Just cleared Devil May Cry for the first time. I stocked up on those Devil Trigger stars before the final boss and essentially just powered through it without much trouble.
Once I process my thoughts I'll be sure to provide more detailed thoughts.
Currently Playing:
Switch - Blade Strangers
PS4 - Kingdom Hearts III, Tetris Effect (VR)
Oooooh nice @RR529! (Only just saw that and your previous post to me)
Interested to hear your thoughts on DMC, especially seeing as this is your first time playing it! I've only ever heard of people experiencing it back in the day or around the time
Anyone looked on Nintylife and saw the "leaked" pokemon evolutions and a few more pokes for sword and shield?
For Sw&Sh it is unfortunately turning into gen 5 situation once again for me where I don't really like any of the pokemon designs coming out at all.
Scorbunny actually has the best supposed end evo but it's so... bland and generic. Almost offensively so. Sobble's looks incredibly weird and dare I say wrong to me and I just flat out don't like Grookey's with that leaf hair
It's rather dismaying as I was (Despite Gamefreak's baffling descisions/PR blunders) slowly coming around on the title as I looked at a few more things about it.
That Viking/Scruffy Meowth looking thing is probably the one that caught my eye the most. But it's still kinda making the best of a bad situation type of deal.
I know I don't have a switch yet but... Bah... I'll bring that old chestnut out and say
"I'm not mad GameFreak, I'm just disappointed"
... Let's hope that Toby Fox's song is actually decent then his contribution to Little Town hero's supposedly muted soundtrack eh?
@Foxy-Goddess-ScotchySobble's final evo sort of reminds me of Greninja, but with a healthy heap of Gex mixed in. I actually really like adult Grookey's (dare I say) sexy leaf hair and DK-esque build. Scorbunny's final evo... the image is so fuzzy that it's hard to tell. Sort of reminds me of Braixen, though, whose design I still love, so we'll see.
Not really in love with any of them, but I also don't hate them. I need to see them in-engine to really get a feel for them, I think.
I do LOVE some of the alternate forms of older Pokemon, though. Galarian Ponyta looks like a My Little Pony, which is adorable, and Sirfetched is so ridiculous that I just adore him. Dapper Weezing is great, too.
I'm actually really excited for this gen. It seems like a decent step up from the 3DS era. IF the writing is on-point and the game really is better about allowing the player to explore at their leisure (the Wild Area seems to be signaling this will be the case), this might very well be one of my favorite Pokemon gens.
@Ralizah I kinda see what you mean about the Gex vibes. Though i'm now picturing Danny John Jules or "The Cat" from Red Dwarf voicing it and it weirdly works for me 😂 (Gex had different voices over here in the UK. For each game in fact)
I thoroughly hope that you both (@Ralizah & @KratosMD) enjoy the games.
If I do every get round to trying it, I'm kinda glad that unlike Gen 5 there'll seemingly be a selection of pokes from previous titles I can use from the get go.
It's something I appreciated about X&Y even if the story was rather pants. Plus I actually liked Gen 6's offerings too.
And I'll make sure to spoiler tag anything remotely spoilery about the leaks or whatever in this topic for you @KratosMD til it's out!
Previously known as Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy
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"You don't have to save the world to find meaning in life. Sometimes all you need is something simple, like someone to take care of"
As Pokemon SwSh is getting more leaks now, I'll try to be more careful about where I look on the internet. If I ever get it, I'd prefer to be surprised in game and not know all the new creatures beforehand.
Still not sure that I want those games though. I don't have a Switch yet (been getting more tempted recently), and what they've announced so far of the games hasn't really excited me. I have enjoyed a lot of Pokemon in the past, and so will be patiently awaiting the reviews for SwSh.
@KratosMD In fairness, Yokai Watch turning into something akin to Xenoblade Chronicles for the fourth entry is more born out of desperation than anything. The series was hot for a short time, but Pokemon, a series that has been consistently popular since the mid-90s, has been eating its lunch as of late. It is also completely failing to catch on in the West, despite a massive overseas push. They needed to change something.
And, you know, that's not a bad thing. The Switch itself was a desperation move on Nintendo's part to save their place in the home console market after the catastrophic failure of the Wii U. Great things are often born out of people and companies throwing caution to the wind in bold attempts to stay relevant. Arguably, this is the biggest reason for Pokemon's design conservatism. Why wildly rock the boat and risk alienating people when a comfortable formula that an entire generation of people grew up with continues to sell ridiculously well every couple of years?
