#spectral pokemon reviews

[defiantdreemurrs]

Pokemon: Gold and Silver - Review

In 2000, Nintendo released the long anticipated sequels to its smash hits, Pokemon Red and Blue. Boasting an entirely new region to explore, a whole new set of over a hundred Pokemon to catch alongside the previous 151, and almost an entire second game unlocked after beating the main game, Pokemon Gold and Silver were an almost immediate success. These games are often mentioned as being “the best in the series” by fans across the globe and represented Game Freak’s most ambitious project to date. After years of only having vague memories of the games from childhood, we decided to finally make an attempt at completing Silver version, after which we plan to play through as much of the main series as possible. We’ve always felt the Game Boy and Game Boy Color era of Pokemon games paled in comparison to some of the later games like Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire and we figured after a disappointing playthrough of Blue a couple years ago, Silver would just be more of the same, but this time in color. We were shortly proven very wrong.

Pokemon Gold and Silver take us into the world of Johto. Johto is a neighbor region to Kanto from the Gen 1 games, a place we’ve heard described as “Kanto’s Backyard”. The region is based on a real region of Japan just like how Kanto was, this time the Kansai region. Where Kanto is centered around a metropolitan area in the form of Tokyo, Kansai is a much more ancient and rural area home to smaller cities such as Osaka and Kyoto. As a result, Johto feels much older than Kanto. Kanto felt like a collection of small yet relatively modern (as of the mid 90s) towns and cities surrounding Saffron and Celadon cities, whereas Johto’s even smaller towns feel much older and rich with history.

Take Ecruteak for example. Ecruteak is home to an ancient pair of towers said to be home to Legendary Pokemon. From these towers designs in the game, to the general atmosphere of Ecruteak, to the fact that a total of four Legendary Pokemon can actually be initially found within these two towers (though three of them roam around after your first meeting), even the limited display of the Game Boy Color gets across that this city has thousands of years of history surrounding it. Playing the game we felt like we were traversing around this rural, ancient region in the heart of Japan soaking in all of its beauty rather than just wandering around a world like our own. For a game series that aimed to transplant the mechanics of Dragon Quest into a more modern world, Johto brings a nice sense of that less modern, almost fantastical element back to the setting.

Not only does it feel like a beautiful region to traverse, it’s also a very relaxing region to traverse. Sure, there’s a lot of deep grass, and later on there are a lot of trainers around that can slow you down, but for the most part those slowdowns just result in having more time to appreciate the world of Gold and Silver. It wasn’t difficult to imagine wandering through the woods in place of the player character, a team of Pokemon at our side, exploring and battling, stumbling across ancient landmarks and historical buildings. All of this on a Game Boy Color game, mind you. Such a simple display and limited hardware and Game Freak still managed to hit it out of the park with such an immersive game. We easily spent hours just wandering around from town to town, not wanting to put the game down because of how sucked into it we were.

There’s a lot more than just Johto to progress through, though. Victory Road and the Indigo Plateau are back, because the game needed somewhere to put the Elite Four and the Pokemon League Champion, and since Johto and Kanto are practically next door to each other it made the most sense to just have the player travel back to Kanto after completing all eight gyms rather than design an entirely new area that’s just next door. The more eagle-eyed of players who attempt to fly away from the Indigo Plateau for training or other reasons might notice that they can’t do so, because when they pull up the Fly map, it shows they’re in Kanto as opposed to Johto. This is kind of an excellent teaser for the game’s post-game content: the entire region of Kanto.

Shortly after his passing, an anecdote about Satoru Iwata’s work on Gold and Silver went around in Nintendo fan circles. He was credited with developing a method of compression that allowed the developers at Game Freak to get both Johto and Kanto’s assets small enough to fit on a single cartridge, allowing the player the opportunity to, after completing the Pokemon League challenge, revisit the home of the previous games’ player character and see what’s changed since the player was last in Kanto. Given that Gold and Silver take place three years after Red and Blue, you can imagine a lot has changed. Cinnabar Island’s volcano has erupted, forcing the inhabitants to flee elsewhere and destroying Blaine’s gym, leaving him with nothing but a cave in the Seafoam Islands, that has become the new Cinnabar Gym. Lavender Town’s giant Tower has been turned into a new Radio Tower for Kanto, with the Pokemon graves within being moved to a new mausoleum building just south of it. A speedy bullet train has been built in Saffron City, allowing quick passage back to Johto. The player’s old rival Blue has become the new Gym Leader of Viridian City.

