Here we go again with Gen III! Dear fellow gamers, may I present you with my Mudkip run of
Sapphire, featuring the aptly named Tidal Wave and clocking at a tiny 7h45 of delightful roaming
— my newest record! Gee, we're nearly treading on speedrun territory at that point! I'm getting much better at exploiting Hoenn's cleverly designed map to save playtime and enhance that sweet, sweet rushing feeling I love to get from my
Pokemon runs in general, and from my Gen III runs in particular. I mean, Hoenn seems to have been designed with speed and efficiency in mind: if you play your cards right, you can cross the whole region without backtracking a single time! And some sections can be short-circuited entirely with no consequences whatsoever, such as Routes 120 to 134. I'm never setting foot again in Pacifidlog Town, let me tell you that.
With his supremely balanced stats and his double Water-Ground typing that leaves him with but a single weakness, Mudkip had the potential to be one of the most badass Water Starters
— like,
Piplup levels of badassery; but alas, the little amphibian is severely let down by his learnset, which is infested with moves with low accuracy. Low accuracy and one-shooting at first turn don't go well together, and Tidal Wave's imprecise move pool really affected the smoothness of my progression. Or at least, it did until I cleared Petalburg City's Gym, after which the tables were suddenly turned move-wise: literally from one Gym to the next, I got hold of Surf, Ice Beam, Return and Earthquake, and the face of my run was changed forever. After that, it was pretty much guaranteed one-shooting all the way to the Champion
— no Battle Items, no hassle. One more Gen III Starter Run polished off with honours, next please!
I also got the answer to the question raised by my
Torchic run, i.e. is May as much of a giant douchebag as Brendan? The answer is limpid: yes, she is
— although we're dealing with a different type of douchiness there. Her way of throwing shade at your Trainer is much subtler than Brendan's, and cuts all the deeper for it. She looks nice enough at first sight, with her cute shyness and apparent friendliness; but she reveals her true colours soon enough. See, May is so happy with herself and so darn self-sufficient that she couldn't care less about having a rival. I used to think that she was a loser for focusing on discovering all species of Pokemons more than on battling me; but I realize now that
I was the loser here, at least in her eyes. As far as she's concerned, I'm totally not worthy of obsessing over, and thus she does her thing and royally ignores me. Ouch, the
shade.
The only times May bothers giving me attention is when she wants to use me as a convenient foil to rub her overinflated ego
— and boy, does she try
hard to take the credit indeed, claiming that I got stronger for her sake and that our past battles inspired me to better myself. Erm,
excuse me? You're not the bloody centre of the Universe here, let alone the centre of
my universe. And sure enough, she tried to sneak into the trophy room with me, just like that dirty little minx Brendan. Savage! And yet: even though I'm the butt of the joke here, I have to tip my hat to GameFreak for coming up with subtler styles of rivalvry that time around, as well as two vastly different yet just as potent brands of shadiness. Brendan and May are the most insulting and infuriating rivals ever, and that also makes them the most brilliant and efficient ones.
Two down, one to go! Treecko's stellar reputation preceeds him, and I sure hope he will offer me a Grass Starter solo run worthy of the name. I'll see you soon with lush tidings of
Emerald, dear fellow gamers; until there, thanks for reading as usual, and drop by anytime!
I'd say they had to balance the starters somehow, but given how Torchic is severely OP, especially in later gens....look, water starters just seem to get the worst draw of the bunch, with a few exceptions. If it weren't for the fire/fighting obsession of the later gens, it'd probably be the most hated type out of all the starters. Sobble looks adorable, but so did Rowlet, so judge is still out on that one (though, so far, it's the only starter I'm interested in).
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of Sword of Shield....ooohhhh boy, E3 was a dozy. Watching GF excuses just made it all worse. "We wanted to give other pokemon a chance to shine" while giving the Champion a Charizard, lick my taint GF. I bet all gen I pokemon will be in, since they conveniently have the models from let's go.
What's even worse, is now they have absolutely no excuse for not having following pokemon. You have a severely reduced number of pokemon, and a good number of them already have following animations, since again, I'm betting most of gen I is in. Shameful.
