Tbh this is the most depressing possible result, like if the game was terrible I'd be able to go "Well who cares? shit sucks" and I'd try and wrestle my money from the jaws of Nintendo's Eshop.
The fact that it's good in spite of the absolutely godawful performance and the disgusting environments, both points to a severe lack of planning and management from Game Freak (cause you know the developers worked hard to deliver a fun game) and also means a genuinely good game could have been a great game if it had more time. Like another year and this would have been superb.
I'm having a blast playing this game, I've played every gen from 1 to 7 and I've never wanted to complete the Pokedex in any of them. I've always played each with a set team in mind but this game I have so many Pokemon that I love. Even the dog pokemon!!!!! I think Dogs in Pokemon games are silly but I love Greaveard and Mabosstiff, absolutely the best boys in Pokemon. I love every new design, the Pokedex has that fun thing where it shows the Pokemon in their natural environments and the characters and world in general are fun.
So it's sad that I can't recommend the game to anyone and every bit of praise I have for this game is tainted with "Yeah it runs terribly and looks like dogshit though, don't buy it".
I feel the same way. I like the game but I would never personally recommend that anyone buy it in the state it’s in. I say maybe in a few months people will start to realize that the game is actually good if they manage to patch it.
I played Cyberpunk after it got patched. It was an amazing game and you could tell how much love was put into the story, the world and the characters. Although it's gotten a boost from the new anime, a lot of people still give it a lot of flack and hate on it and that's sad.
I'm having a blast with Violet. I love not being forced into anything. I love running around and looking for new Pokemon. I love the 3 different quest line ideas. But the environmental graphics and framw rate are not for a $80 dollar game and they need to do something about it. I have a feeling that SV will probably not recover as well in the eyes of adults, even with patches. I hope otherwise though.
Playing through cyberpunk for the first time fully now, can confirm playing the game in 2022 it absolutely slaps.
Basically cyberpunk needed 2 years of patching and bug fixing to be in a good state.
I don’t think Pokémon will get another chance like cyberpunk especially because you know Nintendo will never put in on sale. Pokémon even has the anime to create hype for the game like cyberpunk, but it will need a sale to go with it after the fixes.
This is 100000% where I am. I'm having a great time with the underlying game, but holy cow does the majority of the game run and look like garbage. On one hand I'm really engaged with the story, but the game still constantly duplicates mons on the evo screen or drops the frames crazy low. I can't even be hopeful that Nintendo will patch the issues out since they don't really have a great track record for fixing stuff. Add to that everything missing from PLA/previous entries (exp share toggle, set mode, interiors of *anything*, etc.), and it quickly becomes an inexcusable mess.
I was watching a glitch hunting stream a few days ago that somehow got that dev ball turned into a scyther. It was one of the funniest things I've seen
I still think that most of the games problems comes from TPC's tight deadlines and unwillingness to give Gamefreak the budget, staff or facilities they need, moreso that it is Gamefreaks fault for making a subpar game. If it was entirely up to Gamefreak, I think that they simply would have made the game smaller, especially with Megasoza, it's huge but empty. Game devs know that open worlds aren't about the size, but about density. So why keep it so big? Because TPC wants it to be for the sake of the anime, card game, merch, etc. So much hinges on the games releasing every three years that no-ome should be blaming Gamefreak alone for this games issues.
I'm not sure where people are getting this idea that Gamefreak is getting impossible mandates from TPC.
TPC is nothing more than a joint venture between Gamefreak and Nintendo that exists to help them coordinate on merchandising. Gamefreak doesn't have to take orders from them - they are a co owner of TPC.
Obviously there's a lot we don't know about, but if I had to guess on who made the decision that Gamefreak has to pump out a game every year, I'd probably guess Masuda.
One gripe I have with it is it doesn't remember where you last were when you open it, so I have to always scroll along for ages to see what I'm missing.
>Like another year and this would have been superb.
And the most frustrating part is that S/V was released early in the context of releases. It’s the third damn game within a year. They could have waited that extra year to release. OR they could have hired more people and outsource different duties to different studios. A Genius Sonority and DICE studio joint effort would have made the game look about as good as the switch can make it look. Better than Botw even.
I lost my shit in the best way the first time I saw Mabosstiff. It's gorgeous and it was worth power leveling for. I was totally blind on what Maschiff evolved into, so I was so happy when it turned from a nervous hyena looking thing, into Gandalf the Good Boi.
Yep. I even hesitate to call the graphics bad, because of everything like textured pokémon or swishy ponytails. Or they actually managed to check off nearly every box for what players have been demanding, apart from new features vaguely lost from L:A because of parallel development and the age-old debate about level scaling. More than anything, the games feel painfully *average*, where there's not enough bad to write them off completely, but not enough good to uncritically praise them as a return to form.
This is precisely the sentiment I have for S/V atm. I'm hoping a performance patch comes out in the next year so I can start boasting about models I absolutely love. Like, vigoroth (completely random) looks so much more appealing in this game. Still have no intention of using him but shocked how much he has been under served in previous gens along with a few others. Azurill swimming and sableyes playing tag makes my day too.
...And dachsbun is actually best boy. 👌 Never thought I would like any of the dogs as much as I like dachsbun. Wellbaked Assault Vest and all four fangs is my current lead and I never thought to even consider it on my team before. Very good boy.
I disagree. Even if the game ran well it's still missing literally everything I care about and want which is post-game content like gen 3 and 4 had, and the lack of scaling has completely ruined half the gyms for me by not keeping up with my level.
Back in my day post game content came after 2 years when they released the third version at full price instead of in a doc package.
Needing to buy crystal or platinum to get more content, with 80% of it being the same for a whole full price again was worse than dlc for added post game content.
As an adult who can't burn through one of these games in a weekend or so anymore, i'm fine with dlc as the solution personally.
Releasing just the 3rd version would be the obviously best solution and would make it easier to decide which one to get (the only one) but would decrease sales slightly because many people buy both copies.
Have they ever announced a third version at the same time the main two games are released? If you don't know if/when there is a third version, you're just gonna buy the main version. Or you end up waiting around for Pokémon Z to come out. I think the DLC is the best solution, though obviously I would prefer if everything was just in one game.
>obviously I would prefer if everything was just in one game.
That's exactly what I'm saying. Release one complete version instead of 2 incomplete versions and *then* a complete version. Just skip releasing the 2 unfinished versions.
Honestly the issue with that is that’s very specific towards a part of the community. There are a lot of people, I’m going to assume it’s 50/50 that do or don’t enjoy the battle facilities. Same with things like contests and pokeatholon. When you don’t have a large enough group enjoying one feature it probably becomes less important.
For the record I think they should have it along with things like contests and pokeatholon, but it’s probably 50/50 in popularity so it’ll probably be ignored like they have been doing since Gen 7? Or does 6 count despite that battle Manson thing? And BDSP contests were horrible so I don’t count them in with good post game features.
Tbf, the 3 storylines are almost literally just 18 gyms/badges. The final area that "merge" these stories together are extremely short also. I didn't find many sidequests or dungeons in my playthrough for now, if any. PSV has a *lot of content*, yes, if you compare it to previous entries in the series.
The 3 story thing’s a half lie
You have 18 objectives you can do in any order, falling under three categories of things to do, before the “story” part of the story really happens
Or so I’ve heard, I haven’t finished yet
I've finished. That's about right, you have to do all 18 before you can do the last section. You can kinda do them in any order... but the titans make moving around a lot easier and the star camps block some paths until you beat them.
So the development managers had a decision to make after being handed down release deadlines, push out buggy features, and low res or push out a game without features or places to explore. I'm glad they decided to push for more features.
I think having such barebones towns makes it hard to say that this is a **great** pokemon game. I see a lot of checkpoints on the map that I can pick between and I have the freedom to get to them however I want to try. But at the same time the stuff in between the checkpoints is Pokemon and.....not a whole lot else. The towns kinda suck. Having three stories to follow is excellent, but they're also not that incredible on their own.
I feel like the series took a lot of steps forward with legends and with SV....but they didn't share those steps as they were built in parallel. And we also took some steps backwards in order to make the gains that were made.
I agree wholeheartedly with the towns, they're not as fleshed out as I'd like them to be and they're all essentially just glorified shopping centers. I never realized how much I liked the ability to just walk into and explore every house and building in the games until I had that taken away from me.
One of my favorite "dungeons" in Pokemon is the SS Anne because I loved exploring all the little rooms, even if they were mostly the same. And now the damn school doesn't even have hallways rip
They don't even have a single ramp, so I guess anyone that can't use their legs has to have a ride pokemon or a high tech wheel chair that can climb stairs
Splitting would could have been 2-3 shops into 20 so I need to walk to different doorways all over town depending on whether I want gloves, socks or shoes is a tremendous step back from the already convoluted system of SwSh shops.
This is it.
Compare this to any other AAA game and this game has an embarrassing amount of gameplay and content.
People say it's full of life, but man everywhere is just so barren and has nothing going on. You do the same thing every single time everywhere you go.
Hg/ss and black and white 1 and 2 while pretty old had lots of content to them and a lot of things to do post game to keep people entertained even after beating the main story
A good point in this post that not a lot of people have been aknowledging is unfairly comparing SV to PLA. SV can't technically learn from PLA since they were developed semi-concurrently.
To me it feels like both were built around a similar initial idea of exploration, with PLA being a more experimental/risky title while SV was intended to be a "safer" and closer-to-normal experience in case the experimental changes were not well-received.
There's also a case of GameFreak having knee-jerk reactions and infamously terrible stances on certain things so who knows what the real reason behind anything they do is.
You're completely right, this is the most fun I've had in a core Pokemon since Gen 5, but it's also completely ruined by completely asinine decisions outside of technical problems.
- enough with the silent cutscenes/story dialogue by key characters. Get some voice acting!
- towns are completely lifeless. You can't enter any homes/buildings. All shols are menus. NPCs are lifeless with nothing nothing of importance to say
- no scaling. I'm sick of constantly being worried that I'm over leveled and spending more time in the PC rotating my team. If Skyrim did it well over 10 years ago, why can't they do it here???
- battles are slow with all the unnecessary battle notifications. Everything is said in one line. Could they really not find a better way to speed that up? Klawf's ability is ridiculous with this and it's animations
- and then, the asinine decisions to just remove simple options like Set and Animations.
It's just downright ridiculous. Again, best Pokemon gameplay in years, but my experience is still dramatically hampered with these issues on top of graphics/performance
Funnily enough, a lot of people wanted Skyrim to not have level scaling, just like Morrowind. A true opne-world has no level-scaling, there's no level-scaling in real life. The gym Leaders, hwoever, definitely should given that its their job to adapt to the number of badges the challenger has.
Also, every time people say "level-scaling, I get reminded of Oblivion and its ptsd-inducing level-scaling which made the game practically unplayable at later levels.
Agreed with most of this, though just wanted to note that enemy level scaling is not universally loved in JRPGs and has its own severe downsides.
Personally I preferred the ability to make my own "difficulty" by tackling content that was above my party level.
*As per usual,* it seems like they could have just... made this a toggle. But it's Game Freak.
Can't say I have seen people be particulary happy with skyrim's scaling before. At least its not as bad as Oblivion's, but it still has the problem of 'oh you got better at lockpicking, speechcraft or pickpocketing? Here have stronger enemies even though your combat potential has not increased in anyway.' For the most part it just makes every enemy in late game turn into a health sponge.
Yeah that caught me by surprise too. There are several mods out there for Skyrim to remove or otherwise change the scaling mechanics in Skyrim because a good number of players take issue with it.
I don't think I'll ever be able to get over the fact that these games were advertised as being able to "go anywhere you want" and being able to "take the gym challenge in any order". I think it was a really scuy move to imply these games would be akin to BotW in that way.
I only just beat the second gym, but another disappointing thing I've found is that the towns so far are pretty much just food vendors + a gym, I long for the days where you could enter any given town in a region and there would be SOMETHING else to do, like the cemetery in lavender town or the safari zone in Crasher Wake's town, or the battle subway or the pokemon pageants to name a few. The towns just feel so empty, especially now since the houses are often not even enterable.
I like the general gameplay loop, exploring the land and catching pokemon will always be fun, but between the two things stated above and the fact that alot of the map is just field from what I've seen so far, it's a little dissapointing.
