Tag: pokemon

Posted on

Game Ramblings #215 – Pokemon Legends: Z-A

More Info from The Pokemon Company

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: Switch 2
  • Also Available On: Switch

This is such a strange game. At a glance it feels like it should be terrible – a Pokemon game contained to a single city with limited zones in which to catch Pokemon. However, they made a crucial decision to focus on combat and boy did that benefit the game as a whole.

If you’ve played the previous Pokemon Legends: Arceus, there’s really nothing to talk about except for combat. Simply put, combat is now done in real time in all situations. There’s no difference between fighting a wild Pokemon and fighting a trainer battle and they really lean into that. You as the trainer run around and avoid being hit by stray attacks while simultaneously hitting buttons for relevant attacks. Pokemon are quickly hot swapped so trainer fights don’t lose the real time feel as you go through your lineup of Pokemon swapping out to gain type advantages. It plays a really tight line of familiar but new for the series, even compared against the same feeling of Arceus. However, I do think it has some rough spots in their first attempt at real time.

The first obvious problem is that I think the player’s active Pokemon has too little agency of its own to actively fight. All ranged attacks are relative to the player and the Pokemon tries to follow the player around if they aren’t being actively commanded, and that’s frustrating as hell. As a player, I have to reposition frequently to avoid being hit by attacks, which then causes the Pokemon to get into spots where it has to wildly reposition just to throw a ranged attack which is always at a fixed spot relative to the player’s position, wasting a bunch of time while it repositions. The Pokemon then often gets into spots where its ranged attacks hit things that it should simply be obviously avoiding. It might be an edge of a fence or a tree or the top of a stair that will clip the attack, blocking it from hitting. It’s just consistently dumb as shit that this occurs, because a Pokemon should clearly be instinctively smart enough to reposition itself a bit to avoid this.

Where this gets particularly frustrating is that they very clearly designed the big PvE boss fights to avoid this. Those fights are all just against a Pokemon on a flat surface, and they’re spectacularly fun. These fights become some of the more chaotic avoidance situations in the game, ranging from anything like pool avoidance to bullet hell situations. Some of the early ones are certainly more straightforward damage checks, but later ones start to test the player’s ability to not just faceroll the attack buttons and actually stay moving more often. And they WORK because they DO NOT REQUIRE THE POKEMON TO THINK.

This is then compounded by the large amount of trainer battles that the game pushes you into. If Arceus was about collecting and not having trainer battles as much as possible, this is about as far opposite as you can get. There are entire segments of the game loop dedicated to trainer battles, where sections of the city are cordoned off each night just for trainers to battle in. This is where you get a lot of mileage out of having a traditionally setup party to counter as many Pokemon types as possible, but it’s also where I have my second real problem with the combat system.

Trainer battles in traditional Pokemon games largely involve you guessing your way through the first Pokemon then distinctly having the advantage to switch Pokemon simultaneous to your opponent, leaving you with a type advantage as long as you can generally know or guess the upcoming Pokemon’s weaknesses. That isn’t present here, but it’s also combined with an annoying delay when switching Pokemon where the Pokemon has to play a spawn animation before it can even begin to move for both the player and NPC characters. Generally it leaves the Pokemon open to being hit at least a couple of times before it can even begin to move. This leaves the defending Pokemon with an always present inherent disadvantage to having been put into battle, which feels generally off in the spirit of Pokemon fights. It’s not necessarily that I want to have the guaranteed type advantage of the turn-based games, but I want to at least be able to quickly get a Pokemon into battle and fighting, rather than watching it slowly spawn and be hit.

However, the bulk of the trainer battles in this are inherently more interesting because of the open world and real time nature. You can sneak up on people and knock out their opener Pokemon before they even know you are there. It’s such a dick move if this was to be happening in real life, but as a videogame power fantasy it’s spectacularly fun and effective.

The thing is, despite me having what feels like real core problems with combat I still found this to be so tremendously fun that it again represents what I think is a better path forward for the series. If Arceus represented a quicker paced capture dynamic with an open world, this represents the feeling of Pokemon in a way that more closely matches the TV series. This feels much closer to what I think Pokemon is, with more trainer fights and less capturing but done in a much quicker paced setup inherently due to it being real time. This keeps important things about the core metagame for me – forming a party tuned to type advantages, swapping them out based on what my opponents bring in, making sure that I’m tuning my move set to take advantage of things that aren’t inherent to the types of my Pokemon – and reducing overall user friction by making everything easy to get to.

If I then take combat at face value and assume that some iteration could be done to smooth it out a bit, this represents a future that I think should be core Pokemon and not side game experiment. This combat applied to the Scarlet/Violet world design would work just as well, and in particular would allow them to eliminate their time saving measure of auto result-battles in the open world that always felt like a grinding crutch to me. This combat applied to gym battles in Scarlet/Violet would make those feel like even larger spectacles. This combat applied to Terastallized Pokemon fights would make those feel like skilled battles instead of dice rolls around picking the right overpowered Pokemon. There is just a lot to be gained from Game Freak paying attention to what they are creating with these experiments, and the hope is that they do pay attention instead of throwing it away again.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #156 – Pokemon Legends: Arceus

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Adventure / JRPG
  • Platform: Switch

Look, this is a rough game. It’s hideously ugly. It still for some reason has Pokemon boxes without auto sorting. Balance is often entirely vague even with Pokemon 10+ levels apart. However, I can’t stop playing it. The core gameplay loop is so fundamentally changed but it works far better than I expected it to and in doing so represents a path forward for the series that I couldn’t have expected when Diamond/Pearl came out 3 months ago.

