Pokemon Thread #25 - A new Tera
- Thread starter Kairi Zaide
- Start date
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wingsnut19
Registered User
- Apr 9, 2007
- 3,288
- 300
Doesn't he run away after you get the coins?
Anyone getting ready for the Charizard raids next weekend? I'm not sure what to prepare. I was thinking maybe Azumarill or Sylveon. Seems like they are going to be very difficult raids.
Man I almost forgot. It'll probably have a dragon move since it's a dragon Tera type so Azumarill better be a fairy Tera type for the shield break stage. And honestly at level 6 most people are running strategies where moves 1 and 2 are defensive debuffs and offensive boosting cheers so that probably has to be part of your pokemon's moveset somehow or a couple teammates need to have stat lowering moves.
wingsnut19
Registered User
- Apr 9, 2007
- 3,288
- 300
Yeah it'll definitely have a dragon and fire move, and maybe solar beam? I'm curious it it'll end up having metal claw as well. Not sure how difficult they are going to try and make this battle. If it doesn't have a steel move, Dachsbun might be interesting since it is immune to both fire and dragon attacks.
Gecklund
Registered User
Well I went all out on the raid prep investing in Azumarill. Popped a water shiny boost sandwich and grabbed a shiny Azumarill to raid in style. Hyper trained and EV trained, fairy Tera type. If it has solar beam I'm cooked. Might build a different fairy as a precaution.
Also the more I've been doing high level raids, the more I realize that Tera types aren't terribly important to that high level content. If you haven't downed your boss because your team hasn't buffed/debuffed properly, odds are you're probably going to fail the raid by the time you can terrastalize.
In the context of the Pokemon game series... I think this was a small/medium step forward when you put performance issues aside (although I think the Switch does play a role here).
They still have a long way to go to catch up to modern triple A RPGs and I do think in the longterm they should consider an MMO given the popularity of Pokemon Go and the possibilities of a living, breathing world with breeding, battling, fashion...
But I'm having more fun than I did in Sword and Shield. I'm having more fun than I did with Arceus which felt like a checklist after the novelty wore off.
They still have a long way to go to catch up to modern triple A RPGs and I do think in the longterm they should consider an MMO given the popularity of Pokemon Go and the possibilities of a living, breathing world with breeding, battling, fashion...
But I'm having more fun than I did in Sword and Shield. I'm having more fun than I did with Arceus which felt like a checklist after the novelty wore off.
TheDoldrums
Registered User
really? Had no idea they were rare. I've only put 5 hours into the game so far but I've got one on my team. I liked his style, he's my favourite catch so far.
I’m not sure how “rare” they are, but from what I’ve read they’re definitely not considered a common spawn in the wild. I think a little bit of luck goes into coming across one. And yeah, one of my favorites as well.
Apex Predator
Registered User
- Jun 21, 2019
- 4,407
- 4,677
Gecklund
Registered User
I think they’re “rare” in that they don’t have a high rate but they spawn in a lot of different places so that kind of negates the low spawn rate.
Trying to bull my way to dex completion. It's stunning to me how many times I've roamed around the areas sunkern and sunflora are supposed to spawn and not seeing them spawn. Granted I could just make a sandwich next time I try but still. I saw a sunflora raid in the public postings but it filled up before I could join.
Anyway, yeah. Still having fun.
Anyway, yeah. Still having fun.
Gardner McKay
RIP, Jimmy.
As I near the end of this game, here are my thoughts...
- I had fun, and more fun than I thought. That is most important. However, the fun died off after a while.
- I liked the whole giant pokemon/regional boss concept. I thought it was cool and well executed.
- I enjoyed that there was more to do than just the traditional get all badges and beat the elite four.
- The riding/flying/gliding mechanic was really nice.
- I thought team star was an absolute joke. Viva la star? Come on. Not to mention, the bases were stupidly easy and then fighting a giant car at the end? Easily the dumbest f***ing thing in any pokemon game, ever.
- I still feel like the open world was a flop. The world was bland and generic. It could have been done so much better on a smaller scale.
- The performance issues are embarrassing.
- The battle view mechanics were a total miss. I can't tell you how many times the following happened: 1. I can't see my own pokemon in a double battle because of a strange camera angle. 2. I can't see the opposing pokemon because of something like Tinkaton's hammer. 3. I'm battling and a pokemon/npc walks right through my pokemon as if its a ghost or gets stuck there.
