New Pokémon Game

[LonesomeLamp]

Legends: Arceus

I started playing Pokémon at gen 3 (ruby/sapphire/emerald). It was great. I loved it. Still my favorite generation (but I’ll circle back around to that in a bit). Then I got the Nintendo DS and Pokémon Diamond. Diamond wasn’t bad but it felt way too easy. Barely struggled at three battles, didn’t struggle at all with the others. I wanted Pearl but was too poor to afford it and Diamond wasn’t interesting enough to get me to play any of the next two or three gens.

I finally picked it back up on 2DS with Alpha Sapphire (the gen 3 remake). I finally had fun again. It was still pretty easy, but not overly so as with Diamond. It had an interesting story, though it was basically a rehash like all previous gens. Having some landscape changes and layout changes to some of the towns was a nice refresher. It kept the familiarity of the landscape and all that to cement the feel of the older games, but the changes/updates kept me in the mindset that the new one takes place in the future (I think). I also felt like it tried too hard to hold onto past elements. Like the devs couldn’t decide if the new version took place in the future or would be its own identity parallel to the original. Either way, I liked the game overall.

And then I played Moon. Moon was a very nice change of pace. Beautiful scenery, good story (which, again, is basically a rehash). You can even let a Pokémon out of its ball beside you and you could do stuff with it. One of my favorite gens. But after playing Moon a while, I skipped Sun and then I skipped Sword and Shield and that leads us to the most recent installment of the series.

I thought I wasn’t going to like the new game as much. I heard it had taken a different approach at the series and it has a bit of a survival/exploration thing going on. It even brought along a crafting system. And I’ve been reading mixed reviews about it (with the biggest complaint being that it’s too dialog heavy). I decided to buy it and try it anyway. It is easily one of the best Pokémon games I have ever played.

Yeah it has a ton of dialogue, but it’s because there’s so much crap the game has to teach you. I’ve been reading people say they had already beaten the game before they found out how to use a system the game tells you about in—literally—the first five minutes of playing it. And lemme tell you, there is a lot of new stuff in the game. The battle system has been redone, obviously the crafting system been added, there’s a damage system for you, the player character (I’ll get to that), shiny Pokémon spawns have been tweaked, the story is more than just a rehash this time and the game is fully 3D.

In this game, the story starts out with you falling from the sky and into the past. Instead of there being two main teams (ie, aqua/magma, diamond/Pearl) where you team up with one to take down the other, this game has three teams all working together for once (though they still bicker at each other sometimes lol). Wild Pokémon are just out roaming the fields and you can run right up to them or sneak/run around them. You can throw pokeballs (to catch them) without initiating battle (you can quite literally catch a ton of Pokémon without stopping by running around and throwing balls left and right).

One lesson I learned during my first Pokémon battle in the game: don’t stand between the battling Pokémon. I myself took a direct hit from the opposing ‘mon on its very first attack. Which reminds me, the wild Pokémon can and usually will try to attack your character and you can swap between your party Pokémon before tossing one into battle (you actually have to choose one and manually toss it out to initiate battle). You can also throw berries and cakes and stuff to attract Pokémon. You can throw balls of mud (and one or two other items) at Pokémon to hit them in an attempt to put them into a daze (I like throwing them at NPCs though, even though they won’t collide with them).

Another game mechanic that they brought in but don’t explain very well is fainting. More specifically, what happens as a result of fainting. In previous gens, if your team got wiped out, you was sent to the last-visited Pokémon center. In this game, if your team is wiped out, you still have to run tf away from battle (and running from battle via the option just ends the battle, but you still need to actually run away). If your character themself gets hit by the Pokémon enough times, that’s when you faint, even if your team is at full health. And when you faint, you drop items as opposed to money, but this is where the new mechanic comes into play. If you lose your items, they’re dropped as a single satchel, and then that satchel is deposited into another real-world player’s game for them to recover (and other player’s stuff can end up in your game for you to recover). Recovering satchels sends the items back to their owner, but you get something called “merit points,” which is another form of special game currency, but you also get a chance to get an item reward too.

I absolutely recommend this game. They took away most interaction features from the pokemon, but you can still have your Pokémon out beside you. You can have your entire party out at once and they’ll interact with each other sometimes. I was doing a mission last night and noticed that when I’d toss a Pokémon out, it would interact with the other one for a moment before retreating back to its ball (the other Pokémon, I was trying to “talk to” as part of the mission).

One last thing to say about it before I post this. This may be considered a spoiler, but your character has traveled backwards through time, meaning this game takes place early in the Pokémon universe’s timeline. It’s so early, in fact, that part of the storyline is that you’re helping the professor to build what will canonically become the worlds first-ever Pokédex. The region has one main village and many, many camps outside of the village and almost everyone is terrified or just generally afraid of Pokémon.