I am a huge Pokemon fan. I go out of my way to play as much PvE pokemon as possible, and this game delivers that in spades. I wholeheartedly recommend, and will spend the rest of the review digging into its systems.
In terms of action, it has one verb: throwing. Be it throwing bait, throwing pokeballs, throwing bags of damage. It is a stroke of genius to make a pokemon action game centered around the act of launching stuff. The action gameplay itself needs a few more safety valves to really sing. The boss fights often revolve around dodging, which is fairly common in an action game, but the boss fights have no way for the player to heal themselves. I think a healing system would do much to make the fights a bit less punishing.
The survival game progression curve is satisfying. The beginning of the game has the player scrounging for resources to cobble together the tools they need, while the end of the game provides a feeling of mastery by giving the player options to outright buy the tools they need. In fact, the resource systems are so tightly tuned that the player always always always feels like they're running out of cash. Bagin, an npc who will expand your bag size for a price, is an amazing safety valve for players who accrue more cash than they know what to do with.
The battle systems have been changed slightly. Much of the discourse centers around its difficulty, or the removal of key points of customization, like EVs, held Items, and abilities. The key to understanding the new battle system is understanding that the fantasy of the system is fundamentally different than before. Core series pokemon is about using pokemon battling as a kind of sport. Every person has access to the same pokemon abilities, but only the player is clever/experienced enough to use them to win. Sporting is about two forces competing that have an equal chance of winning. This fantasy is reflected in the very sports-like structure and narrative of the games.
The core fantasy of PLA, on the other hand, is about survival in a hostile, unknown world. Appropriately, this leads to a fundamentally uneven and fatal combat system. Wild Pokemon in battle will often one-shot your own monsters. Over time, a combination of the player's understanding of the combat system and the grit items should turn a treacherous system into a system that feels mastered. This is meant to parallel the progression curve in the resource system. This turns a system balanced around PvP (player versus player) to a system balanced around PvE (player versus environment). It's a welcome change that complements the narrative nicely.
In this framing, the absence of customization points makes sense. Hold items don't work particularly well with the resource and collection systems. Abilities would probably imbalance the mastery curve for players unfamiliar with pokemon. For example, Levitate would probably only serve to frustrate people trying to take down an Alpha Rotom. Abilities also serve to obfuscate important details in the collection systems.
Speaking of the collection systems, this is the hinge on which progression is measured in the game. And it helps that collecting pokemon is easily the smoothest, most satisfying part of the game. Everything from the throwing controls to the little firework animation gives enough juice and fluidity for the player to just keep wanting to do it. Like I said earlier, making throwing the fundamental action verb of the game is an extremely smart idea.
I have plenty of criticisms though. The control scheme feels deranged at times. There were plenty of instances where I was riding on Wyrdeer, saw a cool pokemon, pressed B to hide (the crouch button when you aren't riding), and ended up shooting forward on my antlered steed instead. The lack of a sort button in the pokemon pastures also feels like a huge hole in the system. With the amount of captured pokemon in PLA, there needs to be a way to easily sort the ordering. Tying bask into the controls, the movement system needs to feel a bit more fluid. It works well once the player has access to all the ride pokemon, but player movement feels restricted in some weird ways, such as being unable to jump up a tiny ledge. Finally the boss fights need one or two more things to make them feel more like a back-and-forth. The large health bars, lack of hit stun, and dearth of healing options all serve to make the boss fights feel pretty monotonous.
I'd like to also gush praise on the animations in this game. They had to animate all 200+ pokemon's attacking animations, every move, and have it look good from every angle (since the player can freely move during battle). This is a monumental achievement, and I don't ever want to hear about how lazy the developers for this game are ever ever again.
Lastly, I'd like to talk about the narrative. Many people fundamentally misunderstand what this narrative is about. It's a game about colonization. There are native peoples, there are naive colonizers, and there is a rapid introduction of technology. In this way, it parallels the real world history of the region that the game is based on. This is not a game about Feudal Japan. It's about the shift from Feudal Japan to industrialized, modern Japan. This period of time is largely known as the Meiji Restoration. Go google Hokkaido and the Meiji Restoration, and the parallels should become apparent very quickly.
In this framing, the game is about the protagonist trying to stop the worst impulses of colonization from the Galactic Corps, and about teaching them how to live in harmony with the existing natural environment/native peoples instead of in opposition to them. It is an admirable spin on a hairy subject matter, and credit is due to the developers on exploring the damage that colonization can do to an area in a kid-friendly game. That being said, colonialism does not have a good track record in the real world. I don't think that game freak did an appropriate job in portraying what the dangers of colonization have been/could be. It's a tough subject to grapple with, especially in a game series as kid friendly as Pokemon, but I still feel that it could have been done better.