But hey, we get Dynamaxing in return, which is the speculated reason why the pokedex is so poor. Aren't we all so happy the game got screwed over for a dumb gimmick. The graphics aren't even that good! Digimon on Vita wants a word (and again, that game has 3 following digimon). The animations don't look that good either. Yokai Watch 3 wants a word, it managed to give hundreds of monsters 12 animations each, on a weaker system with a much smaller budget.
Seriously, Pokemon has made more money than Disney Princesses. They're not a rinky-dinky developer with 5 employees living on ramen. They need to either hire more people (because there's rumours the team size is still the same as in the DS era, and that's insane), or drop the yearly releases. Farm the license out to other developers to make spin-offs in between gens like in the DS era instead of this mobile crap, and maybe then we'll actually get the chance to get a good game, since GF sure as heck can't make them anymore!
Keep in mind GF is also working on another game, Village or some crap, at the same time, so no wonder Sword and Shield is shaping up to be garbage on arrival.
Gee, I love your GameFreak rants! They kinda allow me to let out my own frustrations vicariously. As a newcomer, I'm certainly not as emotionally invested in the series as you, and I'll probably never be; but still, some of GameFreak's decisions regarding game design definitely irritate and aggravate me.
DeleteThanks, I'm glad to see they are appreciated. I'd love to eat my own hat like I did with Let's Go, but there's not much hope for sword and shield...what I loved most from Let's Go besides the partner eevee/pikachu and following pokemon was the region that was almost open world in terms of progression and the simple story. Both of which exist only because Gen I was from a much better time. I very much doubt Sword and Shield won't have a terrible story with a linear map, and partner and following are out for Kaiju pokemonn instead.
DeleteAnd I'm serious when I say I want to see the license farmed out. I keep hoping with each new spin-off announcement we get something good. Instead we get Pokemon Quest, Pokemon Masters and Pokemon Sleep...mobile crap. At this point, will we even get a new mystery dungeon? I doubt it.
I seriously hope most people are waking up to Pokemon's BS though. I know there's always been some sort of backlash in the last few gens before a new release but come on.....barely any pokemon in a franchise that has sold itself on the "gotta catch'em all" slogan for 20 years. On top of them lying to our faces about the reasons why. If this doesn't wake the general public up, I give up all hope.
And I'm fine. I'm certainly invested in it, but I'm used to see series I love go down the crapper. Worst was the sims. At least Spyro, Crash and Digimon are making comebacks, so there's something to be happy about. Yokai watch 4 looks pretty good and with pokemon ever so slowly causing more controversy, I hope this will stop people calling any game with monsters partners a pokemon rip-off.
Honestly, it will hurt me way more to write off Megaten, which I'm dangerously close too, since they do nothing but milk persona nowadays. No more unique spin-offs, including my beloved devil survivor. At this point we haven't gotten news on Shin Megami Tensei V for two years. But we have 3 persona 5 spin-offs and an enhanced edition already...I hate to say this, but eat my hat Atlus.
I'd love a new Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, but let's be honest: the chances of it ever happening are painfully slim. I must admit that I renounced the series in my mind already.
DeleteFunny that you're talking about writing off MegaTen, when I have yet to play a single one of those games... :P Makes me feel like I'm coming to the party not just super-late, but when everybody is done cleaning and packing. :D Who knows, maybe the series will be over for good when I finally dive into it.
So sad about megaten....I honestly rue the day persona became popular, I really do.
DeleteOn the bright side, the digimon story games get called persona rip-offs for a reason. They are just as dark (even darker in some moments), explore characters deeply, and if you pick the hard difficulty, may the lord have mercy on you. Only without the annoying school theme and 2 billion waifus, which to me is a plus. Cyber Sleuth had both a female and male secondary characters for you to fawn over, as did the newest world entry. Even Hacker's memory did, and that game only let you play as a male. Much better than the waifu brigade. If they manage to somehow incorporate social links without the school stuff in the next entry, then yeah, they're a superior persona in my book.