With that said, I take LGPE and SwSh as indications that GF is kind of tired of doing the same song and dance every gen, and are taking steps to change the experience of their games in certain key ways. It just seems like those changes aren't really in line with what is expected of them by their hardcore, adult online fanbase.
@KratosMD You should give the Gen V games another chance. B/W were the first games in the series to have a story that wasn't just thwarting an evil team while collecting badges, and it was the first time the gym leaders had an active role in the story instead of being glorified boss battles. Hell, you don't even fight the region champion during the main story! It certainly wasn't a great story if we're comparing it to other JRPGs, but it was the first time a Pokemon game actually had something to say with its narrative. It also had a lot of quality of life improvements over previous games like allowing TMs to be reused, and fixing the slow battles that was an issue in all the Gen IV games. While they didn't end up sticking, B/W also tried to change things up by introducing triple and rotation battles.
B2/W2 were the first "third" entries that tried to be more than just the version we should have got the first time by being an actual sequel. They also had a big focus on post-game content which none of the 3DS or Switch games have been able to match so far. You're free to still think they're underwhelming, but I think they offer a lot more than you gave them credit for.
Anyway, I think one thing to keep in mind with how formulaic Pokemon has been is that the 3DS games did have over 700 unique monsters. This was something that gave Pokemon an edge over other JRPGs, and also why the Switch games ditching the national dex is so significant. Sword and Shield will still have a lot of Pokemon, but when potentially hundreds are being cut...Pokemon starts to become more comparable to other JRPGs, and the series feels extremely lacking. I would be fine with 200-300 Pokemon if it meant better games, but Sword and Shield don't really look like they're doing much to push the series forward.
While Sword and Shield are getting more criticism than past games because of the dex cut being announced as a policy change going forward, I actually think Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee are the bigger offenders. Those games limited Pokemon to the original 151 + Meltan/Melmetal when other remakes had every Pokemon introduced up to that point, and they cut out content from the previous remakes (Sevii Islands). Not to mention its two defining features were the removal of random encounters, and the revised catching system. The former is something that has existed in JRPGs since the SNES, and Pokemon already had ways of making random encounters less tedious with repels. The latter is just the catching system from Pokemon Go in a mainline entry, so it wasn't even a genuinely new feature for the series. They were also more expensive than the 3DS games because they're on the Switch, but they had so much less to offer than past games. I have no hope anything will change for this series when a game like that still sold over 11 million copies.
@Ralizah I feel like it's kind of the opposite, and the Switch games are actually doubling down on Game Freak's reluctance to change the formula in any meaningful way. I already mentioned earlier in my post why I think Let's Go doesn't really do anything new, so I'll just focus on Sword and Shield.
Wild Area: The Wild Area is definitely something new for Pokemon, and I think it's good that they're experimenting with the world design of the series. The problem is that it's only in a certain part of the region, and you're still limited to a fixed camera outside of it. It feels like they want to do something new for the series, but they won't actually commit to it. Not to mention that, from everything we've seen, it looks really empty. It doesn't look like there will be much to do outside of trainer battles, catching Pokemon, and raid battles in the Wild Area. There was an interview where one of the developers compared the Wild Area to the size of two regions from BotW, but areas in that game are way more interactive. I'm seeing a lot of people excited for the Wild Area because it's "open world", but I don't see that as inherently a good thing.
Lack of handholding: This is mostly about how you can skip the catching tutorial, and how you can encounter overleveled Pokemon in the Wild Area. I think these are steps in the right direction, but I really don't like how Sword and Shield is handling these features. You can skip the catching tutorial...but only if you've already caught a Pokemon when pretty much every other game that lets you skip tutorials gives you a yes/no prompt. The game won't just trust that you know what you're doing, you have to prove that you know how to catch a Pokemon in order to "skip" the tutorial. It's basically like being forced to either watch or play the catching tutorial, which I don't think is much different from how things were in previous games. It is at least a little more interactive, but it comes across as something that's only an improvement if you were already planning to catch one of the early game Pokemon.
The issue I have with overleveled Pokemon in the Wild Area is that you can't see what level they are (like in Xenoblade) before entering a battle. It could just end up feeling like artificial difficulty, and considering you can't even catch them at first, it doesn't seem like there's any reason to interact with those Pokemon. I don't care too much about the difficulty in Pokemon, but I don't see why they won't just add a hard mode already.
