Also Available On: Steam, MS-DOS, PS3, PS4, PSP, Vita, Xbox 360, Wii, 3DS, iOS, Android
This game is an absolute guilty pleasure. I’ve played this game a number of times on a number of different platforms and every time I play it it’s a great time. I don’t think I really need to cover what the game is that much here, but I was instead surprised by how much the Switch really brought the game into an interesting new place for me. Each platform has its own set of quirks – the Wii had NES-style controls, the PSP had its small screen experience, the PlayStation consoles had the big screen. I think the Switch might be the best of all worlds.
If you haven’t played this game before, the best way I can describe it is pre-3 Grand Theft Auto through a modern lens, fed through retro nostalgia. It’s top-down action largely involving over the top set pieces, stealing and driving cars around the city, and a bunch of missions you can play in generally a linear order. If you’ve played GTA 1 or 2, you know basically what you’re getting into.
So, why did it work so well on the Switch? Changing modes. I pulled this out to be my work day waiting on a build and can’t touch my computer which meant the Switch was sitting on my desk with a controller and being played in short segments. I then brought it up after work to play while other things were going on. After the kids went to sleep it then got docked and played in a long session on the TV. All three modes worked equally well for different reasons, but importantly they were all fun and they worked seamlessly. This game’s ability to context switch between short and long forms of game is really its biggest strength. If I had two minutes waiting for a build to deploy, I could turn it on and run through a couple of weapon challenges completely separate from the story. At night I could instead run through the entire chain of story missions without stopping. Both types of play were fun and just worked.
Importantly though, all modes of play also controlled well. The game is fun on some of the other platforms I played it on, but frankly this game works best as a twin stick shooter and that wasn’t always available. The Wii Remote doesn’t have any analog sticks. The PSP had the small screen, but only one stick. On the other hand, the PS3/PS4 have the good controls, but not the easy pick up and play short segments. The Switch simply turns on and is in-game in seconds in all variants. Some other platforms like the 3DS could do that but suffered on controls. The Switch is like picking the best parts of each and running with it.
It’s probably an easy conclusion to draw that the Switch works so well here, but I don’t really have that many points of comparison like this. There aren’t many games that are widely available on so many platforms that fit into a performance envelope where the Switch port isn’t obviously being hurt by the lack of hardware strength. Even with the Switch 2, it is often obviously sacrificing image and gameplay quality to choose it as your lead platform over a PC or current generation console. This game is a perfect storm where it just fits the platform perfectly.
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.
There’s some games that I finish and I’m really not sure why. This is one of those. It’s totally a small indie experience where it pulls a lot of things from existing titles at a smaller scope so a lot of the systems don’t feel quite up to scratch. However, it’s got a certain charm that just kept me in the game and it has such low user friction that nothing is ever really stopping me from moving forward. As a result, I just hammered straight through and before I knew it I was done.
Given the similarities to 2D Zelda games combat will obviously be a big focus. If I look at this from a purely combat perspective it really isn’t doing much special. It has a bunch of weapons but in a lot of cases I found them to all be a little off. The first weapon you get is a sword analogue, but if I put it up against a Link’s Awakening sword the hit boxes feel inconsistent, causing a lot of misses. Later in the game you get a sickle that hits twice, but the speed of attacks with it always felt slow enough to not be valuable over other choices. The weapon I ended up using a lot was a parasol due to its rapid attack speed, but it had such a narrow hit box that I was constantly missing smaller enemies by literal pixels.
It was always little things like that that made it feel off compared to the more traditionally AAA titles in this style of game. It wasn’t helped by the lack of secondary items in combat, so for the most part combat was attack spam and dodge. That said, it being a compact indie meant that this was over before it became a problem for me. I was simply finished.
This also extended to the metagame systems in place. There’s a day-night cycle that allows you to do daily missions, but the daily missions are so simple that I was often finishing them before the morning segment of the day. That let me just move the plot forward regularly. There’s a building/crafting system, but it so infrequently required me to build something story-related that I simply skipped it under most circumstances. There are weapon upgrades that require you to farm items, but they often require so few resources and the resources are so easy to get that I never really felt held back in progress. There are side quests that exist and give rewards, but again they are so easy to complete that they might as well just get done but the rewards are so low impact that skipping them is irrelevant.
Again, this is typical of small indie. The systems are there and not damaging to the experience but if they weren’t there they also would not hurt the experience.
So then why do I play indie games like this? Because they’re charming as all hell. The entire premise of the game is that you play as a young grape working as a guardian of a realm of other fruits and vegetables by killing living rot. It’s such a complete theming package from the level of characters all the way up to the world and it all just feels right. You’re helping heal towns so they can get cleaner water or grow plants and ultimately so new plant people can be born on the literal vine. This is the charm that you get from small budget indies. Yes the games may be shorter, but in doing so they are limiting their content scope and allowing themselves to do unique things with theming that you just won’t see at higher budgets.
I suppose ultimately this isn’t really a rambling about much. The game itself could have been any indie game. It probably feels like I’m picking on this specific one but it just happened to be what I pulled at the time. I don’t know that I’ll ever be in a position to make indie games because frankly I enjoy working on larger things. I just love that these things exist in general. I can pull good indies off the shelf and just play them and just finish them. There’s rough edges, there’s missing content, but they’re charming and fun. They’re finishable, and that’s huge.
