#I say easy. I’m very overleveled but also bad at games so it balances

[fithragaer]

Kos or some say kosm

[voltimer]

'The Magic of Johto's Level Curve'

(or, 'a leisurely analysis of the singleplayer balance of Pokemon GSC and HGSS')

The Johto games - especially HeartGold and SoulSilver - seem to have a very good reputation. Some often put the aforementioned HGSS into their top 3 or describe it as the core Pokemon experience. I personally agree with this sentiment and HGSS is either #2 or #1 depending on my mood (it usually competes with Black 2 and White 2).

Despite all its praise though, there seems to be an incredibly consistent point raised against it: the level curve. I see it described as unbalanced, janky, and generally bad.

There are two main problems people tend to cite. First is the level progression in Johto itself, with Gyms 5, 6, and 7 not exactly being a smooth progression upwards and then Team Rocket's Archer and the 8th Gym having a notable level spike compared to those last three. Wild Pokemon levels are also usually a lot lower than the major boss fights they are ahead of, making raising new 'mons harder and grinding for boss fights longer. The other problem is Kanto, whose problems can essentially be said to take Johto's levelling issues and ramp them up. The jump from fighting Blue to the Elite Four rematches and Red is also very significant.

What I'm not going to do here is refute that the above isn't true - these level scaling inconsistencies are certainly present. It's also very different to the vast majority of main series entries, whose level curves are more linear and gradual. Gens 5 and 7 even have a feature which multiplies exp gain based on how much lower or higher you are than the Pokemon you defeat which in a way acts like a rubber band around each game's level curve, ensuring you can catch up easily but not go too overlevelled either. Playing GSC and HGSS when the rest of those entries are like that is a bit jarring. Pokemon is so well-known for having quite a formulaic design across its main series and when compared to that formula with regards to level progression and the like, the Johto games do seem a bit off-colour.

What I am going to do though is try to explain why this so-called bad level curve is at the very least not actually that bad, or, if I can convince you well enough, that the Johto games actually have a unique and (what I call) magical singleplayer game design not properly replicated in any other entry. It goes to the core essence of Pokemon's theming, and it fits with the fact that Johto's narrative also happens to put the most focus on those themes than the rest of the series.

When I say the core essence of theming, I mean the very basics of every Pokemon adventure: you, the player, leave home to go on a journey around your region, meeting various people and overcoming various challenges along the way together with your partner Pokemon. Challenges you overcome are all thanks to the bonds you share with your partners and how you raise them with love and care. As you get older, this is the sort of thing in Pokemon that you probably end up taking for granted. It's typical "power of friendship" stuff, and most people will tend to come to conclude through learning about the game mechanics that this sort of thing is superficial and that stats are all that matter in the end. The more modern Pokemon games also have such a big focus on larger-than-life stories with big climaxes featuring the box Legendaries that it's easy to lose this basic level, down-to-earth narrative theming.

Johto is significant for not having any larger-than-life aspects overshadowing its core. Instead, the core takes centre stage. There is no real overarching story besides your adventure. Team Rocket's antics take a sub-plot role but in the end act as a foil to your story, being one of the more major obstacles you overcome. Catching Ho-oh or Lugia is no cataclysm either, but rather a reward for your achievements throughout the game and thanks to your good and pure heart - recognised by the Legendary in question. Moments throughout the game like how you deal with the situation at the Lake of Rage, or the Dragon's Den trial where you're asked questions to test your ideals as a trainer (which, of course, you pass with flying colours) all contribute to this core as well.

The way Professor Oak congratulates you after defeating Lance ties the knot perfectly on the main campaign:

"Ah, <player>! It's been a long while. You certainly look more impressive. Your conquest of the League is just fantastic! Your dedication, love, and trust for your Pokémon made this happen. Your Pokémon were outstanding, too. Because they believed in you as a Trainer, they persevered. Congratulations, <player>!"

These are just examples of the main story events, though,and Johto has a lot more than that. The region is filled with things to do beside the main campaign - Berries/Apricorns, Pokegear calls, the Ruins of Alph and other optional caves, the Bug Catching Contest, and (in HGSS) the Pokeathlon and Safari Zone, just to name a few of the more notable ones. Tama Hero's review of Pokemon GSC talks a lot about this and it's well-worth a watch even beyond the section describing the games' breadth of side content.

Tama Hero also touches upon the supposed level scaling issue, and her response to the complaints is that there is a "sprinkling" of opportunities for small bits of exp gain throughout the game which should help you stay on track in most cases, and where you can't match levels, you can outplay your opponent.

I certainly agree with the latter. It always feels entirely possible to beat bosses at a level deficit throughout Johto. The Johto League is one of the key cases where you'll probably end up at level disadvantage, but I've consistently been able to defeat it with a team of lv 40s on average (so nearly 10 levels behind Lance's peak), and I'm pretty certain that my not-even-10-year-old self did so as well, even though it took me many, many attempts. From various people I've talked to and bits of let's plays I've seen over the years, this seems to be the common experience too. I think only a minority of people have had to grind to match Lance's levels in order to beat him at all. Granted, it might take you a couple of tries at that level disadvantage (or a great couple of tries more, like little ol' me), but that's surely not an unreasonable expectation. The concept of getting stuck at a difficult stage in a game could be called a universal one, and I think most people agree that it's always pretty satisfying to finally surmount a challenge like that. This can even be said about other Pokemon games - Kanto, Hoenn and Sinnoh also all have large level spikes at the end. In fact, at least when it comes to the end of the maingame, I'd argue Hoenn and Sinnoh have a larger level spike than Johto, but they're not considered impossible or anything

Regardless, though: it's certainly possible to win difficult battles in Pokemon at a level disadvantage. Tama Hero argues that the strategy required to do so isn't something the game teaches you very well, but I think this is a tad pessimistic. In the end I think that most wins will just come down to understanding of more fundamental skills that you've probably learned through the course of the game naturally - using type matchups (gyms are all type themed), using moves with stat changes (the earlygame is full of moves like Growl and Tail Whip), using status moves (no doubt you're going to see the effects of Paralysis and Burns throughout the game at least), and apt use of items (bosses always use potions and often use held items). Players also have more control over the battle than the enemy, with the default Switch mode and a huge amount more items available. It's true that the games don't teach you the deeper, untold mechanics very well, but learning about those only unlock even more ways to succeed for the numbers-minded veterans.

On the topic of those deeper, untold mechanics I also want to talk about something which Tama Hero doesn't mention at all - Effort Values, or EVs. Most of you reading will probably know about these by now, but for those who don't, EVs are hidden values which can increase a Pokemon's raw stats by a certain amount based on the other Pokemon they defeat. They were present in a slightly different form in Gens 1 and 2 in the form of "stat exp" but the premise was the same: your Pokemon grow twofold when you defeat Pokemon, by gaining visible exp for levelling up and visibly gaining stats every time that exp bar fills, but also by gaining stats little by little every time they defeat any Pokemon. Your Pokemon's EVs weren't visible to you in-game until Gen 6 with the Super Training graphic, and numerically weren't until Gen 7 where you can press X on the Pokemon's stat screen to show what are called "base stats".

EV optimisation is crucial to competitive play because the stat boosts they give are quite significant. Competitive players will "min-max" spreads, putting as much as possible into 2 stats to maximise strengths and not wasting any on stats they aren't making use of. In maingame playthroughs, though, EVs will usually end up being a balanced spread because you'll invetivably be facing a variety of Pokemon with different EV yields throughout the game. EVs can also be increased with the Vitamin items (Protein, Calcium, etc.) which you find a handful of throughout the game (and can buy at a premium) and can be used to manually raise EVs, though only to a certain point.

In Gens 3 and onward, a Pokemon can have up to 252 EVs in 1 stat, and 510 in total. At Lv 100, 4 EVs in a stat grant 1 point extra to it. For the singleplayer campaign the conditions are a bit different, but if we assume as a standard that by the Elite Four your EV total is maxed out and you have an even spread, your stats will all be up to 10 points higher than they would be without EVs. In Gens 1 and 2, you can actually max out all of a Pokemon's stat exp values but you're unlikely to cap them all for a good while beyond the maingame so we can consider them about the same as in the later gens for this.

But why is this important?

Firstly, the difference EVs make in the above scenario account for what is usually about 5 levels' worth of stats. Depending on your exact distribution, it could be a couple more or less levels' worth in each stat but the bottom line is that they make your Pokemon's strength higher than it may seem based on level alone.

