#fwiw I have a physical copy of PLA? Like I'm playing on an actual physical game card in my Switch

[crystalkleure]

sorta late to the party, but eyo? new pokémon game?? i’ve been holding off on buying it to see if it‘s better than swsh, but it looks sickkkk! how’re you liking it so far?

IT'S FUCKING AWESOME

Holy SHIT it's SO GOOD!!! For once I don't regret dumping $60 on a game at all!!

It's gorgeous, the gameplay is Extremely Different from every single other Pokemon game, it's sort of like combining a Standard Mainline Pokemon Game with the Pokemon Ranger games? It's like all purely in the overworld, you can even continue running around during battles [and WILL eat shit if you stand in the way of attacks]. Stealthily Sneaking Up On Wild Murderbeasts And Capturing Them Before They See You And Eat You is the primary focus bc you're playing as like a researcher, your primary goal is to Complete Pokedex [a giant folder full of research notes lol it's all paper]. You CAN die. Death is Literally Everywhere in this fucking game, People And Pokemon Literally Dying is like a recurring plot issue, and they don't dance around it at all. The Death Word Is Not A Dirty Word In This Game.

And, and this next bit is why it is Extra Impressive that I STILL recommend this game so Incredibly Highly...

Most of the boss fights are 90% in the overworld. The rampaging Pokemon are attacking YOU. You have to evade them and wait for specific tiny openings to be able to throw your own Pokemon out and actually Engage Them In Pokemon Battle. In other words, Dodging Brutal Bloody Death By Rabid Beast is absolutely crucial. There is a button you gotta press to tuck-and-roll to jump out of the way of attacks, "dodging" makes you invulnerable for a few seconds so the Death can just slip right past you. This is totally fine and even awesome, except...

My dodge mechanic does not work. At all. It is completely broken.

I have been playing this game ENTIRELY WITHOUT AN INCREDIBLY INTEGRAL PART OF IT BEING FUNCTIONAL. I have had to do all this shit WITHOUT ACTUALLY DODGING. I'm just having to sprint out of the fucking way, even in HIGHLY MOVEMENT-RESTRICTED SMALL AREAS THAT LEAVE VERY LITTLE ROOM FOR NON-INVULNERABLE MANEUVERING, because when I press the dodge button, I am not granted that momentary untouchable status. I am still locked into the "dodging" animation for a second though, which, ironically, pretty much GUARANTEES I get hit. Dodging actually gets me killed almost invariably, that's the suicide button for me.

It actually took me a long time to realize there was even something wrong with my game, I just thought I sucked ass at it and Must Be Dodging Wrong Somehow because the very first boss gave me an unreasonable amount of extreme trouble lol, it was making me so sad. It turns out I've been digging a fucking hole in a solid rock wall with a kitchen spoon without realizing I was supposed to have a sledgehammer, and then wondering why everyone else seemed to have such an easier time digging THEIR holes. All thought while I was, however, in fact, successfully digging that fucking hole in the fucking rock with that fucking spoon lmfao.

I actually had to completely break the game in order to progress at one point, FINALLY realizing right at the end of this situation that Maybe My Game Is A Little Broken And Something Is Wrong Actually lol. Like this is what finally tipped me off that maybe I'm not playing this video game the intended way. It's a spoiler, so I'll put it under a cut.

The third boss, Arcanine, is apparently EXTREMELY not supposed to be beatable without dodging. The Impending Boss Battle Warning NPC right before the fight is even very, very clear about this, she straight-up tells you there are attacks that WILL kill you if you are not in your invulnerable state for the moment they are happening.

What happens is, there are a few phases of Arcanine's Attacking YOU Stage, before you can throw your mons at him:

First, he just charges around the stage at you, in straight lines, with pauses in between each rush. It's pretty easy to get out of the way of that by just sprinting, that was fine.

Second, he might jump up into the air and slam down in the middle of the stage, creating a giant shockwave that will hit you if you are anywhere near the center. Again, pretty easy to just get out of the way of that because there is a Warning Pause right before it happens, so you know it's coming. The stage is shaped like a +, so I could just bolt to the far edge of one of the four bars and the shockwave would not reach me.

Third...is his You Will Die If You Don't Interrupt It attack. He moves into the far side of one of the bars of the +, and starts charging up. You have to hit him with your throwable objects ["balms"] like 5 times to interrupt his charging and stun him, allowing you to then throw out your Pokemon and properly battle him. After you deplete his health in battle, he's stunned for several seconds while he regains his HP for the next round, so your throwables have a Massive Amount Of Effect on him.

There's a bar at the top of the screen that you need to deplete in order to win the fight during the Noble Pokemon boss battles, and what makes the bar go down is hitting the boss with your throwables. Outside of that "regaining health" vulnerability window post-proper-battle, the throwables only chip away at the bar just a tiny little bit, they have very little effect.

