The Indigo Disk is everything I already love about Scarlet and Violet but more.

My favorite Pokémon of all time Flygon is back. The others are cool, but many of them are trade evolutions so you'll need a buddy and some cash for Nintendo Switch online, or hope they appear in raid dens. You can actually catch all the starters for the first time. That's pretty awesome. Legendaries are back but not all for some reason. Where's Xerneas, Yveltal, Zygarde, the Tapus and Ultra beasts? Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to exclude them consider their models already exist in Sword and Shield and Gamefreak could just copy/paste them in Scarlet and Violet. Oh well, I'm not super crazy about them anyways so I don't really care. Also, they're shiny locked. I don't care because I don't shiny hunt but it still doesn't make any sense why they are.

The new Pokémon are very cool and strong. The two new evolutions are killer. The four new paradox mons are epic. Terapagos is interesting because of its Stellar tera type, but I'm kind of disappointed. I guess I was expecting too much because how much Pokémon was teasing it since the first episode of the Pokémon: Horizons anime back in April. I expected a total powerhouse beast, Instead, it's a turtle. Still cool, just not epic.

The map is simple and very straight forward. Very cool how you're in an underwater biome. I don't know why but the frames drop to bedrock level whenever I'm near mud. The game is already kinda choppy but for some reason when I'm around the mud, my Switch is about to commit die.

The BBL elite four are cool but you don't interact with them very much so they are kind of forgettable. I can't say the same for Carmine and Kieran. Carmine is such a cool character. I love everything about her: her design, personality, her hair, how tall she is. My second favorite behind Rika. Kieran has a pretty cool character arc. He doesn't think he's good enough, so he trains harder. Eventually, he becomes the strongest around, but becomes a bit of an edge lord. I can relate because I went through a similar phase and am still going through it. Minus being the strongest and the acting like a douche. Kieran undergoes one of the biggest characterizations in all of Pokémon and I'm all for it! One of the many reasons I love Scarlet and Violet are the characters, and the dlc brings us two more great ones.

Being able to fly and not having to charge your tera orb are nifty quality of life improvements.

Soundtrack's alright which is kind of lame considering how many bangers the main game put out.

There's a little team star side mission you can do where you can see the admins in school uniforms and without their crazy looks. Seeing Eri without makeup or Mela in normal sized shoes but still walks as though she were wearing them was something I didn't know I needed until I got it. It was pretty nice to say the least.

There's a "final" cutscene where you meet up with the professor, but from the past. Essentially, the player inspires the professor to do the things he does in the main story and this creates a cool and kinda confusing paradox. I thought it was nice to see the story get proper closure.

In the BBL academy, you can invite the gym leaders or your teachers to visit. I love these characters and I'm super happy to interact with them more. But most importantly, you can invite Rika. Nothing written above matters, that alone makes this a 10/10.

2.1
They got rid of a lot of the handholding with the tutorial, which is great! You can outright skip it now after a point, and my issues with the challenge race seem to have been addressed. You still gotta do some setup before starting but at the very least it doesn't feel like you're being forced to understand every little thing about the game with exhaustive detail. It's ok to not know every little thing and get lost in a game. You also unlock addons at the same time as online now, which is nice. The "Wi-Fi Warrior" and "McDonalds" passwords will still get them both unlocked if you just want to get things going asap with some friends though.

Overall I've been playing the game some more and a lot of the mechanics I was iffy on are warming on me. As I've said the tumble state still feels extremely punishing but you have a good amount of tools to get back into the race. My biggest issue with the game at this point is how much slopes will slow you down if you don't have any rings to boost up them. Like yeah it makes sense that they would slow you down a bit, but most of the time the amount they can slow you makes it feel like you're going up a much steeper surface than what you're looking at.
Also the rubberbanding in singleplayer is just a little absurd, I could get it on the higher difficulty but even on normal it really feels like you're better off playing from the middle and trying to boost into first at the last minute with how aggressive the AI gets.
If the minutiae of new features and adjustments aren't your cup of tea, SRB2K isn't going anywhere though I don't blame people for feeling divided on all the new stuff, it really does feel like a totally new game at this point, even if previous knowledge of SRB2K will still get you pretty far.