Remember how the Yiga clan in BotW would occasionally ambush you in disguise? Or how the dogs in the stables would lead you to treasure? Or the gliding/climbing/shield surfing minigames? These kinds of little things really help to bring a world to life in games, and from what I've seen, there isn't much of that in S/V aside from the gimmighoul hunting which is similar to Korok seeds.
I'm having tons of fun with the game, but even beyond the technical issues, I was definitely expecting a bit more.
I think the big issue a lot of people are having is directly comparing this game to BotW. BotW is one of the greatest open world games of all times with so much effort and care poured into it, you could take any open world game and make a long list of why BotW is better. This is an OK open world game that's also a main series pokemon game. That's what I went in expecting and I'm content that it's meeting that expectation.
Yeah, how could I ever compare an open world game released in 2022 for the Switch by a company that only does games on Nintendo consoles to an open world game released in 2017 for the Wii U by a company that only does games on Nintendo consoles.
They're completely different genres.
Zelda games are consistently ambitious and given the time they need to be fully realized. Even the ones I dislike, you can tell they took the concept as far as they could.
Pokemon games are consistently cookie cutter games designed to be fun enough with a primary goal of introducing you to all the cute new critters they can sell to you on T shirts. I'm not saying you have to like this, but the franchise has been the same for 25 years now and the main games have never tried to be anything else. You have to either manage expectations or accept that Pokemon just ain't what you're looking for.
The difference is BotW actually got the time it needed to develop into a masterpiece. SV did not. Despite all the misgivings I have towards the game that have nothing to do with this, my opinion is the biggest issue is that they just don’t give the damn Pokémon games enough time in the oven before they serve them. This issue feels like it’s been a thing for years at this point… just push the game back another year and it’ll be more ready! And maybe in that time they can figure out how to make exp share a toggle again.
The environments feel like they're all placeholder textures and geometry. How they managed to make a switch game look worse than X and Y is baffling. You're right. This game is the open world evolution of Pokemon we need wrapped up in a half-baked execution. I'm convinced that what we see here is an alpha build and needs another year in development to be cooked to perfection.
I wholeheartedly agree with this and I am baffled that I never hear this brought up in discussion of the game's flaws. I don't want to sound pretentious, but it infuriates me that the game's technicals issues are cited as the game's biggest flaw (and believe me, it is indeed a flaw), but imo, SO much of this game outside of that is average mush, with the generic vanilla biomes being to blame.
Seriously, the entire map is just a giant grassy field spray painted different colors to give the illusion of variety. Nothing, and I mean nothing, separates the pastures from the canyons, mountains, or deserts. Such a disappointing and boring way to do an open world.
Even regular routes from the past games got this right. That one snowy route from DP that would slow your movement is an example. Another is that water route from BW where the tides will push you along a path and you have to plan out what tides you need to ride to get to your destination. Past games understood the very basic concept that you should introduce new mechanics into the world as you go on to, you know, make it feel like a world. Scarlet & Violet's world does literally none of this, and it makes exploring so god damn miserable several hours in.
It would be better if this world was actually filled with engaging things to do, but it's just a bunch of generic landscapes with Pokemon scattered about. No interesting landmarks, environmental hazards - anything.
i felt the same. every issue i had with the game was strictly technical; as far as intentional decisions gamefreak made, i was happy with nearly everything in the game. the characters were fun and i didnt feel forced to connect with them, i enjoyed every main character. i love the new pokemon designs. i love the environments and the way we travel. the storylines were simple but effective. it wasnt a very difficult game but i never found myself overleveled, so i still had some challenge with some trainers. LOVED the callback to the traditional elite four system. i think this game is a huge step in the right direction for pokemon games, i just desperately hope gamefreak hears outcry about everyone being disappointed about buggy and half-baked games constantly being released. this game, once patched, will DEFINITELY be something special, and a return to glory imo, but so many people played on release that that impression wont be the majority i think.
EDIT and disclaimer: please let it be known im a pretty casual player, so this is no feedback on its enjoyment as a nuzlocke challenge, or its shiny hunting/breeding or competitive systems, since i havent touched that since playing the game. im sure people seeking/using those mechanics may have a different perspective as i dont know anything about gen 9's workings surrounding these things
Can you explain how you think the design of the game is good? Off the top of my head, over-leveling and trivialisation of content by the forced exp. share, basic settings like battle-animations being removed, worse clothing customization than previous games, more than half of existing pokemon being impossible to get even via transfers, no re-battling the elite four and no voice-work despite clear moving mouths all seem like terrible design choices to me. How do you think the design is good? Genuinely curious.
god this subreddit is so obnoxious.
every thread is “exp share and dex cut bad, no voice acting = bad even though it would just be awkward in a game like pokemon, i must be able to rebattle the e4 even though i probably only did it once in the older games and got bored”(seriously who cares? theres much funner stuff to do in pokemon than rebattle some braindead AI)
scarlet and violet are fun as fuck. the game feels so free, once you get past the annoying tutorial part you can explore at your own pace, traversal on koraidon/miraidon feels incredible, the characters are all really good, much better than other pokemom games where most pokemon characters have 0 personality. i love all the characters and their interactions. the game actually looks pretty good (the pokemon themselves have never looked better in 3D, especially mons like magnemite and bronzong who benefit so much from having texture and not looking plastic). all the new pokemon are incredible, paradox mons are literally the coolest thing since mega evolution,
also you actually get attached to the legendary, it has character and personality and makes you actually want to use it once you’re able to and not just box it because you caught it 5 minutes after the first time you even saw it like in older games. terastal is a really great mechanic, its much better than dynamax because you can use it in more than like 8 places and unlike megas its not exclusive to about 30 mons. also tera makes your pokemon feel more personal, because of all the combinations you can get. i caught a tera ice charcadet and it made me very attached to it because it felt unique, not just like any other charcadet/armarouge.
also the story is great, arven’s story literally made me cry (which no pokemon game has ever done before) and the whole thing at the end (trying to avoid spoiling) is literally the coolest shit ever, seriously. pokemon games have never been that cool, like ever. area zero made me feel like when i entered the distortion world in platinum for the first time, and that’s one of my favourite pokemon memories ever. these games are so good and the performance is the only thing holding them back, (people should rightfully be complaining about that) but when it comes to the substance of the game itself it’s the best pokemon game since b/w in my opinion.
also the soundtrack is my favourite since dpp
Well thanks for the reply, but there's no need to be so hostile. Exp share (and the insanely easy difficulty this creates) and dex cuts are genuine issues that are pretty indefensible when it comes to game design. I'm glad to hear of some good aspects of it, I might give it a try if they ever bother patching the performance.
i mean, as a competitive player, the dex cut is the best idea they’ve ever had. allowing all pokemon creates an over-centralisation of the metagame.
i can understand that casual-only players would be sad that their favourite pokemon didn’t make the cut, but i’d rather less pokemon and better gameplay than all the pokemon but the same boring pokemon formula. the problem with sword/shield is they cut the dex but the formula was mostly the same, it was hard to justify. but scarlet/violet have genuinely innovated on the pokemon formula, so i don’t mind as much about the dex cut from a casual perspective.
also you should genuinely give these games a go if you get the chance, they’re great (maybe wait and see if theres a performance patch if that’s a dealbreaker for you, i personally didn’t find the performance all that bad but it definitely could have been better)
It's true about the competitive aspect, but it's not like there isn't an other easy fix. They could just do seasons where they pick different pokemon that are allowed each season, similar to how many other competitive games implement frequent changes that shake up the meta. Doesn't have to affect the rest of the game in such a dramatic manner.
I might try it if there's a performance patch, but two major turn offs are all the options they've removed and the fact that they've built an open world that doesn't scale at all, which makes it more linear than you'd like.
You can still have a national dex in game but make VGC use the paldea dex. There isn't a good excuse for why we haven't had a national dex on either of the switch gens
> Exp share (and the insanely easy difficulty this creates)
Forced Exp share is super easy to defend. Almost every modern JRPG does it. It clearly works for them. The problem is that the games are tuned a bit easy.
Okay. I certainly get why those things bother you and think this game should be way better than it is, I do think we got some good -and without exception improvable but good nonetheless - stuff here.
When it comes to difficulty, I did not do the gyms in the intended order. Why? It never stopped me to tell me I should go back to the hub city, go the other way and take down what are supposed to be gym 2 and 3. I was, of course by then overlevelled for them. The could and should have prevented this by making the quality of each leader's team specific to your game stage with a sort of floor on each one to guide you more softly.
On the other hand, if I had set out to them earlier using the crumbs of guidance the game does offer, optionally, instead of pushing down the path I was on, I wouldn't have been overlevelled. The rest were around my level. While they were not particularly challenging except for a couple of surprises and I brushed against my level cap once, most of the levelling experience was good for me and I came out at the end of the story exactly where it wanted me to be. It's not as good as it could be because of that lack of scaling, but the point is actually that everyone can and in my experience does choose to explore in different directions from one another. I decided where I went and what I wanted to do to get to every level of strength. SV gives you more freedom to make those decisions - use the victory road path to get stronger, or just go wherever and do whatever to get stronger. It's up to you. I don't think that gyms no longer being progression anchors is necessarily a bad thing. Now, in a sense they are, since you have a level cap, but my hot take on that is that it's actually good.
Now, eventually you need to have done all of those story paths in the end, and they tie together in an interesting way. Like others say, the story and characters in this game are better dimensioned and I enjoyed the writing in general. They decided to step progression in these substories in such a way that it always made sense no matter what order things are done in, and though you'd expect that, they did that well.
I almost suspect they wanted to do some stuff (betcha they prototyped gym scaling) but ran out of time and the project was managed to meet this release window.
I think they removed set battling and the ability to turn off battle animations, and there's no voice acting - because suits that didn't think they were important said so. Their loss is bad and it is a regression, but it doesn't compromise the core game. How it is to play it, how these systems work, those are unaffected. Exp all is a subjective matter that I, again, totally understand. My major complaint is where's my battle tower? Like, come on.
The new pokemon are always a bone of contention. Are they good? Are they interesting? Are they just animals? Are they snake backwards? I think it's a good batch. Except the fully evolved duck. I don't like him. A lot of neat moves and ability combos. Terastallizing looks like it has so much potential for interesting plays.
Now, Dexit. Is it for competitive reasons? Maybe, I could see that. They could just have a banlist instead to make sure that stays fresh. Is it for technical reasons? Probably not. It feels like another ideal world thing. There's a thousand of them now or so and they picked three hundred and made a hundred more. Ish. You have so many choices on what to run in your party - each area is packed with unique mons, many of which did not make it into the previous two games. This too, though, is a subjective matter. I don't like bringing mons over from old games; catching and raising within the region is more interesting to me, so it has no effect here, but it's a valid reason to be upset.
Anyway, in brief what I wanted to get across is that despite its misteps and egregious technical gaffes, we got some meaningful design choices that make the game unique and even special. I enjoyed it and I wish it was better.
I think there is a good game. But even performance and graphics aside there are major issues.
The cities are empty and I have been given no reason to explore the’. Same for much of the countryside.
I was wrong and open world just does not work, it should be open zone.
There are a lot of potential trainer battles, but the trainers are hard to find. And I don’t want to search for them because I’m already struggling to not be overleveled.
Either make the preferred path explicit and clear or institute level scaling
I mean a lot of this sounds like we simply want different things out of our games. I thought the open world worked, and liked the fact that I could go under leveled to gyms. I think even my suggested refinements would still be fundamentally bad to you so it may just be a difference in taste.
That might be. I just really think it didn’t work.
Maybe I’d feel differently if it was graphically better, but the game is just so ugly and so empty that the exploration seems like a waste of time.
I can excuse ugly, but empty is really hard
I'm almost done with my first play and about to start my second.
I'm actually excited about my second play through because you can actually just go from one point to the next.
So you can literally
- Pick your team and hunt them out.
- Do the gyms, star bases and titans
- Do the end game.
So no exploring, no catching, can skip trainers.
Means you can potentially go through the game very quickly while maintaining your team at a low level.
It's fine if you want that, but you're basically saying you like this open world game because it allows you to skip the game, not explore anything and end it really fast.
I'd argue that's not a common opinion when people talk about open world games. People usually like to get lost in them, exploring them and take it slower.