- The gym tests were pointless.
- Trainer battles might as well not exist. The amount of exp gained is minimal, they often only had one pokemon and overall they were super weak.
- The game itself offered minimal challenge. Easiest pokemon game I have ever played.
- I did not like that no TM's are buyable and EVERYTHING has to be made. I think making a few basic TM's buyable with moderate to OP TM's being via materials and making only.
- The towns were bland, empty and boring.
- The complete lack of any sort of battle tower is highly disappointing.
If they had done three things, I think this game could have been damn near perfection.
1. Cut the open world map by 1/4th - 1/3rd. Quality is ALWAYS better than quantity.
2. Spent more time on performance/mechanical issues.
3. Adding more challenge into the game.
I get that the audience of these games are not just the people who started playing pokemon back in RBY days but it also isn't just 10 year old kids. The games can maintain their current "nice/easy" feel, but have some challenge late/post/optional game.
I'd love a game where they stop focusing on pushing out so many new pokemon, focus on getting the designs right and maybe actually weave in a bit of decent story into the game.
- I had fun, and more fun than I thought. That is most important. However, the fun died off after a while.
- I liked the whole giant pokemon/regional boss concept. I thought it was cool and well executed.
- I enjoyed that there was more to do than just the traditional get all badges and beat the elite four.
- The riding/flying/gliding mechanic was really nice.
- I thought team star was an absolute joke. Viva la star? Come on. Not to mention, the bases were stupidly easy and then fighting a giant car at the end? Easily the dumbest f***ing thing in any pokemon game, ever.
- I still feel like the open world was a flop. The world was bland and generic. It could have been done so much better on a smaller scale.
- The performance issues are embarrassing.
- The battle view mechanics were a total miss. I can't tell you how many times the following happened: 1. I can't see my own pokemon in a double battle because of a strange camera angle. 2. I can't see the opposing pokemon because of something like Tinkaton's hammer. 3. I'm battling and a pokemon/npc walks right through my pokemon as if its a ghost or gets stuck there.
- The gym tests were pointless.
- Trainer battles might as well not exist. The amount of exp gained is minimal, they often only had one pokemon and overall they were super weak.
- The game itself offered minimal challenge. Easiest pokemon game I have ever played.
- I did not like that no TM's are buyable and EVERYTHING has to be made. I think making a few basic TM's buyable with moderate to OP TM's being via materials and making only.
- The towns were bland, empty and boring.
- The complete lack of any sort of battle tower is highly disappointing.
If they had done three things, I think this game could have been damn near perfection.
1. Cut the open world map by 1/4th - 1/3rd. Quality is ALWAYS better than quantity.
2. Spent more time on performance/mechanical issues.
3. Adding more challenge into the game.
I get that the audience of these games are not just the people who started playing pokemon back in RBY days but it also isn't just 10 year old kids. The games can maintain their current "nice/easy" feel, but have some challenge late/post/optional game.
I'd love a game where they stop focusing on pushing out so many new pokemon, focus on getting the designs right and maybe actually weave in a bit of decent story into the game.
Gecklund
Registered User
There was a static sunflora encounter outside of the grass gym town on one of the hills.
LT
Global Moderator
- Jul 23, 2010
- 42,757
- 14,442
As I near the end of this game, here are my thoughts...
- I had fun, and more fun than I thought. That is most important. However, the fun died off after a while.
- I liked the whole giant pokemon/regional boss concept. I thought it was cool and well executed.
- I enjoyed that there was more to do than just the traditional get all badges and beat the elite four.
- The riding/flying/gliding mechanic was really nice.
- I thought team star was an absolute joke. Viva la star? Come on. Not to mention, the bases were stupidly easy and then fighting a giant car at the end? Easily the dumbest f***ing thing in any pokemon game, ever.
- I still feel like the open world was a flop. The world was bland and generic. It could have been done so much better on a smaller scale.
- The performance issues are embarrassing.
- The battle view mechanics were a total miss. I can't tell you how many times the following happened: 1. I can't see my own pokemon in a double battle because of a strange camera angle. 2. I can't see the opposing pokemon because of something like Tinkaton's hammer. 3. I'm battling and a pokemon/npc walks right through my pokemon as if its a ghost or gets stuck there.
- The gym tests were pointless.
- Trainer battles might as well not exist. The amount of exp gained is minimal, they often only had one pokemon and overall they were super weak.
