Spoiler:
Intel Xeon w7-3465X OC | Asus Pro WS W790-E Sage SE | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 FE | 8x16GiB G-Skill Zeta R5 DDR5-6000 | Windows 11 22H2 | (details)
MacBook Pro 14in | M1 Max (32 GPU Cores) | 64GB LPDDR5 6400 | macOS 13
Random
|
Spoiler: Intel Xeon w7-3465X OC | Asus Pro WS W790-E Sage SE | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 FE | 8x16GiB G-Skill Zeta R5 DDR5-6000 | Windows 11 22H2 | (details)
MacBook Pro 14in | M1 Max (32 GPU Cores) | 64GB LPDDR5 6400 | macOS 13
12-27-2019, 01:16 AM
I have yet to watch Yuru Camp OVAs.
I didn't consume a lot of anime this year. I really enjoyed Lord El Melloi II Case Files.
From France with love.
Laptop ROG : W10 / Ryzen 7 4800HS @2.9 GHz (4.2 GHz Turbo disabled unless necessary for better thermals) / 16 Go DDR4 / RTX 2060 MaxQ (6 Go GDDR6)
I beat Pokémon Sword. And while digesting my thoughts on it I beat Ori and the Blind Forest too. It's a short game ok. So I guess I'll talk about both games right now! Also, there are no spoilers per say but I'll be talking about the games in total so, light spoiler warning I guess.
So, Pokémon. I thought about it a lot, and I think I've come up with a good analogy. Sword and Shield is the Link Between Worlds of the Pokémon series. Ok ok, I know that sounds weird but, hear me out. A Link Between Worlds is the best feeling Zelda game to date. The music, the combat, the presentation, and the bosses and especially the final boss fight, it all just feels soooo good. No zelda game has gotten me to feel the adventure quite the way A Link Between Worlds has! Even Breath of the Wild, which is an actual adventure (and a better game imo), doesn't feel anywhere near as adventurous as A Link Between Worlds. But as a game, A Link Between Worlds is kind of just ok? The dungeons are certainly better than recentish ones, like, they are proper Lock and Key dungeons, very Link to the Past-ish. While the dungeons are not as good as the Puzzle-box design of the best Zelda dungeons (Temple of Hara in Link's Awakening, Water Temple OoT, the last 6 hours of Skyward Sword, etc), they're certainly better than the micro-challenge focused Gauntlets that progressively made up the majority of dungeons in the Zelda series. See the Boss Keys series on youtube for the terms and very cool analysis on dungeon design, it has influenced my opinions a lot. But yea, the dungeons in A Link Between Worlds aren't the best, but not the worst either, they're simply good. And they have lots of very cool moments that feel friggin amazing. Like looking down in stereoscopic 3D as you climb the tower, or flattening up against a boss's shield, etc etc. And of course, importantly a Link Between Worlds took a lot of risks in changing up the formula of the Zelda series gameplay, proving that the grand experiment of Breath of the Wild has potential and was worth seeing through. Though admittedly messing up the existing formula a bit, leading to some downsides here and there. The story in A Link Between Worlds is mediocre: and highly predictable and kind of just dull. It's is also very very easy. Like, when first going into the dark world it's a little challenging, especially on Hero mode which is how I usually play it, but even on Hero, the majority of the game is a walk in the park. It's such a great feeling walk though. Pokémon Sword and Shield is like that. It feels GREAT. Gym battles and the championship, the classic arc that has been the backbone of every pokemon game, has never felt better. The spectacle, the music, the challenge and tournament setup, it's all soooo good! In all of the previous games, you fight your way up through the ranks and become the champion, but you never feel like its a championship, because you never see anything, it's all just you and an opponent in a tiny room, and after doing that a bunch of times, yay you are the greatest. But in Sword and Shield, you see it, you hear it, you feel it! This is something Pokemon sorely missed. It also helps that the music pulls a very ARMS-y approach, and it just fantastic, further cementing the challenge/sporting event feel. And the surprise tournament at the end instead of the elite four, so good! The sporting event approach just makes so much sense, I'm surprised they didn't do this before now! It just works SO well! The other big feel improvement is the Wild area and how you interact with Pokemon. Random encounters are a pet peeve of