Pokémon Sword and Shield |OT| God Save The Vespiquen
- Thread starter Xavi
- Start date
- Status
Well, I finished the postgame questline. Unless there’s another one or something I’m pretty close to finished with the game. I’ll check out Battle Tower tomorrow.
Dracovish is a demon that wants nothing but pain for the unholy world he was brought into. The signature moves are okay on the other fossils, but Dracovish takes it to Barraskewda levels of crazy.
The plastic look this gen is very off, especially for the newer Pokemon. Stuff like Obstagoon, Rillaboom, Purrserker, and anything in general that has intricate hair or appendages looks much better in the official art. The softer cel shaded look of Gen 6 and 7 with higher saturation would have been perfect imo, I hope they cottrct this for Gen 9.
I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but I'd like to know how many (the number, not names) Galarian forms there are? Just to get my expectations in check.
Bonus points if you can tell me in terms of raw number of Pokemon (e.g., koffing/weezing counts as 2) as well as the number in terms of evolution lines (e.g., koffing/weezing count as one).
Bonus points if you can tell me in terms of raw number of Pokemon (e.g., koffing/weezing counts as 2) as well as the number in terms of evolution lines (e.g., koffing/weezing count as one).
I've only used it when playing ranked. It asks you to select a team and they're all ready to go.
Ok I’m glad that I’m not crazy, cuz I fought one and that thing was fucking nuts. It just used one tail whip-like attack over and over and one shot everyone. Was very stupid
Only Weezing has a Galar form. Koffing is the normal one.
Raw: 19
Evolution lines: 10
Evolution lines: 10
I'm starting Platinum up for the first time tomorrow. :3Remember when cities had questlines?
They still have tho ? Nothing outstanding but it is still there.Remember when cities had questlines?
https://www.smogon.com/forums/forums/uncharted-territory.525/ for now.
Smogon is pretty much the hub for online Pokemon strategising.
I really wish they'd made the towns/cities bigger, and had a DQ11-esque story that involved travelling around to them a second time so that we could explore.
I like these games but honestly ... yeah, what was that? especially cause B/W managed to solve this issue through music with vocals.
Yup. It's really bad. For a certain scenes, they should had voice acting. Like the beginning with Chairman Rose introducing people to the world of Pokemon.
They should just get voice acting for all of it. Honestly, it would make a world of difference. If they can do it for a niche title like Fire Emblem 3H, they can sure as shit do it for a double digit million seller like Pokemon.
Here;s hoping for gen 9...ahh who am I kidding.
Got my water badge! Now, I’m slowly going through the cave, with that sweet, chill music.
(If there’s one thing this game has, it’s some of the best music in the series. Some complete bangers, chill house and jazz, etc., aye?
Absolute favourite is the clothing store so far.
Also, about one of the rivals:
(If there’s one thing this game has, it’s some of the best music in the series. Some complete bangers, chill house and jazz, etc., aye?
Absolute favourite is the clothing store so far.
Also, about one of the rivals:
They totally modelled Bede‘s personality and all after Dio, didn’t they? From his demeaning and condescending, holier-than-thou personality, that blasted brush back of his hair, etc.
Oh awesome. I'm on Route 10 so I'll be sure to stock up when I get to Wyndon.
Can you give me an example of a location-based questline in Sword & Shield?
OP
OP
OP
OP
Paula in Hammerlocke, you have to deliver an old letter.
That was really rough. It was made worse by the tapping sound of his foot, which made it feel like the music was so low that you could hear it and that everybody else was just dead silent.
I'm engrossed by Death Stranding at the moment but I keep popping in here hoping to see glowing impressions that will motivate me to boot up Pokemon Sword, which has been preloaded and idling on my home menu since launch. At least the icon is cool, I s'ppose!
:\
Some quest.
I'm not going to gatekeep and say "that doesn't count" but I will at least clarify what I mean.
In earlier Pokémon games, arriving at a new town often meant overcoming a specific obstacle or resolving a specific task before you could complete the gym. Many of these took the form of dungeons for the player to navigate, but other times they were a series of battles or miniature scenarios. I'll use the Game Boy games as a point of reference. In some cases, beating the gym leader was not what was required to advance the story and beating the gym leader was incidental.