This game got ruthlessly shit on from the trailers, and frankly it isn’t entirely undeserved. This game is ugly more often than not. The Pokemon models are fine, and at least generally consistent. However, their art style doesn’t really match the world’s art style, and the world is atrocious. However, it doesn’t feel like laziness to me – it feels like a failing of technology. This is pretty clearly using some variant of the Sword/Shield engine stretched beyond its limits. The unfortunate thing as a developer, especially on an experimental title like this, is sometimes you just shoot yourself in the ass and this is one of those times. You get to a point where you can either delay a game by years and restart the core tech or just ship it with what you’ve got and move onto the next thing instead of cancelling a title. It’s time for this series to either move onto Nintendo’s own in-house engines or move to something stock, because it’s clear that Game Freak would be better served focusing on the games, rather than the engine.

However, once you get past that the game is a lot of fun, and it comes down to the core loop just really working. Rather than being gym-focused, the entire focus of the core game loop is research. You’re basically going out into the field, catching as much stuff as you can, and returning. That is the core of building the Pokedex here. The relatively non-linear nature of it means you can kind of wander off wherever you want, whether to focus on new areas or completing the entry of a specific Pokemon. The ability to fast travel back and forth to town means your play sessions are basically as long as you want them to be. The ability to craft (!!!!!!) Pokeballs, potions, etc means that as long as you’re collecting resources, you aren’t having to go shopping. If you run out, you just bring up the crafting menu and seamlessly keep your stock together.

It’s the type of loop that just works on the Switch in the same way that Breath of the Wild did. Your play sessions are as long as you want them to be and it doesn’t matter whether you’re doing a 30 minute or 3 hour block. In both cases you’re making appreciable progress that you can drop back into at any time. It’s a loop that just keeps you engaged and playing in an unexpected way.

Even within that loop, the changes work well though. The simple act of being able to catch a Pokemon without starting a battle while still earning XP for it is tremendous. It so completely speeds up the act of traversal that it allows the new gameplay push to just catch EVERYTHING to work. In the old style, the game would otherwise be a slog.

Even if it’s ugly, the environment being so open is also a huge change. Its openness isn’t quite BotW, but it’s also more than Sw/Sh wild areas were. From a gameplay perspective it’s a huge success. Different areas are visually distinct in a way that’s interesting on its own, but also allows for obvious placement of different types of Pokemon in a natural way. Bugs like Combee or Weedle live in the forest, which makes sense. Things like Spheal or Octillery can be found hanging out on the beach. Your Abomasnows are up in the mountain tops and your Magmars are by the volcano. It’s both obvious AND enjoyable. It’s not that they didn’t try to do this before, but it feels even further down the line of making the Pokemon world more natural than it even previously has been.

It’s also a nice change that the player is FINALLY ACTUALLY IN DANGER. You get attacked by Pokemon in the wild. You have boss fights where you as the player are physically attacking Pokemon and they’re spectacularly fun. It’s one of those things that for the past 25 years everyone has been going “well, why is the player immune?” and it finally happened.

That said, despite the big change to the core gameplay there’s a lot of rough edges here. I complained about it during Sword/Shield but the existence of boxes, let alone no way to auto sort them is still baffling. Even more so when your Pokemon are literally being sent back to an open pasture to live their best lives. A lot of the side content is fine in its existence and kind of attempts to drive completion of the Pokedex, but there’s very little variety or necessity to it. The combat that is there is fine, but I’d like to see the new core loop adapted to a game with a more traditional level of trainer battles.

Frankly, balance is also incredibly vague. One of the core changes is that all battles are now speed-based. Speed can mean that Pokemon go first, but also that they can go multiple times in a row. That alone can easily result in your Pokemon often getting one-shot before taking a turn, even when they aren’t at a type disadvantage. Pokemon 15+ levels below your active one can still do significant damage as well, so I spent a lot of time outside of battle healing or going back to camp to rest against things that really shouldn’t have been a danger. It feels like it was tuned to be difficult, but it instead comes across as odd, because type advantage is still the king and the changes made just make the exploration slower, rather than making the individual trainer battles more difficult.

If this represents a new path forward for the series then all the rough edges don’t really matter. It has its problems, but this pushes a new gameplay archetype for the series that just works. It’s familiar enough, but far more active and far more fun than the JRPG slog that the series has really become known for. If it’s instead just a sidetrack between entries, then hopefully it’s at least a lesson to them that it’s time to take a serious look at their tech stack moving forward. However, after how much I’ve been enjoying this one, I think it’d be a huge loss if this doesn’t represent the direction the series will be sticking to going forward.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #98 – Pokemon Sword

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch

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.