God Sonic Frontiers and now this can I please get a good game to play for the end of 2022...
I didn't actually plan to play this game at all I just did it because someone told me it was released and I felt like taking a break from my Red Dead Redemption 2 playthrough and oh boy do I regret it. It's actually really sad when the first thing you hear about a game that just released is that it's full of game-breaking bugs.
After a tiresome full playthrough of the game in about 20 to 25 hours of playtime, I can affirm that this game is really rough and I wish GameFreak would wake the fuck up!
So the game is a mix Between Sword and Shield with the basic 3D and turn-based gameplay like we all know and lov- enjoy depending on the pokemon game in question... And the newly released Pokemon Legends: Arceus earlier this year. Yep, two mainline pokemon in a single year and we are wondering why each installment of the franchise sucks, quality over quantity Gamefreak! Get the Miyamoto mindset!
As much as an open-world pokemon game sounds cool I doubt they can actually successfully do this right I mean... Wait Pokemon Legends: Arceus did it right so why not this game?
Here's my main issue with the open world in this game, first of all, it's utterly worthless since level scaling doesn't exist. This isn't an MMORPG, the world should grow over the existing player instead of stagnating depending on the area. I know this can be useful if you somehow get rid of all your pokemon and have to start from scratch but honestly, this could've been fixed easily by making an option where you can switch the difficulty around like adjusting if you want the enemies to be level 10,20,30,... So you can get most pokemon at the level you can currently master instead of just grabbing the random high-level ones and then force yourself to level up the ones you can only find at a low level which can be frustrating and also a waste of time.
Secondly, what's the point of an open world if most of the areas are locked due to high-level enemies? There is no point exploring this empty open world other than to find pokemon and random items on the floor, why not make it linear like all of the other ones where it's much simpler to level up and have a smooth, simple, and tranquility walkthrough without having the hassle to make sense of these empty, laggy pokemon wastelands.
And the fact that the game is meant to be played in a linear way makes it even more stupid since the pokemon center lady tells you where to go once you get a new badge, there is no sense of exploration you are just playing a basic pokemon game with the illusion of freedom.
Thirdly, the open world ruined the XP pacing. By that, I mean the trainers that the game used to force you to fight barely serve a purpose here. I know it was kinda frustrating to fight almost all of the trainers on the roads from city to city in the older titles even though I honestly never really had an issue with it personally helped the pacing of the XP making it so that you barely had to grind XP to finish the original story.
In this game, you are forced to do random fights if you want to level up your characters which sucks because I don't want to grind on purpose I want to go to the end!
I ended up fixing that issue by just capturing the highest-level pokemon I could find and just readapting my team every time I caught a new strong one and just removing the weakest one of my team to replace it.
And yes at the end of my playthrough I didn't even use my stater because it was way too underleveled compared to the other pokemon I found in the wild.
I think that's all about the open world, now it's time to talk about the obvious, the graphics.
This is most likely the most controversial part about the game other than the graphical bugs which flooded Twitter the week of its release.
To clear the obvious, Yes the game looks god awful, the Switch isn't powerful but stops blaming the hardware we all know GameFreak is responsible. I could bring the basic "look at Xenoblade 3 compared to Pokemon Scarlet" and you know I will since the difference is fucking insane. We can't bring the "it's a different art style" argument here because dogshit isn't an art style.
Other than the world itself looking like cowshit, the pokemon themselves look good I think I got no complaints about their models and I don't care if they reused them from old games or whatever it looks decent.
But got the humans... Nobody told me this was a Nintendo Switch Sports sequel! They really just ruined one of the only good parts about pokemon, the character design used to be so good in the 2d games! I mean honestly they also look really good in Sword and Shield I just don't know why they made them all look like copypaste characters made in a character creation tool.
Let's not forget about the awful optimization of the game, like it's sad when your game runs better on fanmade emulators than on your own software. I'm not insulting the switch here since the fans themselves makes patch so that the game runs smoother on the emulator and it's pathetic when the fans have to fix the game for them.
