A bit of a surprise expansion to Cadence of Hyrule dropped this week, a new story path for the game featuring the game’s main villain Octavo. I went ahead and did a run through of it, and while this didn’t necessarily warrant a full post, I did a bit of a Twitter-focused mini ramblings. Below is that thread.
Instead of being one of the varied weapons available to the players in the main game, his weapon was an arc weapon that automatically triggered if you move into a space with an enemy in front of, left, or right of your destination tile.
This basically ended in me sort of wildly moving around the screen with max movement as my goal, rather than max damage, but in doing so my damage ended up being extremely high.
There was a lot of noise about this release in the general gaming sphere – a bunch of Pokemon were removed, people got up in arms, they then started picking apart every little thing as reasons why the game was lazy or low quality or whatever the complaint of the day was. Frankly, it felt like a bunch of whining prior to release. Having played the game now, it’s definitely a bunch of whining. While Pokemon Sword is a pretty straightforward Pokemon game in general, it’s still extremely high quality and also takes some important steps forward for the series in a general sense, giving us what is another solid entry worth playing through.
The obvious change here is that despite the Switch’s ability to be played on the go, this is the first mainline release that’s actually playable on the TV, unless you count the Super Game Boy on SNES or Game Boy Player on the Gamecube as console option entries. This definitely made playing the game in long sessions at least a lot more comfortable. The main focus though is definitely on gameplay features, which kind of falls into two main things – the Wild Area and Dynamax Pokemon.
Dynamax is the replacement for Mega Evolution and Z Moves from previous generations. In this case, it feels like it’s been integrated in a much better fashion. For one thing, it’s available to damn near all Pokemon, apart from a handful of legendaries. There’s an additional tier available called Gigantamaxing that also adds some unique moves and fun visual forms, but it’s there as an additional layer. This leaves your entire party as being useful in these situations, which is a much better situation than the limits in place in X/Y + Sun/Moon. The ability to use it is also limited to specific battles – generally speaking, Gym battles and specific wild battles against other Dynamax Pokemon. Overall it means that the system isn’t available to be spammed all the time, but is always equally useful when it is available.
The other big one, and probably the biggest feature, is the Wild Area. What this ends up being from a feature perspective is just another route to catch Pokemon. However, from a visual perspective it’s a huge leap forward for the series. It turns a large portion of the game into a pseudo open world area where you can catch stuff, but also run into Pokemon that are way too strong for your current team, go into multiplayer Dynamax fights, and just generally run around. It’s as close to reaching for a modern RPG experience as the series has ever gotten, and it’s a much larger modernization step than has been typical for the series.
There’s a bunch of little user experience things that have also improved the game in small ways. The player is automatically healed to full after gym fights, including the Elite Four replacement because the player was going to heal up anyway. Pokemon are visible in the world in the grass areas like in Pokemon Let’s Go!, because random fights are fairly silly. HMs continue to go away, with flying open almost immediately at the start of the game via a taxi service and Surf being replaced entirely by a bike upgrade. The player can now setup camp while in the field replacing the need to run back to Pokemon Centers to heal. There’s a portable Pokemon Box device to grab Pokemon in and out of your storage on the go. EXP share for your party makes a return and EXP gain is also around when catching Pokemon, leaving it practical to go for either as a leveling setup.
It’s also worth mentioning just how fucking cool it is to do the gym battles. It’s a little thing, but having a huge crowd chanting and yelling, and having good fight music on is such a huge experience change from the past that I’m honestly surprised they haven’t gone in this direction before. It actually feels like a sport now, which animal rights problems aside, is a fantastic change.
At the same time, there’s still some things they’re stubbornly holding on to for seemingly no reason. The box storage system still exists, and it still can’t be sorted despite the fact that there’s no technical reason to not allow for better storage solutions. Despite the fact that you can see move advantages when switching Pokemon, you can only see that if the opponent’s Pokemon is already out, even though you explicitly know which Pokemon will come out next. Evolution methods are still not shown anywhere in-game, despite the fact that all the information is available on the internet all the time. It’s little things like that that are really going to go a long way to making the series feel like it’s finally really moving forward, and also currently go a long way towards ammo about the series feeling lazy.
