#so your entire existence is now vitriol as the world wants the new protagonist already they want the new game and they’re sick of you

[sammydem0n64]

I need to study but I keep getting hit with oc visions. Crimson we are really in it now

[ranger-report]

Opinion: Disney Changing the Sequels to Non-Canon is a Bad Idea

Once upon a time, George Lucas decided to go back to the well and present unto a hungry audience what is known now as The Prequel Trilogy. Episodes I through III of Star Wars, the biggest sci-fi franchise ever created, a look at what came before the iconic story many moviegoers grew up with, and it was received with....lukewarm results. While they’ve certainly attracted favorable responses over time, the backlash to many decisions made in Lucas’s vision (midichlorians, whiny Anakan, fucking Jar-Jar Binks), they’ve objectively held up over time, and even have defenders. But it was enough for Lucas to make haste and step away from his beloved creation, selling the rights to make future movies to the Walt Disney Company, who wasted no time in getting a new trilogy up and running. Fans around the world were salivating, chomping at the bit for new Star Wars, and they were met with....lukewarm results. Despite high praise for Rogue One, the lowest marks for The Last Jedi (which is a brilliant film, don’t @ me), led to such a surefire hit as Solo was given so-so marks, which recently has led Disney to contemplate making The Sequel Trilogy non-canon to the universe; aka, they exist in their own separate Alternate Reality, giving Disney a fresh start to making the True Sequel Trilogy.

That’s a monumentally bad idea.

Okay, first off, Star Wars is not a franchise like Marvel or DC who can simply decided which flicks to toss aside and deem non-canon, or shunt off to an alternate universe. Yes, there’s something called Legends within Star Wars that holds down the duty of Adventures Which Don’t Fit In The Grand Scheme of things, but to place three NUMBERED entries in the Star Wars Saga into Legends?  That’s just madness.

Let’s review. Disney purchased Star Wars, then at some point before the release of Episode VII: The Force Awakens they announced that everything in the expanded universe of the novels and video games was entirely non-canon. To say that there was a bit of an uproar over this is an understatement. Beloved characters like Mara Jade and her relationship with Luke Skywalker were now lost to oblivion; stories like Knights of the Old Republic, Dark Empire, and Shadows of the Empire, which many grew up with as supplemental material post-Return of the Jedi, now suddenly didn’t matter. In one fell swoop, Disney came in and said “Your stories don’t matter. Our stories do.” Now, they must have had some sort of softening in the face of the fallout, as little by little more and more of the expanded universe snuck back into the proper canon, including Dash Rendar, Leia training to be a Jedi, and the motherfucking darksaber. Disney clearly made a slight attempt to listen to the fans, but for the fans -- including many toxic, vitriolic fans -- this wasn’t enough. Divided over the state of The Last Jedi, fans went apeshit on Disney,harassing actors over social media, calling for Kathleen Kennedy to be fired, claiming that their childhoods had been “raped,” etc etc etc. Many fans stayed home instead of watching Solo (my personal favorite Star Wars flick, don’t @ me), which was the lowest-grossing film in the franchise. Disney woke up, went on damage control, and we got....The Rise of Skywalker. Some how an apology and a middle finger at the same time, the film met with confusion and derision, and now Disney wants a mulligan. Well, Disney, you’ve already tried that once. Let’s learn from that mistake.

Sometimes, like in real life, history is messy. It isn’t perfect, nor is it consistent. Often times when we look back through the annals of civilizations past, we have to wonder what the fuck was going through people’s heads. And that’s Star Wars. They’re also not meant to be serious cinema; born of inspiration from early pulp sci-fi and WWII imagery with a hefty dose of samurai flicks, Star Wars is just meant to be escapism and thrills. Nothing more. In fact, no matter how silly Rise of Skywalker is, it still succeeds in big-screen thrills and set pieces as well as a few intimate character moments. It’s entertaining, if not the movie we wanted as the conclusion to this saga. And the Sequels brought much needed diversity to the character roster, including two men of color and a female protagonist. Granted, Finn and Poe were done dirty when no one allowed them to fall in love with each other (Disney, if you want to undo that decision, I’ll allow that), but they’re two of the best goddamn bits of this whole undertaking to come out of it. And Rey is interesting, a mystery -- possibly an unsatisfying mystery depending on how you view the reveal in Rise -- and her story carries weight, all the way up to the end. While full of plot holes and empty MacGuffins, the Sequel Trilogy is big and bold and at least tries to do something interesting. Especially The Last Jedi, whether you like that movie or not.

