Nintendo makes best new Pokemon ever, plus also Pokemon Scarlet/Violet is a thing

[gogglebob]

I was thinking more the usual "running theme" we have been seeing since Sapphire/Ruby, like how those Team Rockets du jour where obsessed with sea/land, or how the recent Legends Arceus had the time/space obsessed teams. One Professor obsessed with fossils and the past, one professor obsessed with the future (and evolution? hatching?). At best we get a time hole that spits out a legendary. Mostly just more electric/steel types in Violet, though.

 

[Phantoon]

Or like the Opelucid City in Black / White which was ancient / futuristic depending on the game

 

[JBear]

Apparently Toby Fox composed the field music for this game. Good for him!

 

[conchobhar]

Can't help but think they missed an opportunity by having the male professor be the 'futuristic' one. If he were the 'traditional' one, he surely would have had a huge, wildman beard. We could have had Professor Moondog, basically:

 

[Kirin]

Someone already posted "Lechonk", but between that and "Smoliv" the new early-game poke-names are on point.

 

[Falselogic]

Ghost Pirate Lechonk

 

[JBear]

Ghost Pirate Lechonk

Very glad I'm not the only one whose brain helpfully supplies this ever time I see this good chonky boy.

 

[Ixo]

New trailer's up if you're interested:

 

[Sprite]

It's out! It's good!

Exploring is a ton of fun, but it's not so much an open world game as just a regular Pokémon game with the guard rails taken off. Which is still cool, but not the revolution they were promising. The game tells you multiple times "you can do anything you want" but then Pokémon still ignore you if you don't have a high-level gym badge, so you actually can't do anything you want, you're forced to do the same thing you always do, you can just do it out of order if you please.

And the Gyms have an expected order to beat them in, the levels don't scale at all. I really wish they had made it so whatever Gym Leader you beat first is the easiest, and their teams level up as you beat each one. Right now it just feels like I'm sequence breaking, which is still fun and cool, but I'm going to have to get back to those early Gyms eventually and they will be sooo boring.

 

[Falselogic]

I am seeing a lot of comments that it is incredibly buggy? Anyone experiencing that?

 

[Neo Skimbleshanks]

It took me awhile to get started here because the cat starter is literally just a cat PLUS has an adorable little purr sound. Should be a no brainer. But as with the first cat-starter, there’s a brutally disappointing end result. I very reluctantly chose fuecoco because it has the final evolution I have no strong feelings about, winning by default. Anyway, it was really cute seeing that lil bipedal crocodile perch on my character’s shoulder like a parrot.

I was a bit surprised by how choppy the game occasionally looked, but I’m also surprised it bothers some people so much. If I wanted to look at something nice on my television, I would simply watch a movie, such as Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession, which you can stream via the Metrograph app if you live in the US… The graphics successfully convey that many of these critters are adorable. (not Meowscarada, alas…)

 

[RT-55J]

Most reports I've seen make it sound like the game's bugs are either graphical or silly --- that is to say, I've heard very little regarding crashing or game-breaking bugs. (The technical performance is quite bad though, in terms of framerate, shadow-mapping, level of detail, etc.)

Granted, I say this, but I ended up softlocking the game trying to talk to an NPC rather early on (lmao).

 

[That Old Chestnut]

Oh my God. Y'all.

Y'all.

You can literally have your Primeape get mad until it dies and becomes a ghost pokemon.

Spoiler

Stay dark af, you beautiful mess.

 

[Dark Medusa]

I am seeing a lot of comments that it is incredibly buggy? Anyone experiencing that?

It is very buggy and graphically glitchy, but I think the only thing I very much care about is that it LAGS. It makes a game that already has problems with being slow, slower. It's frustrating.

 

[4-So]

That's disappointing to hear and makes me curious about the general performance of Tears of the Kingdom.

New Switch when?

 

[Bongo]

I'd be worried about Tears of the Kingdom if it were being developed by Game Freak instead of Nintendo and Monolith Soft and if it were being released on an uncompromising schedule instead of tolerating delays.

