Pokemon Gotta Catch-Em-All

So, I have a few days to pick my starter. I think Scorbunny is out, but I haven't been able to settle on either of the others yet. Hmm.

Sundown wrote:

Yep, general consensus is that they are solid Pokémon games, if not outright good, with some more streamlining of systems to take away more tedious tasks. And it starts fast, apparently. Three quick notes from the reviews worth knowing (I read IGN, Usgamer, and ars technica):

1. Sounds like the game is about 30+ hours to beat the campaign. And there’s a pretty decent post game as well.
2. Unlike the 3DS games, it doesn’t sound like these get too frameratey.
3. Apparently they might have stripped down the number of TMs, or maybe replaced them entirely with Technical Records that are one-use, but can be grinded from certain Dynamax battles. I only saw this in one review and I’m not clear on the specifics, but that’s not particularly welcome if true.

I'm seeing there's a lack of content in general. Less interesting easter eggs, special areas, etc. There's basically no real dungeons. The open area is great, at first, but then shallow and flat.

The tradeoff is it looks good and the new Pokemon are mostly three-stage evos.

If you like collecting and battling, well, that's almost the entirety of the game now.

I hope they stop trying to put these out every year. They need more time, clearly. Give me that fully open world Pokemon game! I'm not sure Game Freak can pull it off though. Maybe they need to team up with MonolithSoft.

garion333 wrote:

Maybe they need to team up with MonolithSoft. :P

Be still my beating heart, I want this.

I think the Ultra games came out about a year after sun and moon, and then LGPE came out last year, so I think you’re right in their things being annual at this point. Maybe they do need to take an assassin’s creed type break of at least a year at some point.

Still, I’m set with my preorder. I’m not enamored with any of the starters, but I may be defaulting the water type, since that’s what I usually do when nothing really grabs me. That’s more out of habit from when you needed someone to learn surf, and the water starter was generally always a solid choice for that. Even though there are no HMs anymore, old habits die hard. Besides, it should be fairly simple to trade for the other starters once you get a ditto. That’s what I did in sun, and I wound up liking popplio than the rowlet I started with.

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Farscry, did you play Let’s Go? Did you like it better?

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I read the Eurogamer review and the part that jumps out to me is the stuff already mentioned about the world being empty.

I really want to play games these days where the world feels populated. Even if it’s something simple like Animal Crossing. Doors that open and there’s nothing or no one to interact with are bad enough.

Doors that don’t even open or routes that dead end with no point sounds boring.

I'd play it.

I've been reading more reviews because I think that some of the reviewers are longtime Pokemon players who are struggling with some of the changes. (I'm a casual player so I'm happy for some of the QoL changes. I found the 3DS versions fairly bloated and cumbersome to play.)

Gamestop's review was quite glowing, but this stood out to me in Gyms:

The Gyms themselves are a refinement on the longstanding formula in which you would have to go through a maze or solve a little puzzle to reach the Gym Leader. Similarly, each has a Gym Challenge, but they vary from herding Wooloo to competing with NPC trainers to catch a Pokemon, and this keeps things from getting stale.

I realize Game Freak wanted to give the game a more e-sports feel by upping the Gyms, so my assumption now is that's why dungeons are nonexistent. You're meant to use the Gyms and raids in place of the dungeons.

I mean, I dunno what people consider "dungeons", but I do know I'll be glad not to have to do yet another cave filled with still more Zubat and Geodudes.

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ccesarano wrote:

I mean, I dunno what people consider "dungeons", but I do know I'll be glad not to have to do yet another cave filled with still more Zubat and Geodudes.

This is burned into my mind from childhood. I haven't played any other Pokemon since Red/Blue, though.

Does Sword and Shield support multiple saves? Thinking of getting a switch for the kids for xmas and not sure if this one allows multiple saves. The others in the past haven't but it would be amazing if it did!

Nothing confirmed, but it wasn’t mentioned in any of the reviews, so I would be shocked if they did support multiple saved.

I was under the impression it'd be like the Let's Go games. With that one, you could have one save per profile on the Switch. So my and my kids all had our own games going.

I was assuming that's the same for this. I'd guess b/c the profile saves are system wide.

Ah interesting, ok so as long as they had their own profile then they could each play and not overwrite each others teams or story progress. Hope that's the case.

Yeah that’s how it worked with Let’s Go. And as far as I know, every other switch game.

Got my copy in the mail. Now if only I could get my wife, kids and parents who drove all day to visit us to leave...

Well my kids are loving the new Pokémon designs. I picked Grookey as my starter, and claimed my Dynamax Meowth. So far, it’s a fun time. I think I’m happy to have battles to catch wild Pokémon rather than the Let’s Go aim and throw.

I wound up going with Sobble. I love the designs of the early bird and rodent Pokemon.

Scorbunny looked so jolly that I had to pick him. I love how he just hops in place when idle in battle. The farthest I got last night was the Wild Area were I went bananas exploring and catching all the pokemon. It was fun to see all the other players just running around there but it's a bit disappointing you couldn't interact with them directly. Haven't tried raid battles or even the first gym challenge yet.

Heh, I’m just leaving the professors house. Can’t wait to see the wilds

Just got to the Wilds. One thing I love in Pokemon games is when they just throw a ton of creatures at you at once, and let you grab what interests you. Probably one of the reasons I like X and Y more than others, since it felt like the first 5 routes of that game each threw like 5 entirely new creatures at you.

Also, I just got a level 1 Grookey though the Surprise trade for an extra Rookidee I had, so I'm happy with how that turned out. It's level 1, so I'm guessing some people bred a bunch and are just throwing them out randomly to people.

These old ladies can't imagine a life without Pokémon

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EJhTDUAUYAAld2U?format=jpg&name=large)

DSGamer wrote:

These old ladies can't imagine a life without Pokémon

Sounds like clickbait.

Forlorn Hope wrote:

Scorbunny looked so jolly that I had to pick him. I love how he just hops in place when idle in battle. The farthest I got last night was the Wild Area were I went bananas exploring and catching all the pokemon. It was fun to see all the other players just running around there but it's a bit disappointing you couldn't interact with them directly. Haven't tried raid battles or even the first gym challenge yet.

Yeah, his animation when he wasn't picked at all was pretty sad.

So to correct something I typed earlier from the reviews, it doesn't look like TMs have not been replaced by TRs. Instead, they put a lot of the formerly best TMs (like Earthquake and Surf) into the one-use but grindable TRs, and have instead added in a bunch of useful but weaker moves as the TMs to fill in the gaps (like the Fire/Ice/Thunderpunches are back). That's actually a pretty reasonable trade off.

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I think to join someone else's raid you have to push "Y" and select the one you're joining. I could be wrong though since I also couldn't join any.

So the evolved Pokemon walking around outside of the grass, are they catchable?