For decades, fans were able to build their own world off the ashes of Return of the Jedi. And make no mistake, this is a world where almost every single background character has a name, a backstory, and oftentimes an action figure as well. There is a deep, deep sense of entitlement when it comes to the relationship between fans and franchise here. Which is beautiful in some regards, and toxic in others. But while the Sequel Trilogy isn’t perfect, I’d argue that neither the Original Trilogy or the Prequel Trilogy were perfect either. They’re not Important Cinema in the sense of Serious Art, but they are groundbreaking in the sense of special effects, blockbuster history, and franchising. Star Wars changed the game when first released in 1977, and every film in the saga since has carried that weight of living up to expectations -- and in the last 20 years, unhealthy expectations. Stop trying to make Star Wars anything other than entertainment. Let it be. Let it live. Let’s move forward and see what we can do with everything new. Their children out there who have seen the Sequels and seen themselves in Rey, Finn, and Poe, and it would be a disservice to them to say, “Sorry, but your stories don’t matter anymore.” Disney already did that once and it didn’t work for the fans. They shouldn’t do it again.

[pokesception]

Whelp, started playing pokemon sword.  Have complained quite a bit here about dexit & related issues, and honestly I would have skipped at least the initial versions of these games entirely, or at least held off on purchasing them until we could see just how egregious pokemon home will be.  But my brother got shield, and my problems with sword and shield are not so severe that I’m going to refuse to play a game with family.

Thoughts so far?  Setting dexit entirely aside it’s... another pokemon game, for better and worse.  Largely for the better.  The new monsters, at least those I’ve encountered so far, are fun and good.  Music is nice.  Tone is bright and cheerful.  I love my team, and my protagonist.  It’s been nice.

As expected going to a more powerful console, it looks better, but it’s not a huge jump from the 3ds games, not least because lot of the visuals of this game are ported over directly from those games, and the stuff that is new has been made so as to not clash aesthetically with the older stuff.  If you’ve seen mods of usum that display the games at higher res and without the black outlines, it’s very much like that.  Closer to that even than to the let’s go games in ways that I find difficult to articulate.  In and of itself that’s not a complaint, really, the game looks plenty good enough for a pokemon tame.  It’s just not a major leap forward in presentation like the leap from gen 5 to gen 6 was.

Gameplay is mostly what you might expect.  Tall grass battles are an interesting mix of pokemon you can see on the field and engage or avoid as you wish and random battles that appear in the grass.  The random fights appear as a rustling in the grass that again can be pursued or avoided, you just can’t tell what they’ll be before you bump into them.  Finding rarer pokemon in a route is often a matter of sneaking or dashing between the new pokemon to get to the random fight, then crossing your fingers and hoping for the pokemon you want.  I’m not sure if there’s deeper levels to it, like chaining or whatever.  At the surface level it’s engaging enough.

The new pokemon are great so far.  There’s a bunch early on that you won’t have seen if you avoided leaks, and that was really excited.  I went into gen 7 knowing every new pokemon and with a particular desired team all worked out in advance.  This time around I’ve avoided spoilers, and gamefreaks official previews have kept a lot more hidden, so it’s been really fun to meet a lot of cool new faces early on.

The game does let you skip some early tutorials, but still frustrates to no end by stopping you every three seconds for another unnecessary explanation or detour, so it’s still pokemon in that unfortunate regard.  Routes are, if anything, more linear than ever before, at least early on, with the exception of an early expedition through the wild area which... I’ll talk about later.

Experience share is always on and cannot be turned off.  It scales shared xp based on the level of the pokemon, with lower level pokemon getting a higher portion, but not by enough so it’s still a pain to keep everything in the same level range, and you’ll still probably be wildly over leveled from very early on with nary a challenge to be seen even if you try to avoid grinding.

You can access the box from anywhere, which can be used to help overcome both the maintaining-a-level-range and over leveling problems of the experience share, but it’s a hassle to do, and wouldn’t be necessary if you could just toggle off shared exp in the options menu.  And on another level it makes the game even easier, since attrition is much less of a problem when you can swap in fresh pokemon whenever you feel like.

The online functionality is... kind of bad.  Maybe it’s just my internet, but being online in the wild area causes all sorts of slowdown.  Worse, there’s no equivalent to the pss functionality from gen 6.  No way to just see which of your switch friends are online and directly offer to trade or battle with them.  No instead you have to contact them *outside of the game* to share a 4 digit password, and then hope that nobody else happens to be using the same password as you when you try to connect with each other.  Raid battles are neat, but infuriatingly use the same password hassle.  You can’t just have easy friend-only raids from within the game itself.

It’s marginally better then gen 7′s festival plaza, but it remains miles and miles behind gen 6′s pss system that was simple and intuitive, and just centuries ahead of anything that came before or after.