- The game itself offered minimal challenge. Easiest pokemon game I have ever played.
- I did not like that no TM's are buyable and EVERYTHING has to be made. I think making a few basic TM's buyable with moderate to OP TM's being via materials and making only.
- The towns were bland, empty and boring.
- The complete lack of any sort of battle tower is highly disappointing.
If they had done three things, I think this game could have been damn near perfection.
1. Cut the open world map by 1/4th - 1/3rd. Quality is ALWAYS better than quantity.
2. Spent more time on performance/mechanical issues.
3. Adding more challenge into the game.
I get that the audience of these games are not just the people who started playing pokemon back in RBY days but it also isn't just 10 year old kids. The games can maintain their current "nice/easy" feel, but have some challenge late/post/optional game.
I'd love a game where they stop focusing on pushing out so many new pokemon, focus on getting the designs right and maybe actually weave in a bit of decent story into the game.
I still don't understand how hard it is for them to add a slider or two so that users can add some of their own difficulty. Or even just a setting you have to pick before you begin. This has been standard in all kinds of games for decades. It's inexcusable that it's seemingly never even been attempted in a traditional Pokemon game.
Well I think the game's been out long enough that I can share some gripes and thoughts in full without tags. I know it's already a full on article that probably no one will read at this point but f*** it. I type a lot and I'm not gonna just delete my thoughts.
Cons and gripes
-As much as I've had more fun this time around than in Sw/sh. There's just really not enough to do in the post-game if you're not a interested in PVP battles and shiny hunting. Yeah there's a gym rechallenge and elite trainer tournament but that's a piss poor replacement for my biggest gripe of all;
-No battle tower is absolutely insane. I get they could always add one in a content update but like. In spite of Sw/sh's flaws at least it had that much. I battle in PVP casually but sometimes I like taking my built pokemon into the tower for faster turn battling to see some payoff for my work. Players without Nintendo online are basically dicked if they want to do any actual advanced Pokemon team building since the replacement "tournament" level locks the NPC opponents' teams and as far as I know they don't scale your levels as far as I know. Like I'm well past expecting a battle frontier at this point but the tower is just such a basic and fundamental component of a history of pretty threadbare pokemon post game content that it's insane that it's not in there. I get this sneaking suspicion that one of the paid DLCs will be a full fledged battle frontier that is gated behind an additional payment, which would be super scummy. But it's the only explanation I can think of for why there's no tower yet.
-as to the rest of the postgame, I think Tera raids are an improvement over last gens raids, but they're really not enough to cover the lack of a battle tower. At some point they're just a grind and without smarter matchmaking, you're at the mercy of randoms or having to look to sources like discord for link codes and hoping your team knows what they're doing. That said, 7 star event raids could give some compelling reason to go in and build new pokemon for intense high level gameplay. Especially if the 7 star raids are the only way to get some pokemon outside of the Paldea pokedex.
-this is less of a review type point and more of a recommendation, but with an open world like this maybe they could add some truly challenging post game content in the form of daily elite trainer battles. They would appear randomly in different locations every day and have different maxed level, ev trained pokemon, with held items and strong movesets. Or you could have the levels scaled to be equal, battle tower style. And then as a reward for beating them you get premium items like the apricorn balls and say a hidden ability pokemon you can train up. It would encourage players to keep playing and think about breeding and building high grade pokemon. Sure casual players wouldn't give a shit but, it would be something extra to do.
-This is a bit of an endgame/competitive player's gripe but berry collection is a little silly in this game. For anyone that wants to EV train and wants to reset a pokemon's EVs they're at the mercy of what they can find on the ground randomly in the open world. They really needed a system to at least passively cultivate extra copies of the rarer berries if not outright buy them. They've made a lot of changes that streamline competitive pokemon breeding/building like maxing a pokemon's IVs with items, speeding the EV training process up with held items, changing pokemon natures...I mean with the right legwork you technically don't even have to worry about how a pokemon comes out of an egg unless you're looking for a shiny. But it's crazy that the same flexibility and QOL doesn't extend to resetting EVs.