For example, upon arriving to Cerulean City in Red & Blue, you had to defeat your rival, pass the Nugget Bridge, and meet Bill. Bill would give you a key item - the SS Ticket - which was integral to your advancement in the next city. Meanwhile, a break-in had occurred in-town, building up context for Team Rocket. Clearing the Nugget Bridge and defeating the Team Rocket Grunt who stole Dig eliminates the Team Rocket threat in Cerulean City. You also can catch a glimpse of a mysterious cave with a man in front of it that you cannot access. You don't know what it is, but something is out there.
All of these activities are completely separate from defeating Misty in the gym.
Most towns in these games are like this.
Before you face Lt. Surge, you must explore the SS Anne and obtain a key item in the form of Cut. This huge ship has more square footage than some towns. You meet your rival, you meet a sea captain, and you gain access to Surge's gym.
In Fuschia City, you have to venture in to the Safari Zone. The Safari Zone gates you in two ways with two key items: the warden's teeth and the HM for Surf. All these objectives, locations, and characters are completely separate from the gym challenge in this city.
Before you can face Blaine, you have to navigate the burned laboratory and learn about the secret of Mew, the creation of Mewtwo, and how the lab was destroyed. Inside these ruins you would also find a key item that let you in to Blaine's Gym.
Celadon City has the Game Corner dungeon, Saffron City has the Silph Co dungeon, etc etc.
All of these quest lines and challenges are complex, location specific, and defined the player experience in these areas. In Sword & Shield, your singular goal at any given time is to beat the gym leader in that town and there is never anything stopping you from doing it. You just go there, beat them, and move on. Almost every city is like this. The exceptions are extremely minimal and extremely uncommon.
For example, when you go to Nessa's City whose name I cannot remember because you don't do anything there, you meet her outside a lighthouse where she gives you her league card. This is a far cry from Gold & Silver which has a location-based quest line about a sick Ampharos who keeps the lighthouse lit. Before Jasmine will challenge you, you must clear the lighthouse and obtain a key item in the form of medicine to treat the creature who keeps the lighthouse lit. But in Sword & Shield, the lighthouse is inaccessible and Nessa is just standing there.
Pokémon has dropped all of these design philosophies and created a main quest without obstacles. There are no side characters. There are no dungeons. There are no subplots. There are no key items. There is never anything gating your advancement other than the singular quest function: defeat the gym leader.
I find this very deflating. Locations have no function or meaning other than hosting a gym. There is no lore, there are no subplots, there are no side characters, and you only do one thing in that town: beat the gym.
So while talking to one NPC in one city and then another NPC in another city technically counts as a sidequest, it's hardly the level of complexity and location-based content this series used to be famous for.
It's clearly unfinished, but that post above really emphasizes just how unfinished it is. I tried to take my time with it, but still ended up rushing through because the towns and routes serve as tiny pointless filler for the gym battles. They are so unnecessary besides housing each gym. There aren't even NPCs or building interiors in Spikemuth.
Damn, this is a bummer to hear. I haven't started yet, but doesn't Team Yell show up to gate your progression at points? And I thought pre-release there was talk of trials like herding Wooloo from Yamper or whatever to gain an audience with a gym leader?
Team Yell just acts like an invisible wall at different points in the game
The herding Wooloo thing is just a gym puzzle like the old games (Sabrina's teleporters, Blaine's quizzes, etc). Like it's literally in the gym.
Trials are not much different from any gym mechanic in Pokemon. Some may let you skip fighting trainers, but overall it's just a fancy gym mechanic like every other gen.
Like Wrench Ninja says, each gym does have a little minigame to it. These are fine. I do like them.
But Team Yell literally just stands there yelling preventing you from leaving the town early because God forbid the player continue down a straight path any further than they should.
I see. So the gyms still have their light gimmicks, but the towns that house the gyms are generally unremarkable in terms of questing, NPCs or lore.
Huh, so Team Yell just stonewalls you until you complete a town's gym challenge? Hmm.
I'm still looking forward to the simple loop of collecting new 'mons and old faves, and seeing the NPC designs, but given how interesting Galar looked, it seems like there's untapped potential here.