It's also kinda unfortunate that addons from SRB2K aren't forwards compatible at all. I want to play as JP Arle :(

CW: Discussions of Transmisogyny

The common response to vulnerable niche play experiences like Video Game Feminization Hypnosis (2019), Cave Story Sex RPG 2007 (2021), and He Fucked The Girl Out of Me (2022), is mockery both for the boldness of name and of content. Video Game Feminization Hypnosis is a psychic-design-manifesto with lines like "i dont care about the "puzzles" i just wanna explore weird islands & mess with the machines" and "ive half-joked about my games being laced with estrogen but i wonder how powerful they could be. what if we could use video games to forcefem ppl all over the world" nested as hyperlinks throughout her vent towards a better girly gameworld. Written in lowercase text and using internet acronyms like 'ppl', she speaks with a casual concern for unfettered femme exploration games as a way to potentially rewrite the social code.

It has not been product tested for review, nor has either of the other 2 games mentioned. The problem here is that the culture of 'gaming' itself is unable to step beyond the bounds of product review. Franz inquires into this problem around Cave Story Sex RPG 2007

"Why do we seek to quantify something clearly very personal based on how much it resonates with us?

I think my problem is that I think people are looking at this game as they would a product. Like it needs to have some value to me, otherwise it's not "worth playing".

Nadia, Fewprime, Blood Machine, npckc, communistsister, bagenzo, and [pourpetine] (https://xrafstar.monster/games/). These are in my mind the most notable transfemme gamedevs and their relevant store pages for their work¹. It's obviously not a comprehensive list, but this is my notation for who is the most publicly notable and prolific within the scene. Notice that all of the games on these pages are free as are the 3 games I opened with at the start. That's because transfemme gamedevs more often have to make their corpus free just to get eyes. So what are gaming spaces assessing the 'worth' of a completely no strings attached free simulated experiences? I think its the fact we dare to make people uncomfortable and borrowing a modicum of their time (across all the devs I've mentioned I cant think of 1 that takes more than 3 hours to finish, usually only being around 20 minutes in length at most). My sisters have to cheapen themselves to 0 just to get your ear and its still just met with mockery, harassment, and belittlement².

Even when a transfemme game dev gets the chance of any success at all she is thrown down again. In pourpetine's Hot Allostatic Load (2015) she notes among a litany of pained observations that

"One of my abusers was sent a list of the nominees for the upcoming games festival Indiecade. Unfortunately, I was on the list. I ended up winning an award, ostensibly to recognize my feminine labor in the areas of marginalized game design—years of creating access for other people, publicizing their games, giving technical support, not to mention the games I had designed myself. Instead of solidarity from other marginalized people in my field, I was attacked."

Video Game Feminization Hypnosis beats to a much more Utopian drum. A belief that we can mesmerize people into a more pure goo out of this vindictive rut, create a games made out of love, show people feminine Exits.

I believe in all that. I also believe that my words and those of my sisters are constantly being cast a sidelong jeer of disposability. That I and my sisters are then to blame for when a mobbing happens and not the world's own biases and outrage. This world has made this all quite non-negotiable, no more playing along with the democratic cesspits and hateful comedy routines. Here's to reflecting on the play experience others treat as compost as if its the most meaningful urtexts in the world because to quote pourpetine again "Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all i have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome. Build in the gaps between storms of chronic pain." trash art is my queendom.

I hope it suffocates society before it can flee to their patriarch Arks. As princess put it here 'flood the world and dilute the sludge'.

-------------------------------------------------------

1. 2 notable exceptions I know of with pay to play games by transfemme is princess/Girl Software's other games, and the cowriting of Aevee Bee on Worst Girl Games. Also key in on the fact here I'm making no judgements on individual pricing of games as a moral decision.