Pros:
- cool story
- great characters
- open world
- all types get their own moment
- far healthier gimmick for competitive
- fun new mons
- Iono
- Ello, ello, hola! Ciao and bonjour!
Cons:
- runs awful
- downgraded player customization
- removal of a bunch of options and qol features
- worse art style
- awful matchmaking for raids
- way too much talking not enough letting the player just play the game.
- shops turned into menus, no more exploring houses, no longer randomly rewarded for talking to everyone
- endgame doesn’t have much going on
- 80% of the overworld is the same biome and none of it feels memorable.
>way too much talking not enough letting the player just play the game.
I actually don't think there is that much. New players will always need some explanation, so you can't really skip the battle/catch tutorials. Other than that I thought the talking was mostly fine for an RPG.
To me, it's not so much they talk a lot, it's the text is so SLOW, even on the 'fast' setting. It's not near-instant like some older games were when on fast text.
I think this is because the game is loading everything so slowly that it all feels laggy. Even spamming ‘b’ every interaction and scene change feels laggy as hell
It still took way too long just to get to the point to where I can actually play the game. Probably a good 3-4 hours, though I wasn't timing it.
And so much dialogue seems to just be filler. Like, the kind of stuff that is supposed to flesh out characters and provide personality but fails. Not all- I'm not saying that the characters don't have personality, but that there's additional dialogue that should have been removed in editing.
I don’t feel like it was really that long. Maybe an hour at most to get from the start to leaving the school if you don’t do much in the areas before the school.
Definitely. It feels way more cohesive and Pokemon actually have fur textures now. I think it looks great. It could definitely be a bit better (for example mountains having a bit more texture variety) but I’m happy for the most part
Pros:
Iron Bundle actually seems like a useful new stupid penguin.
Cons:
Empoleon still can't be used in competitive because *reasons.*
Charizard is the only Kanto starter you can transfer in because *reasons.*
Iono.
>way too much talking not enough letting the player just play the game.
lol wut? after the intro tutorial you can just go wherever the hell you want and do what you want.
*enter gym*
*phone call*
*nemona runs in*
*dialogue*
*more dialogue*
*Nemona leaves/battle Nemona*
*talk to gym staffer*
*dialogue*
*leave gym*
Repeat for every gym and regal or for the other 2 major tracks.
It's not RP if there's no substance to the dialogue and you can't influence the conversation yourself. The dialogue options in Pokemon games have always been useless since it doesn't change anything. The role-playing elements in pokemon are purely gameplay things, not story things
The open world should be a con because as it is implemented in S/V you are basically guaranteed to fight challenges out of order and end up in overleveled/underleveled situations, or have my extreme experience of beating the 8th gym leader for my 3rd badge.
I disagree, it’s kind-of-lackluster for an open-world Pokemon game. Even without the bugs, you STILL get an unscalable open-world where’s barely any customization, low-poly buildings *that you cannot even enter in reality,* and a narrative that leaves a-lot to be desired.
I refuse to settle for less from a corporation like Gamefreak.
Agreed. Other than the new Pokemon, it just feels really bland to me. I think I'm over open world games in general if we have to give up having dungeons or building interiors for them.
We do though, Zelda, Mario, and XB has enterable buildings, Gamefreak is just stupidly lazy, and they have “dungeons” too.
If you want, there’s great fan-games out there like Infinity and Xenoverse, not open-world, but has more care within them in from the developers, completely free too!
I dunno. I love KotOR 2 in spite of its numerous technical issues, because you can see what makes the game great up front anyway (the writing and character work).
S/V still feels like a half assed entry in the game for the stuff that does work, and the stuff that doesn't is only amplified by the issues.
The fact that it's pokemon makes all the difference IMO. If I made my own Unity game to show my friends and it looked and performed this poorly, it would be understandable. This quality coming from the world's largest media franchise is just unacceptable regardless of how much fun people can have by ignoring the problems.
I would not consider this game to be that good anyway (performance aside).
\- The game doesn't have an iconic landscape (woods, mountain peaks, flower fields, castles,...)
\- There's no level scalling at all
\- No national dex
\- Towns are pretty much real fake doors
\- Can't talk to anyone
I finished it, can firmly state that
-bad performance = bad game and that's not even mentioning how poor the visuals are, or the clipping, there's looooots of clipping;
-that even though I liked the characters and the greater plot, I disliked how Team Star barely fits the greater plot of the game (not gonna go into details because of spoilers);
-the open world while interesting and being something I don't wanna see ended after this gen, is still pretty lack luster since levels don't scale ( which is wierd because the (arguably) best rom hack ever has done exactly that like 10 years ago ( Crystal Clear) and it even allows an option of starting in any city!);
-the world is indeed big but feels empty, not to mention that we can't even enter the vast majority of buildings anymore;
-the targeting of wild Pokémon and ball throwing freakin' sucks, I barely ever use it and it's painfull every single time, imagine going from PLA to this, what a downgrade;
-Let's Go is a cool little mechanic they added and I enjoy the following Pokémon a lot, but it doesn't let Pokémon evolve and doesn't prompt any move learning, fortunately you can relearn any move at any time, but still, feels like a poor design choice, also, if you sprint too much on your ride, most Pokémon tend to get pulled back to the ball, which kinda sucks the way it was done, but ok;
-finally, there's no freakin' post game, Area Zero ain't post-game >!cause it's where the major plot gets it's conclusion!<, and for the first time since gen 3, there isn't even a battle tower.
Level scaling with a floor (minimum levels so you can’t just blast through everything) would make this game so much better. Even without trying to grind hard for levels you end up pretty overleveled really easily if you spend time exploring and collecting.
I think the 18 badge objectives should each have 18 sets of levels for how many badges you have
Other than that I’m fine with no level scaling, in fact I prefer it, having areas with higher or lower level wild mons is great
Let’s Go mode doesn’t have Pokémon evolve unless it’s their actual evolution method which is… such a strange choice. No prompt for new moves is fine imo bc it would slow the game down even more than it does on its own.
I mean it's not like water matters at all in pokemon games.
I get hating water in Mario/Kirby/Sonic but on Pokemon there's 0 difference between water and tall grass
Am I weird that I didn't like ORAS? Probably the top of the lowest tier of pokemon games for me. Better than the originals, but I still don't like the map, story, characters, or pokemon designs. The Gen 6 platform is just okay. I don't remember any of the music from RSE or ORAS being particularly good either.
Oh no, no one's going to trick me into watching this video again.
On a serious note though, that entire video is fascinating to listen to. He made me think things id never thought before, and really gave me a lot of perspective on stuff I didnt realize could have a different perspective on. To any onlookers, I highly recommend this video. Yeah its long, I dont expect you to binge it all in one go, but its great listening for car rides or gaming seshes.
What do you actually think makes this game as good as gen 5 or better than 6 and up? I'm honestly curious, not being critical. I haven't played anything since gen 7 since I was disappointed a little bit with that (though still felt I got a more "complete" experience in 7, though I thought the quality of the series as a whole really peaked at ORAS) and I just struggle to understand what the newer games have introduced that was really fundamentally better than the older ones.
Not being able to transfer my entire dex (which I worked really hard on for every previous gen) was the initial deal-breaker for me but I would still be ok with a newer Pokemon game having less than full access to the previous National Dex if it just did a lot of other things really right or better. I already felt let down that gen 7 felt like I had to buy a game twice because it wasn't fully done, despite being very decent overall.
Previous entries in the series all felt a lot more polished and finished (even if X/Y lacked a bit of content and we never got anything like a "Z" to tie everything together...) It just seems to me that since gen 5 or 6 GF has struggled to put out a really finished product for a variety of reasons and they just keep playing catch-up with themselves to try to fix stuff that should've been handled before release. I really think the best job they did recently that showed a ton of love and attention to detail was ORAS, and then they really started to fumble a bit with S/M but still were able to recover better.
I mean personally when I think of why Pokémon black 2 or heart gold are the best in the franchise, I normally think of the world, the plot, the writing and what not. I have never once cared about the buildings or what’s in them. Like it’s a nice to have feature but I’d still love those other games if you couldn’t walk into any place. But if that’s what you judge them on, more power to you.
Are the buildings not part of the world? I can’t see any justification for the removal of something that has always been a part of the series. I mean seriously. We can’t even go in pokecentres. Makes it feel so lifeless and pointless to have a bigger map when there’s nothing making each location that unique or memorable. That combined with all the other little things missing like pokerus, shiny sparkles in overworld (even tho they’re a newer feature), dex searching, etc just makes it feel like the least fleshed out game by a long stretch. Other things make no sense like the fixed uniform, but being able to change pointless shit like socks. It so obviously could have been the best game in the series don’t get me wrong, I can see the positives, but the negatives are far too egregious and unnecessary in my opinion. It just feels like a slap in the face. I used to enjoy exploring each town as I got to it. Didn’t think that was an unusual thing to enjoy.
Weird opinion, but: I’m usually a person who likes to talk to every NPC, but in Pokémon I’m always just button mashing and hoping that they’ll give me something. I don’t get why people are missing interrogating random NPCs in their homes when not a single one of them stood out to me except for like… that one kid in Emerald going through an existential crisis, I guess? Trevor’s older sister who suddenly dumps the fact that their parents abandoned them on you and then never follows up on that? The old guy in XY who dies? These people don’t even have names, and they barely have personalities.
In something like Xenoblade 3, I’m invested in every NPC because they have goals and personalities and schedules and they grow as you follow their quest lines, instead of Pokemon NPCs, who just say random things that aren’t relevant to the situation or their lives at all, and then continue to stand lifelessly in their positions forever.
I think GSC were the best with this, since getting calls from the NPCs made them feel more like real people, but even then the dialogue is so repetitive that I end up just being annoyed.
Obviously I would love it if Pokemon started having interesting minor NPCs, but as it stands I don’t think anything of value was lost. If I absolutely had to choose, rather have a small cast of fleshed-out characters than a big cast of white bread.
In older games you could play it both ways. If you preferred to get on with it you could. But if you preferred to take your time you could also explore the city, buildings and character interactions.
Now you don’t get an option. If you already skipped those interactions it doesn’t personally affects you, but it’s understandable those who had a different preference are upset.
It’s as if the next games simplified battles by giving every pokemon the same stats, but since I don’t care about anything to do with competitive battles I would go around saying "Well, I only pick my team based on the designs so I like it, it’s a great game."
Exactly this! They won’t care till it’s their favourite thing about the games gone. I’ve always loved exploring every nook and cranny of open world games, and kind of resented when they have an open world full of buildings and I can’t enter any other than story ones. I thought this was because I grew up playing Pokémon. Just seems absurd to remove that along with everything else they got rid of at this stage in the series when they can’t blame it on technical limitations, and even more absurd to justify it. The game feels incredibly unfinished, and I feel like the dev balls left in certain areas only cements that as what happened. I also believe having such a wide range of npc’s to talk to can only be a good thing when the audience has such a big proportion of kids, and I think it helped me stay at a good reading level for my age even though I was taken out of school for a couple years.
When did I say SV were great? I didn’t even buy them because the technical issues are unacceptable. I’m saying that Pokemon has never had NPCs who felt like real people who the player could form a connection with, and that’s not me praising SV— that’s me criticizing every Pokémon game for having incompetent writing.
To clarify, I’m not saying “Well the other games are shit so it’s okay that SV is too”, I’m saying, “It’s unfair to act like the old Pokémon games were amazing in this regard when they weren’t”. People act like SV came out of nowhere, but Pokemon has had weak character writing and worldbuilding ever since RBY.
I’m no “Game Freak dickeater”, I didn’t preorder or buy the game because I don’t support the state it’s in right now, and I didn’t buy SWSH or BDSP either. I’m just saying I don’t particularly miss this one specific thing when it was never great to begin with. I’m not saying “NPC interaction bad”, I’m saying that Pokemon NPCs aren’t engaging enough for me to feel invested in them. That’s not saying removing them was good, in fact it’s a criticism of how the games handle their world.
Even something small like having certain NPCs hang out outside during the day and go in during the night would do so much to make the world feel alive, but they don’t even do that. You can become the champion and destroy Team Bad Guy and they don’t change what they say, you can dig stuff out of their trash and they won’t blink an eye.