What about the gameplay? it's fucking pokemon it's still a decent game at heart and by that, I mean this game can reproduce the mechanic of a rock-paper-scissors game which isn't too impressive because all pokemon games are just that.
But yeah the gameplay is fine, it's what you would expect out of a pokemon game. My main issue would be that the combats are super slow especially due to the useless textbox taking so long to appear and disappear also the combat animations which cannot be skipped makes the combats a slog to go through.
And now is the time I talk about the new gimmick used in combat because it can't be a pokemon game without a new gimmick. That gimmick would be called Terastallizing, and it's just something that changes the pokemon type based on the attack you picked and also slightly raises your base atk/def, kinda wish they'd brought back the giant thing it made me horny.
Last but not least (least would be the open world) the story.
It's bad, like a toddler-type story you'd find in a children's cartoon like pokemon- fuck!
Though there's a vaguely interesting twist in this game, it's separated into three different storylines which end up becoming one after finishing the three for the ending, and honestly, it's kinda cool. I mean it's nowhere near anything original but it's a fucking pokemon game let's say it's novel.
Actually thinking about it it's kinda lazy since the first storyline is about the excepted getting all 8 gym badges and that's fine but the two others are about helping some rando cure his dog by finding herbs guarded by pokemon guardians and the other one is about fighting a gang of school delinquents to teach you about how bullying is bad.
My issue is that the final one is a bit random and comes out of nowhere it's kinda linked to the boy and his dog storyline but it's just a cheap way to put the legendary pokemon in the spotlight at the last minute.
I guess that's all I have to say about this very mediocre title of this mediocre franchise. I hope GameFreak will wake the fuck up and give us something on par with black & white or something because this is just sad...
Last-minute complaints, the beginning is awful, you just follow your "rival" for 2 hours and suffer through useless text and bad cutscenes to end up being thrown in this shitty open wasteland.
And like I just said the quality of the dialogue is overall very shitty and boring like none of it matters it's just making me waste time with the slow text speed and lags of the game.
In conclusion, I do not recommend this game at all It's not unplayable but it's not good either. Just play black & white again.
I didn't actually plan to play this game at all I just did it because someone told me it was released and I felt like taking a break from my Red Dead Redemption 2 playthrough and oh boy do I regret it. It's actually really sad when the first thing you hear about a game that just released is that it's full of game-breaking bugs.
After a tiresome full playthrough of the game in about 20 to 25 hours of playtime, I can affirm that this game is really rough and I wish GameFreak would wake the fuck up!
So the game is a mix Between Sword and Shield with the basic 3D and turn-based gameplay like we all know and lov- enjoy depending on the pokemon game in question... And the newly released Pokemon Legends: Arceus earlier this year. Yep, two mainline pokemon in a single year and we are wondering why each installment of the franchise sucks, quality over quantity Gamefreak! Get the Miyamoto mindset!
As much as an open-world pokemon game sounds cool I doubt they can actually successfully do this right I mean... Wait Pokemon Legends: Arceus did it right so why not this game?
Here's my main issue with the open world in this game, first of all, it's utterly worthless since level scaling doesn't exist. This isn't an MMORPG, the world should grow over the existing player instead of stagnating depending on the area. I know this can be useful if you somehow get rid of all your pokemon and have to start from scratch but honestly, this could've been fixed easily by making an option where you can switch the difficulty around like adjusting if you want the enemies to be level 10,20,30,... So you can get most pokemon at the level you can currently master instead of just grabbing the random high-level ones and then force yourself to level up the ones you can only find at a low level which can be frustrating and also a waste of time.
Secondly, what's the point of an open world if most of the areas are locked due to high-level enemies? There is no point exploring this empty open world other than to find pokemon and random items on the floor, why not make it linear like all of the other ones where it's much simpler to level up and have a smooth, simple, and tranquility walkthrough without having the hassle to make sense of these empty, laggy pokemon wastelands.
And the fact that the game is meant to be played in a linear way makes it even more stupid since the pokemon center lady tells you where to go once you get a new badge, there is no sense of exploration you are just playing a basic pokemon game with the illusion of freedom.
