New game is out, it rules
Here’s some pics
11 Likes
been seeing a lot of screenshots of incidental dialogue from this that are unhinged enough that i’m having trouble believing they’re real
7 Likes
This game truly learned from the school of Yakuza and just stuffed all the thousand NPCs with completely wild dialogue and it’s all the better for it
9 Likes
I’m also enjoying this! I think it’s differentiating itself quite nicely from Arceus. The city is a big functional improvement over the Arceus hub which required a lot of toing and froing for rewards. New professor and pokedex rewards are nice and streamlined and a lot less of a grind. I think I’m worried about environment diversity in the late game given that the city is very small. Like I had crossed the whole thing 2 hours in.
I think holding lock on to access the battle menu is dumb but I get why they did this with how many actions exist in a given situation. Just feels like it should be autolock on or I just wish I could make it a toggle. We’re always fighting one Pokémon and thinking about catching one Pokémon at a time so thinking about switching targets or knocking on and off in the way you might do in Souls just isn’t a factor here.
The premise of future Paris being embroiled in a battle royale where the streets are subject to Purge rules every night to determine the strongest Pokemon trainer in the city is kinda wacky but works for the day night cycle. Train and quest by day, fight by night. It’s not too stressful though I’m not exactly clear on what progresses time or doesn’t.
I think it’s funny how the writers bet that players forget that your character never really says why they came to Lumiose or what happened to their original hotel booking. This is a bit unusual for Pokemon games which at least frame your reason for being on the adventure, you kinda just happen into the tournament and it’s unclear whether your character had any prior knowledge of it coming in. Arceus at least had the isekai framing.
The museum is delightfully disturbing.
My current team is OK but I think I’m going to junk about half of these soon.
- Whirlipede
- Croconaw
- Heracross
- Espurr
- Gyarados
- Pansage
9 Likes
Got my alpha Staryu.
Switching Pokémon in and out feels like you just immediately get screwed by the real-time system sometimes. I kinda wish it just paused when you are thinking of selecting Pokémon
Did you hear how the new Shiny hunting method is just flying into a quick travel point over and over again? I love it
3 Likes
Touch grass(-type Pokémon)
10 Likes
There’s a Switch version, so it should be emulable, but I don’t really want to. That’s not a knock on game quality I just would literally feel bad if I played that much pokemon at this point when there are so many other games I should be playing.
What else do you have on your backlog? I’m curious to hear
1 Like
Final Fantasy IX
Final Fantasy X-2
Half Life: Decay (via @gimelrey)
Tail Concerto
Fuga
Laika: Aged through Blood
Control
Ocarina of Time
Legend of Spyro trilogy
Ace Attorney trilogy
Earthbound
Digimon Story: Time Stranger (haven’t bought yet, but counting this)
Death Stranding 2 (isn’t even out for PC yet, but counting this)
Super Mario: Odyssey
Final Fantasy: Tactics
Terranigma
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective
Chrono Trigger
The World Ends with You
Celeste
Disco Elysium
Fallout 4: London (specifically London, I have no interest in base Fallout 4)
Golden Treasure: The Great Green
Halo: Reach
Hate Plus
Metal Wolf Chaos
No More Heroes
Okami
The Outer Worlds
Pseudoregalia
Ratchet and Clank: A Rift Apart
Sonic Frontiers
Zone of the Enders: 2nd Runner
There are probably others but these are all I can think about. There are some I should probably finish all the way like Nier Replicant.
5 Likes
Dang, you’ve got a pretty solid backlog here. You won’t be hitting Pokemon anytime this year
4 Likes
Well, I have to finish Pokemon Violet, which is what I’m playing now. I’m currently about 6 hours into it I think. That’s the other thing. After that I will have beaten all of the mainline pokemon games, which is something I said was probably going to be a pokemon stop.
1 Like
So I played through and finished it. I meant to write more regularly about it but I ended up kinda falling off it every week. I’d enjoy a session and then just not play for 2 weeks. This is probably the most difficulty I’ve had getting through a Pokémon game. It’s not hard but it is very grindy even beyond Pokemon’s usual format and the city gets very dull in the back half as it barely changes. Slow ass game.
The leaderboard climb is fun at first but becomes very repetitive. I think traditional gyms would almost have been preferable as a formula.
Spoilers from here I guess
The mid game leaderboard skip which takes you all the way to rank F, presumably cuts what would’ve been a really unpleasant grind. After this the game locks in hard to the new formula:
- 3 Rogue mega Pokémon show up across the city
- You beat them
- The next ranked opponent appears
- (Sometimes there is a Scooby-Doo adventure with the ranked opponent)
- Grind regular trainer fights to unlock the ranked fight
- Do ranked fight
- Repeat until game end.
Mega fights are also a grind and are sort of similar to the bosses in Arceus except the trick is to dodge huge AOEs while chipping away with Pokemon attacks rather than waiting for a weakened state to unload damage. If you don’t have the appropriate mega Pokémon with a type advantage you will do barely any damage and the fights drag.
The progression of fashion is good but you do kinda settle into an outfit early. You’ll see mine slowly change and settle while I hang with my Pokes. Getting a team and meeting new chars is fun but actual combat is very tedious. Some of the characters are pretty good additions. Everyone seems to love the electric-type streamer girl who is not the same as previous electric-type streamer girl.
Z-A must the biggest recurring cast of any Pokémon game. You fight Canari again about 4 times. Towards the end it really feels like shonen episodes where previously fought bosses show up to do their character thing. Probably the best being the ex-gangster Dragon maid who serves the Fairy type debutante who have a sort of sub-dom thing implied by their type weakness.
Mega Scolipede and Mega Starmie are my favourite megas but I had a lot of trouble finding my team in this one. The game balance is built around megas very heavily so if you like a Pokémon and it doesn’t have one then you are heavily incentivised to kick them out of the party unless they have amazing stats. The only Pokemon I haven’t used before that I stuck with were Aurorus, Scolipede, and Simisage. Starmie, Slowbro, and Pinsir rounded out the team. I called the Slowbro ‘Shellder’ in memoriam of there being no Shellder in the game.
The Scooby Doo adventure stuff you do with the aforementioned cast tend to be the highlights and the Mega Fights are the Pokemon Company-sanctioned gimmick that gums up the pace. I get people like Megas but most megas kinda suck imo. Once you get to rank C there are very few designs that are making me look forward to the reveal of more.
Having to be a direct sequel to a mainline Pokémon game leads to a lot of weirdly dark subplots, which are even weirder if you haven’t played X and Y, which I haven’t. There are multiple criminal groups and at one point you are tricked into debt bondage to be a heavy for the Pokémon Yakuza. The kindly man who runs the hotel you’re staying at is also a 3000 year old immortal who used to make weapons of mass destruction to purge the earth of overpopulation.
The number 1 spot on the leaderboard turns out to be a ruse by the city corporation for finding someone worthy of the right to use AZ’s Mega Floette, a god-level Pokemon. You and your rival simultaneously reach this rank and fight for the right. You win but he just takes Mega Floette anyway (‘Let me do this OK?’) while you and the rest of the cast team up to make a path to the final boss. We spend so much time doing this there’s no reason we couldn’t have all just gone there togehter. We could’ve all fought Hyperrogue Ange Floette.
Kinda unclear what we really did. Just destroy a big nuke cannon that AZ built. If anything we made the situation worse by bringing the Floette there. Whatever. AZ dies in a rare canonical Pokemon death that I imagine is sadder if you played X and Y.
I enjoyed the game mostly but it is also very grindy and dumb.
8 Likes