-Performance, honestly. Yeah it's rough and I hope they fix it but I had no real issue getting through all the game's content. In the end it doesn't require precise timing or movement to function since it's still just a turn based battle and collectathon. However, there is one area where the performance issues border on unplayable: Tera raids. It honestly doesn't happen to me much but I've seen it happen to others and heard them complain about it but sometimes players will get stuck in move selection and are unable to fight. For me the worst I get is I'll go to pick a move and the raid boss will interrupt me, but having one member of a squad unable to participate is absolutely killer. Either way I do hope Game Freak can figure out how to improve performance across the board.
-However I will say, that this shouldn't have come to a surprise to anyone. While the issues weren't as bad in SW/SH and Arceus, I remember I'd see some performance issues here and there in the wild areas, especially when panning the camera.
-Last real serious gripe I can think of: while surprise trade is somehow lightning fast and probably the most optimized feature in the whole game, it's crazy to me that they still haven't figured out a better online matchmaking system for raids and co-op play. Like the whole "public feed" system in SW/SH was a joke for random matchmaking. Link codes are fine but not everyone wants to rely on discord or have friends with similar life schedules to play with on a consistent basis. Randoms suck, but it's often better than nothing. And sometimes nothing is what you get with public link code sharing. As an example, I use the /r/Pokemon discord to find Tera raids. And people are in there joining each raid they can immediately so most people who are slower console typists have little chance to get in. Going to the public matchmaking for Tera raids is awful.
You pick a raid you want to join and you have to wait a full minute for the game to tell you that you couldn't get in the lobby. But it takes about 4 minutes for the game to give you the option to refresh the list to try a different set. And you can't join the others on the list because in that minute you wasted waiting for the game to fail to put you in the lobby, the rest of the high level ones are definitely already full. So you just have to sit an wait for the game to let you try again. The obvious alternative is host your own, but that involves zooming around the map trying to find 5 star or above raids among the three and four star ones. It's just a shitty system.
-Almost forgot one gripe before I hit post reply but unless I'm stupid and there's some way to navigate the pokedex better, it's a goddamn hassle to navigate the dex. I'm pretty sure SW/SH had a search function and the pokemon boxes in this game do so I don't see why I have to hold right and let the game pan past dex entries until I find the one I'm looking for. If anyone actually read this behemoth of a review and knows a better way to navigate the pokedex, I'd love to be enlightened. At least the new dex entry animation is pretty neat.
Pros and whatevers:
- I respectfully disagree with @Gardner McKay regarding the overworld. At least in terms of aesthetics. Is Paldea on par with Hyrule or Temeria? f*** no. But I think it's a better open world than Hisui which looked pretty drab aside from the little villages and the one ocean cliff/beach zone. Generally, I like exploring Paldea. It's not the game's biggest selling point or strength but I've enjoyed my time in the open world. However I'd agree that it could be condensed about 20-25% to improve performance and hell if it got a battle tower in, I'd be all for it.
-As a whole, I'll be honest I spoiled myself and looked at all the new pokemon designs before I even booted the game. At first glance I was pretty iffy but most of the new designs are pretty solid. I still think last gen and Gen 6 have had the best new pokemon designs in the 3D era, but there are a good set of new ones that I really like, and their full animations really help that (watch Toedscool running and tell me it's not amazing). Though even after immersing myself with them, it's probably the worst set of starter lines in a while. I kinda like the sprigatito line and Fuecoco is okay. But the water bird is an abomination.
-Overall the concept of open world main line pokemon gameplay was done well in my opinion. It's not perfect but it's a step in the right direction and it's the first time in a while the mainline games made me feel like I was in control of exploration.
-Disagree with @Gardner McKay again about Team Star to an extent. I agree that the process of clearing their bases was really just a dumb showcase for the let's go battling system but I actually liked Team Star's story more than any other antagonist team's story since probably Gen 5. I legit don't even remember much about the others in between 5 and 9 other than how they looked. I thought team star's story was a little bit of emotion pandering but at least they were sympathetic and likable for the most part.
-Speaking of storylines, the story with Arven and the Titans was simple, yet so effective. Who'd have thought that a man trying to heal his dog would be all you need for an effective story thread? And honestly the way that bleeds over into the endgame story is pretty great. Felt for Arven when he found out the truth about his mom/dad.
-Speaking of characters, I like how Nemona is really...she comes off as one note and a trope...because she is. But they poke fun at that in a pretty effective way. I mean this is the first game in the series to make me genuinely laugh, not chuckle, but laugh and it was usually something Nemona did or at her expense. And even though she's one note and a cliche, somehow at the end of the victory road quest it was genuinely endearing that all she wanted was for you to succeed and for the two of you to have great pokemon battles.