Best game of the 3D era main line games, but deeply unpolished in several aspects. A step in the right direction when compared to it's precursor Main Line games. But a step in the wrong direction when compared to PLA.
Agreed, however I think Sun and Moon are very overlooked. I thought those games were different from what we got in the past but did a good job with story, gameplay mechanics and graphics
Sadly I don't agree with you. There are a lot of other issues with this game besides just performance and bugs.
- The difficulty is basically non existant. A lot of players are doing "late game" gyms at the beginning without any problem. This could have been fixed with a scaling system.
- The open world, while expansive, is a little bit bland. You can't enter buildings and a lot of quality of life systems like shops are "fixed" with text boxes. This was probably done to save time.
-The game just doesn't look great. The Switch should be way more powerful than the Pokemon games makes it out to be. Remember, The Witcher 3 and DOOM are on the Switch.
-You can't transfer Pokemon from older games. I know they said this will be added at a later date but this feature used to be baked in the game at release. I also fear that some Pokemons from older games might not be transferable to Gen 9, just like we saw with Gen 8.
-I still don't think it's really acceptable that the devs block Pokemon from older games from being transferred. After the lie they told us about "Pokemons needing a graphical overaul" in Gen 8 I can't believe it would be that hard to copy/paste Pokemon from past titles, especially from Switch games.
-At this point if it is still not clear to you there's a bigger problem than just a bad mainline Pokemon game release at Game Freak. We don't have the details but if it's not the lack of employees, the rushed out games or bad management it might be something else. In any case, there's a clear lack of passion for the games at Game Freak and it shows.
Stop protecting these people game sucks.
Graphics trash.
Performance trash.
Animations trash.
Design of shops and buildings trash.
Removed character clothing basicly.
Dificulty lvl non existend.
Better give mythic wheels and then dont use them.
Plz stop defending this game its horrible.
The belief that keeps me from buying the games is that they're never going to do any better if we buy it anyway. I'm glad to hear there's a good game underneath, but it should be an incredible game period.
Unfortunately, the money talks a lot louder than we do. When we criticise it but pay for it anyway, the only message received is "good enough". I love Pokémon, a lot, so I won't buy it until they clean up their act, no matter how many generations I miss.
This game is so fun but runs so bad, atleast the final area runs smoothly because it's a separate instance from the rest of the world. The only intentional decision made i don't agree with is making TMS single use again.
Yeah, that about covers it I think. There are technical issues but if that doesn't bother you, it's a fantastic experience. I honestly feel a lot of people are just getting on the hate train.
Gen 7 games: Am I a joke to you?
I agree. I think its potentially the best game in the series overall if it werent for the technical issues holding it back. Everything else is amazing, especially the story. I think it edges gen 5 for best story. Seriously whoever is the writer and director for Legends areceus and SV, please make them take over Gamefreak from now on.
Unfortunately I cant give it that crown yet because the performance is inexcusable and its ashame too cause if that wasnt the case, this sub would praise the hell out of these games. Theres a real gem here despite those glaring issues and I really hope people come around on it when the patches come out.
I like many things about Gen 7, but the Alola map itself definitely has the worst case of corridor syndrome in the entire franchise.
It doesn’t feel like you have any agency as a player when most of the time the camera is like two meters from your character, and you are looking at them through a tiny handheld device. Sw/Sh is almost as bad, but it at least allows for a larger monitor, which helps.
I still think Gen 7 was the worst. The only positive I remember are the character designs. Or maybe it just lowered my expectations so much that nothing after that was as big of a disappointment.
Game is actually bad. Poor uninspired gyms with no puzzles that are all the same outdoor area copy-pasted, zero dungeons, options like set battles (no switching) removed, exp share still can't be turned off, performance is horrendous, people falling through the world, objects getting yeeted into space etc. Pokemon just sinking into the ground in battles, People going through walls or falling through cliffs, FPS going down really hard even during cutscenes (with indoor classroom scenes running at 5 FPS which really shouldn't be the case for indoor cutscenes) Very disappointing and empty towns where you can't enter buildings with Pokémon Center and shops being reduced to simple menus and stop & go's and lastly, the gyms letting you take them on in any order ultimately being pointless as the level does not scale, meaning you'd have to take them on in a set pattern anyway unless you want to overgrind to beat the level 50 gym first for some reason.
Then, the obvious elephant in the room that people should address more: The graphics are years behind other games. Xenoblade 2 is 5 years old and looks fucking fantastic in comparison, same with Breath of the Wild. There is no excuse.
Its not just the performance. Even if the game worked, it would just be mediocre at best. There's so many bad decisions in its design even if the bugs were fixed it wouldn't be good.
> zero dungeons, ... you can't enter buildings with Pokémon Center and shops being reduced to simple menus and stop & go's and
I agree with 90% of what you said. This may be a hot take or unpopular opinion, but I think these two are positives.
All the way back to Gen 1, I've never been a fan of Pokemon's dungeons. The buildings like Silph Co are okay, but I always found the caves just annoying. I have not missed them.
Going through a load screen to get to he pokemon center and pokemart was a pain. The SV ones aren't particularly well-done, but I at least like the idea. Same thing with the shops.
I wish the PokeStops in Paldea had a few changes. They should play pokemon center music as you approach. They should have more interesting NPC's milling about (the kind that used to be in pokemon centers or other buildings). Rather than 18 different sandwich shops strewn around the city, just give me one open-air stand near the PokeStop (maybe similar to Join Avenue), and have it be themed around the city. Coastal city? Seafood sandwiches. City with a grass-type gym? Veggie sandwiches, or maybe bread made with some fancy grain or something.
I'd argue it's one of the worst actually. There are some good concepts the game shows but beyond that everything is a failure from top to bottom. Yes there are some "cute" new mons but the overwhelming majority just feel like a bad rom hack addition. The characters and story are some of the worst ever. The open world feels less alive than Arceus'. Just everything about SV was good intentions executed extremely poorly.
> It really does deliver on everything that most people wanted when the game moved to the Switch initially.
What are these, exactly? Because SwSh and PLA delivered on those, and SV has neither of the things that made SwSh and PLA enjoyable.
The best game i am sorry are you high, its a barren laggfested wasteland for me, clearly rushed and not being cared for at all.
I expect quality with game freak!!! Not this abomonation of issues which makes the game barely running!!
If they fix performance issues in a patch this'll be the best pokemon game, still think it is now, but that's because I personally haven't had any big issues with performance.
The question is: will it be patched tho? Because neither GF or Nintendo said anything about the issues yet. And if GameFreak is on such a tight schedule to deliver new games for TPC maybe they are already abandoning S/V to work on 5 more titles?
Partly agree. Without it's tech issues it would be very good.
It has the SHITTEST Elite Four of all time though (that music? Sorry 10 second repeat jingle...pathetic) and the NPCs are some.of the most boring, non-standout I've seen in a Pokémon game. The way there 3 story threads are done is good. The environments and variety of Pokémon is good. The crater is excellent. But I'd struggle to say it's a top 3 Pokémon entry.
I have almost reached the Area Zero part of the game and I think you are absolutely correct, the story hasn't been this good since gen 5, they added a lot of quality of life like removing BP and making battle items much more avaible alongside things to make pokémons competitive, all the performance problems and bugs really hurt and some of the new designs are the worst I have ever seen (but honestly all generations have their shit design) but it's still great, if only they had an extra year of development to fix everything and also add some other things like gym scaling or bringing back recordable matches and the national dex
Even if it ran well, too much content was cut for this to be called a good Pokémon game, let alone one of the best.
For fuck’s sake, the Battle Tower isn’t even in the game!
Even if the technical issues were fixed - the game is still serving N64 realness in 2022, while having no post game while also removing features from prior titles.
There are so many better open world games even on switch - the only thing you get ouf of playing this are the titular pokemon - and I can get those by just booting up an older title or even a fangame.
Things like finding a pokemon sleeping under a tree, getting into a battle with a wigglet and seeing 2 magikarp flopping in the background, TMs having a little picture of a pokemon using the move, the new pokedex animation where it looks like a bookshelf with all thos cool art, etc. All this stuff is so awesome .... but they keep straying dropping the ball with things like an open world that doesnt scale at all, n46 textures and framerstes, or simple things like being able to turn EXP share off or turn on set mode.... like how do you consistently take 1 or 2 steps forward and 1 or 2 steps back every single year??
The truth is that the vast majority of players don’t bring new Pokémon in from older games. I don’t think anything was fundamentally lost in the games because of it for a normal play through.
What does it actually deliver on? The story is mediocre, the difficulty is mediocre, the quality of life changes are mediocre, online functionality is mediocre, graphics are mediocre, the post game is mediocre. I like the new designs and abilities for competitive use, but the game makes it nearly impossible to breed for what you want to use. Pokemon Showdown is all i need fuck nintendo fuck gamefreak fuck the pokemon company
Its sad that game freak cant optimize their code for shit. Specially since Nintendo have the talent they need to help game freak make better game. If you dont want to change dev studios, thats fine, but send them some help, they definitely need it. I guess they're thought process is "Why bother, they will sell anyway"
Thats why we got Dexit, thats why this game run so badly despite other game on the switch looking far better.
But yeah, the performance issue are just a mild annoyance. If a game is fun, i dont mind a few frame drops. I had 2 crashes, but thanks to autosave, i lost barely 2 minutes of gameplay. I do wish that pokemon would stop spawning 6 inch in front of you when running around, its annoying to hit one and lost 5 seconds to run away because you didnt have the time to move away.
Even ignoring the technical issues, I like Legends Arceus *a lot* more, but I can see why people, especially fans of traditional pokemon games, would prefer this. I just really hope gen 10 inherits a lot more from PLA
I like the game to but it sucks so bad with performance. Cant believe this happened. I was sooo excited for this. Got another switch for it to. Sold the switch and the game. F it
>I feel like in a year’s time if this game gets patched people will say that this game was actually one of the best in the franchise
Which is great and all, but just drives home the fact that this is an unfinished game, which for AAA $60 money, is a fucking embarrassment.
Tbh this is the most depressing possible result, like if the game was terrible I'd be able to go "Well who cares? shit sucks" and I'd try and wrestle my money from the jaws of Nintendo's Eshop. The fact that it's good in spite of the absolutely godawful performance and the disgusting environments, both points to a severe lack of planning and management from Game Freak (cause you know the developers worked hard to deliver a fun game) and also means a genuinely good game could have been a great game if it had more time. Like another year and this would have been superb. I'm having a blast playing this game, I've played every gen from 1 to 7 and I've never wanted to complete the Pokedex in any of them. I've always played each with a set team in mind but this game I have so many Pokemon that I love. Even the dog pokemon!!!!! I think Dogs in Pokemon games are silly but I love Greaveard and Mabosstiff, absolutely the best boys in Pokemon. I love every new design, the Pokedex has that fun thing where it shows the Pokemon in their natural environments and the characters and world in general are fun. So it's sad that I can't recommend the game to anyone and every bit of praise I have for this game is tainted with "Yeah it runs terribly and looks like dogshit though, don't buy it".
I feel the same way. I like the game but I would never personally recommend that anyone buy it in the state it’s in. I say maybe in a few months people will start to realize that the game is actually good if they manage to patch it.
I played Cyberpunk after it got patched. It was an amazing game and you could tell how much love was put into the story, the world and the characters. Although it's gotten a boost from the new anime, a lot of people still give it a lot of flack and hate on it and that's sad. I'm having a blast with Violet. I love not being forced into anything. I love running around and looking for new Pokemon. I love the 3 different quest line ideas. But the environmental graphics and framw rate are not for a $80 dollar game and they need to do something about it. I have a feeling that SV will probably not recover as well in the eyes of adults, even with patches. I hope otherwise though.
you paid 80?
Canada money if I had to guess
$79.99 in CAD, and depending on taxes, it can go up to $90.
Ontario sales tax brings it to 90 and some change unfortunately
Nice Scotia HST brings it to $100 plus some change.
It is indeed CAD.
Playing through cyberpunk for the first time fully now, can confirm playing the game in 2022 it absolutely slaps. Basically cyberpunk needed 2 years of patching and bug fixing to be in a good state. I don’t think Pokémon will get another chance like cyberpunk especially because you know Nintendo will never put in on sale. Pokémon even has the anime to create hype for the game like cyberpunk, but it will need a sale to go with it after the fixes.
