of our time.)

I didn’t mind the limited Pokémon at release because I never transfer my teams thru the games anyway - I’m a sentimental anxious idiot afraid of decisions and commitment and I can’t commit to the one-way transfers to move my teams up to new games. And that plus the Wild Area having trade-evolution Pokemon walking around made me feel like completing my pokedex was actually attainable. So I did!

I don’t hate the game, but I am disappointed by it. I’ve never been a Battle Tower or shiny-hunting person, but I’ve ended up doing those because I don’t know what else to do.

So that’s my opinion on why SwSh has bummed me out more as time goes on, since you were curious.

(Joker from Mass Effect 2 when you ask him for gossip about your teammates voice: “But that’s just my opinion, no need to go spreading it around.” ;) I’ll gladly chat with friends but the poke-discourse got too intense on twitter and I am not inviting that kind of bad energy into our lives. None of us deserve that.)

I’ve still got a lot of endgame stuff for Sun and Moon, UB hunting and I haven’t made it to the Battle Tree yet because my Moon team is getting its ass kicked by everything because I turned the exp share off and overcompensated in the wrong direction and am chronically underleveled. There’s a certain charm for me in being underleveled because I used to have endless patience to overlevel my team to extremes because my childhood anxiety was something like “if I die in the game I die in real life???” and I was terrified of losing and now I’m like “blacks out twice in a row in Moon as I go toward the postgame stuff yolo”. So when I feel like playing Pokemon I’ll probably spend more time in Alola, when I’m not trying to hatch that damn shiny Rookidee because I accidentally committed to that.