This means that the wild Pokemon grinding that is criticised for being too tedious in Johto as a result of low levels is also better than it seems because even when you don't level up, you're gaining EVs for every one of those you defeat. The stagnant levels in the midgame of Johto also contribute more to your Pokemon's growth than it may seem from the slow level gain. The Pokegear rematches which you gain access to after defeating Team Rocket before Gym 8 may also be a little infrequent, but they also very often give you Vitamins afterwards to add to all of this.

Secondly is what seems to be a fairly unknown fact: in-game trainers do not have any EV spreads. Thanks to the work of speedrunners, we have exact data of enemy trainers' Pokemon to show this. Trainers do have IV spreads based on their "AI level" (more 'advanced' AI levels will have up to 30 IVs across the board) but the difference near-perfect IVs will have on their Pokemon is not as great as the combination of random IV spreads and relatively balanced EV spreads yours.

That 10 level deficit vs Lance is suddenly more like 5 in practice. Some of his Pokemon also happen to have pretty high stats naturally in Gyarados and the Dragonites, and the level deficit will still be slightly present, but once we factor in strategy again, you can abuse their type weaknesses and make good use of items, status and whatever else have you to swing the odds in your favour.

The only way you can find out anything about EVs in Johto is from a NPC in Blackthorn City who gives your Pokemon the Effort Ribbon if they have reached their total of 510, and the only practical way for a player without the technical knowledge to have achieved this is to have spent time throughout the game doing lots of little bits of training - in other words, putting in the effort - to have incidentally capped their Pokemon's EV total. It's only fitting that you find this NPC towards the end of the Johto campaign because it's likely that by this point a couple of your team members will be eligible for the ribbon.

This finally ties back to the point of core theming. EVs are an invisible stat giving your Pokemon an extra edge over their in-game opponents, or, at worst, one closing a gap in strength between them, as a result of all of the time you've spent raising those Pokemon throughout the game. In other words, EVs are essentially the statistical representation of the "dedication, love, and trust" you have for your Pokemon which gets you through seemingly difficult challenges. Levels, then, are only a surface representation of your Pokemon's strength: they create the feeling of an uphill battle, but you can win against the odds by believing in yourself and your partners. It's probably exactly what you thought as the naive and uncynical child playing through a Pokemon game for the first time, and probably one of the ways you made such fond memories of it. In hindsight, this is definitely how it was for me. It is a sort of magic, really.

There is still a big Red elephant in the room, and I do think that the level gap between the end of the Kanto Gyms and Red is maybe too hard to go and beat immediately after even with the power of EVs and such, but Red is by all means a superboss and final challenge of the Johto games, and I don't think it's unreasonable to have to grind for a while to build up for and to finally be able to take his team of Lv 80s on. The same can be said about the Elite Four Rematches in this game and others, Steven in Emerald, or that one Barry fight in Platinum if you do decide to beat the E4 rematches 20 times to make his levels nearly match Red's. If you're setting out to fight a superboss like this, the grind is part of the prerequesites. It's definitely still possible to beat someone like Red with a 10 or even 20 level deficit if you play well, though. I admit, I haven't beaten Red in a long time, but I have beaten Emerald Steven with a ~15 level gap before. Tama Hero also said she has beaten Red with a team of level 50s in Crystal in the review.

I said before that the other games in the series haven't replicated this sort of thing as well. Gen 5 was the beginning of a marked shift away from this design, with its overarching story-driven style and a change to exp gain which would honestly be incompatible with the level curve in Johto. Gen 6, whilst returning to the exp system without level deficit multipliers, saw different means of statistical representations of the 'dedication, love and trust' trio in Pokemon Amie, which can break the game almost as much as the Exp Share when enough Affection is built up. Gen 7 brings back Gen 5's exp system whilst retaining the Exp Share and Affection systems, and actually ends up even diverging from the EV design which went before by having in-game trainers and Totem Pokemon with competitive, min-maxed EV spreads from as early as the Trainer's School. Whilst I am yet to play Let's Go and Sword and Shield, their Exp system with a 'permanent Exp Share' of sorts makes it a huge amount different and from what I've seen and heard, overlevelling is quite easy despite the game being designed around the feature. I really hope that Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl at least return to Gen 6's exp mechanics, or better, reunite us with the held-item version of the Exp Share which doesn't make me feel like I'm cheating whenever I use it.

Before I go too off-topic, though, I should probably return to the original thread of this post to make some concluding remarks. What can't be denied that the way GSC and HGSS are designed may not be for everyone. I know for sure that a lot of people prefer to be able to breeze through a Pokemon game at a brisk pace without many roadblocks, but as someone who in recent years has come to appreciate much slower-paced and immersive singleplayer Pokemon playthroughs, I can't help but love the way GSC and HGSS are designed in the way I've explained, or appreciate their unique identity amongst the rest of the series. Coming to think about this has also shed light on why I adored HeartGold as much as I did when I first played it way back 11 years ago. I poured hours and hours into the game, and as a result, its magical design put me under its spell.

_____________________________________________________________

Though I linked to the references I did use when they appeared, here they are again. Do check them out if they're of interest to you!

Tama Hero's GSC review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgtMVKP2T6Y

speedrun.com trainer data for HGSS: https://www.speedrun.com/pkmnhgss/guide/k2zij

speedrun.com trainer data for SuMo: https://www.speedrun.com/pkmnsunmoon/guide/d2683

Tama Hero (YT) is one of the few people I know who actually makes longer-form Pokemon analysis content besides Aleczandxr (also YT), who whilst not being a 'PokeTuber' has made some brilliant analyses of storytelling through setting in Sinnoh, Hoenn, Johto, and just recently, Unova. I did not refer to them here but I can highly recommend their content, at least.

Thank you very much for reading to the very bottom here. This is my first time writing something like this and I appreciate it.

[hitodama89]

Okay, I think my Christmas preparations are finally more or less back on schedule, so I can’t keep the Sword/Shield rant inside any longer! I’m sure this’ll get long, so sorry mobile users. =‘D

First the disclaimers: these are just my feelings about the games and I don’t present them as absolute truths. You better not come hunt for my head if you disagree, as I’m not going to do it for you either! Let’s keep everything civil here, okay?

So... How was the game? (I’m gonna talk just about a single game as I’ve only played Sword, but I have no doubt this all is true for Shield, too.) Eh, I had my fun with it - it IS a Pokémon game after all. There are some great aspects that I even loved! Battle musics are the best part, as there were several tracks that sounded good as all heckaroni and set the mood perfectly. I found the graphics to be easily good enough, as they never bothered me and some scenes even looked really nice. Characters had a ton of potential, but in a true Pokémon game fashion they were of course pretty simple caricatures of what they could’ve been - still not bad at all! A couple of characters even went through a surpsiring amount of development throughout the story! Same with the region, as it had a lot of potential and I adored the Arthurian vibes used in it, and the region’s variant of Pokémon League as a “sport tournament” was also an interesting consept. I have my bone to pick with Dynamaxing, but the things I were worried about in advance were actually proven to be wrong. I feared that the mechanic would be overused and feel just plain stupid, but the game surprised me by explaining it decently enough (If Pokémon can shrink to fit into Pokeball why couldn’t they also do the opposite?), using it sparingly in the main story and making the instances when it was used just really cool. So yeah, the game absolutely has its good side! But of boy, the bad side is... Truly something else.

Where to even begin with... I guess I just say this right at the start: the game is unbeleavably unfinished. Corners have been cut in every possible way you can think of, and even in ways that will surprise you. For example what do you think about a city where you aren’t able to access any single other building aside from Pokecenter? Or about the only two caves of the games that are just straight corridors instead of mazes? There are no puzzles, no HMs or anything that would replace the vast majority of them (only fly and surf are present in the most boring way ever seen), no cities where you could even pretend to get lost in, no stationary special Pokémon waiting to be challenged (like Sudowoodo in gen two), no... Anything. The game is just void of any extra content aside from going from place A to place B - and even that is executed in such a horrifying way it makes me want to shake my head in despair. You are constantly on a very, VERY narrow railroad and you are not allowed to take even two steps to check out anything else than what you are meant to see next. The game has other absurd limitations, too, like just plain hard limits on what level Pokémon you are allowed to catch in each part of the game. You see a Pokémon that’s on higher level? Nope, you can’t throw a ball at it. There sure is the wild area where you are supposed to be able to do what you want and go wherever you desire, but the level limitations are present also there and aside from Pokémon, there isn’t really anything in the whole big place to see or do. I have heard some people have loved exploring the wild area, but I personally can’t understand what there even is to explore! A few items scattered here and there and wild Pokémon - and oh, the Max Raid Battles. The fucking Max Raid Battles.