Maybe a third version of the game could ramp up the complexity of the towns and what you do in each.
Wow, this looks astonishingly lazy.
Going from the bespoke animations and environmental details of Luigi's Mansion 3 to this really underscores a certain absence of efforts on Game Freak's part. Or at least, they invested their effort elsewhere in the game. I don't mean to suggest they're "lazy" overall, but clearly their priorities were different.
There is very, very little to do in any given town. They look nice but there's just nothing in them. A Pokémon center, a gym, and maybe an NPC that will say "I sure do love living with my [Pokémon Name]".
Do you have any ideas why they took this more, uh, minimalist route? Do you get the impression the team was maybe rushed? Or that they maybe put their time and energy into other aspects of the game?
I think part of the frustration underpinning this game's release is that the resources available to this developer don't seem commensurate to the revenues the games bring in (six million copies in three days in Japan).
When Sony has a high-profile release, i.e. Uncharted 4 or God of War or the recent Death Stranding, you can really see all of their cash burning onscreen. I don't think Pokemon needs to outsource a million contractors to model unique pottery for a single NPC's home like the one chateau in Uncharted 4, but I think fans feel frustrated because they know that if any company could afford to invest its game's environmental design, etc, it should be TPC backing Game Freak.
On the flip side, the profit margins for these games must be INSANE, lol.
I don't know. I think every Pokémon fan has their theories and armchair conjecture but the fact is we don't know. It could be time. It could be budget. It could be talent. But it also could be vision. All we know for sure is that since XY the series has gotten simpler and simpler, thinner and thinner, with fewer and fewer features and less and less content.
But for everything that could be "forcing" this to happen, it might also just be the vision of the series. Remember the infamous ORAS quotes (this is a fan translation from Reddit, just FYI):
Game Freak might just want to make games without obstacles and so these are the games they make. They might want the pace to be brisk with no depth because they don't think people have the attention span to stay in one place for too long. I don't know. I don't understand it. I don't think anyone but Game Freak does.
The best part about these games is the Wild Area, which I'd say is their most successful experiment ever. The new Pokémon are also a series-high. Certain competitive mechanics have been streamlined and made way more accessible and this is great too.
But other than that, this is probably the weakest the series has ever been. In my opinion, anyway. I find it extremely disheartening. I'll still play it for 400 hours but this series deserves and could be so much better. I don't understand how people just swallow and energetically excuse a series as rapidly diminishing as this one.
Edit: Mobile typos
Last edited:
I haven't played a Pokemon game since Crystal.. but I am falling in love with it all over again. Even though I don't know half of the pokeman they are sooo cute.
I don't think anyone knows for sure but I fear they are heading into WWE2K territory. While these games are not as bad as the WWE games I am increasingly getting the feeling that they know the game is going to sell to its audience no matter what so why bother doing anything more than the bare minimum.
Luigi's Mansion 3 is a weird point of comparison because there were multiple times I'd play that game and find the exact same hotel room layout.
Granted, that's a hotel so of course you'd expect uniformity in rooms, but entering every room and being like "okay time to check every same area" was a bit grating.
Very interesting. I've been meaning to ask for your impressions in a PM, but this works too, lol.
Maybe Game Freak figures that people want to find and catch Pokemon above all other things. Hence the Wild Area's variety of them. Hence the relative absence of obstacles. This may be partly informed by the success of Pokemon Go, where the core of the experience was chancing upon Pokemon and capturing them.
But I agree that something is lost when you sideline the adventure and intrigue that captured our imagination as kids.
All this being said... You mentioned this being a trend. Maybe I remember incorrectly, but Sun and Moon seemed to feature a decent amount of adventure. I actually found its setpieces to be quite memorable. For example, the otherworldly boss battle with a possessed Lusamine (or whatever her name was — the hot mom in heels, lol). The pathfinding from one place to the next was generally super-linear, and there was way too much handholding at the start. But overall, Alola was an exciting region.
I feel like this critique only really applies to the RIP Suites, which is just one of... 16 floors in LM3? 17 floors? Did you reach the medieval castle, the botanical gardens, the movie set, the history museum, the boilerworks, the desert ruins, the pirate cove, etc?
- Status