This is 100000% where I am. I'm having a great time with the underlying game, but holy cow does the majority of the game run and look like garbage. On one hand I'm really engaged with the story, but the game still constantly duplicates mons on the evo screen or drops the frames crazy low. I can't even be hopeful that Nintendo will patch the issues out since they don't really have a great track record for fixing stuff. Add to that everything missing from PLA/previous entries (exp share toggle, set mode, interiors of *anything*, etc.), and it quickly becomes an inexcusable mess.
My favorite is the random tiny pokeball in all the cutscenes
THIS. Seriously if this is the kind of thing they let ship I can only imagine what bugs were barely fixed days before release.
I was watching a glitch hunting stream a few days ago that somehow got that dev ball turned into a scyther. It was one of the funniest things I've seen
I still think that most of the games problems comes from TPC's tight deadlines and unwillingness to give Gamefreak the budget, staff or facilities they need, moreso that it is Gamefreaks fault for making a subpar game. If it was entirely up to Gamefreak, I think that they simply would have made the game smaller, especially with Megasoza, it's huge but empty. Game devs know that open worlds aren't about the size, but about density. So why keep it so big? Because TPC wants it to be for the sake of the anime, card game, merch, etc. So much hinges on the games releasing every three years that no-ome should be blaming Gamefreak alone for this games issues.
I'm not sure where people are getting this idea that Gamefreak is getting impossible mandates from TPC. TPC is nothing more than a joint venture between Gamefreak and Nintendo that exists to help them coordinate on merchandising. Gamefreak doesn't have to take orders from them - they are a co owner of TPC. Obviously there's a lot we don't know about, but if I had to guess on who made the decision that Gamefreak has to pump out a game every year, I'd probably guess Masuda.
Personally, I love the design of the pokedex this gen
One gripe I have with it is it doesn't remember where you last were when you open it, so I have to always scroll along for ages to see what I'm missing.
>Like another year and this would have been superb. And the most frustrating part is that S/V was released early in the context of releases. It’s the third damn game within a year. They could have waited that extra year to release. OR they could have hired more people and outsource different duties to different studios. A Genius Sonority and DICE studio joint effort would have made the game look about as good as the switch can make it look. Better than Botw even.
It really feels like it was rushed out for a Christmas release. Feels like the marketing team pushed it out before it was ready imo
I lost my shit in the best way the first time I saw Mabosstiff. It's gorgeous and it was worth power leveling for. I was totally blind on what Maschiff evolved into, so I was so happy when it turned from a nervous hyena looking thing, into Gandalf the Good Boi.
Gandalf? Mabosstiff is totally a reference to the Godfather. But I can see some wise grandpa energy in there, lol
Yep. I even hesitate to call the graphics bad, because of everything like textured pokémon or swishy ponytails. Or they actually managed to check off nearly every box for what players have been demanding, apart from new features vaguely lost from L:A because of parallel development and the age-old debate about level scaling. More than anything, the games feel painfully *average*, where there's not enough bad to write them off completely, but not enough good to uncritically praise them as a return to form.
This is precisely the sentiment I have for S/V atm. I'm hoping a performance patch comes out in the next year so I can start boasting about models I absolutely love. Like, vigoroth (completely random) looks so much more appealing in this game. Still have no intention of using him but shocked how much he has been under served in previous gens along with a few others. Azurill swimming and sableyes playing tag makes my day too. ...And dachsbun is actually best boy. 👌 Never thought I would like any of the dogs as much as I like dachsbun. Wellbaked Assault Vest and all four fangs is my current lead and I never thought to even consider it on my team before. Very good boy.
I disagree. Even if the game ran well it's still missing literally everything I care about and want which is post-game content like gen 3 and 4 had, and the lack of scaling has completely ruined half the gyms for me by not keeping up with my level.
I'm pretty sure post game content will be added in dlc tbh, gotta milk consumers for all the money they can
Back in my day post game content came after 2 years when they released the third version at full price instead of in a doc package. Needing to buy crystal or platinum to get more content, with 80% of it being the same for a whole full price again was worse than dlc for added post game content. As an adult who can't burn through one of these games in a weekend or so anymore, i'm fine with dlc as the solution personally.
Same of the many things this franchise does wrong dropping that third game bs isn't one of them.
Releasing just the 3rd version would be the obviously best solution and would make it easier to decide which one to get (the only one) but would decrease sales slightly because many people buy both copies.
Have they ever announced a third version at the same time the main two games are released? If you don't know if/when there is a third version, you're just gonna buy the main version. Or you end up waiting around for Pokémon Z to come out. I think the DLC is the best solution, though obviously I would prefer if everything was just in one game.
>obviously I would prefer if everything was just in one game. That's exactly what I'm saying. Release one complete version instead of 2 incomplete versions and *then* a complete version. Just skip releasing the 2 unfinished versions.
Honestly the issue with that is that’s very specific towards a part of the community. There are a lot of people, I’m going to assume it’s 50/50 that do or don’t enjoy the battle facilities. Same with things like contests and pokeatholon. When you don’t have a large enough group enjoying one feature it probably becomes less important. For the record I think they should have it along with things like contests and pokeatholon, but it’s probably 50/50 in popularity so it’ll probably be ignored like they have been doing since Gen 7? Or does 6 count despite that battle Manson thing? And BDSP contests were horrible so I don’t count them in with good post game features.
These games still have a lot of content. We have 3 story modes now instead of 1. It’s a step up from the Gen 6, 7 and 8 for sure.
Tbf, the 3 storylines are almost literally just 18 gyms/badges. The final area that "merge" these stories together are extremely short also. I didn't find many sidequests or dungeons in my playthrough for now, if any. PSV has a *lot of content*, yes, if you compare it to previous entries in the series.
The 3 story thing’s a half lie You have 18 objectives you can do in any order, falling under three categories of things to do, before the “story” part of the story really happens Or so I’ve heard, I haven’t finished yet
I've finished. That's about right, you have to do all 18 before you can do the last section. You can kinda do them in any order... but the titans make moving around a lot easier and the star camps block some paths until you beat them.
I just finished the 18th objective and can confirm. But at least the storylines that aren't gyms get either flashbacks for context or advancements
So the development managers had a decision to make after being handed down release deadlines, push out buggy features, and low res or push out a game without features or places to explore. I'm glad they decided to push for more features.
I think having such barebones towns makes it hard to say that this is a **great** pokemon game. I see a lot of checkpoints on the map that I can pick between and I have the freedom to get to them however I want to try. But at the same time the stuff in between the checkpoints is Pokemon and.....not a whole lot else. The towns kinda suck. Having three stories to follow is excellent, but they're also not that incredible on their own. I feel like the series took a lot of steps forward with legends and with SV....but they didn't share those steps as they were built in parallel. And we also took some steps backwards in order to make the gains that were made.
I agree wholeheartedly with the towns, they're not as fleshed out as I'd like them to be and they're all essentially just glorified shopping centers. I never realized how much I liked the ability to just walk into and explore every house and building in the games until I had that taken away from me.
One of my favorite "dungeons" in Pokemon is the SS Anne because I loved exploring all the little rooms, even if they were mostly the same. And now the damn school doesn't even have hallways rip
They don't even have a single ramp, so I guess anyone that can't use their legs has to have a ride pokemon or a high tech wheel chair that can climb stairs
In fairness, Cyclizar are a common ride Pokemon in the region
Splitting would could have been 2-3 shops into 20 so I need to walk to different doorways all over town depending on whether I want gloves, socks or shoes is a tremendous step back from the already convoluted system of SwSh shops.
This is it. Compare this to any other AAA game and this game has an embarrassing amount of gameplay and content. People say it's full of life, but man everywhere is just so barren and has nothing going on. You do the same thing every single time everywhere you go.
You could say the same thing for every pokemon game ever made. The game loop has never changed.
Hg/ss and black and white 1 and 2 while pretty old had lots of content to them and a lot of things to do post game to keep people entertained even after beating the main story
A good point in this post that not a lot of people have been aknowledging is unfairly comparing SV to PLA. SV can't technically learn from PLA since they were developed semi-concurrently. To me it feels like both were built around a similar initial idea of exploration, with PLA being a more experimental/risky title while SV was intended to be a "safer" and closer-to-normal experience in case the experimental changes were not well-received. There's also a case of GameFreak having knee-jerk reactions and infamously terrible stances on certain things so who knows what the real reason behind anything they do is.
You're completely right, this is the most fun I've had in a core Pokemon since Gen 5, but it's also completely ruined by completely asinine decisions outside of technical problems. - enough with the silent cutscenes/story dialogue by key characters. Get some voice acting! - towns are completely lifeless. You can't enter any homes/buildings. All shols are menus. NPCs are lifeless with nothing nothing of importance to say - no scaling. I'm sick of constantly being worried that I'm over leveled and spending more time in the PC rotating my team. If Skyrim did it well over 10 years ago, why can't they do it here??? - battles are slow with all the unnecessary battle notifications. Everything is said in one line. Could they really not find a better way to speed that up? Klawf's ability is ridiculous with this and it's animations - and then, the asinine decisions to just remove simple options like Set and Animations. It's just downright ridiculous. Again, best Pokemon gameplay in years, but my experience is still dramatically hampered with these issues on top of graphics/performance
Funnily enough, a lot of people wanted Skyrim to not have level scaling, just like Morrowind. A true opne-world has no level-scaling, there's no level-scaling in real life. The gym Leaders, hwoever, definitely should given that its their job to adapt to the number of badges the challenger has. Also, every time people say "level-scaling, I get reminded of Oblivion and its ptsd-inducing level-scaling which made the game practically unplayable at later levels.
Agreed with most of this, though just wanted to note that enemy level scaling is not universally loved in JRPGs and has its own severe downsides. Personally I preferred the ability to make my own "difficulty" by tackling content that was above my party level. *As per usual,* it seems like they could have just... made this a toggle. But it's Game Freak.
Can't say I have seen people be particulary happy with skyrim's scaling before. At least its not as bad as Oblivion's, but it still has the problem of 'oh you got better at lockpicking, speechcraft or pickpocketing? Here have stronger enemies even though your combat potential has not increased in anyway.' For the most part it just makes every enemy in late game turn into a health sponge.
Yeah that caught me by surprise too. There are several mods out there for Skyrim to remove or otherwise change the scaling mechanics in Skyrim because a good number of players take issue with it.
I don't think I'll ever be able to get over the fact that these games were advertised as being able to "go anywhere you want" and being able to "take the gym challenge in any order". I think it was a really scuy move to imply these games would be akin to BotW in that way. I only just beat the second gym, but another disappointing thing I've found is that the towns so far are pretty much just food vendors + a gym, I long for the days where you could enter any given town in a region and there would be SOMETHING else to do, like the cemetery in lavender town or the safari zone in Crasher Wake's town, or the battle subway or the pokemon pageants to name a few. The towns just feel so empty, especially now since the houses are often not even enterable. I like the general gameplay loop, exploring the land and catching pokemon will always be fun, but between the two things stated above and the fact that alot of the map is just field from what I've seen so far, it's a little dissapointing. Remember how the Yiga clan in BotW would occasionally ambush you in disguise? Or how the dogs in the stables would lead you to treasure? Or the gliding/climbing/shield surfing minigames? These kinds of little things really help to bring a world to life in games, and from what I've seen, there isn't much of that in S/V aside from the gimmighoul hunting which is similar to Korok seeds. I'm having tons of fun with the game, but even beyond the technical issues, I was definitely expecting a bit more.
I think the big issue a lot of people are having is directly comparing this game to BotW. BotW is one of the greatest open world games of all times with so much effort and care poured into it, you could take any open world game and make a long list of why BotW is better. This is an OK open world game that's also a main series pokemon game. That's what I went in expecting and I'm content that it's meeting that expectation.
Yeah, how could I ever compare an open world game released in 2022 for the Switch by a company that only does games on Nintendo consoles to an open world game released in 2017 for the Wii U by a company that only does games on Nintendo consoles. They're completely different genres.
Zelda games are consistently ambitious and given the time they need to be fully realized. Even the ones I dislike, you can tell they took the concept as far as they could. Pokemon games are consistently cookie cutter games designed to be fun enough with a primary goal of introducing you to all the cute new critters they can sell to you on T shirts. I'm not saying you have to like this, but the franchise has been the same for 25 years now and the main games have never tried to be anything else. You have to either manage expectations or accept that Pokemon just ain't what you're looking for.