Thirdly, the open world ruined the XP pacing. By that, I mean the trainers that the game used to force you to fight barely serve a purpose here. I know it was kinda frustrating to fight almost all of the trainers on the roads from city to city in the older titles even though I honestly never really had an issue with it personally helped the pacing of the XP making it so that you barely had to grind XP to finish the original story.
In this game, you are forced to do random fights if you want to level up your characters which sucks because I don't want to grind on purpose I want to go to the end!
I ended up fixing that issue by just capturing the highest-level pokemon I could find and just readapting my team every time I caught a new strong one and just removing the weakest one of my team to replace it.
And yes at the end of my playthrough I didn't even use my stater because it was way too underleveled compared to the other pokemon I found in the wild.
I think that's all about the open world, now it's time to talk about the obvious, the graphics.
This is most likely the most controversial part about the game other than the graphical bugs which flooded Twitter the week of its release.
To clear the obvious, Yes the game looks god awful, the Switch isn't powerful but stops blaming the hardware we all know GameFreak is responsible. I could bring the basic "look at Xenoblade 3 compared to Pokemon Scarlet" and you know I will since the difference is fucking insane. We can't bring the "it's a different art style" argument here because dogshit isn't an art style.
Other than the world itself looking like cowshit, the pokemon themselves look good I think I got no complaints about their models and I don't care if they reused them from old games or whatever it looks decent.
But got the humans... Nobody told me this was a Nintendo Switch Sports sequel! They really just ruined one of the only good parts about pokemon, the character design used to be so good in the 2d games! I mean honestly they also look really good in Sword and Shield I just don't know why they made them all look like copypaste characters made in a character creation tool.
Let's not forget about the awful optimization of the game, like it's sad when your game runs better on fanmade emulators than on your own software. I'm not insulting the switch here since the fans themselves makes patch so that the game runs smoother on the emulator and it's pathetic when the fans have to fix the game for them.
What about the gameplay? it's fucking pokemon it's still a decent game at heart and by that, I mean this game can reproduce the mechanic of a rock-paper-scissors game which isn't too impressive because all pokemon games are just that.
But yeah the gameplay is fine, it's what you would expect out of a pokemon game. My main issue would be that the combats are super slow especially due to the useless textbox taking so long to appear and disappear also the combat animations which cannot be skipped makes the combats a slog to go through.
And now is the time I talk about the new gimmick used in combat because it can't be a pokemon game without a new gimmick. That gimmick would be called Terastallizing, and it's just something that changes the pokemon type based on the attack you picked and also slightly raises your base atk/def, kinda wish they'd brought back the giant thing it made me horny.
Last but not least (least would be the open world) the story.
It's bad, like a toddler-type story you'd find in a children's cartoon like pokemon- fuck!
Though there's a vaguely interesting twist in this game, it's separated into three different storylines which end up becoming one after finishing the three for the ending, and honestly, it's kinda cool. I mean it's nowhere near anything original but it's a fucking pokemon game let's say it's novel.
Actually thinking about it it's kinda lazy since the first storyline is about the excepted getting all 8 gym badges and that's fine but the two others are about helping some rando cure his dog by finding herbs guarded by pokemon guardians and the other one is about fighting a gang of school delinquents to teach you about how bullying is bad.
My issue is that the final one is a bit random and comes out of nowhere it's kinda linked to the boy and his dog storyline but it's just a cheap way to put the legendary pokemon in the spotlight at the last minute.
I guess that's all I have to say about this very mediocre title of this mediocre franchise. I hope GameFreak will wake the fuck up and give us something on par with black & white or something because this is just sad...
Last-minute complaints, the beginning is awful, you just follow your "rival" for 2 hours and suffer through useless text and bad cutscenes to end up being thrown in this shitty open wasteland.
And like I just said the quality of the dialogue is overall very shitty and boring like none of it matters it's just making me waste time with the slow text speed and lags of the game.
In conclusion, I do not recommend this game at all It's not unplayable but it's not good either. Just play black & white again.