The protagonists are more expressive than in Sun and Moon, but they're most likely still silent protagonists, and Pokemon games usually don't have a strong enough supporting cast to carry the story. There's also still no voice acting despite the recent mainline games clearly trying to be a little more cinematic. I didn't really care about this when the series was on the 3DS, but I've played a lot more JRPGs in recent years, and it honestly feels a little absurd that we still don't have this for big story scenes.
There's also dynamax/gigantamax, but that's literally just a combination of megas and z-moves. I think the biggest thing that bothers me about this game is that there's no feature I can be completely excited about. Every cool feature has some kind of drawback because Game Freak is so hesitant to actually push the series forward. I find it disappointing because games like Dragon Quest XI show that you can modernize a series without drastically changing the formula.
@Storytime7 No, SwSh are definitely changing up the formula more than usual. Your complaints are valid, but it seems more like you're saying that they're not changing things ENOUGH, which is a perfectly valid opinion, but it doesn't jive with the judgment that GF is doubling down on the way their older games are designed. I'm obviously not arguing that the game is a radical shift from the status quo ala BotW, but the additions are reasonably major. The Wild Area, as you point out, is something completely brand new, and is much more notable than the random gimmicks they tend to include every gen. Incorporating Pokemon on the map in a main gen title is also a major change, and it seems like they fit way better in the larger environs of the Wild Area as opposed to the cramped, GB-era corridors of LGPE. They're drastically increasing the scope of character customization, which is nice, considering how well-received that feature was in X/Y. Even the ability to skip tutorials at all is a massive change, especially when you consider how regimented SuMo were.
If that's not enough for you, then that's fine, but SwSh certainly represent a big change for the mainline titles.
As for overleveled mons, I refuse to believe there won't be some visual indicator of when they're higher level than you, but we'll see.
As for DQXI, I love the game to death, but I don't see how it really modernizes the series. It's basically a PS2 game with modern graphics, right down to the FFXII-esque level design.
@KratosMD I'm surprised you dislike B/W so much considering, as was stated, it was one of the only real attempts made at telling a compelling, JRPG-esque story in the series, and it radically changed things up by completely changing which mons were obtainable throughout the main story. It's also the only Pokemon game to question the logic of parents being OK with their kids venturing out into the wilderness on their lonesome, which made the relationships in-game feel surprisingly real.
D/P was the only generation I ever just fully gave up on, I think. Something about that gen bored me to tears. I'd probably play a remake, though, and give it more of a fair shake so long as it's not in the style of LGPE (I can't get over the forced motion controls and lack of wild Pokemon battles).
To me, it doesn't look like Pokemon SwSh is doing much to change the formula. The wild area is the big change, but I can't tell yet how good that'll be. It may be an impressive open world area with lots to explore, but I'm worried that it'll end up being a fairly boring and empty area with not much going on other than the wild pokemon walking about. Pokemon appearing in the wild might be a revolutionary thing for pokemon, but in this day and age it's not really impressive.
Sun and Moon felt like a bigger change. They replaced the usual gyms with the island trials, and replaced the standard evil team trying to use a legendary to accomplish their goals with less serious thugs Team Skull. Plus the sunny Alola region has a much brighter and different vibe to the previous regions.
In regards to past main series games, my favourites are Platinum, Hg/Ss, and B2/W2. These had a lot of areas to explore and didn't feel as linear as some of the more recent games. There were also plenty of side activities to do in them.
I wasn't very keen on B1/W1, mainly due to those games being very linear, and I didn't care for the story.
I haven't played it @Ralizah but from what I've seen and heard of DQ XI sounds like it plays pretty much the same as DQVIII (which I have played) just with field encounters instead of random battles.
Me and JohnnyShoulder talked about it a few weeks back in fact in the PS4 thread and said pretty much said the same thing that the game is exeedingly old school in terms of design, maybe even too much for us 😅
I've also seen a few more of the supposed leaks and there's some more that I actually like and a few bizzare ones too.
To be honest I'm not sure I really like Galar/Alola forms in general.
Whist it makes sense there should be them and some more work has been done to them, they feel a bit more like a reskin/recolour which... just seems a little off in a monster catching game to me.
Maybe I'm just reaching that age though and I'll have to start yelling at kids to get off my garden/lawn
Previously known as Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy
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"You don't have to save the world to find meaning in life. Sometimes all you need is something simple, like someone to take care of"
@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy I wasn't a huge fan of Z-moves and Megaevolutions, personally. It all felt a bit too elaborate, too Digimon-y for my liking. Gigamaxing is kind of silly, but it retains a simplicity to it that I like.