Also, lots of people are hoping Digimon Survive will be like Devil Survivor, what with all the talk of hard choices and both being strategy games. A bit of a far-off dream, but since Atlus is crap now, it's all we can hope now. Religious themes are out, which is a bummer, and I don't know if they'll have the guts to kill characters off like Devil Survivor. But like I said...it's our only hope. Because all atlus will give us is more persona spin offs.
Speaking of Hacker's Memory, now that is what the third entry in a pokemon generation should be. They reused 85% of their assets and had some characters make cameos, sure, but they made a completely new storyline and new characters, added tons of digimon, and even extra modes for post game content that completely change gameplay. Now that's how you re-use assets, GF!
And yeah, I know I'm praising Digimon a lot, and it's completely unfair to try to get it to replace both Megaten and Pokemon...but I think the franchise deserves the praise after the rough years it had. The fact it improved so much, and yet it still has guts to try new things, instead of sticking to the two types of gameplay that are proven to work is commendable. The lack of DLC and microtransaction crap also helps(in fact, the newest world entry had tons of free DLC, how often do we see that anymore). It's just too bad Bandai Namco always end up removing the games from the digital stores, like they do with all their other anime titles except for a few dragon ball games. Licenses are crap. At least the games always go on sale, so you can get them for 20 euros before even a year is up.
You know what? You've been praising Digimon so very much in Pokemon-related posts that I now feel like I HAVE to give the series a try. And thus my next playthrough will not be yet another Pokemon solo run, but rather a Digimon run. Of which entry, not that'll be a surprise. Stay tuned for my first impressions! ^^
DeleteI hope you start with the Vita titles. Or the PSP ones, if you use the english translations. The first DS game is good, though incredibly grindy if you want certain digimon, the third game on PS1 is also good, and the very first game...is a cult classic, with a lot of bugs due to the translation team. Also severely obtuse without a guide, but charming like no other game. Truly unique.
DeleteOther entries...well, there's a reason people stopped buying them. Unlike Pokemon, they spent about 13 years jumping from genre from genre at a whim (that pet sim was good, let's follow it up with a dungeon crawler where you use a tank throughout the dungeon. Nah, let's go for a normal RPG now. Now a fighting game. Now a racing game. Now back to an RPG, but way shorter, and let's plaster the commands all over the digimon, instead of a normal clean UI. Ooohhh, now let's do a hack n' slash).
Some of the times those ideas were great. Most of the times, the games were average. And some, they were truly awful (Digimon World 4, the hack and slash, is just about the worst). After so many experimentation, they finally managed to nail down what mostly works, and judging by Digimon Survive, they seem to be able to translate that to genres they never tried before (which is surprising at this point, I know).
Ironically, the games finally reached the good point at the tail end of the PSP...when the 3DS came along. Which is when the problems with pokemon started to become apparent. Now we're here; the years of experimentation has lead digimon to actually know what it wants to do and what it needs to change. The years of stagnation has lead pokemon to add gimmick after gimmick in a desperate attempt to freshen up the series. And yet, because they always sell well, pokemon never truly gets to figure what works and what doesn't, so no feature ever sticks. If they got a sales failure like Digimon World 4, I guarantee they'd at least figure out that the partner and following pokemon from let's go were good.
The 'dark' tone only truly came along starting with the vita, though the games always had a bit more story than pokemon, and a bit more varied at that. Nowadays they also always have two games in development, one of which is always a story game, so if the RPGs are what you like, you get one about every 2 years.
Also, I hope you like the designs. While I have some problem with Mega digimon in general (because 90% of them are humanoid, whereas the previous levels have an even split between feral and humanoid digimon), one thing I always loved about digimon is that they let some of their monsters actually be ugly. In such a huge roster, that’s totally okay! Also, if you pick any story or world title, they actually follow you *cough*
Based on the consoles I own and the fact that I don't play emulation (anymore) nor Japanese games (yet), I'm pretty sure you can deduce which line I'm currently playing, and on which system. ^^
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