But while all of this provides an interesting and content-rich post-game for the player to explore and sink even more time into, we feel it comes at the cost of making the game’s main region suffer somewhat. In order to fit an entire second game into the back of the main game, the main game had to be smaller as a result. It’s nice to traverse two entire regions in one game but it’s not quite as nice when the game’s main region ends up being much faster to progress through as a result. While we did spend our time wandering around and didn’t focus too much on speed (though we were playing a little quickly since we do have a lot of games to get through), the end of the game hit us a lot sooner than we expected. In just a few short hours of playing we made it all the way up to the third gym, and the very next day blazed through four more. 

What makes this relatively fast pace even more annoying is that the levels themselves are paced really weirdly. We didn’t fight every single trainer we came across, but we did fight a good amount of them and made sure to fight every trainer in every gym, and we still had to grind somewhat when we came across the Elite Four. The game’s gyms are balanced to where you end up roughly in the mid 30s after completing all eight of them, with Clair’s team in the Blackthorn Gym having a single level 40 leading a team of mid 30s. The pacing then jumps wildly out of control as the Elite Four range from low 40s to low 50s, and then again even more so at the end of the post-game, where after facing mostly 30s, 40s, and even some 50s, you face a challenging team composed of mid 70s and even a level 80. I’m assuming the game intends you to grind out your team in the Victory Road in order to reach a more appropriate level for the Elite Four, but this was somewhat difficult since it’s full of rock- and ground-types, one of which we had on our team.. In the end we just repeatedly challenged the Elite Four and didn’t bother to heal as a way to grind some more levels out more easily as well as to form strategies against them, which I would argue is actually a great way to go about it if your team is well equipped for the fights otherwise.

This is, of course, assuming you even have the team you want in the first place. After picking our starter and catching a few other Pokemon to get us through the first gym, we started thinking about the Elite Four and the eventual challenge at the end of Kanto, and decided to plan out a team instead of our usual method of just using what we catch. We had a solid team put together of Pokemon that we liked first and foremost but would also be able to tackle these challenges more easily thanks to type matchups. Getting a few hours into the game though and doing more research on where to find them, we realized a lot of the team we were building would take far too long to put together, with half of them not even being available until arriving in Kanto (despite being brand new Johto Pokemon!). Almost none of the new Dark-types are available in Johto, the only one being Umbreon, and the only Fire-types available that aren’t your starter are Magmar and Entei (and Ho-oh for those playing Gold). Since we had no interest in waiting that long for the Pokemon we actually wanted and because we wanted our full, final team embedded forever in the Hall of Fame after beating the Elite Four, we ended up having to use two Legendary Pokemon, in the form of Lugia and Entei.

Personally, we don’t feel like including Legendaries on your team makes a whole lot of sense anyways, and we usually try to restrict to no more than one because realistically who expects an 11 year old child to have even just one? But the game restricting so many of the newly introduced Johto Pokemon to the post-game and even keeping the ones it does allow you to catch in Johto itself restricted to a smaller handful of types meant we had to break our own rule if we wanted to take advantage of certain type matchups. Considering how many Pokemon throughout the game are weak to Fire-types, we had to pick Entei just to capitalize on that because otherwise we were pretty heavily limiting ourself and making the game harder.

Personal issues with the availability of certain Pokemon aside, these games present a rich experience through an immersive world, an experience that is a bit marred by its own ambition. Ambition is something we can respect though. It took a lot of effort to fit Kanto into the game and we imagine a lot of players were thrilled to go back to the land they spent so many hours exploring and playing through in Red and Blue (though, being born too late to play those games, we didn’t have that experience). Even if we didn’t have that experience in Kanto already, it’s still really impressive and almost as fun to sink time into. It’s like a whole entire second game that you unlock after beating the main game, with an even more difficult final challenge. We respect the developers at Game Freak a lot for attempting this, and in the end we’re really looking forward to returning to Johto later on in Pokemon Crystal as well as the remakes, HeartGold and SoulSilver.