-Some may not like it but the options to streamline shiny hunting are appreciated. Yeah it cuts down on how special they are but some people don't have time to devote their entire day to random encounters and egg hatching. It still takes work, but it's more doable. And honestly it's more engaging than check random encounter, nope, check again, repeat or hatching egg after egg. It's at the expense of the dopamine rush of finally getting the shiny but it's still exciting and I have more of a life to lead than dedicating 10+ hours per shiny.
Ultimately I think there's a great game here but yes. It did need more time in the oven. Some features needed overhauling from the last gen that weren't. Other features were improved but not enough. And even though I enjoyed myself, GameFreak cannot look at their sales and think that this release product in this state is acceptable. At some point the value gained with nostalgia and prestige wears off an people will get tired of a lower quality product. And I'm part of the problem at the end of the day. It's good enough and better than their last shit product so I'm playing the hell out of the game and would probably get DLC too. Life's funny like that.
Cons and gripes
-As much as I've had more fun this time around than in Sw/sh. There's just really not enough to do in the post-game if you're not a interested in PVP battles and shiny hunting. Yeah there's a gym rechallenge and elite trainer tournament but that's a piss poor replacement for my biggest gripe of all;
-No battle tower is absolutely insane. I get they could always add one in a content update but like. In spite of Sw/sh's flaws at least it had that much. I battle in PVP casually but sometimes I like taking my built pokemon into the tower for faster turn battling to see some payoff for my work. Players without Nintendo online are basically dicked if they want to do any actual advanced Pokemon team building since the replacement "tournament" level locks the NPC opponents' teams and as far as I know they don't scale your levels as far as I know. Like I'm well past expecting a battle frontier at this point but the tower is just such a basic and fundamental component of a history of pretty threadbare pokemon post game content that it's insane that it's not in there. I get this sneaking suspicion that one of the paid DLCs will be a full fledged battle frontier that is gated behind an additional payment, which would be super scummy. But it's the only explanation I can think of for why there's no tower yet.
-as to the rest of the postgame, I think Tera raids are an improvement over last gens raids, but they're really not enough to cover the lack of a battle tower. At some point they're just a grind and without smarter matchmaking, you're at the mercy of randoms or having to look to sources like discord for link codes and hoping your team knows what they're doing. That said, 7 star event raids could give some compelling reason to go in and build new pokemon for intense high level gameplay. Especially if the 7 star raids are the only way to get some pokemon outside of the Paldea pokedex.
-this is less of a review type point and more of a recommendation, but with an open world like this maybe they could add some truly challenging post game content in the form of daily elite trainer battles. They would appear randomly in different locations every day and have different maxed level, ev trained pokemon, with held items and strong movesets. Or you could have the levels scaled to be equal, battle tower style. And then as a reward for beating them you get premium items like the apricorn balls and say a hidden ability pokemon you can train up. It would encourage players to keep playing and think about breeding and building high grade pokemon. Sure casual players wouldn't give a shit but, it would be something extra to do.
-This is a bit of an endgame/competitive player's gripe but berry collection is a little silly in this game. For anyone that wants to EV train and wants to reset a pokemon's EVs they're at the mercy of what they can find on the ground randomly in the open world. They really needed a system to at least passively cultivate extra copies of the rarer berries if not outright buy them. They've made a lot of changes that streamline competitive pokemon breeding/building like maxing a pokemon's IVs with items, speeding the EV training process up with held items, changing pokemon natures...I mean with the right legwork you technically don't even have to worry about how a pokemon comes out of an egg unless you're looking for a shiny. But it's crazy that the same flexibility and QOL doesn't extend to resetting EVs.
-Performance, honestly. Yeah it's rough and I hope they fix it but I had no real issue getting through all the game's content. In the end it doesn't require precise timing or movement to function since it's still just a turn based battle and collectathon. However, there is one area where the performance issues border on unplayable: Tera raids. It honestly doesn't happen to me much but I've seen it happen to others and heard them complain about it but sometimes players will get stuck in move selection and are unable to fight. For me the worst I get is I'll go to pick a move and the raid boss will interrupt me, but having one member of a squad unable to participate is absolutely killer. Either way I do hope Game Freak can figure out how to improve performance across the board.
