VoidofLight

@Orwellian87 Oh, I listen. I even criticize gamefreak myself. I'm just tired of the bad faith criticism that always comes from people who aren't even interested in the series, or people who spew nothing more than negativity.

If you want criticism I have some:

Sword and Shield isn't a great Pokemon game. It fails with the story of the game, and the region design is pretty abysmal. The whole game feels like walking down boring hallways, with it feeling like the devs wanted people to get through it as quickly as possible. The dungeon design is something that makes me sad, as caves in Pokemon games used to be visually interesting while also being good dungeons- but SwSh's caves are one floor and don't really have branching rooms nor paths.

Scarlet and Violet is probably one of my favorite games in the series gameplay-wise, but the game feels lacking in terms of the region itself, along with the performance issues that were only just recently fixed. The game has some pretty rough graphics- mostly with the textures being low quality for no real reason. The towns are pretty barren with no interiors and the biggest city in the game- Mesagoza is a city that I genuinely hate the layout of. All to the point where I avoided going there unless I outright needed to do so.

Pokemon Legends Arceus is graphically rough with the clothing textures on characters somehow being muddy. Despite this- with all three games, the core gameplay loops and the enjoyment I got from them outweighed the negatives. I don't ignore that those negatives exist, and I wish they didn't exist- but at the same time, there's a reason why I haven't quit the series yet. I was on the verge of quitting back with Pokemon Sun and Moon because I hated those games and everything that Gamefreak did with them- but now I actually see that there's some potential, and that the devs still have some kind of ambition or drive to do something new or interesting with the series.. just not the resources to really do that.

@LikelySatan I mean, if you want to waste your time- then I guess that's your prerogative. I don't see how PLA was worse than the worst fangames, given most of those tend to be genuinely awful and miss the point of the series outright- but you do you.

@Filthy I mean, I'd say that Z-A is fresh and daring compared to previous games, given that the game is actively switching from a turn-based combat system to an action combat system. Z-A is basically trying to make a Pokemon equivalent to Xenoblade Chronicles. The main reason why outlets aren't fully gushing about it is because the demo literally only has you interact with the combat for the game, and gave them a small window of time to interact with said combat. There was no exploration portion- which is a huge part of the game.

@Arawn93 The playerbase isn't who decides what is or isn't mainline. If they were, then PMD would be considered mainline more than Scarlet and Violet. It's The Pokemon Company and Gamefreak who decide what is considered mainline from what isn't. Let's Go, Pokemon Legends, and Pokemon Champions are all considered mainline games. The only distinction is that Legends is their experimental title, Let's Go was trying to capitalize off of the hype Pokemon Go had at the time while on-boarding new fans, and Champions is the new competitive situation so that the devs can be freed from having to make the new Pokemon singleplayer games focus first and foremost on the competitive scene.

Champions existing makes it clear that Gamefreak is giving themselves more wiggle-room on what they'll be able to do with a singleplayer Pokemon game at this point.

@SpaceboyScreams Or maybe there's more to games than just visuals? They were judging the game based off of the gameplay, which is more important to them than visuals. If visuals matter heavily to you, then you're going to be forever disappointed with this series. It's always been like this, ever since Pokemon Red and Blue- with Gamefreak being behind in comparison to their peers. I'd like for that to change, but as a long-term fan there's more important things I'd rather get them right than worrying about the textures of a window, or the textures on a tree.

This series has had major issues with having a massive lack of content and issues with their stories. People often cite the issue of Pokemon Sword and Shield being the Wild Area's graphics and the pokemon not being to scale- but the real issues are the level design, the story, the lack of content, and a lack of post-game outside of the DLC.

Contrast this with PLA, which is a game that got glowing reviews despite how it looks. A lot of that game looks far worse than the more polished areas of SwSh, with the water tiling from certain heights and the textures being low resolution. Yet people still love PLA because of the moment to moment gameplay and the amount of content that the game had. The story actually made sense as well- even though it relied a bit more on telling than actually showing.

While I wish Z-A would look better, it's still one of the best looking Pokemon games in the HD era, and one of the better looking open world games- showing clear signs of improvement in terms of visuals. The only game to beat Z-A visually is probably Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee.