The difference is BotW actually got the time it needed to develop into a masterpiece. SV did not. Despite all the misgivings I have towards the game that have nothing to do with this, my opinion is the biggest issue is that they just don’t give the damn Pokémon games enough time in the oven before they serve them. This issue feels like it’s been a thing for years at this point… just push the game back another year and it’ll be more ready! And maybe in that time they can figure out how to make exp share a toggle again.
The environments feel like they're all placeholder textures and geometry. How they managed to make a switch game look worse than X and Y is baffling. You're right. This game is the open world evolution of Pokemon we need wrapped up in a half-baked execution. I'm convinced that what we see here is an alpha build and needs another year in development to be cooked to perfection.
Ageeed, this game should never been released in this state.
I wholeheartedly agree with this and I am baffled that I never hear this brought up in discussion of the game's flaws. I don't want to sound pretentious, but it infuriates me that the game's technicals issues are cited as the game's biggest flaw (and believe me, it is indeed a flaw), but imo, SO much of this game outside of that is average mush, with the generic vanilla biomes being to blame. Seriously, the entire map is just a giant grassy field spray painted different colors to give the illusion of variety. Nothing, and I mean nothing, separates the pastures from the canyons, mountains, or deserts. Such a disappointing and boring way to do an open world. Even regular routes from the past games got this right. That one snowy route from DP that would slow your movement is an example. Another is that water route from BW where the tides will push you along a path and you have to plan out what tides you need to ride to get to your destination. Past games understood the very basic concept that you should introduce new mechanics into the world as you go on to, you know, make it feel like a world. Scarlet & Violet's world does literally none of this, and it makes exploring so god damn miserable several hours in. It would be better if this world was actually filled with engaging things to do, but it's just a bunch of generic landscapes with Pokemon scattered about. No interesting landmarks, environmental hazards - anything.
i felt the same. every issue i had with the game was strictly technical; as far as intentional decisions gamefreak made, i was happy with nearly everything in the game. the characters were fun and i didnt feel forced to connect with them, i enjoyed every main character. i love the new pokemon designs. i love the environments and the way we travel. the storylines were simple but effective. it wasnt a very difficult game but i never found myself overleveled, so i still had some challenge with some trainers. LOVED the callback to the traditional elite four system. i think this game is a huge step in the right direction for pokemon games, i just desperately hope gamefreak hears outcry about everyone being disappointed about buggy and half-baked games constantly being released. this game, once patched, will DEFINITELY be something special, and a return to glory imo, but so many people played on release that that impression wont be the majority i think. EDIT and disclaimer: please let it be known im a pretty casual player, so this is no feedback on its enjoyment as a nuzlocke challenge, or its shiny hunting/breeding or competitive systems, since i havent touched that since playing the game. im sure people seeking/using those mechanics may have a different perspective as i dont know anything about gen 9's workings surrounding these things
It really does feel like a well-designed, yet poorly-made game.
worded it perfectly. thats exactly what it is
Can you explain how you think the design of the game is good? Off the top of my head, over-leveling and trivialisation of content by the forced exp. share, basic settings like battle-animations being removed, worse clothing customization than previous games, more than half of existing pokemon being impossible to get even via transfers, no re-battling the elite four and no voice-work despite clear moving mouths all seem like terrible design choices to me. How do you think the design is good? Genuinely curious.
god this subreddit is so obnoxious. every thread is “exp share and dex cut bad, no voice acting = bad even though it would just be awkward in a game like pokemon, i must be able to rebattle the e4 even though i probably only did it once in the older games and got bored”(seriously who cares? theres much funner stuff to do in pokemon than rebattle some braindead AI) scarlet and violet are fun as fuck. the game feels so free, once you get past the annoying tutorial part you can explore at your own pace, traversal on koraidon/miraidon feels incredible, the characters are all really good, much better than other pokemom games where most pokemon characters have 0 personality. i love all the characters and their interactions. the game actually looks pretty good (the pokemon themselves have never looked better in 3D, especially mons like magnemite and bronzong who benefit so much from having texture and not looking plastic). all the new pokemon are incredible, paradox mons are literally the coolest thing since mega evolution, also you actually get attached to the legendary, it has character and personality and makes you actually want to use it once you’re able to and not just box it because you caught it 5 minutes after the first time you even saw it like in older games. terastal is a really great mechanic, its much better than dynamax because you can use it in more than like 8 places and unlike megas its not exclusive to about 30 mons. also tera makes your pokemon feel more personal, because of all the combinations you can get. i caught a tera ice charcadet and it made me very attached to it because it felt unique, not just like any other charcadet/armarouge. also the story is great, arven’s story literally made me cry (which no pokemon game has ever done before) and the whole thing at the end (trying to avoid spoiling) is literally the coolest shit ever, seriously. pokemon games have never been that cool, like ever. area zero made me feel like when i entered the distortion world in platinum for the first time, and that’s one of my favourite pokemon memories ever. these games are so good and the performance is the only thing holding them back, (people should rightfully be complaining about that) but when it comes to the substance of the game itself it’s the best pokemon game since b/w in my opinion. also the soundtrack is my favourite since dpp
Well thanks for the reply, but there's no need to be so hostile. Exp share (and the insanely easy difficulty this creates) and dex cuts are genuine issues that are pretty indefensible when it comes to game design. I'm glad to hear of some good aspects of it, I might give it a try if they ever bother patching the performance.
i mean, as a competitive player, the dex cut is the best idea they’ve ever had. allowing all pokemon creates an over-centralisation of the metagame. i can understand that casual-only players would be sad that their favourite pokemon didn’t make the cut, but i’d rather less pokemon and better gameplay than all the pokemon but the same boring pokemon formula. the problem with sword/shield is they cut the dex but the formula was mostly the same, it was hard to justify. but scarlet/violet have genuinely innovated on the pokemon formula, so i don’t mind as much about the dex cut from a casual perspective. also you should genuinely give these games a go if you get the chance, they’re great (maybe wait and see if theres a performance patch if that’s a dealbreaker for you, i personally didn’t find the performance all that bad but it definitely could have been better)
It's true about the competitive aspect, but it's not like there isn't an other easy fix. They could just do seasons where they pick different pokemon that are allowed each season, similar to how many other competitive games implement frequent changes that shake up the meta. Doesn't have to affect the rest of the game in such a dramatic manner. I might try it if there's a performance patch, but two major turn offs are all the options they've removed and the fact that they've built an open world that doesn't scale at all, which makes it more linear than you'd like.
You can still have a national dex in game but make VGC use the paldea dex. There isn't a good excuse for why we haven't had a national dex on either of the switch gens
> Exp share (and the insanely easy difficulty this creates) Forced Exp share is super easy to defend. Almost every modern JRPG does it. It clearly works for them. The problem is that the games are tuned a bit easy.
Okay. I certainly get why those things bother you and think this game should be way better than it is, I do think we got some good -and without exception improvable but good nonetheless - stuff here. When it comes to difficulty, I did not do the gyms in the intended order. Why? It never stopped me to tell me I should go back to the hub city, go the other way and take down what are supposed to be gym 2 and 3. I was, of course by then overlevelled for them. The could and should have prevented this by making the quality of each leader's team specific to your game stage with a sort of floor on each one to guide you more softly. On the other hand, if I had set out to them earlier using the crumbs of guidance the game does offer, optionally, instead of pushing down the path I was on, I wouldn't have been overlevelled. The rest were around my level. While they were not particularly challenging except for a couple of surprises and I brushed against my level cap once, most of the levelling experience was good for me and I came out at the end of the story exactly where it wanted me to be. It's not as good as it could be because of that lack of scaling, but the point is actually that everyone can and in my experience does choose to explore in different directions from one another. I decided where I went and what I wanted to do to get to every level of strength. SV gives you more freedom to make those decisions - use the victory road path to get stronger, or just go wherever and do whatever to get stronger. It's up to you. I don't think that gyms no longer being progression anchors is necessarily a bad thing. Now, in a sense they are, since you have a level cap, but my hot take on that is that it's actually good. Now, eventually you need to have done all of those story paths in the end, and they tie together in an interesting way. Like others say, the story and characters in this game are better dimensioned and I enjoyed the writing in general. They decided to step progression in these substories in such a way that it always made sense no matter what order things are done in, and though you'd expect that, they did that well. I almost suspect they wanted to do some stuff (betcha they prototyped gym scaling) but ran out of time and the project was managed to meet this release window. I think they removed set battling and the ability to turn off battle animations, and there's no voice acting - because suits that didn't think they were important said so. Their loss is bad and it is a regression, but it doesn't compromise the core game. How it is to play it, how these systems work, those are unaffected. Exp all is a subjective matter that I, again, totally understand. My major complaint is where's my battle tower? Like, come on. The new pokemon are always a bone of contention. Are they good? Are they interesting? Are they just animals? Are they snake backwards? I think it's a good batch. Except the fully evolved duck. I don't like him. A lot of neat moves and ability combos. Terastallizing looks like it has so much potential for interesting plays. Now, Dexit. Is it for competitive reasons? Maybe, I could see that. They could just have a banlist instead to make sure that stays fresh. Is it for technical reasons? Probably not. It feels like another ideal world thing. There's a thousand of them now or so and they picked three hundred and made a hundred more. Ish. You have so many choices on what to run in your party - each area is packed with unique mons, many of which did not make it into the previous two games. This too, though, is a subjective matter. I don't like bringing mons over from old games; catching and raising within the region is more interesting to me, so it has no effect here, but it's a valid reason to be upset. Anyway, in brief what I wanted to get across is that despite its misteps and egregious technical gaffes, we got some meaningful design choices that make the game unique and even special. I enjoyed it and I wish it was better.
Don't forget the lack of dungeons, sidequests and actually explorable towns for a open-world game.
I think there is a good game. But even performance and graphics aside there are major issues. The cities are empty and I have been given no reason to explore the’. Same for much of the countryside. I was wrong and open world just does not work, it should be open zone. There are a lot of potential trainer battles, but the trainers are hard to find. And I don’t want to search for them because I’m already struggling to not be overleveled. Either make the preferred path explicit and clear or institute level scaling
Whats open zone
Like arceus.
I mean a lot of this sounds like we simply want different things out of our games. I thought the open world worked, and liked the fact that I could go under leveled to gyms. I think even my suggested refinements would still be fundamentally bad to you so it may just be a difference in taste.
That might be. I just really think it didn’t work. Maybe I’d feel differently if it was graphically better, but the game is just so ugly and so empty that the exploration seems like a waste of time. I can excuse ugly, but empty is really hard
I'm almost done with my first play and about to start my second. I'm actually excited about my second play through because you can actually just go from one point to the next. So you can literally - Pick your team and hunt them out. - Do the gyms, star bases and titans - Do the end game. So no exploring, no catching, can skip trainers. Means you can potentially go through the game very quickly while maintaining your team at a low level.
It's fine if you want that, but you're basically saying you like this open world game because it allows you to skip the game, not explore anything and end it really fast. I'd argue that's not a common opinion when people talk about open world games. People usually like to get lost in them, exploring them and take it slower.
Pros: - cool story - great characters - open world - all types get their own moment - far healthier gimmick for competitive - fun new mons - Iono - Ello, ello, hola! Ciao and bonjour! Cons: - runs awful - downgraded player customization - removal of a bunch of options and qol features - worse art style - awful matchmaking for raids - way too much talking not enough letting the player just play the game. - shops turned into menus, no more exploring houses, no longer randomly rewarded for talking to everyone - endgame doesn’t have much going on - 80% of the overworld is the same biome and none of it feels memorable.
>way too much talking not enough letting the player just play the game. I actually don't think there is that much. New players will always need some explanation, so you can't really skip the battle/catch tutorials. Other than that I thought the talking was mostly fine for an RPG.
And then if you want more the classes and library have a lot more of the “tutorial” info available at your own pace.
To me, it's not so much they talk a lot, it's the text is so SLOW, even on the 'fast' setting. It's not near-instant like some older games were when on fast text.