I was extremely cautious about Max Raid Battles from the very beginning, because they sound like something straight out of PoGo, and I was not wrong - they capture very well the feeling of trying to win a Raid on your own because you have no one else to do it with you! You can challenge the Max Raid Battles with computer allies, too, but especially on higher levels the allies are just ridiculosuly bad. Most of the time you would do better if you were there on your own, but that on the other hand is impossible; you have to have a team of four players in the battle. You can try to recruit other real players to participate in the battle, but I have managed to get someone to come with me literally once. One big reason for this might be that the game doesn’t explain how do you even join the battle, and it is far from self-explanatory! Other online functions aren’t much better, and the game doesn’t even have a GTS - the only thing that allowed a lone player like me to have a chance of completing the Pokedex. We have had GTS since gen four, for goodness sake! Now we are left to make 1243255425 wonder trades (/surprise trades) in the hope of getting all the version exclusive Pokémon to the other version. It’s plain unbelievable.

But oh, I’m not even done with Max Raid Battles yet! Because you know what? Even seeing one is RARE. For the last week I’ve seen one per day, and all of them have had extremely uninteresting Pokémon in them. You can use a certain item to make one appear, but that is more gambling than the slot machines in the old games ever were. First you make a dice roll to decide if you get a normal or rare battle - if it’s normal, haha, good luck, there’s almost never anything interesting there! In rare battles there might be, but they are, well, rare. And truly rare Pokémon in them are even more rare - and rarest of them all are the reason why I have negative feelings towards Dynamaxing even if the story made good effort to sell the idea to me. The thing is you can Dynamax any Pokémon, but some species have a special Gigantamax forms with special appearances and attacks. But not every Pokémon of the species can do it - far, faaaar from it! The Gigantamax form Pokémon are the rarest things you can find from Max Raid Battles and they are rare enough to make me feel desperate even thinking about the odds of finding - and then catching, as you only get one throw - one! There are a few I would love to have, but I’ve found a shiny Pokémon and caught Pokerus before I’ve seen a single one of the Gigantamax Pokémon I’m looking for in the wild.

There are still two major things I feel like I need to mention about the games, one of them being difficulty. Other than the odds of finding a Gigantamax Pokémon, there isn’t any sort of difficulty at all. Your Exp Share is permanently turned on so your team will sooner rather than later be overleveled enough to oneshot literally anything you meet. I spent a good while wondering why the heck was the option of turning the Exp Share off taken away, and I think I have an answer: it’s just one more symptom of the game being unfinished. The thing is almost every route in the game is really short and there are really, really few trainers to actually battle with. There’s also no way to re-challenge normal trainers (and barely anyone for that matter) so I think the Exp Share is permanently on to not make the game a ridiculous grindfest. But then no one actually tested (or cared) how balanced the exp gaining rate is and now we are at the opposite end of the problem. The game’s AI doesn’t seem that smart to me either, as every time an enemy Pokémon survives an attack due to miss or some other miracle all they do is use moves that raises their stats - like that was going to help them in any way! Catching wild Pokémon isn’t any more difficult either, and finding them is even less of a problem. The whole game is full of fully evolved Pokémon, including strong dragons and even things like Eeveelutions, just wandering around! And their catch rate is far from anything you’d expect from such monsters: most of the time I just threw one Quick Ball at them and was done with it. Such excitement. I also caught the version mascot Legendary into Premier ball in order to imagine for a little while that there was at keast some challenge in the game. Oh, and the game has literally two Legendaries in it, and I think the first one was likely an auto catch. Yeeeeey!

Then there’s the last big thing: the tiny-ass Pokedex. You aren’t allowed to have more than half of the existing Pokémon in your game, even as transferred from older versions like previously. This is one of three reasons why I feel like someone(s) at some point of the command chain of making Pokémon games is getting maddeningly greedy. The first thing is the pattern that latest games seem to be forming: SuMo 2 was just a pure cashgrab, Let’s Go games were clearly meant for bringing the cash of PoGo players to the main company and now we are getting a new gen opener games that are, like I’ve stated a thousand times, just not ready in the launch day. The second reason is also the reason why I believe SwSh was so rushed: it had to be launched in time for this year’s Christmas market no matter the consequences. They could’ve taken a few more months like Animal Crossing is doing, but that seemed never to be an option. And the third reason is the Pokedex. It would be easy to think that the Pokedex is just another victim of the rush, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. First of all we’ve known about the cut for a long time - it seems like there was never an intention to include all the Pokémon in the game. Secondly Game Freak has blatantly lied about the reasons of making the cut (”we need more time to build these Pokémon models”, when in truth apparently many of the models were just reused and polished versions taken from the last gen) so the real reason of not having all Pokémon available must be something they’d rather not tell to the players. Thirdly, and where this all comes together, is the launch of Pokémon Home. Now that the Pokémon many players have taken from game to game ever since gen three can’t be transferred to a main series game anymore, the only solutions are to either leave them behind or transfer them to Pokémon Home - a monthly subscription service. There was a similar service before, Pokémon Bank, but apparently they weren’t making enough money with it when people bought it, transferred everything they wanted through it, and cancelled the service after one month. So now they are making sure you can’t cancel Home, unless you want your, what, 15 years old Pokémon to simply vanish to thing air. They are boldly taking advantage of the same thing they have utilized in many advertisements recently - people’s nostalgy towards the Pokémon they have owned for so, so many years.

So yeah, that’s about it. There are other things that bother me about these games, inluding their story that has the most unbalanced pacing I might have ever seen and how it leaves so, so many questions open, but I think I want to start closing this rant at this point. Because it leaves things to the same note as what is playing most loudly in my head after finishing the game: I’m worried about the future of this franchise, and for completely new reasons than ever before. Previously I and many others have been worried about the direction of the Pokémon designs, increasingly gimmicky game mechanics and similar things, but all those seem such tiny worries compared to how badly things are now. Now I’m worried about if all the future games will be made short-sighted monetary gains as their main goal. Because that, my friends, would be what finally could kill Pokémon.

[mannatea]

Pokémon Shield: A Review

DISCLAIMER: THERE WILL BE SPOILERS HERE!

First, my credentials/gaming history, so you can see if my opinion is valuable to you or not. I would like to make it clear from the start that I do not consider myself a ‘gamer’ by any stretch of the imagination. I’m a filthy casual at best.

I’ve been playing video games since I was maybe eight or nine years old. I’ve always enjoyed dabbling in a variety of genres, and have a great appreciation for the work that goes into creating each and every game, no matter the intended audience. Some of my all-time favorite titles include Tales of Symphonia, Fire Emblem (7), Final Fantasy IX, Legend of Dragoon, Chrono Cross, Tetris, Bust-a-Move, Project Gotham Racing, Ecco the Dolphin (PC,DC), Roller Coaster Tycoon, Harvest Moon (N64/PS1), World of Warcraft, and of course our beloved Pokemon!

I started with Pokemon Red, and enjoyed it immensely, but Silver stole my heart and my imagination. My brother and I used to sit at the kitchen table with guide books open and notebooks at the ready to craft and create new, extremely cool teams. I sank an unbelievable amount of hours into that game, and into Pokemon Stadium (1 & 2), Hey You! Pikachu, Pokemon Puzzle League, and even Pokemon Pinball. Unfortunately after Silver, my interest waned. I was an adult by the time Emerald debuted, and while I was initially charmed by it, found my interest waning quickly. I bought and played Diamond, Pearl, Platinum, SoulSilver, and Black & White, but didn’t beat any of them. I felt like the magic had…disappeared somehow.

But when X and Y released in 2013, I binged on Pokemon X, beat it, and for the first time since childhood started breeding a competitive team just for the heck of it. I also found myself really enjoying Pokemon Sun a couple of years later (though the post-game of breeding didn’t really do it for me this time).

They lost me with Ultra Sun/Moon. I wanted to like them, really, but it was too much of a rehash, and too much handholding (like the originals were, and I could only stand going through that once).

Now here we are with Pokemon Sword and Shield. They released just a few days ago (15 November, 2019) and the controversy has been wild. It seems to me that everyone has some kind of very strong opinion, and a lot of people are very angry.

Pokemon has always been one of my favorite franchises, but my history with the games is far from spotless so I like to think I can manage a mostly unbiased review, though of course everything in this post is my personal opinion.

Here’s what I’ve done in the game:

40 hours played.

200 pokemon in the pokedex.

Main story and post-game story completed.

I played with no specific self-imposed rules and was not spoiled for hardly anything before I started playing.