mine. They make sense when working around the constraints of the NES or Game Boy, but frankly, they should have stayed on that hardware. As a mechanic, random encounters are just god awful, they are frustrating, annoying, and mostly serve to slow the player down. But in Sword and Shield, by just the act of having pokemon be on the field and avoidable instead of forced encounters, I caught so many more pokemon! At the end of the game, my Pokédex had over 300 unique pokkems in it. That's easily double what I end most games with! I wanted to catch and battle Pokemon in sword and shield, it wasn't something that was annoying that I optimized around, and that's GREAT. Catching, growing, and battling Pokemon is the core of Pokémon, and they are the best they have ever been in Sword and Shield. Also they continue Pokémon's progress in removing all of the blecky time-wasting mechanics that have lingered in the Pokémon series, so things like, getting around, catching pokemon, and getting through text and the menus are all better than ever. All together, Sword and Shield is the best the gameplay loop that is Pokémon has ever been! It all feels and plays so good! Thaaat said, when you take the entire game as a whole, it's just ok. It's easy, I mean, ridiculously easy. Maybe because of the Wild area and all of the extra Pokémon I was interacting with, but I went into the championship with a 15-20 level advantage. To say the championship was easy would be an understatement. It wasn't even a walk in the park, it was like, press A and read manga kind of easy. Most of the game I had a massive level advantage like that. I didn't actually read manga on the side since it felt fantastic and it was really interesting, but it went by so fast because I was just too bloody strong, so it was kind of a let down in that regard. I even started messing around with bad type matchups just to make the fights last a little longer, which says a lot about how good the game feels, but also a lot about the game's difficulty. The champion gave me a little surprise since the game cheated and let him go first (something the series always has done, much more noticeable here though), but it was still trivial. Even the post game, where they added on 15 more levels, wasn't enough to reach my party. Easy Peasy. Also the story is... barely even there to be honest. Pokémon is not exactly known for good storytelling, but this is definitely a story low point for the series. It's not bad, it's just... absent. The only good part to its story was Hop's arc, that was good. Finally, the post-post-game is meh. I really wish they took the wydon tournaments and the battle tower and just merged them. The tournament format, using your Pokémon at their strength level instead of being flattened to match, getting experience, etc, combined with ranking up and advancing? It would have been so good! Detached as they are, both the battle tower and the tournaments just feel kind of rote. But even with all of that, I really enjoyed Pokémon Sword. It's actually one of my favorites. The basic act of playing Pokémon has never been better, it was just a blast to pick up and play and interact with the game! It takes a lot of risks, smooths over lots of old crappy design, and is just fun. It's the most fun I've had in a Pokémon game since X and Y. Needless Rant: Also wow this ended up way bigger than I thought so I'm going to talk about Ori later. Ok bye! Intel Xeon w7-3465X OC | Asus Pro WS W790-E Sage SE | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 FE | 8x16GiB G-Skill Zeta R5 DDR5-6000 | Windows 11 22H2 | (details)
MacBook Pro 14in | M1 Max (32 GPU Cores) | 64GB LPDDR5 6400 | macOS 13
01-07-2020, 07:44 PM
I actually liked Pokémon Ultra Sun. It's probably an unpopular opinion. Yeah, the game was extremely linear but it was actually fine. The story was completely ridiculous, and yet I had no issue with it. You take control of an 11-year old kid on his quest to become the champion who also happens to casually walk in on a conspiracy between a cooperation and a dimension-consuming Pokémon. No big deal. Aaaaaaaand you just happen to save the world and all these dimensions along your way to become champion. Afterwards you just continue on your journey like nothing ever happend. Ohh yeah, and you get to get to catch which is probably the most powerful Pokémon in the existence of the game's lore. Just casually in the possession of a 11-year old kid.