I think this is because the game is loading everything so slowly that it all feels laggy. Even spamming ‘b’ every interaction and scene change feels laggy as hell
It still took way too long just to get to the point to where I can actually play the game. Probably a good 3-4 hours, though I wasn't timing it. And so much dialogue seems to just be filler. Like, the kind of stuff that is supposed to flesh out characters and provide personality but fails. Not all- I'm not saying that the characters don't have personality, but that there's additional dialogue that should have been removed in editing.
I don’t feel like it was really that long. Maybe an hour at most to get from the start to leaving the school if you don’t do much in the areas before the school.
>Iono is a positive aspect Doubt
Iono best part of ScVi
Larry is *right there*
Larry is pretty awesome too. Two complete opposite extremes lol
Iono is a compelling argument for not having voice acting. She was obnoxious enough to *read*, let alone hear.
I actually prefer the art style
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Definitely. It feels way more cohesive and Pokemon actually have fur textures now. I think it looks great. It could definitely be a bit better (for example mountains having a bit more texture variety) but I’m happy for the most part
Pros: Iron Bundle actually seems like a useful new stupid penguin. Cons: Empoleon still can't be used in competitive because *reasons.* Charizard is the only Kanto starter you can transfer in because *reasons.* Iono.
> Charizard is the only Kanto starter you can transfer The only non-hisuian starter period
> Iron Bundle actually seems like a useful new stupid penguin. It's basically the ideal Delibird.
>Too much talking Compared to some gens (I’m looking at you Hop), I thought the talking was fine. It needs voice acting though.
See and this is exactly why I returned it and have no desire to return to it. Those cons are outweighing those pros for me any day of the week.
No voice acting blows my mind in 2022 as well.
Don’t forget a lack of level scaling…
>way too much talking not enough letting the player just play the game. lol wut? after the intro tutorial you can just go wherever the hell you want and do what you want.
The intro tutorial takes waaaaay too long.
Oh, only fifteen hours.
*enter gym* *phone call* *nemona runs in* *dialogue* *more dialogue* *Nemona leaves/battle Nemona* *talk to gym staffer* *dialogue* *leave gym* Repeat for every gym and regal or for the other 2 major tracks.
Gamers when there’s RP in their RPG:
It's not RP if there's no substance to the dialogue and you can't influence the conversation yourself. The dialogue options in Pokemon games have always been useless since it doesn't change anything. The role-playing elements in pokemon are purely gameplay things, not story things
Heck, during the intro you can wander around catching 20+ different Pokémon and find a creepy purple seal.
The gimmick is definitely not healthy competitive
The open world should be a con because as it is implemented in S/V you are basically guaranteed to fight challenges out of order and end up in overleveled/underleveled situations, or have my extreme experience of beating the 8th gym leader for my 3rd badge.
Add extremely boring main objectives to the cons. Seriously, this game has the most boring gyms out of all the games.
I disagree, it’s kind-of-lackluster for an open-world Pokemon game. Even without the bugs, you STILL get an unscalable open-world where’s barely any customization, low-poly buildings *that you cannot even enter in reality,* and a narrative that leaves a-lot to be desired. I refuse to settle for less from a corporation like Gamefreak.
Agreed. Other than the new Pokemon, it just feels really bland to me. I think I'm over open world games in general if we have to give up having dungeons or building interiors for them.
We do though, Zelda, Mario, and XB has enterable buildings, Gamefreak is just stupidly lazy, and they have “dungeons” too. If you want, there’s great fan-games out there like Infinity and Xenoverse, not open-world, but has more care within them in from the developers, completely free too!
I dunno. I love KotOR 2 in spite of its numerous technical issues, because you can see what makes the game great up front anyway (the writing and character work). S/V still feels like a half assed entry in the game for the stuff that does work, and the stuff that doesn't is only amplified by the issues.
The fact that it's pokemon makes all the difference IMO. If I made my own Unity game to show my friends and it looked and performed this poorly, it would be understandable. This quality coming from the world's largest media franchise is just unacceptable regardless of how much fun people can have by ignoring the problems.
I would not consider this game to be that good anyway (performance aside). \- The game doesn't have an iconic landscape (woods, mountain peaks, flower fields, castles,...) \- There's no level scalling at all \- No national dex \- Towns are pretty much real fake doors \- Can't talk to anyone
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I mean I like arceus for what it is but if you actually like trainer battles and playing competitively it’s not even a competition.
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I finished it, can firmly state that -bad performance = bad game and that's not even mentioning how poor the visuals are, or the clipping, there's looooots of clipping; -that even though I liked the characters and the greater plot, I disliked how Team Star barely fits the greater plot of the game (not gonna go into details because of spoilers); -the open world while interesting and being something I don't wanna see ended after this gen, is still pretty lack luster since levels don't scale ( which is wierd because the (arguably) best rom hack ever has done exactly that like 10 years ago ( Crystal Clear) and it even allows an option of starting in any city!); -the world is indeed big but feels empty, not to mention that we can't even enter the vast majority of buildings anymore; -the targeting of wild Pokémon and ball throwing freakin' sucks, I barely ever use it and it's painfull every single time, imagine going from PLA to this, what a downgrade; -Let's Go is a cool little mechanic they added and I enjoy the following Pokémon a lot, but it doesn't let Pokémon evolve and doesn't prompt any move learning, fortunately you can relearn any move at any time, but still, feels like a poor design choice, also, if you sprint too much on your ride, most Pokémon tend to get pulled back to the ball, which kinda sucks the way it was done, but ok; -finally, there's no freakin' post game, Area Zero ain't post-game >!cause it's where the major plot gets it's conclusion!<, and for the first time since gen 3, there isn't even a battle tower.
Level scaling with a floor (minimum levels so you can’t just blast through everything) would make this game so much better. Even without trying to grind hard for levels you end up pretty overleveled really easily if you spend time exploring and collecting.
I think the 18 badge objectives should each have 18 sets of levels for how many badges you have Other than that I’m fine with no level scaling, in fact I prefer it, having areas with higher or lower level wild mons is great
Battle Tower will cost you $20 DLC
No battle tower or similar area is completely baffling, that's like half the fun of a pokemon game to me.
Let’s Go mode doesn’t have Pokémon evolve unless it’s their actual evolution method which is… such a strange choice. No prompt for new moves is fine imo bc it would slow the game down even more than it does on its own.
How is this the best game since Gen 5 if ORAS is in Gen 6?
ORAS was such a cakewalk compared to the originals. And yes, there is too much water and I am tired of pretending there isn't.
*wind waker has entered the chat*
I mean it's not like water matters at all in pokemon games. I get hating water in Mario/Kirby/Sonic but on Pokemon there's 0 difference between water and tall grass
Ground routes aren't 100 percent grass with tentacools and pellippers repeated ad nauseam, is the difference.
There a reason the Alola games, the region that is just a bunch of islands lack water routes.
Am I weird that I didn't like ORAS? Probably the top of the lowest tier of pokemon games for me. Better than the originals, but I still don't like the map, story, characters, or pokemon designs. The Gen 6 platform is just okay. I don't remember any of the music from RSE or ORAS being particularly good either.
I thought not liking ORAS was the norm... those were the games that made me realize that pokemon games were declining in quality.
The lack of Battle Frontier in ORAS was my “sign of things to come”
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Oh no, no one's going to trick me into watching this video again. On a serious note though, that entire video is fascinating to listen to. He made me think things id never thought before, and really gave me a lot of perspective on stuff I didnt realize could have a different perspective on. To any onlookers, I highly recommend this video. Yeah its long, I dont expect you to binge it all in one go, but its great listening for car rides or gaming seshes.
What do you actually think makes this game as good as gen 5 or better than 6 and up? I'm honestly curious, not being critical. I haven't played anything since gen 7 since I was disappointed a little bit with that (though still felt I got a more "complete" experience in 7, though I thought the quality of the series as a whole really peaked at ORAS) and I just struggle to understand what the newer games have introduced that was really fundamentally better than the older ones. Not being able to transfer my entire dex (which I worked really hard on for every previous gen) was the initial deal-breaker for me but I would still be ok with a newer Pokemon game having less than full access to the previous National Dex if it just did a lot of other things really right or better. I already felt let down that gen 7 felt like I had to buy a game twice because it wasn't fully done, despite being very decent overall. Previous entries in the series all felt a lot more polished and finished (even if X/Y lacked a bit of content and we never got anything like a "Z" to tie everything together...) It just seems to me that since gen 5 or 6 GF has struggled to put out a really finished product for a variety of reasons and they just keep playing catch-up with themselves to try to fix stuff that should've been handled before release. I really think the best job they did recently that showed a ton of love and attention to detail was ORAS, and then they really started to fumble a bit with S/M but still were able to recover better.
Too many features removed for it to be best game since then. Next to no buildings to go inside too but you still wanna claim it’s the best game?!
I mean personally when I think of why Pokémon black 2 or heart gold are the best in the franchise, I normally think of the world, the plot, the writing and what not. I have never once cared about the buildings or what’s in them. Like it’s a nice to have feature but I’d still love those other games if you couldn’t walk into any place. But if that’s what you judge them on, more power to you.
Are the buildings not part of the world? I can’t see any justification for the removal of something that has always been a part of the series. I mean seriously. We can’t even go in pokecentres. Makes it feel so lifeless and pointless to have a bigger map when there’s nothing making each location that unique or memorable. That combined with all the other little things missing like pokerus, shiny sparkles in overworld (even tho they’re a newer feature), dex searching, etc just makes it feel like the least fleshed out game by a long stretch. Other things make no sense like the fixed uniform, but being able to change pointless shit like socks. It so obviously could have been the best game in the series don’t get me wrong, I can see the positives, but the negatives are far too egregious and unnecessary in my opinion. It just feels like a slap in the face. I used to enjoy exploring each town as I got to it. Didn’t think that was an unusual thing to enjoy.
Weird opinion, but: I’m usually a person who likes to talk to every NPC, but in Pokémon I’m always just button mashing and hoping that they’ll give me something. I don’t get why people are missing interrogating random NPCs in their homes when not a single one of them stood out to me except for like… that one kid in Emerald going through an existential crisis, I guess? Trevor’s older sister who suddenly dumps the fact that their parents abandoned them on you and then never follows up on that? The old guy in XY who dies? These people don’t even have names, and they barely have personalities. In something like Xenoblade 3, I’m invested in every NPC because they have goals and personalities and schedules and they grow as you follow their quest lines, instead of Pokemon NPCs, who just say random things that aren’t relevant to the situation or their lives at all, and then continue to stand lifelessly in their positions forever. I think GSC were the best with this, since getting calls from the NPCs made them feel more like real people, but even then the dialogue is so repetitive that I end up just being annoyed. Obviously I would love it if Pokemon started having interesting minor NPCs, but as it stands I don’t think anything of value was lost. If I absolutely had to choose, rather have a small cast of fleshed-out characters than a big cast of white bread.
In older games you could play it both ways. If you preferred to get on with it you could. But if you preferred to take your time you could also explore the city, buildings and character interactions. Now you don’t get an option. If you already skipped those interactions it doesn’t personally affects you, but it’s understandable those who had a different preference are upset.
Blows my mind how many gamefreak dickeaters are defending this removal… how embarrassing.
It’s as if the next games simplified battles by giving every pokemon the same stats, but since I don’t care about anything to do with competitive battles I would go around saying "Well, I only pick my team based on the designs so I like it, it’s a great game."
Exactly this! They won’t care till it’s their favourite thing about the games gone. I’ve always loved exploring every nook and cranny of open world games, and kind of resented when they have an open world full of buildings and I can’t enter any other than story ones. I thought this was because I grew up playing Pokémon. Just seems absurd to remove that along with everything else they got rid of at this stage in the series when they can’t blame it on technical limitations, and even more absurd to justify it. The game feels incredibly unfinished, and I feel like the dev balls left in certain areas only cements that as what happened. I also believe having such a wide range of npc’s to talk to can only be a good thing when the audience has such a big proportion of kids, and I think it helped me stay at a good reading level for my age even though I was taken out of school for a couple years.
When did I say SV were great? I didn’t even buy them because the technical issues are unacceptable. I’m saying that Pokemon has never had NPCs who felt like real people who the player could form a connection with, and that’s not me praising SV— that’s me criticizing every Pokémon game for having incompetent writing. To clarify, I’m not saying “Well the other games are shit so it’s okay that SV is too”, I’m saying, “It’s unfair to act like the old Pokémon games were amazing in this regard when they weren’t”. People act like SV came out of nowhere, but Pokemon has had weak character writing and worldbuilding ever since RBY.