The Game’s Introductory Sequence [8/10]

As is standard for the franchise these days, the game flings you into the world with little fanfare regarding customization. Rather than the intro being a dialogue of sorts between your character and a professor, you are now instructed to choose what you look like (from a sparse few options) after typing in your name.

The first ‘cinematic’ is pretty boring, but I think the attempt at immersion is genuine enough (the idea being that your character is watching Leon’s broadcasted fight on your new smart phone). My character has a better house in-game than I do in real life. I’d kill for all that storage in the kitchen!

My biggest gripe with the introduction is that it reminded me too much of Sun & Moon’s introduction—in the worst of ways. I wouldn’t say it’s slow-paced, but the constant interruption by other characters is about enough to make a person rage-quit. Luckily I’ve been blessed with a lot of patience; it makes tedious content easy to bear (so long as it’s not difficult), but even I was feeling antsy before the first hour of the game was up, just because Hop and Leon never shut up and I was chomping at the bit to Explore.

Considering this is the first thing a player experiences…I really feel it could have been improved, especially the dialogue, but there were a few really positive things about it, too. The outdoor BBQ was a nice touch (considering everyone knew we’d be going off on Adventures in the morning and all), the game does let you avoid having to learn how to catch a pokemon (your mom slips a few pokeballs into your bag at one point without telling you and if you use them to catch pokemon, Leon will not teach you how to do it later), and I feel like as far as introductions go, this one was fairly short when compared to Sun and Moon’s introductory period.

While I’m being positive, the game plops you down into an idyllic little English countryside and not only do you get to enjoy that aesthetic, but the Slumbering Weald is probably one of the prettiest/most charming places in the game, and you get a peek at it early on!

 The Starter Pokemon [5/10]

I’ve experienced worse? I wasn’t spoiled for any of the starter pokemon’s evolutions starting out, and while I didn’t exactly hate any of them, I sure didn’t love ‘em, either. I named my Scorbunny “Chad” on the assumption that he was likely to turn into a chad, though I’m not sure that accurately describes the pokemon I ended up with. Clearly modeled after soccer players, my Chad is a cocky all-star jock. They went all out on his Pyroball animation but Double Kick can see itself out of my house. No love in this club.

I just really wish I found any of these starters or their evolved forms to be charming, but they’re not. Rillaboom is basically George of the Jungle but 3% less of a himbo, and Inteleon is Greninja’s younger brother in accounting.

 Gyms, Gym Challenges, & Game Balance [6/10]

This is probably one of, if not the, most debated topic over at Reddit. Is the game balanced? Are the gyms too easy? Are they making this game for 5-year-olds suddenly?

Eh. I do think the game is, perhaps, Too Easy, but a game being easy isn’t a shortcoming in and of itself. Check out my section on the story and characters for more on this topic, but I’ll post the short of it here, because it’s relevant: if the gameplay is going to be easy, we either need an option to make it more difficult, or the characters, story, and world have to carry the game in such a way that the easy gameplay still feels fun.

Shield had, uh, none of that going for it, unfortunately. The plot is lackluster (more about this later), and the gameplay wasn’t able to pick up the slack. In other words, the gameplay didn’t make the game feel Substantial in any way.

Which is kind of bad, considering Dynamaxing is a new feature!

The biggest issue for most people was the Experience Share. It’s turned on by default and there seems to be no way to turn it off. You get insane amounts of XP for defeating and catching pokemon, and your whole team seems to level pretty evenly even if you only occasionally use some pokemon in the party.

I personally played the game with the default battle option (where it asks if you want to switch out to a new pokemon when the enemy is going to send out a new one) because I barely remember half the pokemon in the game’s typing. Knowing the name of what’s coming next doesn’t always help me. (How’s that for an embarrassing truth?)

I personally liked the experience share, though I feel having the ability to toggle it on/off (or even on for certain pokemon and off for others) would have been ideal. The idea with having it on all the time is that your team will level fairly evenly so you’ll be able to switch in any of your six pokemon to battle without having to struggle through leveling some of the weaker ‘mons up individually. Additionally, it enables you to easily replace a pokemon on your team mid-game if you so desire. And I did (I replaced my shiny Orbeetle with regular cotton candy Rapidash).

My team at end-game was as follows:

Cinderace (Chad)

Greedent (Moriah)

Thievul (Penelope)

Liepard (My)

Corviknight (Octavia)

Rapidash (Calliope)

As you can see, I have no grass pokemon, no water pokemon, and no electric pokemon. I have two dark types. My move coverage mostly sucked throughout the game, because Thievul had 3 dark moves, and My had 3 normal moves. I’m an official idiot, thanks for coming to my TED talk. Usually I can struggle through no matter how garbage-tier my team is, and this game was…no exception.

I steamrolled the first few gyms and their challenges even though I wasn’t vastly overleveled for any of the content. After the ghost gym (which was easy for me with my dark types) I’d say the difficulty level went up slightly, mostly because my brain has refused to hold type advantages/weaknesses that came after Gen1. I feel like most original type weaknesses made some kind of sense to me and I was never able to incorporate dark and steel into that mix, let alone fairy.

At any rate, once you fight a pokemon once, the game will tell you if your moves are super effective against them or not. I remember people complaining about this feature when it was added (in Sun/Moon I think), but I like it. It doesn’t actually help a lot if you don’t know what the moves do/aren’t looking at move power/effects, but it’s useful for my sieve of a brain in a pinch.

Hop as a rival was almost never challenging. He always starts with the same pokemon, and his team is fairly easy to sweep. That might be kind of the point, but I wish you could have encouraged him to take the starter that’s strong against yours for a bit more of a challenge. Yeah, it’s not much, but it would have been something. Marnie is a better rival than Hop in the sense that she’s actually a better battler, but I swept her team pretty easily too, every single time we fought.

The only real challenges in the game were fighting Raihan (I only had one very weak fairy move and no ice to counter his dragons) and Leon (he definitely outleveled me). On Leon I had to use revives and potions!

The gym challenges started off as pretty cute (herding Wooloo, pipe puzzle maze) but quickly grew into lazy boring doldrums (basically gauntlet fighting of one kind or another). I guess I’d say ‘nice try’ for these and say I don’t really care if I see them again or not unless they’re going to actually give it a real go.

Overall, the story part of the game felt balanced enough for me personally but if I’m being completely unbiased: it was too easy to get levels. I could have wandered around less/caught fewer pokemon as I journeyed and enjoyed more of a challenge, but I just…gotta catch ‘em all, y’know? Most people do! GameFreak should have known this and designed accordingly.

The big issue with game balance feels like it comes…after the game, and I don’t mean the post-game so much as the Max Raid Battles that require other people, but the NPC trainers you can battle with are legit trash at what they do, which kind of forces you to find other trainers, but…

 Online Compatibility & Features [3/10]

So I think the rating speaks for itself, here. The interface is confusing, the stamps are annoying, and the ability to see other players but not interact with them in any meaningful way is rage-inducing (and not just because of the FPS drops).

X/Y had a better online system!

Sun and Moon was better!

I don’t know why we regressed. I’m glad they kept the “wonder trade” (renamed to random trade, I think), because I always did enjoy doing that, but the GTS was the best idea they ever had and they abandoned it for random trading? I don’t want to trade with randoms? If I wanted to do that, I’d just do a random trade in the first place!!! The inability to put what you’re looking for into the stamp that people see? Oversight. Or just bad design. Probably both!

I’ve never hated a pokemon online experience more than this. I’m just astounded by how bad it is. I tried to join max raid battles last night and kept being told the event was over, but the stamps just…didn’t refresh? For HOW LONG? I can’t even tell you because I don’t know, and I couldn’t find a way to manually force them to refresh. It’s like they update every 15 minutes instead of every 15-30 seconds (which they should if I’m browsing for trades to make or battles to join). There are ways around this (according to Reddit) but the interface should be intuitive and easy to use by default.

C’mon, guys, you can do better. This is legitimately embarrassing in the year 2019.

 Music [5/10]

There are some really magical tracks in this game, and there are some really terrible tracks. It doesn’t feel at all cohesive or thematic. I absolutely hated the gym battle remix; it was worse than the regular gym battle music. I feel like the gym battle theme would have really caught on if they didn’t have any other synth sounding tracks in the game, but they kind of do, so it blends in instead of sticking out as a bop.

Notable nice tracks were Hulbury, Glimwood Tangle, Slumbering Weald, and the desert route (which I can’t remember offhand). Some of the better music reminded me of the soundtrack for Tales of Symphonia, which is high praise coming from me. Unfortunately for every good track there were probably 3 forgettable ones.