Apart from raid battles, the wild area is... interesting?  Not all that different from having just a really big route with subareas of various level ranges.  Not bad, but not as big a departure as I had made it out to be in my head.  An idea with some potential that future games might expand into something great but that, knowing this series, will just be dropped after a single generation instead.  I’m still pretty early in the game, so my opinion on it might change after returning to it later.

The biggest frustration of the wild area, and something that brings it down tremendously, is that while you can encounter, and with some effort defeat, pokemon there, you cannot catch them at all if they’re above an arbitrary level range set by your number of gym badges.  This runs so completely counter to everything almost good about the wild area that I basically swore the whole thing off until I get to the end of the game, and frankly they might as well have just made it a post game area at that rate.

It’s extra frustrating because the problem of a player getting access to a pokemon too strong for the game too early on is one that the pokemon games already solved infinitely more elegantly all the way back in gen 1!  Just make pokemon that you acquire at too high a level uncontrollable, exactly like traded pokemon, so you can catch that over leveled onyx or whatever, but can’t use it until you’ve progressed far enough in the game for it not to be over leveled anymore.  How hard is that?  And who cares if a player gets an over powered pokemon early and steam rolls the game?  If that’s how the player wants to play, why is it a problem?  It’s not like the main game is challenging to begin with, thanks to always on exp share its almost impossible not to have over leveled pokemon anyway, what does it matter if it’s because you caught them that way or because they just outleveled the game curve?  A better exp scaling system would fix all those problems anyway.

Pokemon games not only failing to progress and solve problems that return game after game, but also repeatedly forgetting solutions that the series has already implemented is the longest running and most frustrating and most justified complaint to level at the entire series.  Of course, in the past pokemon as a series always had one core feature that none of the other - often more innovative - monster hunting games that sprang up in its shadow could replicate.  Backwards compatibility, the ability to maintain your collection in full going forward from generation to generation in a chain unbroken since gen 3 on game boy advance.  And that’s where dexit puts a sour note on the whole business.

The last several pokemon generations have failed to significantly improve on the core gameplay of a nearly two decade old franchise, but for many that has been largely forgiven because each new generation could easily be viewed not as stand alone games but rather as major expansions to the same existing game.  Dexit breaks from that, and forces the new games to be viewed as stand alone games and... well they aren’t pad at all.  They’re still cute.  I’m having fun so far.  Sword and Shield is no Anthem, no Fallout 76, no singular disaster to turn an otherwise largely positive track record on its head, and the extreme negativity directed against the game has been way overstated, even probably by myself.  In particular any vitriol directed at the devs is almost certainly unwarranted, the problems that have been growing in the pokemon series generation after generation almost certainly come down to corporate decisionmaking way above the heads of anyone who actually *worked* on the game.

Still, now that gamefreak’s pattern of cutting progressively more and more corners has reached the point of cutting actual pokemon, it’s shouldn’t be surprising that a lot of people who had been giving all those issues a pass suddenly aren’t anymore.

And while pokemon sword and shield isn’t a bad game, it’s hard to compare it to something like oras or usum and say it’s worth 50% more up front cost AND an added monthly subscription to access features like GTS that used to be just part of the game to begin with.

The dex cuts would have been more forgivable if the games had been a major leap forward, whether in graphics or gameplay.  Monster Hunter World, for instance, had /dramatically/ less content in terms of sheer quantity than the games that came right before it, but it also completely overhauled the visuals, heavily revised and updated the core gameplay, and completely changed how the area maps worked.

Alternatively, I think all the people currently complaining about models and trees and balance would have been fine with ‘just another pokemon game’ if it had maintained the backwards compatibility, just as they’ve been alright with ‘just another pokemon game’ for game after game after game until now.  Imagine if gamefreak had announced sword and shield as the last main line games to maintain all previous pokemon instead of the first games not to.  Then at least everybody’s personal faves would have had the chance to see play on a home system, and sword and shield could advertise themselves as the biggest pokemon games ever and actually mean it, and players would have time to adjust to what was coming.

I’m reminded of a scene from the Gravity Falls Halloween episode in season one.  Mabel & Dipper had always trick or treated together, but this year dipper decided to ditch mabel to try and go to a teen party, arguing that they were getting too old for trick or treating.  To which Mabel says something along the lines of “I knew some Halloween would be our last, but I didn’t realize it had already happened.”

And that’s the feeling I have with pokemon right now, the wet blanket draped over all the bright colors and fun new characters and monsters in sword and shield.  I knew eventually pokemon games wouldn’t be able to keep supporting all the pokemon, I knew eventually my collection would be left behind.  But I didn’t think it had already happened.  And to find out that gen 7 of all games was the last ‘complete’ pokemon?  That’s just kind of sad to realize.  And while I am on balance enjoying sword and shield, it’s a realization that keeps coming back uninvited to sour the experience.