@Filthy Most of the impressions were people talking about how they're enjoying it enough to want to actively desire to play more of the game. They just can't say for certain if the combat is better or not, given it's a massive shakeup and they only had two demos that were roughly 10 minutes of gameplay each. Not really enough to determine the flow of the game or get used to the combat.

@Arawn93 Well good thing that Legends isn't a spin-off. It's confirmed mainline by Gamefreak themselves. Check Serebii if you don't believe me.

Also Gen 9 didn't have any changes because it was in development the same time as PLA. It's why it took us until PLA to get things like overworld catching and pokemon that actually interacted with their environment instead of running around aimlessly. Gen 8 having overworld pokemon was a last minute addition added because of the popularity in Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee.. which is why it was so underbaked.

This is how generational cycles work with this series. You don't exactly get the pay-off of new features until the game after the next Generation. Gen 10 is probably going to have a turn-based battle system still, but it'll also have PLA's overworld catching system. The game after that will build on what Z-A introduced.

@LikelySatan @SpaceboyScreams There's footage of the show-floor demo on Youtube. Both slices of it. If you don't want to take the words of outlets, then you can decide based off of what you see in the actual gameplay video.

@roy130390 The reason why I think this isn't correct is because they spun competitive off into it's own game- which is one of the main factors that held Gamefreak back from making any huge changes to the gameplay or battle systems.

I really do think they're gearing up to make mainline more experimental, and that Z-A is the beginning of that. Especially after the Blueberry academy DLC had a test for us controlling pokemon, and Z-A having held items and natures.

The combat looks like it's a much needed evolution of the series. Instead of just adding a gimmick atop the same unchanging battle formula that's been in circulation since Pokemon Red and Blue- we're actually getting something new.. and it looks really fun. Seeing what we saw in the demo, I might end up pre-ordering whenever I can get the ability to do so.

The stuff in the article sounds interesting. Not the largest fan of Mega Evolution myself honestly, but the real time combat is a pretty welcomed addition, and I’m interested to see how setting the game in a city changes things.

@Serpenterror Right now a lot of people are speculating that this might be an offline adaptation of the first storyline of Champions of the Continent. Given how eerily similar the combat looks, and how it seems to have a gacha component to it.

@TheExile285 Champions of the Continent had a self-insert protagonist I believe. If this is just a full game adaptation of that game’s first story arc, then they’re probably going to go the route of a custom protagonist.

@ShieldHero Champions of the Continent is the prequel to Octopath Traveler. It’s a mobile game though.

This has to be somewhat related to Champions of the Continent, right?

The game helped me in a dark moment of time mentally.

@Skunkfish That's assuming a lot of people own USB cameras in this day and age though. The only people I've seen who own them are content creators or people who worked online.

I'm not paying for a camera along with this upgrade pack. They should make upgrade packs that require accessories to play free if you have to pay for the accessory.

@Fizza They'll be in champions, yeah- but I was mostly just talking about my own collection in HOME. Building an All Forms National Dex, and I just wish there were more permanent pokemon forms to get ahold of.

@Lizuka It's mostly meant for Competitive play, similar to Pokemon Showdown. I don't think they intended for this to have singleplayer value. If anything, it's probably being done so that the mainline games can be more like Z-A and PLA, where combat actually gets meaningful changes made to it rather than utilizing gimmicks to keep it "fresh."

@N8tiveT3ch I think they partnered with ILCA, and this game is made to work on both phones and console. The UI and battle field are eye-bleeding though.. which is a hallmark of ILCA for some reason.

I just hope it frees the mainline games from their competitive shackles, since that's what's stopping Gamefreak from evolving the series at this point in terms of combat mechanics.

I hate that this game will have nothing of value pokemon-wise given megas are temporary, but eh. At least character customization looks good.

Oh, Game Mill being behind this makes a ton more sense now. They genuinely live up to their name with how many games they produce being complete and utter rubbish.

@Spider-Kev The people who beat the game in that short amount of time were marathonning it non-stop and rushing through it. If you're actually doing everything you come across, the game is far longer.