There wasn’t anything particularly engaging when it comes to the music here, but it’s at least passable.

 Graphics, Design, and Animation [6/10]

I should clarify that this is 6/10 for a pokemon game, not in general. I don’t expect flashy realism in a pokemon game and neither should you. The graphics are adequate most of the time, but the animation leaves a lot to desire when you look away from the pokemon that feel like they were Chosen Ones (and received a lot more attention).

Rapidash, for example, is using the same base model and animations it’s been using since it’s been in 3D. I’m not going to claim since Stadium, but holy cow the animations are for sure the same as they’ve been since at least X/Y for all the older moves. I’m not impressed.

The characters all have dopey expressions on their faces always. The models just use one talking animation loop and it almost never changes. The main character still looks on like a smiley face emoji when turmoil occurs, and though this isn’t as bad as it was in Sun/Moon, it’s still…kind of jarring?

The Wild Area looks kind of bad sometimes, and some areas in the actual game were lackluster compared to what they should have been. Ballonlea is the town you step into after walking through the (honestly) magical Glimwood Tangle, and it’s this charming fairy wonderland…with two houses and a stadium the size of two billion football fields. Uh. Okay? You’re telling me they destroyed how much natural habitat to make this gym? It just doesn’t jive with the scenery/theme out there, especially considering Opal’s theatre is tiny. And it’s not just that I think the game is lacking thematically (though it clearly is), but there’s this…laziness to the design when it comes to places like Ballonlea. It could have been SUCH an enchanting town to explore, but it was two houses with nothing important in them and a sports arena that feels completely at odds with its surroundings. (In this town you do learn that an NPC you spoke to earlier was a ghost, but it’s not as if this is very important information/goes anywhere, really.)

Spikemuth, for all its flaws, was at least memorable. I can’t say the same for most of the towns in this game. I really enjoyed the music in Hulbury but you best bet I had to look it up to remember the name of the town! Time is partly to blame. We don’t spend a lot of time in each town, and we have no real reason to go back to them aside from visiting the nearest Pokemon Center to heal and rest up. But I would argue that, beyond that, the individual designs just…don’t feel memorable because they’re not memorable. The names are mostly meh (every time I see Ballonlea I think of Bologna for some reason), but without anything else to connect to the place as more than just a place…there’s no reason to remember any of it.

Like the music, these are all passable, graphics more than animation, animation more than design, but that’s all there is to it.

Camping and Cooking, Feathers and Fetch! [4/10]

I don’t actually have a lot to say about this. It’s a cute idea, and it’s fun maybe the first ten times that you do it, but then it’s just really boring. The game is terrible at explaining how to create different curry dishes, but it’s almost idiot-proof. I’ve yet to fail at it.

But I’m not sure I care about it, either?

You get like 1/100th of the amount of berries you need to cook while you journey along, so it feels disproportionate. I dunno. Just not a fan.

Playing with your pokemon is the only real joy that comes from camping, but its fun is limited. When you’ve tossed the ball a few times, or watched Liepard smack the feather toy a while, it has that, “Okay, I’ve seen it!” kind of feeling to it. That doing well at cooking can heal your party/cure status conditions is incentive to do it, but it’s faster to just fly to a pokemon center and run back on your bike most of the time than to pitch a tent with your ‘mons.

I feel like there should just be…more you can do when you’re camping together. I’m glad Pokemon Amie is dead (it was cringey), but it felt more personal than this.

I wish I had more to say about this feature, but it felt tacked on and lackluster after I camped a few times.

 Dynamaxing, Gigantamaxing, and Max Raid Battles [4/10]

The urge to give this a zero was high, but I am making an effort to be balanced.

That said, I hate dynamaxing. Gigantamaxing is almost the same thing, it’s just Worse Somehow. Until yesterday I thought they were basically the same thing (and that some pokemon just got extra cool dynamax forms). As it turns out, they’re not the same thing at all! Or rather, they are, but they’re also not?

Dynamaxing makes your pokemon grow large and gives it these generic MAX moves that it can use in combat (Max Knuckle, Max Flare, Max Strike). It lasts for three turns and then your pokemon reverts back to its regular ‘ol self.

Gigantamaxing is when your pokemon grows a little larger than large, gets a special Look, and gets the same generic MAX moves (but with special effects added to them). Oh, and better stats.

At least, that’s how I understand it.

Both are great for Max Raid Battles, where you team up with NPCs or other players and take down huge dynamaxed pokemon that are out in the wild.

Neither is a fun feature as part of the actual gameplay. I guess as a gimmick it works all right, but just like Z-moves it has a long annoying animation sequence, and like Mega Evolutions only some pokemon get to gigantamax (everyone else is just a pleb, I guess). I dunno. I just didn’t find the concept very engaging…maybe because it seems evil and wasteful in-universe, and this is more or less stated in the game itself, but what-the-hell-ever, we’re just going to keep doing it ‘cause it looks cool!

It’s just too goofy a concept for me. Maybe if Dynamaxing doubled or tripled their size, I’d find it more understandable and more aesthetically pleasing? I hate seeing my pokemon, or the opposing pokemon, grow 50+ feet tall and scream at three billion decibels.

(For the record I never liked Mega Evolutions or Z-moves as a concept, so it’s not like I’m nostalgic for a different gimmick. That said, at least I’d accepted Megas as a thing, and Z-moves were overall not too groundbreaking or gamebreaking.)

The design of dyna/gigamaxing is to connect it with specific places so that you can’t just max your pokemon in every battle and sweep every team you fight against, but it still feels like it gets used too much. I’m currently at a point where I find having to dynamax feels like a chore.

Considering this is what the game tried to sell itself on in the initial trailer…? Yikes? I don’t know. I think some people are more ‘okay’ with the concept of dyna/gigantimaxing than others, and I think I’d be fine with it if we only had dynamaxing. Introducing both just feels like overcomplicating things for no real reason, and maybe also poking a little hard at the hornets’ nest that is the competitive community.

Because now you have to go out and grind gigantamax pokemon to catch one, so it forces you to do the thing you might not like to get a pokemon that can do the thing you don’t like, because it’s objectively better in combat? But really, who knows? Maybe these overpowered phenomena will end up banned, anyway.

Despite my disdain for this release’s gimmick, I do think Max Raid Battles are pretty fun, at least…when I’m not getting my ass completely kicked while some NPC trainer’s Eevee is using Helping Hand… It’s actually pretty enjoyable when you can somehow find other people using the y-comm and take on a gigantamaxed pokemon with the help of actual human players. But y’know…good luck using that…lol.

Overall I think the biggest downfall of Dynamaxing/Gigantamaxing is that it doesn’t really add anything of substance to the game. I don’t think it makes it more fun. It’s also not necessary for max raid battles (this could be a phenomena we don’t understand yet that randomly seems to affect wild pokemon, just like with the UBs—hell, Anabel and Looker could return and claim this is all related to that stuff and I’d probably find that believable enough). So what does it add? Flavor? Culture? Nah. It’s just kind of there.

 Post-Game: Is That All? [3/10]

Post-game in Sun and Moon was the Alola version of the Battle Maison, breeding, and a somewhat lengthy (for a post-game) story where you assist Interpol agents Anabel and Looker in hunting down and capturing Ultra Beasts. The plot was somewhat woven into not only Sun and Moon’s storyline (Lusamine’s shenanigans), but also borrowed from the Sapphire/Ruby reboots and X/Y. If you didn’t already know Looker from Ruby/Sapphire/X/Y, or Anabel from Pokemon Emerald, you’ll still probably find them somewhat compelling/interesting as characters. Also, they did a really good job in Sun of making circumstances seem dire—of showing instead of telling you how dangerous the UBs were and how important it was to protect the people of the towns and villages you’d visited throughout your adventure.

Shield has… Max raid battles, a battle tower, and…breeding. Oh, and a storyline about the legendary dogs that barely makes any sense and is plagued by really irritating new characters.

The terrible truth is that the post-game of Sword/Shield is embarrassingly bad. You’d think they’d want to outdo themselves with every release. Sun and Moon hit it out of the park with their post-game content. Most people enjoyed the hunt for UBs, or at least the characters of Anabel and Looker. Sword and Shield have…. Sordward and Shielbert. DID I STUTTER?