 

[Dark Medusa]

Yeah, it's not as graphically demanding as Breath of the Wild, I think, and yet it runs quite a lot worse. It definitely has more to do with Game Freak and The Pokemon Company's demands for when the game had to come out, and less to do with the hardware.

 

[MetManMas]

Things to keep in mind with Game Freak are that 1) for all the amazing stuff they've done over the years they still absolutely do not quite have the skills or people for AAA HD game development, 2) they want to do things besides Pokémon (or at least mainline Pokémon) too, and 3) they are absolutely at the mercy of Nintendo and The Pokémon Company and their various component parts (anime, manga, TCG, merchandising, mobile spinoffs, etc.) wanting like 100 new monsters every couple of years to keep the money train a rollin'.

Pokémon should slow down so Game Freak can have more development time and hire more people, but given how lucrative the series remains I don't see that happening.

 

[muteKi]

Pokemon has never really been a "AAA" series in any real sense of the term beyond sales. And I largely don't care. I just want my weird little guys

 

[Sprite]

Anger Shell
Pokémon’s Attack Rose!
*weedaweedaweedawee*

Anger Shell
Pokémon’s Sp. Attack rose!
*weedaweedaweedawee*

Anger Shell
Pokémon’s Speed rose!
*weedaweedaweedawee*

Anger Shell
Pokémon’s Defense fell!
*woodawoodawoodawoo*

Anger Shell
Pokémon’s Sp. Defense fell!
*woodawoodawoodawoo*

For the love of Arceus, Game Freak, streamline things a little!

 

[Gaer]

Oh my God. Y'all.

Y'all.

You can literally have your Primeape get mad until it dies and becomes a ghost pokemon.

Spoiler

Stay dark af, you beautiful mess.

You could say he died m-

D-died mad a-

Mad a-abou—

 

[Dark Medusa]

Anger Shell
Pokémon’s Attack Rose!
*weedaweedaweedawee*

Anger Shell
Pokémon’s Sp. Attack rose!
*weedaweedaweedawee*

Anger Shell
Pokémon’s Speed rose!
*weedaweedaweedawee*

Anger Shell
Pokémon’s Defense fell!
*woodawoodawoodawoo*

Anger Shell
Pokémon’s Sp. Defense fell!
*woodawoodawoodawoo*

For the love of Arceus, Game Freak, streamline things a little!

The frustrating thing is THEY DID. In Pokemon Legends: Arceus! And then they went back to not streamlining things!

 

[That Old Chestnut]

You could say he died m-

D-died mad a-

Mad a-abou—

It's also a direct reference to it's Pokedex entry from Sun!

Spoiler

It has been known to become so angry that it dies as a result. Its face looks peaceful in death, however.

Well, except for the face, because that mf looks livid.

 

[Bongo]

They streamlined a lot of things, but unfortunately, not everything. Tera raids are so, so much better than max raids, for instance.

 

[Sprite]

The frustrating thing is THEY DID. In Pokemon Legends: Arceus! And then they went back to not streamlining things!

I, uh, kind of hated the battle system in that game 😅 It didn’t go nearly far enough as an overhaul while the few changes it did make would have been a disaster for the main games from a competitive standpoint. Though yeah, it was a lot faster to play.

The biggest thing I’m missing from that game is how it de-emphasized battles as the only method of interacting with Pokémon. Sometimes attacking a Pokémon was the dumbest thing you could do, because you’d just scare it away. Meanwhile here we’re mowing through crowds of infants to skin them for TM parts. Which is still fun (I love the Let’s Go mechanic), but feels a bit icky when they had figured out a different approach that worked so well.