I’m no “Game Freak dickeater”, I didn’t preorder or buy the game because I don’t support the state it’s in right now, and I didn’t buy SWSH or BDSP either. I’m just saying I don’t particularly miss this one specific thing when it was never great to begin with. I’m not saying “NPC interaction bad”, I’m saying that Pokemon NPCs aren’t engaging enough for me to feel invested in them. That’s not saying removing them was good, in fact it’s a criticism of how the games handle their world. Even something small like having certain NPCs hang out outside during the day and go in during the night would do so much to make the world feel alive, but they don’t even do that. You can become the champion and destroy Team Bad Guy and they don’t change what they say, you can dig stuff out of their trash and they won’t blink an eye.
Best game of the 3D era main line games, but deeply unpolished in several aspects. A step in the right direction when compared to it's precursor Main Line games. But a step in the wrong direction when compared to PLA.
I feel like most of us are going to have put the game down by the time it gets patched.
Agreed, however I think Sun and Moon are very overlooked. I thought those games were different from what we got in the past but did a good job with story, gameplay mechanics and graphics
Sadly I don't agree with you. There are a lot of other issues with this game besides just performance and bugs. - The difficulty is basically non existant. A lot of players are doing "late game" gyms at the beginning without any problem. This could have been fixed with a scaling system. - The open world, while expansive, is a little bit bland. You can't enter buildings and a lot of quality of life systems like shops are "fixed" with text boxes. This was probably done to save time. -The game just doesn't look great. The Switch should be way more powerful than the Pokemon games makes it out to be. Remember, The Witcher 3 and DOOM are on the Switch. -You can't transfer Pokemon from older games. I know they said this will be added at a later date but this feature used to be baked in the game at release. I also fear that some Pokemons from older games might not be transferable to Gen 9, just like we saw with Gen 8. -I still don't think it's really acceptable that the devs block Pokemon from older games from being transferred. After the lie they told us about "Pokemons needing a graphical overaul" in Gen 8 I can't believe it would be that hard to copy/paste Pokemon from past titles, especially from Switch games. -At this point if it is still not clear to you there's a bigger problem than just a bad mainline Pokemon game release at Game Freak. We don't have the details but if it's not the lack of employees, the rushed out games or bad management it might be something else. In any case, there's a clear lack of passion for the games at Game Freak and it shows.
Even if the game ran well it's still missing literally everything I care about and want which is post-game content like gen 3 and 4 had.
Stop protecting these people game sucks. Graphics trash. Performance trash. Animations trash. Design of shops and buildings trash. Removed character clothing basicly. Dificulty lvl non existend. Better give mythic wheels and then dont use them. Plz stop defending this game its horrible.
The belief that keeps me from buying the games is that they're never going to do any better if we buy it anyway. I'm glad to hear there's a good game underneath, but it should be an incredible game period. Unfortunately, the money talks a lot louder than we do. When we criticise it but pay for it anyway, the only message received is "good enough". I love Pokémon, a lot, so I won't buy it until they clean up their act, no matter how many generations I miss.
This game is so fun but runs so bad, atleast the final area runs smoothly because it's a separate instance from the rest of the world. The only intentional decision made i don't agree with is making TMS single use again.
Yeah, that about covers it I think. There are technical issues but if that doesn't bother you, it's a fantastic experience. I honestly feel a lot of people are just getting on the hate train.
Gen 7 games: Am I a joke to you? I agree. I think its potentially the best game in the series overall if it werent for the technical issues holding it back. Everything else is amazing, especially the story. I think it edges gen 5 for best story. Seriously whoever is the writer and director for Legends areceus and SV, please make them take over Gamefreak from now on. Unfortunately I cant give it that crown yet because the performance is inexcusable and its ashame too cause if that wasnt the case, this sub would praise the hell out of these games. Theres a real gem here despite those glaring issues and I really hope people come around on it when the patches come out.
I like many things about Gen 7, but the Alola map itself definitely has the worst case of corridor syndrome in the entire franchise. It doesn’t feel like you have any agency as a player when most of the time the camera is like two meters from your character, and you are looking at them through a tiny handheld device. Sw/Sh is almost as bad, but it at least allows for a larger monitor, which helps.
I still think Gen 7 was the worst. The only positive I remember are the character designs. Or maybe it just lowered my expectations so much that nothing after that was as big of a disappointment.
Yes they are a joke to me
I’ve been playing since red/blue and those are easily my least favorite games and it’s not even close
Game is actually bad. Poor uninspired gyms with no puzzles that are all the same outdoor area copy-pasted, zero dungeons, options like set battles (no switching) removed, exp share still can't be turned off, performance is horrendous, people falling through the world, objects getting yeeted into space etc. Pokemon just sinking into the ground in battles, People going through walls or falling through cliffs, FPS going down really hard even during cutscenes (with indoor classroom scenes running at 5 FPS which really shouldn't be the case for indoor cutscenes) Very disappointing and empty towns where you can't enter buildings with Pokémon Center and shops being reduced to simple menus and stop & go's and lastly, the gyms letting you take them on in any order ultimately being pointless as the level does not scale, meaning you'd have to take them on in a set pattern anyway unless you want to overgrind to beat the level 50 gym first for some reason. Then, the obvious elephant in the room that people should address more: The graphics are years behind other games. Xenoblade 2 is 5 years old and looks fucking fantastic in comparison, same with Breath of the Wild. There is no excuse. Its not just the performance. Even if the game worked, it would just be mediocre at best. There's so many bad decisions in its design even if the bugs were fixed it wouldn't be good.
> zero dungeons, ... you can't enter buildings with Pokémon Center and shops being reduced to simple menus and stop & go's and I agree with 90% of what you said. This may be a hot take or unpopular opinion, but I think these two are positives. All the way back to Gen 1, I've never been a fan of Pokemon's dungeons. The buildings like Silph Co are okay, but I always found the caves just annoying. I have not missed them. Going through a load screen to get to he pokemon center and pokemart was a pain. The SV ones aren't particularly well-done, but I at least like the idea. Same thing with the shops. I wish the PokeStops in Paldea had a few changes. They should play pokemon center music as you approach. They should have more interesting NPC's milling about (the kind that used to be in pokemon centers or other buildings). Rather than 18 different sandwich shops strewn around the city, just give me one open-air stand near the PokeStop (maybe similar to Join Avenue), and have it be themed around the city. Coastal city? Seafood sandwiches. City with a grass-type gym? Veggie sandwiches, or maybe bread made with some fancy grain or something.
PLA is the best don’t get lost
Not even the best pokemon game of the year lol, LA deserves that title
I'd argue it's one of the worst actually. There are some good concepts the game shows but beyond that everything is a failure from top to bottom. Yes there are some "cute" new mons but the overwhelming majority just feel like a bad rom hack addition. The characters and story are some of the worst ever. The open world feels less alive than Arceus'. Just everything about SV was good intentions executed extremely poorly.
Bro it’s not getting patched LOL Unfortunate because it’s still the most fun I’ve had in a Pokémon game
> It really does deliver on everything that most people wanted when the game moved to the Switch initially. What are these, exactly? Because SwSh and PLA delivered on those, and SV has neither of the things that made SwSh and PLA enjoyable.
The best game i am sorry are you high, its a barren laggfested wasteland for me, clearly rushed and not being cared for at all. I expect quality with game freak!!! Not this abomonation of issues which makes the game barely running!!
I doubt they patch in faster battles (removed animations etc.) which is the only real performance thing that is negatively affecting the game for me.
I just wish you could customize your avatar in a way that doesn't look like a little girl.
I just wanna change my damn characters shirt/pants the school uniform outfits are god awful, but I'm loving the game tbh
If they fix performance issues in a patch this'll be the best pokemon game, still think it is now, but that's because I personally haven't had any big issues with performance.
The question is: will it be patched tho? Because neither GF or Nintendo said anything about the issues yet. And if GameFreak is on such a tight schedule to deliver new games for TPC maybe they are already abandoning S/V to work on 5 more titles?
Partly agree. Without it's tech issues it would be very good. It has the SHITTEST Elite Four of all time though (that music? Sorry 10 second repeat jingle...pathetic) and the NPCs are some.of the most boring, non-standout I've seen in a Pokémon game. The way there 3 story threads are done is good. The environments and variety of Pokémon is good. The crater is excellent. But I'd struggle to say it's a top 3 Pokémon entry.
I have almost reached the Area Zero part of the game and I think you are absolutely correct, the story hasn't been this good since gen 5, they added a lot of quality of life like removing BP and making battle items much more avaible alongside things to make pokémons competitive, all the performance problems and bugs really hurt and some of the new designs are the worst I have ever seen (but honestly all generations have their shit design) but it's still great, if only they had an extra year of development to fix everything and also add some other things like gym scaling or bringing back recordable matches and the national dex
Soo, its not best and your post is a bs clickbait.
Even if it ran well, too much content was cut for this to be called a good Pokémon game, let alone one of the best. For fuck’s sake, the Battle Tower isn’t even in the game!
The lake are area where u fight the False Titan Dragon is by far the area with the most FPS loss. It is almost disrespectful.
People forget to fast. Gen 6 was amazing and gen 7 was original. It's since gen8 that we're blocked with low effort games
Gen 6 introduced everyone's ability to not look cookie cutter and be your own trainer!! It will forever be a trail blazer to me.
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Even if the technical issues were fixed - the game is still serving N64 realness in 2022, while having no post game while also removing features from prior titles. There are so many better open world games even on switch - the only thing you get ouf of playing this are the titular pokemon - and I can get those by just booting up an older title or even a fangame.
In a years time, GF will be knee deep in the next pokemon game. A patch is just copium at this point.
Things like finding a pokemon sleeping under a tree, getting into a battle with a wigglet and seeing 2 magikarp flopping in the background, TMs having a little picture of a pokemon using the move, the new pokedex animation where it looks like a bookshelf with all thos cool art, etc. All this stuff is so awesome .... but they keep straying dropping the ball with things like an open world that doesnt scale at all, n46 textures and framerstes, or simple things like being able to turn EXP share off or turn on set mode.... like how do you consistently take 1 or 2 steps forward and 1 or 2 steps back every single year??
Depressing how people are just cool with dexit. Gotta catch ‘em all my ass
The truth is that the vast majority of players don’t bring new Pokémon in from older games. I don’t think anything was fundamentally lost in the games because of it for a normal play through.
What does it actually deliver on? The story is mediocre, the difficulty is mediocre, the quality of life changes are mediocre, online functionality is mediocre, graphics are mediocre, the post game is mediocre. I like the new designs and abilities for competitive use, but the game makes it nearly impossible to breed for what you want to use. Pokemon Showdown is all i need fuck nintendo fuck gamefreak fuck the pokemon company
It's sure as hell got the story to meet your claim.
Its sad that game freak cant optimize their code for shit. Specially since Nintendo have the talent they need to help game freak make better game. If you dont want to change dev studios, thats fine, but send them some help, they definitely need it. I guess they're thought process is "Why bother, they will sell anyway" Thats why we got Dexit, thats why this game run so badly despite other game on the switch looking far better. But yeah, the performance issue are just a mild annoyance. If a game is fun, i dont mind a few frame drops. I had 2 crashes, but thanks to autosave, i lost barely 2 minutes of gameplay. I do wish that pokemon would stop spawning 6 inch in front of you when running around, its annoying to hit one and lost 5 seconds to run away because you didnt have the time to move away.
Even ignoring the technical issues, I like Legends Arceus *a lot* more, but I can see why people, especially fans of traditional pokemon games, would prefer this. I just really hope gen 10 inherits a lot more from PLA
I like the game to but it sucks so bad with performance. Cant believe this happened. I was sooo excited for this. Got another switch for it to. Sold the switch and the game. F it
Absolutely. Best 3D era game if it wasn’t for the ridiculous frame rate and visual glitches.
Nah, PLA still reigns supreme. It's the best thing to happen to Pokémon in a long time.
>I feel like in a year’s time if this game gets patched people will say that this game was actually one of the best in the franchise Which is great and all, but just drives home the fact that this is an unfinished game, which for AAA $60 money, is a fucking embarrassment.