They’re terribly designed characters, and so insulting as to not really be any fun at all. The Pokeball Guy mascot is Actually Fun; these dudes aren’t. They’re barely even villains? It was an excuse to try and pull what Sun and Moon pulled, but it didn’t work. I never felt like anyone was in danger at any point, probably because magically everyone was evacuated before I even arrived on the scene to stop Sordward and Shielbert’s vile schemes. :U Oh, and because I felt little or no connection to any of the towns I visited along the way, let alone the gym leaders. Maybe if these guys had showed up partway through the game and we sort of knew who they were already, this wouldn’t seem so out-of-nowhere, but it was, and that made it even worse than it had to be.

When it’s all over, you get your legendary dog (I named mine Goodest Boy), but it wasn’t a fun storyline at all. Who are these guys? Why should I care about them? I cared about Looker and Anabel because they came onto the scene and showed that they cared about each other as people (and showed it, multiple times). These guys? They wreaked havoc and didn’t even go to jail. At least Rose went to jail!

I don’t think the post-game is terrible so much as I think it’s underwhelming, especially considering what it came on the heels of. I don’t expect More More More from every game, but I do expect improvements to be made. A decent post-game storyline is all I was asking for, and I didn’t even get that.

But there’s the tower and you can breed pokemon and train EVs and all that stuff more easily now, so…

 Characters, Story, and Worldbuilding [4/10]

Let me put this as delicately as I can: I’m not a fan.

I could easily rant about bad character writing, bad stories, and weak worldbuilding for hours, but I’ll limit myself because 1) this is a pokemon game, and 2) nobody really looks for exceptional characters here.

As I said earlier, I feel like Sun and Moon did it Better. Most of the main characters in Su/Mo were likable, interesting, had a fun design, or were amusing. Not so in Shield.

Hop has a terrible name (literally a million names to choose from and they picked this?), but the biggest crime he commits is that he doesn’t get a satisfying story arc at all. When he got down about himself I had hope there would be some cool development, but there wasn’t. He ended up getting his crap together and making a Team and Picked a Strategy (which still involves sending the sheep out first I guess). And then randomly in the post-game decided he was going to be a professor…lol.

I felt like 20 different people wrote that plot, because it was terribly cobbled together and didn’t flow at all. Natural progression would have been nice.

Marnie barely has a story and barely develops. Piers seems to kind of have more ‘meat’ to his character but not a lot is done with it.

The gym leaders are otherwise really meh. Okay, so Nessa and Sonia are pals. Gal pals. Pals that are gals. Gals that are pals. Great. I don’t think we ever see them talk so it doesn’t matter. Melony has a son…and it’s just a nod to the other game where her son is the gym leader instead? Boring.

Bede is an asshole with a sob story who doesn’t really get redeemed but gets the redemption option anyway. They could have REALLY done something amazing with this guy but chose not to. His backstory is actually pretty interesting! But they didn’t utilize it worth a damn. And also he was right about the mural soooo…

Sonia was maybe the best character in the game, and that’s just from a technical standpoint. She had development, she developed, she grew as a character. Emotionally, though, I felt detached from her. Maybe it was being called a child all the time that did that? I’m not sure. I get that the protag is a child but I’m living independently and doing well for myself so maybe have a little respect idk… Especially when the first 2/3 of the game you’re told the adults will handle things, and then randomly you’re interrupted every fifty seconds to take care of other people’s nonsense. :|

In fact, I felt emotionally disconnected from pretty much every character. I didn’t really like or feel for anyone. Hop came the closest (feeling guilty about losing a battle cause it might make his brother look bad), but the bad dialogue options and inability to actually cheer him up was frustrating more than anything.

There are zones that are breathtakingly lovely (Slumbering Weald! Ballonlea! Glimwood Tangle!) but all the rest are more or less forgettable. The characters are connected to the world…sorta, but there are times it feels like they force-connected them through dynamaxing and dialogue accents instead of trying to make characters who naturally fit into the world. Like I talked about before, Opal’s gym felt completely disconnected from the reality of her environment. She lives there for a reason. Doesn’t the stadium’s presence jar her? How many fairy pokemon lost their homes when that thing took away tens of acres of forest? What’s the story here? Or anywhere for that matter?

Spikemuth was a waste of space but at least it felt like an attempt to show us a poverty-stricken area… Unfortunately it all fell flat the second they used two models for Team Yell! Team Yell could have been really cool, especially if they’d had different models with their names (challenged by Team Yell Grunt Sierra/Troy/Nellie/whatever), and the same team yell outfit/clothes/paint on. Then we could see these are just regular guys and gals from this poor area who want to cheer on their hometown girl!!!

But that was a weakness throughout the game, because Team Yell were all gym trainers, and all shared models…just like all the other gyms. It felt lazy to me. The outfits can be the same, but way to go making all the models literal clones. That’s just laziness.

The villains are all meh. Rose? Of course he was a villain. The problem is that he’s not a villain for being a capitalist pig or anything. He’s a villain for wanting to fix a power issue that’s 1,000 years from happening. Meh motivation. If it was 50 years away then we have a compelling villain! But no, not 50. A thousand years from happening. And he can’t wait five fucking minutes.

Oleana was boring.

Leon was exactly the person he was the entire game…

The taxi service is a cute idea, and a nice gameplay addition, but it doesn’t really add anything to the world because they didn’t make the effort to integrate it.

Anyway, I’ve rambled enough.

The short of it is this: I walked away from this game not really caring about the world or any of the characters. I don’t even have a favorite character. I can’t remember the last time that happened to me. YIKES.

The Wild Area [8/10]

I don’t want to cover this for too long, because I feel it’s been done to death, but the Wild Area is what the whole game should have been. Or at least, more of the game. I don’t expect we’ll ever get a fully open-world pokemon game EVER, but this foray into the true 3D tells me that it could be a lot of fun, actually, even in somewhat constrained environments. (Oh, and with a good map.)

I enjoy the idea of the Wild Area, but I think its usefulness is limited without the appeal of having more pokemon patched into the game later. Until I get sick of it, though, it’s a pretty neat concept, and it makes hunting for new pokemon to catch a little more fun than it usually is. I like that they kept the overworld pokemon in this area as well as on the routes you have to travel; it feels like more of an adventure to dodge a huge Steelix and scoot closer to see what that yellow thing is in the grass you can’t quite make out. :)

Basically: fun concept that is enjoyable for now but has limited enjoyment. As far as negativity goes, I don’t have much to complain about here that I didn’t complain about in the Online Compatibility section above.

The Pokemon Themselves [6/10]

I was challenged by @hijauindah to list my top five favorite new pokemon from the game, so here we go!

Nickit (cute design!)

Boltund (smooth, well designed—not too cluttered)

Ponyta/Rapidash (MY LITTLE PONY… I think Rapidash could look better, but I’m just glad they cared enough to try something new with them…)

Frosmoth (Super pretty pokemon design.)

Dragapult (Nifty design.)

Most of the new designs are just…okay. There are a lot I don’t actually care for. But I’m biased; I just want more creature-based pokemon that look like they could exist and function in the world they live in. Some of these designs they come up with look like they’d have died out ten thousand years ago due to being Poorly Evolved lol.

 Final Thoughts [6/10]

The worst part of the game for me personally was probably feeling like I was getting interrupted constantly by other characters. JUST LET ME PLAY. But the best part was definitely exploring the new areas, catching a shiny 2 hours into the game, and getting to the end more or less with the team I started with.

The individual scores don’t add up to a 6/10 (they actually add up to a 5.16/10) but I think it’s worth noting that I did have a fun time playing through the game, I intend to hop into the breeding stuff, and even though I don’t have to keep max raid battling and stuff, I probably will.

It’s far from the 9s that it was getting by certain people from certain places that won’t be named here, but it’s not as if it’s a dumpster fire game. I don’t regret the money I spent on it, and I hope to keep enjoying the game for a few more months (albeit more casually than I did over the weekend), but I hope GameFreak has learned from its follies and puts its best foot forward with the next game, because I will not manage to be this forgiving again.

[jaybug-jabbers]

Bug Run 5: A Clean Victory

There was something I needed to do before going any further in this game.

I made a little visit to the Name Rater.

Truth is, I was never satisfied with the nickname I gave my Galvantula OR my Crustle. For Galvantula, it was just such a plain and common name, and she deserved better. For Crustle, her name was alright, but a little too long and awkward to say outloud, you know?

After christening the new names, we were prepared to tackle anything!

However, the moment I took a step toward my next destination, I ran into my rival. The encounter was a tad unnerving, which is the only reason I bother to mention it here. Tonka took care of my rival’s bird with Rollout just fine, so that wasn’t so bad. (Yes, I know. I still had Rollout. What can I say? It takes a while for Scoliopede to earn its better moves, and in the meantime, a rock move really is darn useful.)