-However I will say, that this shouldn't have come to a surprise to anyone. While the issues weren't as bad in SW/SH and Arceus, I remember I'd see some performance issues here and there in the wild areas, especially when panning the camera.
-Last real serious gripe I can think of: while surprise trade is somehow lightning fast and probably the most optimized feature in the whole game, it's crazy to me that they still haven't figured out a better online matchmaking system for raids and co-op play. Like the whole "public feed" system in SW/SH was a joke for random matchmaking. Link codes are fine but not everyone wants to rely on discord or have friends with similar life schedules to play with on a consistent basis. Randoms suck, but it's often better than nothing. And sometimes nothing is what you get with public link code sharing. As an example, I use the /r/Pokemon discord to find Tera raids. And people are in there joining each raid they can immediately so most people who are slower console typists have little chance to get in. Going to the public matchmaking for Tera raids is awful.
You pick a raid you want to join and you have to wait a full minute for the game to tell you that you couldn't get in the lobby. But it takes about 4 minutes for the game to give you the option to refresh the list to try a different set. And you can't join the others on the list because in that minute you wasted waiting for the game to fail to put you in the lobby, the rest of the high level ones are definitely already full. So you just have to sit an wait for the game to let you try again. The obvious alternative is host your own, but that involves zooming around the map trying to find 5 star or above raids among the three and four star ones. It's just a shitty system.
-Almost forgot one gripe before I hit post reply but unless I'm stupid and there's some way to navigate the pokedex better, it's a goddamn hassle to navigate the dex. I'm pretty sure SW/SH had a search function and the pokemon boxes in this game do so I don't see why I have to hold right and let the game pan past dex entries until I find the one I'm looking for. If anyone actually read this behemoth of a review and knows a better way to navigate the pokedex, I'd love to be enlightened. At least the new dex entry animation is pretty neat.
Pros and whatevers:
- I respectfully disagree with @Gardner McKay regarding the overworld. At least in terms of aesthetics. Is Paldea on par with Hyrule or Temeria? f*** no. But I think it's a better open world than Hisui which looked pretty drab aside from the little villages and the one ocean cliff/beach zone. Generally, I like exploring Paldea. It's not the game's biggest selling point or strength but I've enjoyed my time in the open world. However I'd agree that it could be condensed about 20-25% to improve performance and hell if it got a battle tower in, I'd be all for it.
-As a whole, I'll be honest I spoiled myself and looked at all the new pokemon designs before I even booted the game. At first glance I was pretty iffy but most of the new designs are pretty solid. I still think last gen and Gen 6 have had the best new pokemon designs in the 3D era, but there are a good set of new ones that I really like, and their full animations really help that (watch Toedscool running and tell me it's not amazing). Though even after immersing myself with them, it's probably the worst set of starter lines in a while. I kinda like the sprigatito line and Fuecoco is okay. But the water bird is an abomination.
-Overall the concept of open world main line pokemon gameplay was done well in my opinion. It's not perfect but it's a step in the right direction and it's the first time in a while the mainline games made me feel like I was in control of exploration.
-Disagree with @Gardner McKay again about Team Star to an extent. I agree that the process of clearing their bases was really just a dumb showcase for the let's go battling system but I actually liked Team Star's story more than any other antagonist team's story since probably Gen 5. I legit don't even remember much about the others in between 5 and 9 other than how they looked. I thought team star's story was a little bit of emotion pandering but at least they were sympathetic and likable for the most part.
-Speaking of storylines, the story with Arven and the Titans was simple, yet so effective. Who'd have thought that a man trying to heal his dog would be all you need for an effective story thread? And honestly the way that bleeds over into the endgame story is pretty great. Felt for Arven when he found out the truth about his mom/dad.
-Speaking of characters, I like how Nemona is really...she comes off as one note and a trope...because she is. But they poke fun at that in a pretty effective way. I mean this is the first game in the series to make me genuinely laugh, not chuckle, but laugh and it was usually something Nemona did or at her expense. And even though she's one note and a cliche, somehow at the end of the victory road quest it was genuinely endearing that all she wanted was for you to succeed and for the two of you to have great pokemon battles.
-Some may not like it but the options to streamline shiny hunting are appreciated. Yeah it cuts down on how special they are but some people don't have time to devote their entire day to random encounters and egg hatching. It still takes work, but it's more doable. And honestly it's more engaging than check random encounter, nope, check again, repeat or hatching egg after egg. It's at the expense of the dopamine rush of finally getting the shiny but it's still exciting and I have more of a life to lead than dedicating 10+ hours per shiny.