2. Does not remotely just happen On Backloggd³ if you think this is just a grievance I have with this site you're gravely misreading me and I urge you to slow down your social media outrage use for a bit qt~

3. Although I should not lie, social media sites are remarkably more unreliable habitats for trans people than they initially appear, this place has been a great learning experience of that in my case

Find it so deeply endearing that this work marred in technical limitations and an altogether rushed-ish structure is The Greatest love letter to a very genwunner philosophy, ALL without feeling egregious or pining for nostalgia. Game Freak despite everything loves its fans who can realistically Never Be Happy and makes that practically explicit from sunrise to sunset, and folds that into something new and altogether hopeful for a brighter future and earnest contextualization of its past.

Not tooo strong of one though, at least for me. Character writing is certainly the best here (or at least, toe to toe with Sun and Moon for me), especially from a moment to moment lens. Finale speaks volumes in its own way there, all so personable and defined and really have weight, presence, beautiful relations and chatter. But it also feels far too hesitant to break free of its limitations and that ends up being probably the most annoying part. Legendaries tend to be metaphorical or stand-ins for wide-spreading things in the series but this REALLY is the most "you just couldn't be serious about a heart to heart to be personable with a Pokemon huh." Still for what it's worth it swings as hard as Black/White and Sun/Moon do, just lacks the wherewithal structurally and in execution to get as high as they do. But it is nice to see people gas this up as their "finest hour" because it's not like it's wholly undeserving of that.

Mechanically it's like, we're taking our Legends Arceus prototype open world map (and bits of it structurally) and making it a Red/Blue + If It Was On Unreal Engine. Or in other words, very LARGELY hands off explore at your own pace open world and take in all the fights and sights and feel your journey of ADVENTURE, while having to reel-in that other than a couple cities the "expanse" is rather,,, illusory haha. I remember first touching this and LOSING it at how absolutely amazing the big hub town area is. I even took the classes, I was so into it all. Granted, high off an edible, but that expectation solidified, it felt so good. Unfortunately, literally nothing else in the game's areas capture or get even close to that, bar maybe the last one (which is kind of cheating really).

It is however also the comfiest Pokemon game to date. Extremely relaxing, potent quality of life implementation from top to bottom. Not a single hour feels even a bit wasted or as grindy as anyone's worst memories with this franchise. So easy to pick up and settle in, get cozy with seeing all of what's on offer here...
And as turbo-niche as talking about this game's difficulty may be, I do like how generally designed the leveling curve and fights are too. A couple were super tough checks for me even! Granted it was cuz i built my team a little awfully haha... all of them were Physical hitters ;w; Certainly some "wow that's funny" moments that feel both charming and, well, naturally hilarious. They gave one of the most important fights a literal ace-in-the-hole pokemon build that's INSTEAD sent out close to the start, while making their actual ace-in-the-hole a pokemon that's a SET-UP DESTROYER. Amazing. Well done.

I will say I find myself a bit more smarmy, sarcastic here, mostly cuz things have been hard and I sortttt of lightly pushed through with too much fervor just so a good friend of mine could get their birthday Suicune Raid present. Also cuz this gets a little too gassed up I feel >.> Not from a bad place tho! And who cares what I think there really!!! I'm glad people are having so much fun!!

Still, gives some to chew on, which puts this on an upper echelon for monster collectors in general. I think if you've been away from this series for feeling completely left out of the hyperlinear storyblook palooza, definitely give this a shot. It really is up there with the best Pokemon's put out.

PMD2 still sweeps tho

I’d call myself the most casual of Pokémon fans; big into it as a kid who was the perfect age to get in on the ground floor of this Whole Thing, but after gen 3 and bar a brief but frenetic romhack phase in my late teens, I’ve settled into the kind of distantly pleasant relationship with the series where I pick up each new game and have a good time playing through to credits but then never touch or think about them again, and repeat every two years. I couldn’t tell you the names of most new guys, but I CAN see a picture of them and go damn, that’s a cute critter. Casual. So no one was more surprised than me when Pokémon Violet turned out to be not only my favorite Pokémon game easily and by far, but one of my favorite games this year?? I play a lot of games man, and mostly bangers too.