It was Emboar that worried me. This was the first time I was facing it fully evolved, and the thing is damn intimidating even for a very balanced team, let alone a mono-bug one. My newly-named Crustle, Gaia, went toe-to-toe with the massive swine, dishing out Rock Slides. Emboar decided to use Rollout and start powering the move up on me. So that was a pretty scary moment. Thankfully, Gaia did not miss any of her Rock Slides, and the pig went down.The last foe, that water monkey, was trivial when I had a Leavanny with Leaf Blade.

The next gym we faced was the dragon-themed gym with Drayden. I noticed there was a big of a level jump with that gym, though, with just the gym trainers outlevelling my team. So I decided to do a little grinding beforehand. In our travels I taught Volcarona Psychic, because at this point, the poor moth’s moveset is still quite terrible. (It still had String Shot and Whirlwind, for pete’s sake.) I also taught my Galvantula Thunder and … well, Flash. I didn’t want to teach it Flash, but I was wandering around a cave attempting to reach some TMs. Sadly, a roadblock prevented me from ultimately getting the TM, but we’ll talk more about that later.

After a little training, the fight with Drayden wasn’t too bad. Ra took out Druddigon with Psychic, Green Bean got a 2HKO on Flygon with Leaf Blade– after a lucky miss with Flygon’s Rock Slide– and Tonka took on the big boy Haxorous with a combination of Toxic and Venoshocks.

After finishing off the dragon gym, we’re treating to another piece of the plot with Team Plasma. Some giant steampunky ship shoots ice cannons at the city, there’s a lot of running around and shouting over some “DNA Splicers,” and lots of grinding on Plasma grunts. The usual.

I MUST take important note of one event that took place in the midst of all this, though. As I was running back and forth between Pokecenters and the Plasma ship, I ran into a random trainer with just a Crustle. And it wiped out my entire team.

The problem had been it got off two Shell Smashes and I hadn’t been paying it close attention and was fooling about. So, naturally, it outsped everything and destroyed us with rocks. Also, I was super dumb and forgot my Galvantula had Sucker Punch. (Look, it was really late at night and I was tired and being stoop.)

Wounded by this experience, I took a lengthy side-quest to grind for Blue Shards by losing many times at the World Tournament (they give shards as consolation prizes) so I could visit the Move Tutor and give my Scolipede Superpower. This is actually only neutral on Crustle and in the end I still needed to use my own Crustle v. Crustle to take care of the foe cleanly, but. Still. Superpower would end up proving very important on my Scoliopede. I suspected as much, as it was excellent coverage for a team largely lacking coverage.

Anyway. I finally reached the Colress fight.

This was a fun one. I had to actually think very carefully about his team. Colress opens with a Magnemite that loves to thunder wave and then Volt Switch. I eventually decided to try equipping Green Bean with a Cheri Berry and getting up a Swords Dance. Then he just stubbornly hacked away with his Leaf Blade. This is a very difficult approach, but it was important for someone to take out the ‘easy’ pokemon so I could save my other pokes for the tougher ones. Colress used a Full Restore once on Magnemite, so after that, I did the same for Green Bean. Then continue with the Leaf Blades. Green Bean somehow barely takes two Flash Cannons to the face and finishes Magnemite off, in red health and paralyzed, but alive. He did a very good job.

Next, Magnezone came out. This one was for Tonka. Superpower brought it to the low yellow, and then Magnezone thunder waves. I have to take a big hit, but a second Superpower takes Magnezone out.

Beheeyem is the easiest for my team to cope with, being pure Psychic with low defense. It does Calm Mind, which can be scary, but I can easily take it out before it does anything awful; Gaia just X-Scissors it to death.

Metang, on the other hand, is not easy. Zen Headbutt messes with Tonka, Meteor Mash cuts through Gaia and gives scary boosts, and the thing has ROCK SLIDE to add insult to injury; plus Agility. With a Steel typing, it resisted a lot of crap, too.The trick, as it turns out, was fucking it up fast and hard with F-Zero’s Thunder before it could do much damage. Thunder brought it to the low yellow and luckily paralyzed it; Signal Beam finished it off.

The ace was Klinklang. I find it odd this pokemon is pure steel when it has so many electric moves, but okay. F-Zero uses Thunder, which brings it into the yellow and paralyzes again (whoo!). Klinklang Shift Gears. I know it resists bug so I need to Thunder again; unfortunately I get the miss. However, the foe gets paralyzed. I Thunder again and finish things off.

It was a good battle, but Team Plasma wasn’t finished quite yet. We run into the true man behind the scenes, the foul abusive-parent Ghetsis, and chase him off his ship and into some backwater cave somewhere.

Then N shows up, there’s some drama with legendery dragons, and Ghetsis is very cranky about the whole thing. Without giving us a chance to even save or anything, he launches right into attacking us.

Not gonna lie, this last fight is exciting and the music is damn good. It feels high-stakes.

Ra was first out, since I’d just used him to take care of Kyurem. He was able to take care of Confagrigis with some Psychics– although we had to get toxiced and put up with a full restore, but held on long enough to take it out. A special defense drop did help us.

Next out was Hydreigon; Green Bean used X-Scissor. After that was Eelektross, and I was fearing the Flamethrower, so I sent out Gaia. It’s a bit rough, with thunderbolts and acrobatics, but it never actually pulls out the flamethrower and I finish it off. After that is Seismetoad; that’s easy as pie with a grass move.

Drapion is out next, and I really want to use Psychic on it, but Ra is pretty weak from his long fight with Confagrigis. I try it out, but he’s outsped, as I suspected. Dang. I send out Green Bean next, and take it out with three X-Scissors.

Toxicroak is handled cleanly with Thunder. And then that’s it!

In retrospect, the battle didn’t give me any trouble. But somehow they still made it feel exciting. Possibly it’s just because I remember the fight vs. Ghetsis from original Black/White, which really left an impression on me.

(Lord N was there to talk to me after the battle. Still love him so much.)

After the Plasma plot wraps up, we move on to Victory Road. And that’s when I run into some trouble.

See, the plan all along had been to add my sixth and final teammember at Victory Road. That is where Durant, a super-late-game bug, hangs out. The problem is, I was playing Pokemon White 2, and apparently they tweaked it so that you can’t even reach Durant until post-game.

That really stinks! I have no idea why they did that, but I decided I wasn’t going to let a technicality like that slow me down. Like previous game runs I’ve done, if a particular version I was playing didn’t technically have full access to the species I needed for a bug run, I … bent the rules slightly.

So we snuck into Clay Tunnel. This trip was only for one thing: capture a Durant. We grabbed the first one we saw. She was lovely, and we named her Kolibri. She didn’t have Hustle, and honestly? I think I’m ok with that. Missing is pretty darn annoying.

Once we had our final team member, it was all about going through Victory Road and doing a little grinding. We met our rival one last time along the way. His Emboar was tough enough by now that it could shrug off Gaia’s Rock Slides. So I went with a new tactic, using Volcarona’s Psychic. The rest was easy enough to deal with. Then it was on to the Elites!

(MIGHTY BUG POWER DETECTED!)

Unfortunately, I made a mistake when I was grinding before facing the Elites. I thought they would be around level 60, so I brought my team all to level 60. As it turns out, no. They were all in the high 50s. So I was ever-so-slightly overlevelled.

Not a huge deal, but it is a shame. I really prefer to never be over-levelled, even by a little bit. Unfortunately there wasn’t much I could do about it.

The Elites were not too hard. Shauntal’s fight was kind of fun. Ra took on Confagrigis with Heat Waves, but got a Spec. Def drop with a Shadow Ball, so I had to switch out when Chandelure came in. I decided to bring Tonka in. As cruel as it sounds, Tonka was kind of expendable against this particular team. I got a Toxic off before going down, though. Ra came back in to blast with Psychics for neutral damage, but unfortunately the darn thing was hitting all its Fire Blasts and it got a crit, so Ra went down. Luckily it was injured enough that F-Zero could finish things off. Golurk was easy pickings for a Leaf Blade, and Drifblim went down to a Thunder.

Marshal fight had Tonka doing some work on the opening Throh. I feared Guts on Conkeldurr, and sent out Kolibri; however, it did not fare well against those Hammer Arms. Thankfully those moves dropped Conk’s speed, though, so I felt safe bringing Ra in, even against the inevitable Full Restore, and I could just Psychic. (See, at the time, I didn’t realize that thing is actually slow as dirt anyway.) The rest of the team was an easy clean-up, especially when Meinshao misses its High-Jump Kick and I put a Rock Wrecker in its face.

