Whenever you force them out of this nirvana, they become enraged and naturally wish to fight anything in front of them.
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Pokemon asks us this question: is it more moral if the dogs get pedicures before the fight?
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I think Game Freak’s official stance now is that pokemon are just testing you when battling to see if you’re worthy, and so when you catch one in the ball it’s an intentional act on the pokemon’s behalf. Any time they seem threatened or hurt it’s all actually just good natured roughhousing.
So basically:
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“its not unethical! its not unethical!” the pokemon continues to insist as they slowly shrink and transform into the pokeball
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I imagine that all the battling / catching is all actually as unethical as it looks, and all the attempts at sugarcoating it is just the adults making up phony justifications so that the children they send out to do all the dirty work won’t keep asking questions
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rare video of pokemon having fun in their natural environment. we need to go back…
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what I’m learning here is Pokemon have the life, minus the endless fighting.
We know that at least one pokemon type is formerly human which implies that this shrinking is an ability that can be learned, possibly by accident
Likely the reason that this was better understood in ancient times before the ubiquity of the PokeBall is that the general public would never have accepted the technology if they were aware of it’s potential
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The town music is so relaxing I just stopped in a conversation with Cyllene to put headphones on and lay down
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How are you liking this game so far? I’m very curious about it; people are saying that it’s pretty much the first time a mainline pokemon game has significantly switched up the formula.
That is certainly true, if a value neutral assessment from me at this point. It’s got a bit of Monster Hunter in it with the maps and quest structure. The plot framing is also a little obscured in promo media you’re a time traveler?
This is before trainers or gyms so it’s more about the Pokédex than anything
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i have been playing so much of this game and i haven’t finished a pokemon game since black/white. it’s just real fun to fuck around in, i spent like 2 hours trying to complete a sidequest by catching a buizel that was 2’8" and ended up only getting two 2’7" buizels which this sidequest guy DOES NOT WANT which is like, i dunno. it’s fine? i walk away from that like “well i guess it’s cool that a lot of pokemon can be different, and a 2’8” buizel is a cool thing that can exist, i guess i’ll keep going at it"
tbh i have a very limited pool of knowledge regarding pokemon and enough time has passed where i have forgotten a lot so going into a new pokemon game like this feels a bit freeing cuz i am just sort of making up things as i goemon
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It certainly seems like way more of a departure from the main games then I expected having watched some streams. Do you think they could do a sequel to this one that only minimally changes to formula or would the novelty have worn off by then and bigger changes need to be made?
Also, and you can put any answer to this in spoiler tags, is there ever any acknowledgement of your player character wanting to go back to their own time away from their isekaied existence?
(Translation: “I want to go home…”)
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At first I thought it was a pretty radical departure. The more I think about it though I think this is more an extremely low bar (as a Sword and Shield victim) and that it’s a radical innovation if you’ve only played Pokémon games for the last 20 years.
I do like their commitment to making it feel a lot more like Ash Ketchum’s action RPG. I also like that the filling out of the Pokédex is a core narrative motivation that’s actually tied to the core game loop rather than some metafetchquest made a borderline chore by the need to trade.
It feels like a lot of good decisions come from just abandoning this game having to revolve around trading and half-acknowledging PvP as a pillar.
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yeah i can see a sequel helping to flesh the systems out a bit more but im drawing a blank on what i’d really look for in a sequel. modern environment? i know a lot of people are down on the look of the game so i imagine they’d consider addressing that in the next one, maybe. OH you can’t pet the pokemon which frankly is a goddamn CRIME
as for the protag, not sure if this is very spoilery since it’s early in the game and im only like 3/5ths maybe thru. they basically drop in from a rift with amnesia while wearing modern clothes and i havent encountered much regarding their home or their insights on returning. their insights are mostly about pokemon. they have pokemon brain. hopefully something happens and maybe i missed or forgot something but yeah. people definitely love to remind you that you fell from the sky. like constantly
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Yeah I feel like this game is what the mainline series should have been for a few years now, at the very least just for how it streamlines battles and catching etc so there’s way less text boxes to sift through, but also because the ‘get all the gym badges and become the champ’ is so painfully stale now.
One drawback to the seamless integration of the battles is that the camera doesn’t dynamically frame the battle for best effect, instead it just stays centered on your character, so you end up with things like the opponent’s health bar covered by the cinematic black bars or having to constantly move around to get the best view etc.
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I’ve been playing this game for days and am really fascinated by the strange but subtle characterization the protagonist has.
Most Pokemon games are all about complimenting you as much as possible and just constantly hyping you up and making you feel like a perfect little baby hero. When people are mean to you they’re really mean and cartoony about it; a lot of the games don’t really give you a rival anymore, or if they do, they redeem the rival and explain that he’s only bad because of his family life, or something.