Ultimately I think there's a great game here but yes. It did need more time in the oven. Some features needed overhauling from the last gen that weren't. Other features were improved but not enough. And even though I enjoyed myself, GameFreak cannot look at their sales and think that this release product in this state is acceptable. At some point the value gained with nostalgia and prestige wears off an people will get tired of a lower quality product. And I'm part of the problem at the end of the day. It's good enough and better than their last shit product so I'm playing the hell out of the game and would probably get DLC too. Life's funny like that.
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Stayed up way too late to bull through the last 66 or so dex entries I needed for the shiny charm. Went out and did two hunts. Mass outbreak hunt for dratini took about 20 minutes and the spot was perfect for open world spawn resetting. All the Dratinis would spawn in a very tight area so by the time it showed up as pink it was very easy to cycle new spawns in and check all of them at once. Then did an herba mystica boosted hunt trying to find the paradox salamence which is my most desired shiny. And the hardest to get it seems. I reset the shiny boosted spawn for dragons in his only spawn point about 6 times before the shiny charm, so abiut three hours. Didn't see one shiny even with boosted odds. One try with the boost and the shiny charm I got Zweilous and Gible to shine. No Roaring Moon yet but I'm gonna stick with it. In all, I probably could have cleared content and the pokedex faster but I spent too much time hunting shinies. Have about 9 so far. 3 were found completely incidentally and with full odds (Mudbray, the new frog thing (wild Tera static spawn), and Meditite which I found on my way to try to shiny hunt Glimmet).
Like I said above, I really appreciate that there are options to cut down the time it takes to hunt a shiny. If someone else wants to hunt at full odds to make it mode special to them, they can.
Also gonna add one gripe. Legends Arceus had an almost overwhelming variety of outfits to buy for a game that could only be played solo. S/V has a fair number of accessories but locking the player in to wearing the Academy uniform at all times is dumb.
Like I said above, I really appreciate that there are options to cut down the time it takes to hunt a shiny. If someone else wants to hunt at full odds to make it mode special to them, they can.
Also gonna add one gripe. Legends Arceus had an almost overwhelming variety of outfits to buy for a game that could only be played solo. S/V has a fair number of accessories but locking the player in to wearing the Academy uniform at all times is dumb.
wingsnut19
Registered User
- Apr 9, 2007
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- 300
I have such a hard time with seeing the Dratini shiny. I'm colour blind and that pink and blue are really hard for me to distinguish between unless they are side by side. I've been over scrutinizing every single Dratini because of it haha. And I don't even bother with some of the others that are super similar because I'll just never be able to tell. I have found 5 shinies so far though, just wandering the world. Gabite, Phanpy, Magnemite, Venomoth, and Tropius.
Gardner McKay
RIP, Jimmy.
Regarding the two disagreements, fair enough. I think Paldea was fun to explore, it just felt bland at certain points. But I may be alone in that feeling.
Also, with team star I think you nailed my issue with team star. Not only was it emotional pandering, but a tired trope.
There is a great game deep beneath the surface but GameFreak barely scratched the surface. How much of it is fixable with future updates? I dunno. But I do know that I can't go back and re-experience this game over again with those updates and that is a problem.
Oh man. That's rough. Masuda honestly might be your better choice then. And yeah without sounds and a visual cue, there's some pokemon where they're so small or the color variant is so indistinguishable that I don't even bother checking. It wouldn't surprise me if the game somehow told me I've already run past 8-10 shinies. I do masuda hunts here and there but it's a huge test on my adhd brain. Getting the shiny is admittedly more exciting but when I'm running around and then I have to wait for each egg animation to mostly be disappointed, it's hard to suppress the pull I have to more exciting gameplay with a different game.
wingsnut19
Registered User
- Apr 9, 2007
- 3,288
- 300
It doesn't really matter what is fixable with updates because GF won't do anything about the major issues, they never have. There were very fixable issues with the code in Sword and Shield that made the square shiny mechanic not work properly and they never touched it, same with the stuttering and weird performance in some areas. The only thing they will patch is any exploits that become mainstream like they did with the duplication stuff last gen (which exists again in these games).
Apex Predator
Registered User
- Jun 21, 2019
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