A big big part of this accomplishment is that Pokémon has finally cracked the code on writing, like really for real this time. I know Pokémon guys like to talk about gen V and I am even a gen Whatever Sun and Moon Were liker for the stuff those go for at the end but there is simply nothing as consistently and thoroughly well done in this series before now and certainly not on the scale we see here. Every single person pops with huge personality, and for the first time those personalities are supported by like, stories that while not REVOLUTIONARY are certainly a tier above the stock standard baby anime tropes we’ve seen in the past. Hearing that Team Star were like the what, third antagonist group in a row who were a spin on Misunderstood Waylaid Youths had me groaning at first but their stories and motivations land! There is nuance in the laying out of their situation, there is acknowledgment that institutions in power and authority, especially over children, can and do fail to care for them and also are able to accept responsibility. Arven is a great little guy, firmly in the “wanna stick him in a little glass bottle and shake it up” tier. A potent blend of condescending and pathetic with a genuinely deserved chip on his shoulder at the way his life has turned out. And I’ll acknowledge that it’s because I have a chronically (and someday probably sooner than later it will become terminally) ill cat who has been having a really bad month, but his scenes really hit for me and I extremely cried near the resolution of his story.

The idea that a Pokémon game can have that power over me is only possible because Game Freak’s writers have subtley but definitely expanded the scope of maturity in how they treat the world of Paldea compared to previous games. Arven’s story fundamentally cannot work without acknowledgment of violence, real violence outside of the context of Pokémon battles – of death and dying, active dying that is happening now and happening TO us rather than in abstract stories of ancient struggles. This sort of thing is evident everywhere you look in Paldea. The Pokémon League isn’t the centerpiece of your life or anyone else’s, even the people who work for it; and they DO work for it, in an employment capacity. But there’s a distinct feeling that it’s not in its heyday even if it’s still a Big Deal. Almost every single gym leader does this as more of a side gig than their whole thing, and sometimes they’re not around or there’s an implication that these events have to be scheduled around their availability to some degree. Gym tests are based on the local town culture more often that they are on hard battle prowess and those cultures are a much greater and more foregrounded part of the town identities. When you get to the Elite Four finally, the building has two rooms that you get to see, a sort of lobby foyer where you’re interviewed with a classic gray office carpet floor pattern that every American desk drone knows intimately, and the single battle arena that everyone shares. It’s a much more realistic take on the idea than everyone having a giant customized zone within a huge tower or something. Everyone stays to watch after you beat them. It’s more informal but it’s been formalized. Even though you can’t walk into everyone’s houses anymore Paldea feels so much more like a real place where people live than any other region.

In keeping with this new emphasis on storytelling both explicit and implicit, Violet rewards role playing. Sure, you’re a kid in a magical world on a fantasy school assignment with completely free reign to stop about the country at your leisure, but you’re allowed and encouraged to like, go to class also! And if you’re pacing them out you unlock a handful of classes as you hit major milestones in the game’s three concurrent storylines. These vary in usefulness and the degree of information you learn from them is extremely fucked up lmao, like this is the first time I can think of that Pokémon explicitly explains a LOT of the underlying mechanics that are going on beneath the simple surface of the menus but these explanations are meted out mostly in a math class that you won’t see all of for 80% of the game it’s very funny. I don’t know that these are for actually learning anything, they’re all flavor, and I think it was incredibly brave of Game Freak to ferret away like eight or nine completely fleshed out unique NPCs in the school, only two of whom you would ever even see after the tutorial if you weren’t coming back for all this completely optional shit. There’s even a social link system separate from the classroom stuff! The school nurse has a series of social link cutscenes and she doesn’t even TEACH a class! There’s your math teacher, right, and via some hints in dialogue and her character design you can figure out that she is a retired gym leader and she used rock type Pokémon and she is the sister of the current gym type leader before any of this is told to you and you can DO THIS because she has geometric shaped hair, geode-themed jewelry, her name scheme fits her sister’s, and in one of her classes she name drops specific moves in her examples. There is simply a degree of care here that may not be particularly DEEP but is deeply REWARDING to engage with, if you’re willing to engage with it.