It may not be very effective, but nobody’s surviving a boulder to the face at half health.

Since the other two Elites are Psychic and Dark type, I don’t think I even need to bother mentioning their fights. With a full team of Bug types, it was pretty trivial to get through.

The Champion battle was decently difficult, so I was glad it wasn’t too anti-climactic. Tonka used X-Scissor on Hydreigon and managed to tank a Flamethrower– in the very low yellow health, after Leftovers. He finished the dragon off and Druddigon was out next. I honestly forget what I did with that fellah. I probably used F-Zero against him. Aggron was out next, so I went with my special attacker Ra. Heat Wave did a respectable chunk, but Rock Slide was, of course, a death sentence for Volcarona. Knowing that the Full Restore was incoming, I sent Tonka out and potioned up too. Then I used Superpower, which ALMOST killed. Tonka goes down and I clean up with F-Zero.

Archeops is next; one Rock Wrecker is all it takes, after Gaia survives the Rock Slide. Very happy Gaia hit all of her Rock Wreckers when she needed to.

Lapras was a bit of a troll. I sent out F-Zero, confidant in one-shotting the beast with Thunder, but it didn’t quite kill and it used freaking Hypnosis on me. Urgh. Swapped over to Kolibri and took a Surf very badly but finished Lapras off.

Finally, the ace, Haxorous. I sent out Green Bean. It was a tough choice, knowing this thing was probably going to Dragon Dance, and that was pretty scary. She could have easily gotten her late-game sweep if I let things get out of hand; my team was already weakened a bunch. I decided to get a Reflect up. I think that ultimately saved my butt. It did use Dragon Dance as predicted, and Green Bean used one X-Scissor before going down to an X-Scissor of Haxorous’ own. Then I sent the low-health Gaia in. He managed to survive the Earthquake thanks to Reflect and finished Haxorous off with an X-Scissor. (Yes, that’s an awful lot of X-Scissors going ‘round, but to be fair, this *is* a mono bug team)

And that’s it for Pokemon White 2! It was a fun little romp, but I admit it was very easy. I did expect that, though. Oh well! Maybe next time, if I’m hunting for a challenge, I can do that all-Vivillon run of X/Y I keep considering. :P

This is a repost on a new blog. The original post was on Feb 25, 2019.

[zorualesbian]

i've been wanting to play the pokemon games but there are so many and i don't know where to start. do i have to start from the first ones? if not, then where should i start/what order should i play them in?

you don’t have to start with the first games. each game is its own self-contained story set in the same universe, so you dont need the context of the previous games and the tutorials in the beginning always go by the assumption you’ve never played a pokemon game before. there are typically some references to previous games made by nameless npcs, but it’s never anything major and if you really wanted to understand them i think it would just take a quick google search to get the full context, you wouldn’t have to go back and play an entire game or anything.

there’s not really a suggested order to play them in, but i definitely don’t mind making recommendations. ive played through all these games several times, and with the exception of firered/leafgreen, diamond/pearl/platinum, and heartgold/soulsilver i’ve played through them within the past 2 years. so my memory is relatively fresh.

first of all, i’m not going to recommend you anything that’s had a remake. i love the classic games and i feel like they were a wonderful starting point for a fantastic series, but theyre not a great starting point. i play them for the nostalgia because i grew up playing pokemon since the first generation, my wife didn’t really play pokemon until the fourth generation and only enjoys the classic games because she already loves pokemon. compared to newer games, theyre just not that fun if you don’t already have a lot of nostalgia/love of pokemon in general. 

also a quick note about which versions you should pick--it honestly doesn’t matter. they’re the same game, but there’s a small handful of pokemon that’ll appear in one version and not the other. sometimes i choose by which pokemon on the box art i like best and sometimes i choose by going to serebii and looking at the version exclusives list. its really up to you and your preferences, and it doesn’t matter that much either way

Sun and Moon/Ultra Sun and Ultra Moonthese are definitely the ones i’d suggest starting with, they’re the most beginner-friendly by far. there’s a new feature that tells you if your opponent is weak or resistant to your moves if it’s a pokemon you’ve fought before, which is great because now you don’t have to mentally keep track of the type matchup chart and the individual types of 800+ pokemon! your pokedex also shows you if a pokemon is part of a pair or has evolutions, so you won’t make mistakes i made when i was a kid where i assumed some of my pokemon didn’t have evolutions and didn’t train them and missed out on some cool pokemon as a result. story-wise, they’re my favorite so far and have done the best job of fleshing out and developing their characters.

as for whether you should play sun/moon or ultra sun/ultra moon, i’m not sure. the ultra versions have a few new pokemon, new areas, new moves, and an “enhanced” story, which is basically the same as the old story but deeper this time (and while i haven’t finished it, i’m enjoying it a lot). but the “new” things aren’t that many and i think whats giving me so much appreciation of the ultra story is the fact that ive already played through sun/moon, but that might just be me. it’s probably better to go with the ultra version because it has much more content for about the same price, but original sun/moon are still good choices if you have your heart set on those.

Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphiretheyre remakes of the third generation games ruby/sapphire and imo they lived up to the hype. ruby/sapphire were fan favorites and so are or/as. they aren’t really difficult because the games that came out right before this introduced an item that lets your entire party gain exp from a battle even if they didn’t participate, and while or/as are more balanced for this item than the game that introduced it, they still arent quite all the way there. personally i don’t mind it, i think these games are enjoyable regardless of if they’re challenging or not, but you’re free to turn the item on/off as you want to make it as easy or as difficult as you want.

X/Yhoo boy. i actually don’t like x/y. they had bad pacing, the story barely held itself together, and this is the game where the exp share was introduced and if you never turn it off, your pokemon get way overlevel and you can effortlessly breeze through the game. but they’re pretty, and i think the fact that theyre ridiculously easy might make them more enjoyable for new players because it’s the perfect chance to just build a team of pokemon you like instead of worrying about strength or team composition. plus, this is the first game to have character customization and you get enough money through the course of the game that buying all the clothes is easy.

Black/White and Black 2/White 2black and white are by far my favorite pokemon games, and black 2 and white 2 are the only direct sequels to a previous game so you should probably wait until after playing b/w to worry about b2/w2. i really enjoyed the story and this was the first time i actually got heavily invested in the characters because until this point, most characters in pokemon games felt pretty flat and one-dimensional. the one complaint i have is how exp scales based on your level. the concept itself is fine, but it feels like the scaling is extreme and there’s a lot of exp you start to lose just by going up a single level, which makes grinding a massive pain. but grinding isnt really required, so it’s nothing to worry about unless you’re determined to be overlevel.

HeartGold/SoulSilverremakes of the second generation games gold/silver and another huge favorite of mine, but arguably also a direct sequel to red/blue. they don’t lean heavily on red/blue but when they were initially designed they were called pokemon 2 and were intended to be the last games, so unlike other games it begins with the assumption you’ve already played the previous game. but the tutorials are still available and neither gold/silver nor red/blue are very story-heavy in the first place, because this is when the series was still finding its footing. i think theyre perfectly fine to play through with no context, but i can understand if you’d prefer to skip them for now. i very much enjoyed having my pokemon walk around with me all the time, the environments are beautiful, and hg/ss has the most useful use of the DS’s bottom screen.

Diamond/Pearl/Platinumok i know i listed diamond/pearl but that’s just because they deserve a mention. platinum is the enhanced version, and unless you see a pokemon thats exclusive to diamond/pearl and you REALLY want it, you should play platinum. that being said, i don’t actually like these games that much. they made improvements to the gameplay that have stayed through the current generations and provided deep lore about the pokemon universe and had a killer ost and a fun underground mining mini game, but outside of those the game always felt really lackluster to me and even as a kid i had a hard time getting invested in it. i think it was level design and difficulty curve that put me off so much but since i havent played them in so long i can’t say that for sure. overall, i’d say they’re worth playing at least for the lore because it’s very good and very important, but probably only if you already like pokemon. theyre not great first games.

FireRed/LeafGreeni’m only listing these because they’re currently the most updated way to play the first generation (red/blue) but they’re older than anything else on this list. stat calculations are different. movesets are different. and both of those are a bad different, not good or even neutral. they did a good job of providing extra tutorials, but overall theyre just completely outdated and suffering from red/blue’s bad layout and level design. i’m hoping these are the next games we get remakes of (remake of a remake sounds ridiculous, but these games are seriously getting close to 15 years old) but until then i’d really only suggest playing them if you already love pokemon and just want to see older games in the series.