However, the core of the series is still as strong as ever. It’s still just straight enjoyable to play the stat game, play the type advantages, and build out the party that suits you the most. I’m also not sure if it’s a placebo, but the game felt much better balanced in general, and certainly balanced more difficult than in the past. I found myself using a significantly larger amount of Pokemon to use my type advantages, even in just fighting wild Pokemon and Route trainers. By the end of the game, my party’s level range was only around 60-65 for all members, which is an extremely narrow range for my typical use. In general I had to use those as well. I was almost always around level parity with the opponents, so going in with type disadvantage was a good way to get killed. In good news, I didn’t feel a need to grind either, so the curve felt pretty appropriate to a first-run through.
End of the day, this one is a pretty simple thing to recommend. If you’ve liked Pokemon in the past, you’ll still like Pokemon now. At the same time, while I sort of get where people are coming from, I think it’s worth ignoring the pre-release noise. The loss of Pokedex did not effect the quality of the game and only helped the game’s overall balance, and the game that is there is still as good as ever. Frankly, if removing more Pokemon results in steps as big as the Wild Area for Gen 9, remove even more. If there’s anything to take out of this generation it’s that there’s been a big jump in the quality of what’s there, but they’ve definitely still got a lot of room to grow now that they’re fully embracing their console future.
If there’s any game that was ever a no brainer for me, it’s this one. I’ve played the hell out of the Kunio-kun series, whether it’s in the brawler River City titles, or the off the wall ones like Super Dodgeball. This one tapped WayForward as a developer, and I’ve played the hell out of the Shantae series. Combine them into one place? You better believe I’m all in.
If there’s any place to start with this one, it’s that the game is so mechanically sound in a way that 2.5d brawlers somehow always seem to stumble on. As a developer, it’s easy for me to dismiss the complexity behind making a few combat buttons feel good, but a lot of games seem to get it really wrong. However, this one just feels really smooth in action. It’s really easy to tell where I am in my combos, allowing me to mix light and heavy attacks effectively. Enemy tells are really solid, but not super easy, so my ability to block always feels really fair and skill based. There’s enough weapons thrown in the environment (and easy ability to use your enemies as weapons) to give a bit of fun extra chaos to the combat. It just feels really solid the whole way through.
If there’s any real tripping point in the control scheme for combat, it’s that the left face button (X on Switch) is really overloaded with contextual inputs. It’s your light attack button, but it’s also the button to pick weapons up, and it’s also the button to go to a new zone or enter shops when near them. It’s pretty easy in the chaos of a lot of people to accidentally travel or pick up a weapon, leaving you open to be attacked. Luckily the boss fights tended to be 1 on 1 encounters, so it was never really a big hazard.
Speaking of boss fights, that’s where the game really shines. You’ve got a few standard face smacking combat bosses, but there’s some really different mechanics at play here. There’s a boss at about the mid point of the game that is almost entirely a bullet hell fight, with the ultimate goal being to direct the boss to hit themselves with a deflected projectile to allow the player to damage them. There’s also a really fun boss that involves avoiding the buttons on a Guitar Hero-style running board in order to get between combat phases. Overall, these boss fights allow for some breathing room in the core mechanics to where the game isn’t just a core brawler the whole time. They exist both as large challenges that definitely have to be learned, but also exist as a way to introduce fun new ways to think about the player’s skill set, and end up breaking up the game in a way I wasn’t really anticipating.
The rest of the game’s core is pretty standard, but well put together. There’s a light layer of RPG leveling and stat improvement, giving the player a pretty concise and obvious power curve. There’s a wide range of accessory items that can be used to help the player pad out skills or damage based on their preferred play style. There’s a dojo to learn new skills based on your level. Most importantly, and very much hidden, there’s food shops to buy health items. However, the first time a specific health item is consumed, it gives you a permanent stat boost. This is extremely important to the player’s power curve, and it’s curious that it is not mentioned in-game (or I’m dumb and missed it), but it works extremely well in practice, as the player inevitably will need to hop into a shop to get some health along the way.
I suppose this is a bit of a short rambling, but really there’s not much to say here that would be a surprise. It’s a great developer known for making 2d action games in a series known for great 2.5d action, and it follows the formula it helped establish in a very modern-focused way. If you like anything like Turtles in Time, Double Dragon, or River City Ransom, you know what you’re getting into and you will definitely be happy. If not, I couldn’t think of a better place to start.
