Are we doing this again?
Let's start with the main gimmick, the open world. This is the first open world Pokemon game, and it sucks! For as much flak as Sword and Shield got, I believe that was the perfect template for what Pokemon should strive for. A large open area, akin to Pokemon Safari, but a structured and semi-linear main game. And there are multiple reasons as to why that is the best approach.
For instance, having an open world means that there are no dungeons whatsoever. 90% of the caves are linear hallways, there are no block puzzles, nothing fun to do besides entering and exiting caves that look almost identical to one another. The world is littered with tiny glowing pixels that represents items, but there's nothing really special to be found while exploring beyond 32 stakes that hide four of the five legendary Pokemon.
This extends to the towns, they are so boring. There are almost no important NPCs to talk to who may reward you with goodies, and beyond the Gyms, which are all identical, no building insides were designed. Towns have little to no personality, with very little to make them stand out, and what little they have... there's no point to it, since exploration rarely nets you anything truly special.
And just like there are no dungeons and no puzzles, gyms have lost their dungeons too, now you have challenges, which are the stupidest minigames ever made. One is... pushing a giant olive through a net. Another is... just fight 3 trainers in a row. Another one is the world's lamest Simon says minigame. This feels like something made for babies. I understand that Pokemon games are for everybody, but at some point Nintendo has to acknowledge that most of the people that keep buying this junk are the adults that grew up with it. Mario is still fun, Mario is still creative, Mario still has optional challenges... Pokemon has nothing for adults beyond competitive fighting.
Going back to the legendaries, by now we have over 1000 different Pokemon species... and there are only 400 in the game. That's pathetic. And there are only 5 Legendaries, one which is given to you from the start. During the DS days some idiots complained about having too many legendaries... man, legendaries were great, legendaries usually were rewards for dungeons or optional quests. They were extra stuff for players to do. Finding 32 stakes hidden throughout this empty world is so boring! I'd take fetch quests over them any day of the week.
Then there's Tetralizing, because Pokemon feels like Digimon lately since they can't stick to a mechanic and add depth to it. Mega-evolutions were the best thing to happen to Pokemon, but then they tried different, and worse, tweaks to it, probably because designing new forms for Pokemon was too time consuming and Game Freak always takes the laziest approach possible. Tetralizing is at least interesting, because you could potentially change the type of your Pokemon and mess up your opponent, so I'm sure that it's a fun competitive mechanic... but for us that care about the single player experience, this is just a lengthy animation that adds a silly hat to your Pokemon and looks lame as hell.
Paradox Pokemon are interesting, they are futuristic(Violet) or past(Scarlet) versions of Pokemon, but there are so few of them. They could've been fantastic additions as new Mega-Evolutions.
And then, of course, as per usual, Game Freak always takes a couple of steps back with each new release. How come Pokemon X and Y had the best trainer customization throughout the entire series? Sure, in this game you have a more in-depth face-hair editor, but beyond gloves, shoes, socks, backpacks, hats and glasses... you are stuck with four stupid looking uniforms that you can't even change the colors of. They use the Pokemon Highschool theme as an excuse, but it's just gamefreak being lazy. Besides, the uniforms truly look stupid. And, of course, we are back to consumable TMs. They made changes to the formula that were beloved by everyone, like TMs that are multiple use, but they undo it. I swear, Game Freak are one of the dumbest developers around, and they get rewarded for it with great sales.
And that's not even getting into the technical issues. The framerate is all over the place. Due to the open world, NPCs or Pokemon may walk in the middle of cutscenes or battles, which isn't gamebreaking but does look dumb. Plenty of times when initiating battles the camera just points at thin air. Where is Nintendo's seal of quality? No, really, this feels like shovelware with how poorly made it is. The game crashed a bunch o' times. A Nintendo game crashing, is this really their new standard? Oh, and since monsters don't de-spawn while battling, it's perfectly possible to exit a fight only to have a Pokemon standing directly over you, instantly triggering another battle.
I will say that the game does have a few good elements to it. You are given three main objectives, Gym Leaders, Star Squad bosses and Titan Pokemon that you can tackle in any order. Nothing scales alongside you, so it's perfectly possible that you'll overlevel most areas by the time you reach them, particularly if you are thorough with capturing 'mons and what have you. To be honest, I prefer this approach to Final Fantasy VIII of having everything scale alongside you, but they could've taken certain measures, such as having the levels of the Pokemon you face on each trial change depending on how many you tackled before. So the first Gym Leader you tackle, regardless of who it is, will always have Pokemon at a certain level and so on. That would've fixed everything, but Game Freak doesn't get paid to think, I figure. Another thing I'll give them is that by the time you have unlocked every exploration ability... moving around the open world, as empty and forgettable that it is.... can be kinda fun.
I also liked the final stretch of the game. It's the closest thing to a dungeon that the game has, and you have your three buddies running alongside you while bickering and talking, which reminded me a lot of X and Y, when your other buddies would sometimes run alongside you. How come X and Y already did some of the things this game does but better? Speaking of that... the story is kinda endearing at times, particularly everything involving Arven. The Cassiopeia storyline is too stupid for anyone over 3 years to find interesting, surprising or entertaining in any way.
Also, the ending credits song is a total banger.
I've played Pokemon my entire life. I've loved Pokemon my entire life. People disliked Pearl and Diamond... I didn't, I liked them a lot. Even their remakes which got low scores I considered to be really good. While most people hated Sword and Shield for how basic they were... I still thought they were decent games. I still do. But this is where that stops. This is a low quality, low effort game. Game Freak have gotten away with it because Pokemon's formula is simply fun, but this game just took too many steps back, and is just too unpolished to be worthy of having the "NINTENDO" label on their cover. This is downright shameful. If I was Nintendo I would take the IP away from GameFreak and give it to another developer to have a crack at it, because this is insulting. I was done with writing about games but this game was just so horrid that I couldn't help myself. It's THAT bad.
2.0
No comments:
Post a Comment