All in all, I wholeheartedly recommend this game. It is very smartly designed. It breaks away from the pokemon formula in bold, daring ways, and it feels like a great step into a whole new genre of Pokemon game.
In terms of action, it has one verb: throwing. Be it throwing bait, throwing pokeballs, throwing bags of damage. It is a stroke of genius to make a pokemon action game centered around the act of launching stuff. The action gameplay itself needs a few more safety valves to really sing. The boss fights often revolve around dodging, which is fairly common in an action game, but the boss fights have no way for the player to heal themselves. I think a healing system would do much to make the fights a bit less punishing.
The survival game progression curve is satisfying. The beginning of the game has the player scrounging for resources to cobble together the tools they need, while the end of the game provides a feeling of mastery by giving the player options to outright buy the tools they need. In fact, the resource systems are so tightly tuned that the player always always always feels like they're running out of cash. Bagin, an npc who will expand your bag size for a price, is an amazing safety valve for players who accrue more cash than they know what to do with.
The battle systems have been changed slightly. Much of the discourse centers around its difficulty, or the removal of key points of customization, like EVs, held Items, and abilities. The key to understanding the new battle system is understanding that the fantasy of the system is fundamentally different than before. Core series pokemon is about using pokemon battling as a kind of sport. Every person has access to the same pokemon abilities, but only the player is clever/experienced enough to use them to win. Sporting is about two forces competing that have an equal chance of winning. This fantasy is reflected in the very sports-like structure and narrative of the games.
The core fantasy of PLA, on the other hand, is about survival in a hostile, unknown world. Appropriately, this leads to a fundamentally uneven and fatal combat system. Wild Pokemon in battle will often one-shot your own monsters. Over time, a combination of the player's understanding of the combat system and the grit items should turn a treacherous system into a system that feels mastered. This is meant to parallel the progression curve in the resource system. This turns a system balanced around PvP (player versus player) to a system balanced around PvE (player versus environment). It's a welcome change that complements the narrative nicely.
In this framing, the absence of customization points makes sense. Hold items don't work particularly well with the resource and collection systems. Abilities would probably imbalance the mastery curve for players unfamiliar with pokemon. For example, Levitate would probably only serve to frustrate people trying to take down an Alpha Rotom. Abilities also serve to obfuscate important details in the collection systems.
Speaking of the collection systems, this is the hinge on which progression is measured in the game. And it helps that collecting pokemon is easily the smoothest, most satisfying part of the game. Everything from the throwing controls to the little firework animation gives enough juice and fluidity for the player to just keep wanting to do it. Like I said earlier, making throwing the fundamental action verb of the game is an extremely smart idea.
I have plenty of criticisms though. The control scheme feels deranged at times. There were plenty of instances where I was riding on Wyrdeer, saw a cool pokemon, pressed B to hide (the crouch button when you aren't riding), and ended up shooting forward on my antlered steed instead. The lack of a sort button in the pokemon pastures also feels like a huge hole in the system. With the amount of captured pokemon in PLA, there needs to be a way to easily sort the ordering. Tying bask into the controls, the movement system needs to feel a bit more fluid. It works well once the player has access to all the ride pokemon, but player movement feels restricted in some weird ways, such as being unable to jump up a tiny ledge. Finally the boss fights need one or two more things to make them feel more like a back-and-forth. The large health bars, lack of hit stun, and dearth of healing options all serve to make the boss fights feel pretty monotonous.
I'd like to also gush praise on the animations in this game. They had to animate all 200+ pokemon's attacking animations, every move, and have it look good from every angle (since the player can freely move during battle). This is a monumental achievement, and I don't ever want to hear about how lazy the developers for this game are ever ever again.
Lastly, I'd like to talk about the narrative. Many people fundamentally misunderstand what this narrative is about. It's a game about colonization. There are native peoples, there are naive colonizers, and there is a rapid introduction of technology. In this way, it parallels the real world history of the region that the game is based on. This is not a game about Feudal Japan. It's about the shift from Feudal Japan to industrialized, modern Japan. This period of time is largely known as the Meiji Restoration. Go google Hokkaido and the Meiji Restoration, and the parallels should become apparent very quickly.
In this framing, the game is about the protagonist trying to stop the worst impulses of colonization from the Galactic Corps, and about teaching them how to live in harmony with the existing natural environment/native peoples instead of in opposition to them. It is an admirable spin on a hairy subject matter, and credit is due to the developers on exploring the damage that colonization can do to an area in a kid-friendly game. That being said, colonialism does not have a good track record in the real world. I don't think that game freak did an appropriate job in portraying what the dangers of colonization have been/could be. It's a tough subject to grapple with, especially in a game series as kid friendly as Pokemon, but I still feel that it could have been done better.
All in all, I wholeheartedly recommend this game. It is very smartly designed. It breaks away from the pokemon formula in bold, daring ways, and it feels like a great step into a whole new genre of Pokemon game.