And still I had no issue with the whole story and game's linearity. It's probably because the story actually was present throughout the whole game. Getting thrown in these ridiculous situations always managed to entertain me. Team Skull were entertaining villains throughout. I loved the occasional dialogue options. While it absolutely doesn't matter for the story it's quite funny. Well... At least that's how I think of Ultra Sun. Ohh yeah, about Ori and the Blind Forest. It's absolutely amazing. Don't you dare saying anything less about it. Well... Except for the new content of the Definitive Edition. That was not really bad, but it was kinda unnecessary to add more to a game which was essentially nearly perfect. If you manage to make me replay a game at a higher difficulty, then you know you did a job right. In case you didn't know, there is a sequel coming out in March. 01-07-2020, 09:30 PM
Some Pokemon thoughts of mine...
Team Skull is the best team. Guzma is the best boss. It's a shame Ultra Sun/Moon took out his best line ("Y'all are stupid"). I liked Sun and Moon actually. The overworld engine was terrible, character animations were stiff as hell, and your character never changes their expression. It was virtually a hallway in terms of design, but it brought me back to Pokemon after abandoning it after Diamond and Pearl (and now I have to play all the ones I missed). Hop is the new Hau, minus the malasada. A "born to lose" mostly happy/over excited rival you continually smack down for free EXP and laughs. Even has the same exaggerated hand animations as Hau at times. At least Hop has more character. And at least Sword and Shield gives you 3 potential rivals. Spoiler: So first the good points. Bash is awesome. Very very very good design there! It recontextualized combat into platforming and just, mmm good design! Ori is also very pretty and a metroidvania, one of my favorite genres! And the story was pretty cute too, with lots of "aww" moments. However, the combat (outside of Bash) is really boring. It's literally just mashing the button to take out enemies, or hold the button to pop and hurt lots of enemies. You don't even aim. The platforming was floaty and flowy, which feels great when running about, but it too often required landing on very tiny surfaces which conflicted with its floaty-flowy style. I very often did a dance around poles where I climbed up them, went over and past them, climbed up the other side, repeat, until finally landing on top. The run-away sections, the "bosses" of the game, were the worst though. I'm not a big fan of chase sequences in games, and Ori was nooo exception. It shifted away from the gameplay I liked and turned into a high-precision platformer (with floaty controls, bad combination) that forced me to be perfect for 1-2 minutes straight, otherwise, restart. My brain can't focus for long protracted periods of intense and precise activity, so I had to just brute force it with repetition and memorization, and that's very not fun for me. Also the game's multi-monitor support was unusually bad. Ori just straight up ignored the primary monitor and always went to the left-most display. I have honestly never encountered THAT before! From the size differences of the paragraphs above, you might think that I didn't like it, but, it was a really fun little game! It just took more time to explain the bad bits. Sure it had some times that bothered me, but mostly it was a great way to spend 10 hours time. I liked it enough that I even 100%'d it! With it's nice map system, it didn't take long at all. All in all, it was fun, and I'm definitely going to get the sequel when it comes out! As for the Definitive Edition addons, they made progression a little weird, but they are really nice. Like, I avoided the dark zone assuming I'd get something to reveal it later, and then the game ended and I as like, wait. But the new addons are pretty nice. The dash is so nice! So much better than walking. Intel Xeon w7-3465X OC | Asus Pro WS W790-E Sage SE | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 FE | 8x16GiB G-Skill Zeta R5 DDR5-6000 | Windows 11 22H2 | (details)
MacBook Pro 14in | M1 Max (32 GPU Cores) | 64GB LPDDR5 6400 | macOS 13