RE: DQVIII vs DQXI, there are some very notable differences between the two. Primarily in terms of how progression happens. VIII feels very open throughout, and has a large world map that you can sort of wander at your leisure. There's still an order to events, of course, but the game doesn't really push you in the direction of where you need to go. DQXI, on the other hand, doesn't have a world map that you can traverse on foot, but much more linear zones that funnel the player toward the next story location. It's very much like FFI vs FFXII. The blacksmithing is ostensibly similar to alchemy, with the key difference that alchemy in DQVIII is very much about random experimentation, whereas you can only smith items in DQXI if you have the recipe. And recipes are found on bookcases, in chests, as side-quest rewards, etc. Smithing is also a minigame on its own that requires some level of skill and planning (and a smidge of luck) if you want to make +3 items. In pretty much every respect that it differs from VIII, I vastly prefer XI. But, yes, it IS extremely old-fashioned, and the feel of the narrative does echo VIII quite a bit.
@crimsontadpoles The biggest accomplishment of SuMo, imo, was the move toward much more realistically scaled environments. No longer did the player character feel like a giant who was 1/4 the size of the Pokemon center.
I really liked Lumiose City in X/Y, though. That was the Novigrad or New Vegas of the Pokemon universe. It was nice to explore an actual large city for once.
I can only really remember the first bit of VIII of having to find a crystal ball for the local mystic.
There's definitely a story there in it... But for the life of me I can't remember besides there being an evil wizard and surprise surprise the world needing saving at the end
At the time of playing DQVIII I remember thinking it felt a lot like I was playing a more refined & Cel shaded version of FFI or better yet FFIII thanks to the extremely tenuous links to the overall narative for each area til I got a little over halfway... and even then there was a bunch of padding .
Series just isn't my cup of tea sadly. Though I think it's quite something to have 11 games and still be very recognisable and resemble it's first iteration... Compared the FF series which goes all over the place
Well I haven't played Gen 7 yet (I may end up doing so at some point) ... Z moves did sound a terribly convoluted and some of them dangerously op too.
Gigantamax/Gigamaxing is really just a timed mega-evolution though isn't it mechanically? Still seems rather Digimon-like not that particularly mind (Well. Long meowth/fluffy Eevee don't really seem that important, but some of the other ones actually look worthwhile)
Being the nosy git I am, couldn't help but look at a few more pokémon leaks for SW/SH.
Might've just seen the silliest pokemon design I've ever seen 😂 (baring Stunfisk that I loathe with a passion)
Just a normal looking penguin but with an icecube for a head. The evolution is just a bigger body with smaller head. It's just... Wow. If it's supposed to be referencing besides an ice cube and Pingu It's WAY over my head lol
-EDIT- Well hopefully no one saw that as the spoiler tag for the image didn't work at all!
@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Gigantamaxing is, a bit. But, like Dynamaxing, it only seems to be something that's triggered in specific special locations, so you can't really rampage through the game with it like you could with Z-moves. In that sense, it'll be more setpiecey than anything, I think.
Just saw the leaked Pokemon. A few are stupid looking (like the one you described), but I'm liking most of the new designs.
Some of the leaks are contradictory, so it'll be interesting to see how things pan out RE: the post game.
Oh yeah the alternate transformation is called Dynamax! I thought it was a bit odd I was saying giga and gigant-amax... that'd be a bit confusing
Tbh I'm not entirely sure what's real or not now @Ralizah regarding the leaked pokemon! There's been a few that I can't believe are real and there have been a few fakes thrown in as well
... Only a week or so left now though so enjoy!
Previously known as Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy
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"You don't have to save the world to find meaning in life. Sometimes all you need is something simple, like someone to take care of"
@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy To be fair, I confused the terms a bit earlier as well, and they sound stupid in the first place. Basically, Dynamaxing is when the Pokemon get BIG for a few rounds. Gigantamaxing is the one that feels sort of like mega evolutions, because the Pokemon actually change forms. Also, I think any Pokemon can Dynamax, whereas only a few specific types of Pokemon have alternate, Gigantamaxed forms.
It's going to be interesting to see how these games are received once, for better or for worse, copies are out in the wild. Pokemon Sw/Sh AND Death Stranding landing within a week or so of eachother is going to make this a pretty wild November for the industry.
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