I got a slight bit dizzy in the first level or two, but it isn’t as bad anymore. Think I got used to it.

@koopababble What does he think he is? A [BIG SHOT]?!

@Orwellian87 In the case here, it seems entirely different from the Peach situation. Often times when they bring in a younger version of a character- they don’t often go with the same exact VA.

I don’t get how you can have worse twists than the lows of Nirvana Initiative- but I guess they figured out how to surpass it.

This feels like SMT.

@Maxz Instructions unclear, my PC monitor has a crack in it where my fist previously was.

@Maxz It gave me a virus and now my PC's over-all framerate is 2FPs.

@Hisui25002 Dirty Blonde and Blonde.

@LittleOtik4Smash Why don't we have a party based spin-off for Diddy Kong?

@Princess_Lilly The product still works, it's just that it dips in intensive areas which is unavoidable on the type of hardware that the Switch 2 is. No console is without FPS dips. Even the PS5 struggles to run games like Final Fantasy XVI. In order to "optimize it" on this hardware, they'd end up having to get rid of most of the detail, or reduce what can be broken from what can't.

@The_Nintend_Pedant They wouldn't have kept the idea of breaking chunks of terrain for DK if DK didn't fit the idea. The idea of breaking terrain was something they were playing around with towards the end of Odyssey's development, but it was always just a simple test of tech. They were told to make a 3D DK game, and then decided to repurpose that idea after the fact because they believed it fit DK. Even Miyamoto and other staff who worked on the original Donkey Kong and the DK series of games approved of the gameplay fitting alongside DK.

Also, you really don't understand game dev- do you? I never said it wasn't their fault the game doesn't perform smoothly. I said that the core reason it doesn't run at 60 FPS at all times is because of the voxel system- which is incredibly intensive in terms of development for a game. The devs made it clear in their interview (which I can tell you didn't read) that the way voxels work is effectively going to take eight times the resources that a normal game without this tech would take.

"Tanaka: From a programmer’s perspective, voxel technology is well-suited for creating gameplay centered around destruction. However, it also uses a lot of system memory, and we faced the challenge of Switch not having enough to support everything we wanted to do. I'll explain with some simple arithmetic. If you're asked to double the size of a 1 × 1 pixel image in both width and height, you end up with a 2 × 2 image, which means four times as many pixels. But when you do the same with voxels, you've got width and height, but also depth to contend with. So, doubling all three dimensions gives you 2 × 2 × 2, or eight times the data. It may sound simple to just “double something,” but the reality is that memory usage, voxel density, and all kinds of processes end up gobbling up eight times the resources. It was clear that the memory available on Switch would struggle to handle that load, and we felt that manifesting the huge volume of terrain that we did in this game might have been unachievable on that platform. With the move to Switch 2, we gained not only more memory but also greater processing capacity. That gave us the freedom to incorporate gameplay ideas we'd previously abandoned because they were too demanding."

@Princess_Lilly The performance drops are because the game uses voxel terrain for everything. All of the enemies and environments in the level are built out of voxels- which is relatively resource intensive. Especially when everything is able to be taken apart and outright destroyed.

@The_Nintend_Pedant Wario is a greedy character who effectively wishes to garner riches for the sake of having them. He screws people over in his games- and his gameplay is much more than just being centered around destruction.

Donkey Kong has always been a really strong character in his series. Him using brute strength to destroy chunks of the environment makes sense from a gameplay perspective, given how he’s able to do things like lift massive barrels and chuck them with ease. On top of this, Bananza isn’t about treasure hunting while the Wario games are. DK isn’t amassing bananium because he wants to get rich- he’s digging it up so he can eat it, because he’s a Gorilla. His whole journey in Bananza is so that he can get to the center of the earth and wish for tons of Bananas to eat- at least going off of what the developers have said.

There’s a fundamental difference between the characters- and Bananza fits DK more than it would Wario given that the game was designed for DK in mind.

@AverageGamer I didn’t backtrack. Nothing you said changes the fact that Gen 10 is a Holiday 2026 release.

I really hope I enjoy this more than Odyssey. Odyssey gave me this weird uncanny feel that makes me quit halfway through replaying the game.