(01-09-2020, 05:09 PM)MayImilae Wrote: I haven't finished Sword yet (thanks to Astral Chain, Luigi's Mansion 3, Links Awakening), and I'm not even at the 4th gym challenge yet, but I agree with a lot of what you've said. This is one of the most fun Pokemon games I've played in years. I've been having so much fun in the Wild Area catching Pokemon and leveling them up and playing with different teams, way more than I have in a long time. I think this game will be my first time completing the Pokedex since the GBA era (even if it's not really the "full" Pokedex). (01-07-2020, 12:18 PM)MayImilae Wrote: I do wish there was more to do in Sword and Shield, like, a better post-post-game, and maybe a bit of challenge to get a feeling of accomplishment to accentuate the sportsy feel, but even so, I really enjoyed my time with Sword. I really hope they expand on these concepts and take this even further in the next game. More of the game as wild area, more challenge so I'm not super over powered from enjoying the wild area, and a more tournament-y post-post-game are on my wish list. I am not expecting the next game to be the "breath of the wild" of the Pokémon series any more than I expected this one to be, but I like what Pokémon has done with this game, and I want them to keep going with this and keep making it better. What are your thoughts on the Isle of Armor and Crown Tundra DLC? Since it's taking the place of the 3rd version game, this looks like it'll be a great post-game. And more Pokemon too. I'm pretty excited for it. And is anybody freaking out of the remastering of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon? It's my favorite spinoff game and favorite overall soundtrack of any Pokemon game, and they didn't mess with perfection. Hearing it again in the demo on my Switch with crystal clear audio was a magical moment. The new art style took a little getting used to, and they could have used the 3DS visuals if they wanted to, but it works surprisingly well once you play it. concerns and speculations and spoilers: 01-12-2020, 06:52 PM
It's kind of a slap in the face, that Expansion Pass. Sword and Shield was already pretty lacking in polish and content. Now stuff that arguably should have been part of the main game (you know, if Game Freak had spent another year developing theses games) is going to be paid DLC by the looks of it. From the start there should have been more Wild Areas, more Pokemon, and just more stuff to do in general. So now you get the chance to pay (again) to experience what a lot of fans were originally expecting from a mainline Pokemon game.
I understand that no one works for free, so paid DLC in itself isn't the issue. I'm also glad to see they aren't giving fluff updates or abandoning Sword and Shield as a "done deal" kind of game. But given how mixed a lot of the reception has been (Sword and Shield have great "cores" - catching and battling - but everything else is meh), I dunno. Rubs me the wrong way. 01-12-2020, 08:42 PM
I'm quite happy with the DLC plans. I've never really been a big fan of the whole "release the game again" thing, so I've always just played through the first version or waited until the later version. I mean, I've never enjoyed playing through a game twice just to get to some a tiny bit of new content *cough* RPG evil playthroughs *cough*. So I'm really glad they are doing this. I'll get to revisit the game I enjoyed and advance my team up to level 100, I get to play new content in the game I liked, and I don't have to replay a whole bunch of stuff I've already done. So I think this is great route for Pokémon to go. And honestly, they should have done this years ago!
Intel Xeon w7-3465X OC | Asus Pro WS W790-E Sage SE | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 FE | 8x16GiB G-Skill Zeta R5 DDR5-6000 | Windows 11 22H2 | (details)
MacBook Pro 14in | M1 Max (32 GPU Cores) | 64GB LPDDR5 6400 | macOS 13
You're right. It's breaking up the formula of "release the game again" and replacing it with "sell decent/okay base game, sell DLC that makes it an actual finished product".
Like I said, the DLC itself isn't the problem. The problem is that what's DLC should have been there Day One (even just some of it). Expansions are fine by me, but in this case Sword and Shield were pretty weak entries, so it feels like a snub. Pay more money to get the content that a lot of fans felt should have been there in the beginning. You could argue that Game Freak was rushed or lazy or pressured to release early or whatever when they dropped the ball on numerous aspects of Sword and Shield, so it stings that a bunch of complaints are getting addressed as a paid add-on. At least in the case of other editions (Yellow, Crystal, Emerald, Platinum, Ultra) the original games had a fair amount of stuff inside the games. Sword and Shield on the other hand are kind of sparse. You could ignore the quasi-definitive edition Pokemon games without missing out on significant features because the regular ones were very complete games in their own rights, but Sword and Shield always felt like they weren't as polished as a product. |
« Next Oldest | Next Newest »
|