[puclpodcast]

Pokemon News Issue #118 (E3 Special)

First a Pokemon Direct, and now E3?! Man I love June.

  Anyway, welcome to the 118th issue of Pokemon News. With E3 in full swing as of writing, Nintendo has already revealed their plan for most of 2017 and 2018. Not only that, but we also have more specific news in the world of Pokemon. So for this issue, I’ll be discussing the new games Nintendo revealed as well as Pokemon itself. So let’s get right into it!

  First up, let’s review the new games that Nintendo will be release later this year and in 2018.

  For you Xenoblade fans, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was given its first trailer on the Nintendo Switch. Showing off the impressive graphics and hints at its story, the game is slated for a Winter release later this year.

  Next up, Nintendo announced a brand new Kirby game that would be released for the Nintendo Switch. This iteration brings back the mechanic for Kirby to “recruit” enemies and have players 2 – 4 control the new allies. Team attacks using multiple players was also shown, with allies using their abilities to enhance Kirby’s attacks. The game, whose title is yet to be revealed, is set to come out sometime in 2018.

  Probably the biggest surprise came in the form of the announcement of Metroid Prime 4 for the Switch, as well as a “reimagining” of Metroid II for the 3DS called “Metroid: Samus Returns”. No release date for Prime 4 has been given, but “Metroid: Samus Returns” is set to release on September 15, 2017 for the 3DS.

  Yoshi’s Wooly World is getting an arts and crafts themed sequel for the Switch sometime in 2018. Centered around cardboard with a stage-flipping mechanic, this cute and colorful game will support the tradition co-op gameplay the same way as Wooly World. And there will most likely be a Cardboard Yoshi amiibo too.

  Following this, we have the unveiling of the next batch of DLC for the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. With new questions, gear, and adventures to be had, this DLC will also come with four new amiibos featuring the four champions that you encounter in the game. Your collection will never end Thatch, you can’t escape it.

  And quite possibly the biggest presentation was that of “Super Mario Odyssey”. Lot’s of gameplay was shown off, detailing the mechanics of Mario’s upgraded hat fittingly called “Cappy”. This magically hat for the first time in a Mario game allows Mario to possess certain enemies, allowing the player to control any possessed creature. From Goombas and Hammer Bros, to Bullet Bills and even giant T-Rexs, Mario will be taking the entire world by storm in his latest Odyssey on October 17 of this year.

    Now I know what you are all thinking; that’s all fine and dandy, but where the heck is Pokemon!?

While Pokemon did take a back seat for E3 after having an entire Nintendo Direct dedicated just for them, we did get some new Pokemon info nonetheless.

  CoroCoro revealed new details about an upcoming Pokemon distribution for the next Pokemon movie, “Pokemon: I Choose You!” These distributions are for the mysterious Marshadow and Hat Pikachu.

  This Marshadow is known to have the moves Close Combat, Force Palm, Shadow Ball, and its signature move “Spectral Thief”. Along with it, Marshadow will be holding “Marshadium Z”, which is needed for it to use its own Z-Move “Soul-Stealing 7-Star Strike”. As for Pikachu, the only way to obtain it is to scan a special Ga-Olé Disc’s QR code that theater goers will receive in into their copy of USUM, not Sun or Moon. The move set for this Pikachu is unknown at the time.

  One final thing for this issue, and its a pretty big one. During Nintendo’s E3 Livestream, Tsunekazu Ishihara of the Pokemon Company confirmed that a Pokemon RPG is currently being made for the Nintendo Switch and that Game Freak is behind its development. At long last, Pokemon is returning to console with a proper game. Will it be like Coliseum and XD, or will be see a game similar to the Stadium series or something new entirely. Only time will tell, and let the speculation begin!

  And that’s all she wrote for E3. I’d like to know from you guys; which games are you most excited for from Nintendo’s E3 Presentation? What do you think the Pokemon Switch game will be like? I’d love to hear your guys’ thoughts in the comments below. And with that, I’ll see you guys in the next issue!

from Pokemon News Issue #118 (E3 Special)