I also find Violet to be a quite beautiful game, beyond the way it stylishly makes use of a lot of smart 2D assets and cleverly implemented recycled animations to paper over places where it’s clear development was rushed and there wasn’t time to finish or polish everything (the food eating cutscenes are charming and incredible I don’t make the rules!). If the Galar region felt a little generic in the styles of the environments, Paldea has it beat in two important ways: first by having a more creative set of locales to trudge through, including things like wildflower rich stream beds, misty lakes, spindly cliffs, and bamboo groves among others. These unique little treat areas do a lot to separate out the expected plains and deserts and snowy mountains and make things feel less monotonous. It’s always a treat to wander into somewhere pretty and special, and to see which Pokémon are thoughtfully placed to live in them. The second way Paldea marks itself as the better of Game Freaks 3D environment outings is that the terrain is just generally more varied. I was a little worried to hear about “entire game world wild area” because frankly the wild areas kind of sucked ass??? Like it was cool to run around and catch guys at will but I found the more authored routes in Sword and Shield ultimately more compelling even if I couldn’t just go catch a Flapple or whatever anytime. Here though, even when you are just running up the grassy plains there’s always a LOT going on in terms of mountains and trees and elevation – no two areas feel truly the same even when they’re the same biome. This makes the game world feel more like a place even as it cleverly routes the player roughly along only a few pathways to see most of the leveled content in a more or less proper order without compromising the ultimately nonlinear nature of the game.

I wanna give a special shoutout to Area Zero, the secret fucked up super big crater that occupies the center of the map and is where the last bit of story content in the game takes place after you’ve finished your initial three threads. It ties everything that’s cool about this game together really well. As you descend into this harsh and dangerous zone you may quickly realize that it’s the only place in the game where your minimap isn’t active and why would it be, Area Zero isn’t mapped. The music is sedate and uncanny, and when it breaks for battle it’s weird and anxious. The Pokémon here are weird ones, or rare ones, or fully evolved ones, or, at least on the very top levels, ones that can fly in and out of the crater’s rim. The Pokémon you find will become stranger the deeper you go. There’s an otherworldly shimmer in the air, and the twinkles mimic the ones that outside the crater indicate an item to pick up on the ground; here they trick and disorient you. It’s the only place in the game where your constant companion, the legendary on your box cover, won’t come out of their ball, which leaves you without a mount, so no bike, no jump, no glide, no easy way out of the crater. The distance feels huge when you have to hoof it. You bring the protagonists of each of the other three stories in the game with you on the trip and while it’s delightful to see them all interact with each other (it would have been TRAGIC for this to have not happened) it also reveals more about them even this late in the game; Nemona, my favorite character in the game for being a fucking freak ass weirdo who loves blood more than anything, in unimpeachably cheerful and energetic but when you see her out of her element in the Pokémon League circuit she’s revealed to have a hard time relating to other people outside of her one interest, and kind of generally rude and thoughtless with their feelings. Penny gets to show herself to be deeply empathetic towards and protective of others in a more proactive way than in her own story but she’s also harsh and quick to anger in doing so. Arven is the true protagonist of the game and its emotional burden rests with him, and his mask cracks the most. So ultimately you get a small sad story about the ways families can fail each other and these three awkward kids who bond through one pretty fuckin bad day and it’s like, y’know it’s good! There is a lot of cool stuff here.

Nobody is more surprised than me! Truly! I have always basically liked Pokémon but I’ve never been ENTHUSIASTIC. It’s just that this one did a lot of inacore stuff, gave me a bone with a lot of meat to chew on just to my tastes, and when you slap that on top of Pokémon's general play which is rock solid as ever, and what I feel is a real nailing down of the open world side of things this time? I dunno man, I think they really knocked this one out of the park.