Now, the problem with Arcanine is that, after you've won a Proper Pokemon Battle against him twice, and thus have presumably gotten the bar at the top of the screen down to its final segment, Arcanine has a Final Berserker Phase of Attacking YOU. He puts a Wall Of Fire in the center of the +, greatly reducing your mobility by confining you to whichever of the four corners you are standing in. He's GOING TO be able to hit you with his rush attacks like this, you really gotta be able to either dodge properly or have enough health that you can tank the hits until he moves into his "Charging Ultimate Move" attack phase again.

And the thing about his final Charged-Up Uber Attack is that he will ALWAYS move to the exact opposite side of the cross from the side you are trapped in, the massive fire barrier will always be between you, so you can only BARELY reach him with perfectly-aimed throwables to interrupt it. Your aim has to be really perfect. Probably much easier to do if your Switch is plugged into a big TV [mine was not, I've been in handheld mode only].

I actually don't know what happens if you successfully interrupt the charged attack under those conditions, because I had a problem here and was never able to do it. I would find "the sweet spot" where ONE of my throwables would make contact -- and, mind you, the boss is not moving at all while he is charging up -- and then none of my other throwables would hit, even though I threw them at the same exact spot at the same exact power and was definitely hitting Arcanine with them? No matter what I did, only that first balm made contact, which meant I was never able to interrupt that last move, which meant it killed me when he unleashed it. Always. Invariably. Because my health was already tanked due to my limited mobility coupled with being unable to dodge from before; I had already taken too many hits by that point.

So, in order to beat this boss, I had to just...never let him get to that final phase. I had to end the battle BEFORE that last uninterruptable, undodgeable Uber Attack, because that last attack was certain death for me.

So what I ended up doing was just pinging the bastard with low-effect throwables throughout the WHOLE match. I had to spam that shit CONTINUOUSLY, WHILE sprinting around out of the way of rush attacks and shockwaves. I always had to be facing the boss and aiming well enough to hit that bitch with my projectiles a million fucking times, because I had to chip the meter at the top of the screen All The Way Down BEFORE the final charged attack in the final phase started.

And I succeeded! I got the meter all the way down. It was empty. I had depleted a HUGE AMOUNT of that meter with only low-effect balms, because I could only battle Arcanine with my Pokemon twice at maximum under these conditions. That Meter Was Fucking Empty.

And the battle did not end.

I did NOT win upon emptying the fucking meter, as I should have. You are supposed to Instantly Win as soon as that bar is blank. Apparently, the devs did not expect anyone to be able to do this fight the way that I did, so it appears that there was no exit condition to the battle assigned to "what if you win via low-effect balm spam before the final phase even starts" in the code. There was like no win protocol programmed in for that I guess.

But I DID win, obviously, I ended that battle and have now moved on to the next part of the game [I'm currently in Wayward Cave].

I won when I died.

I wasn't able to end the fight before that final charged attack happened, so, of course, I just watched Very Grumpily as Arcanine killed me with it. And then the "You are fucking dead" cutscene [whatever it is, I actually still haven't seen it bc I've just been resetting the game when I can tell I'm fucked bc I'm impatient] didn't play. The "You've won the match and calmed Arcanine" cutscene played. And the fucking story progressed and everything was fine. When I fucking died to that last attack. THAT'S WHAT ENDED THE MATCH. ME DYING.

I'm going to guess that what happened there, in the code, was that the game handles the "end of the match" protocol in such a way that it checks the state of the meter to determine WHY the battle ended. If the "match has ended" flag gets triggered, the game FIRST checks "Is the meter empty?" to determine whether the battle has ended because you've won or lost, and if the meter is empty upon the match ending, then it assumes you must have won, because of course depleting the meter is supposed to be an instant win. It does not determine whether you've won or lost based on YOUR health unless the meter is not empty; it checks the state of your health AFTER it checks the meter. It makes sense, because it's assuming that if you're taking damage, you're not depleting the meter, because you're PROBABLY not pinging throwables at the boss while trying to dodge its attacks against you, you're probably throwing shit at it while it's stunned, and CAN'T attack you. So the game apparently assumes that you can't really fully deplete the meter during a part of the match where you CAN take damage and die.

So, that was an Incredibly Harrowing Bugged-Out Boss Fight lmfao, and it's hilarious now that I think I understand what happened. I would actually do it again, that was fun. It was like Ultra Hard Challenge Mode, having to do that shit without being able to dodge OR stop that last attack. Had a fucking "How I used time travel to beat FNAF Security Breach" moment, just waiting for the Giga Monties to start spawning in my Pokemon game now lol. I had to break fucking everything to win.