I'm a huge fan of JRPGS but not a massive fan of Pokemon. D&P and HGSS have a special place in my heart but apart from that I don't really care about the series.

My partner hates JRPGs. On a whim, they decided to play a copy of Sword we had lying around. I have never seen them devour a game like this, playing the required 30 hours to see the credits (and then some more because the game REALLY doesn't end there) across 4 days.

Watching them play this entry has made me appreciate how important Pokemon is for casual RPG players.

Pokemon Sword is the first turn-based game that hasn't made them walk away from boredom. It also had a good balance of stats, moves, systems and gear to evaluate without overwhelming a new player. The graphics are pretty enough and the Pokemon designs are hard to fault, even though we both had to stop our selves from throwing up as the frame rate plummeted after connecting to the internet in a Wild Area. I also think the roster is pretty good despite what others may say, especially with the DLC, providing a tonne of familiar faces that my partner had already seen in promotional art or the Pokemon knowledge that is seemingly airborne to every human on Earth. I enjoyed seeing some of my favourites from previous generations here (Rest in Power Greninja). Contrast this to Generation V where you had to play with these 150 new boring ass Pokemon and you will enjoy it!

I am going to make an assumption based on my own experience of Pokemon. Here we go. Pokemon was never good and playing a new Pokemon game will never give you the same feeling that your first did. I liked Pokemon as a kid and because I enjoyed playing Pokemon Pearl, I played Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker - which is a banger - and lead me to play Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies and started my love for the genre. But the Pokemon games have always been repetitive with boring ass stories that drag on (even the games with good stories such as White have this issue) and copy-pasted design choices. Pokemon always was and always will be 'baby's first JRPG', but I am very appreciative for it introducing me to some of the most important games of my life. And I hope it does the same for my partner.

It was okay - just made me want to go and play Hades some more.

There are only 2 dungeons and the game hints at things that are more impressive than what is actually in the game (a character just disappears and you never to get to date him even though he says he is an axe? that sounds sick what the hell).

The combat and RPG elements are quite simple but inoffensive. The dating sim elements feel quite non-existent (the dating events are nowhere near as good as something like Persona) and everyone is way to eager to get into your hands.

Non-binary representation tho :)

Lovely Planet with a porn addiction. An "FPS with cards that you can discard" paints Neon White as a post-doom-(2016)-er shooter without the animation budget but it truly fails to describe the most genius part of the equation; all of the discards are movement abilities.

Going fast is fun. Death, Taxes and Preservation of Momentum. Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing gets a shotgun, speedy thing turns into a fireball and speedy thing flies into an enemy/door/off-the-side-of-the-map. Give a man seemingly unlimited movement options and he will try to beat his high score for a lifetime.

And you think Neon White would Godspeed the shark at some point but no, the game folds in on itself and emerges as a new piece of origami, with a decidedly familiar looking blue rocket launcher card tucked into the telefragging folds.

The seemingly poor reception to the narrative has worked in the games favour for a player like me who felt contractually obligated to watch Neon Genesis Evangelion at some point in their life. The tropes are sincere, the internet humour is still fresh and the characters are only slightly less horny than they first appear.