@AverageGamer I know the Holiday release is after the games went global, but ever since then they’ve kept that up.

I won’t be able to update the game due to the lack of internet when I pick it up.

@LazyDaisy I remember hearing it wasn’t intentional and rather a choice made because of how sprites in that era could only have a couple of colors- and that Link’s belt was already purple so the hair accidentally ended up as being purple.

@KoopaTheGamer It’s just strange since the shirt on Link’s actor is the tunic Link usually wears. Maybe they’re going with an adaptation of Zelda I.

@TheFunkyPhantom It was due to the limited color palette of the sprites. It was a choice that wasn’t intentional, or Link would have been drawn with pink hair in the official artwork for the game.

@LazyDaisy @Fiskern Read developer interviews on Link to the Past. The pink hair wasn’t intentional and was a consequence of a limited color palette for the Sprite. All the official art of Link in A Link to the Past is depicting Link with blonde hair.

Also, Link only has brown hair in Zelda I and Zelda II’s official art and sprites. Every other depiction of the character ever since A Link to the Past has been Blonde. The closest we got to brown in 3D Zelda is the Hero of Twilight, who has dirty blonde hair.

@ChopperDX “Legends is not mainline.”

Okay, so are you going to argue that with Gamefreak? Who officially counted it as mainline through interviews and official posts about the game? Because the devs and the company count it as a mainline Pokemon game.

The reason why BDSP didn’t cannibalize PLA is because again- they were faithful remakes. Remakes of games that already came out, which most people weren’t going to purchase again. PLA was a brand new game- and a sequel to the original Diamond and Pearl games- along with a prequel to Platinum.

Also, I know for a fact Gen 10 isn’t going to be until late 2026 because I’ve been following this series and it’s release patterns since I was in the third grade. If one thing hasn’t changed at all about this series, it’s that gamefreak always aims for a game a year- and aims for that game to release in the holiday season to maximize profits. They will never release a mainline game on the series’ anniversary. The only reason PLA released in January was because of an internal delay.

@Yoshi3 Link in that game is meant to be Blonde. The pink hair was a sprite miscolor. The actual art for the game has him with blonde hair.

I guess it could’ve been worse. Could’ve been something like Tom Holland. This being said, I dunno if the guy cast as Link looks that much like Link. Brown hair feels weird for a character who’s historically been blonde outside of the first game.

@ChopperDX We aren't getting a Gen 10 reveal here. At all. Believe most of us or don't, but the most we're getting is Z-A news and that's all.

"Arceus released two months after BDSP," Yes. Yet, BDSP was a faithful remake of Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, and was never going to sell as well as a brand new Pokemon game. That's usually how things work with the series sales-wise. Gen 10 is a new generation of Pokemon- and new generations tend to outsell the games in the middle of a generation. Z-A will be drowned out by the hype of Gen 10 if Gen 10 is announced before Pokemon Day 2026.

Also yes, the 30 year anniversary is coming next year. Gamefreak doesn't release games on the anniversary though. They'll announce the next game for the anniversary on Pokemon Day- but it'll be released in November- much like how Gen 7 was announced and released back for the 20th anniversary.

Also, yes Scarlet and Violet is turning three. They're clearly extending it's life to give Gen 10 a bit more time for polish. Z-A will tie everyone over, and the TCG is being kept relevant by a Mega Evolution set as well as a ton of filler sets that are releasing this year. If this isn't enough proof to show that we aren't getting Gen 10 until late 2026- I don't know what else you'll believe. I guess you'll just have to end up disappointed that Gamefreak won't announce the next generation of Pokemon on a Presents that's clearly going to focus on Z-A.

Edit: Also, Legends isn't a Spin-Off. It's mainline. Just like Black 2 and White 2 were mainline.

This is just probably hyping up Z-A news. They're not going to drop anything massive given that it's too early to tease Gen 10 and Gamefreak stopped doing anything meaningful spin-off wise for years at this point- aside from the fluke that was New Pokemon Snap.

I'll probably get Z-A, but I'm bummed that most of the reveal will probably just be new Mega Evolutions. Something I have no real interest in, given that I'm a collector and Megas won't be able to be transferred into HOME.