This game has a lot more bleak and dark shit in it (RELATIVE to the overall vibe of other Pokemon games of course) and the character’s facial expressions are so delightfully dismayed and miserable. Your character is always expressing silent horror and misery–and often, at things the player is probably not scared of. You can reply to other characters in conversations, and they almost always give you the option to say something forlorn, miserable, or negative, particularly when people challenge you to battles or tell you to do something brave and heroic (“I’d rather not,” etc). It gives the player this really quiet kind of mopey characterization that I haven’t seen the Pokemon games touch before.
There are also a lot of NPCs who essentially persecute you–one or two other characters are absolutely obsessed with the idea of you being isekai’d into the world, to the point where they bring it up in almost every conversation and voice all sorts of weird paranoias and negative thoughts about you directly to your face. The most intense moment comes in the third act when the leader of your organization accuses you of essentially being some kind of witch who has caused a cosmic disaster and EXPELS you from the organization you’re a member of/exiles you from the town. You do a slow walk out of town at the slowest possible movement speed while NPCs whisper horrible rumors about you and your character has the MOST miserable and devastated expression I’ve ever seen on a pokemon protagonist’s cartoony little face.
It is so intense compared to other games in this series!!! There’s a sequence which follows where you run around the starter zone begging people to help you and take pity on you, and almost EVERYONE rejects you and they’re like “I don’t care about you enough to take a risk for you.” Incredibly strange and to see this shit in a pokemon game, haha!
They explicitly state in an early part of the game that you are fifteen years old. In in some of the other games, I believe you are explicitly 10? So I’d guess that this game is deliberately pitched older than the other games, and that some part of the logic for this involved Nintendo going “this is More Mature than our other games. Therefore, the story should be more mature, which means character should be miserable all the time, and should be persecuted for being an isekai child, and should have a dark night of the soul in the third act,” which is nothing special when it comes to game storytelling but is certainly very unusual for this IP.
I love it. I don’t think Gamefreak is ever gonna make the “dark, brutal” pokemon game I wanted when I was 15 but this is definitely the closest they’ve ever gotten. I haven’t finished arceus yet but this third act misery twist is weirdly compelling, haha!
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Last night, I completed my playthrough of PLA.
Warning: if you put this game down when the credits rolled, you missed out!! There are like 15 hours of story content after the credits!!
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The main quest continues with a new plot mission. At the very end of this mission, a whole ass villain is revealed and you do a boss fight against them and learn that they were responsible for all thespace time shit in the story, and indirectly responsible for the protagonist isekai-ing into the world in the first place. What!!!
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There is a “Path of Solitude” battle system where you do solo fights in the arena. Each Pokémon has a designed, puzzle-like “Path of Solitude” enemy which can be most easily defeated by a specific encounter strategy. If you complete the battle you get a mark in your pokedex so that’s another focus for completionists
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There is a “massive mass outbreak” system where huge crowds of pokemon swarm around the world and you get a chance to get rare ones from these clusters of swarming monsters. This only gets unlocked at the end of a multi-hour questline with a story element. It took me like 4-5 hours to unlock this
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Every legendary from Diamond and Pearl is in the game and each has their own story quest. Some of the legendaries only unlock after you have defeated the secret villain
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After you collect one of each Pokémon, you battle Arceus in a giant arena boss fight and then when you defeat him he agrees to accompany you as your Pokémon. The next time you return to your village, a strange compulsion directs you to lie down in bed. You then unlock a kind of battle tower-adjacent feature, which has a points and rewards system. You complete the battle tower matches in your dreams. These battles are designed by Arceus, who is God, and God sits there and watches you do them and keeps track of the points.
This is wild as hell. All Pokemon games are designed for extended play after the main plot, but this game has so, so, so much shit, and that postgame stuff is so “plotty” itself, that I cannot believe they dropped the credits when they did. I know multiple people who quit playing after the “end” of the game because they didn’t realize there were like 5 new endgame features hiding behind 10+ hours of story quests.
I think Game Freak did this to make the game feel more “generous.” I dunno if it worked. I now realize why all the completionist-focused open world games I am sick of do that whole silly little “drop the player back into the game world and blast them with new map icons asap” thing. If you hide it behind natural, setting-respecting story, people don’t ever realize that the levers in the dopamine box are all still hooked up and they can keep playing, lmao
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I totally forgot how that clown was responsible for your isekai-ing. Can you remind me? I was way too distracted looking at his ridiculous stupid cosplay and the implications of it. Like how did he create an outfit that looks exactly like Arceus without ever having seen Arceus? Just his educated guess based on tiny murals?? Like what
Anyway, I also just completed the game yesterday and got the Shiny Charm. I really wish perfecting the IVs in Arceus went back and reflected the stats in other games but apparently it does not 
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