 

[Sprite]

I honestly would be delighted if they situated Legends as the new flagship series that gets all the new Pokémon while pulling back on the main series and making it a low budget retro series that still iterates on the competitive scene while soaking up fewer resources. Farming out the DP remakes was a good move.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

The feeling I get is that Arceus was a big swing with lots of new ideas, but since they didn't know how it would sell, they kept Scarlet/Violet (which were in development at the same time) more traditional. My HOPE is that, because Arceus was a big hit, they'll start to lean farther in that direction in the future. Because Violet is a fine Pokemon game, but it definitely feels like a step back after how free-flowing everything was in Legends.

Anyway, not to be that guy, but HOLY SHIT the framerate in this game is awful. Any time I'm in an open area, it feels like it's running at 15-20 FPS. Yeah yeah, you can still play it, but personally I find it really detracts from the experience. It honestly makes me wish I had gone to the trouble of figuring out Switch emulation so I could play this on more powerful hardware.

 

[Dark Medusa]

Yeah, I don't think they can do it for the main games because it wouldn't work for PvP, but it was certainly better than what we have now. I agree that it wasn't feasible for this game, but I wish they took some lessons forward in terms of speeding things up (I was more referring to text boxes speed and other design considerations).

Farming out the DP remakes was a good idea from a resources standpoint, but the result that we got was incredibly disappointing to me. I liked that Gen, and while FR/LG and HG/SS are among my favorite Pokemon games ever (and ORAS did a great job revamping Hoenn but was super duper bogged down in new Pokemon bullshit), but the DP remakes are bland and added very little. But if it meant they could put their focus more on innovating, then I agree.

I highly doubt we'll see what you're saying happen. The flagship series still sells about twice as much what Legends did, and there's no way they're changing the cash cow until it proves the milk doesn't flow. I do think there's a decent chance that Legends gets to be its own series that tries to innovate more, and I'd be ecstatic just to see that. I love your proposal, it's just not feasible.

 

[Dark Medusa]

The feeling I get is that Arceus was a big swing with lots of new ideas, but since they didn't know how it would sell, they kept Scarlet/Violet (which were in development at the same time) more traditional. My HOPE is that, because Arceus was a big hit, they'll start to lean farther in that direction in the future. Because Violet is a fine Pokemon game, but it definitely feels like a step back after how free-flowing everything was in Legends.

Anyway, not to be that guy, but HOLY SHIT the framerate in this game is awful. Any time I'm in an open area, it feels like it's running at 15-20 FPS. Yeah yeah, you can still play it, but personally I find it really detracts from the experience. It honestly makes me wish I had gone to the trouble of figuring out Switch emulation so I could play this on more powerful hardware.

Completely agree on all accounts including your hopes here. Like we've been saying, though, the bad framerate really feels more like poor optimization than anything that would be completely fixed with more powerful hardware (although I'm sure it's quite a bit better). I don't care that much about graphics, but when you start dropping frames and especially getting lag, it really hurts.

 

[Sprite]

Yeah, I don't think they can do it for the main games because it wouldn't work for PvP, but it was certainly better than what we have now. I agree that it wasn't feasible for this game, but I wish they took some lessons forward in terms of speeding things up (I was more referring to text boxes speed and other design considerations).

Farming out the DP remakes was a good idea from a resources standpoint, but the result that we got was incredibly disappointing to me. I liked that Gen, and while FR/LG and HG/SS are among my favorite Pokemon games ever (and ORAS did a great job revamping Hoenn but was super duper bogged down in new Pokemon bullshit), but the DP remakes are bland and added very little. But if it meant they could put their focus more on innovating, then I agree.

I highly doubt we'll see what you're saying happen. The flagship series still sells about twice as much what Legends did, and there's no way they're changing the cash cow until it proves the milk doesn't flow. I do think there's a decent chance that Legends gets to be its own series that tries to innovate more, and I'd be ecstatic just to see that. I love your proposal, it's just not feasible.

All true. In a perfect world we’d get Jazz age Unova, but I dare not dream~

And at the end of the day, I dropped Arceus like a stone the moment I finished the Pokédex, whereas this game is likely to extract hundreds of hours out of me.