ok lets see, this is one of those temtems yeah? cyber sleuth? …palworld? no guns in this one?
i was a bit optimistic when starting the game up, despite getting jumpscared by a botw stamina bar when hitting the run button. never do this, please. but the tone was ultimately set by the soothing vocal song signalling everything’s going to be alright. sure, i believe you, game i’ve just met for 10 minutes. on that note, there’s a gimmick here where vocals come in when you do the obligatory mega evolution/z shmove/dynawhatever mechanic. or limit break if i wasnt trying to pigeonhole this into pokemon so badly. other jrpgs learn from this please! im deducting points tho because the audio is clearly too high quality to be coming from a cassette player. da diegetics...
upon setting out, you realise you’re going to spend a lot of your time in a fairly humdrum open world, encountering wooden npcs, getting into double battles (colosseum/xd fans eat your heart out) where your monsters have like 8 moves each (half of them unusable while you watch your AP bar filling), being rewarded with like 5 different currencies stuffed into the same menu as your level-up moves. a type system where hits aren’t merely “super effective”, they cause shit like stats dropping, contact damage being taken, induced type changes, leech seed, you name it. and you get some bonus AP? did that sound overwhelming? should pokemon be overwhelming?
a looooot of thumb twiddling in a game where i had both difficulty sliders turned all the way up anyway. i think pokemon is smart in being dumb. you get 4 moves. they are always accessible (unless you have 0 pp. but then you just have to get it up) and predictable. you only get exp and money. i didn’t find the strategising in this game particularly rewarding or necessary, so a lot of the complexity just felt a headache to trawl through. your tms can only be sorted alphabetically, and you get so many of them that i just… stopped wanting to look there. yes my room is still messy.
idk. id probably forgive the excess here (it is an open world game) if i had a stronger reason to keep going. i found the writing somewhat stale, but the political bent funny. area music unmemorable but still vibey. quests sorta boring, but passable. the monsters are cute. i like them. i could finish this and have a decent time. but i probably wont! (it is an open world game)
oh also they added scald to this game. and made it 90 base power. im just saying.
i was a bit optimistic when starting the game up, despite getting jumpscared by a botw stamina bar when hitting the run button. never do this, please. but the tone was ultimately set by the soothing vocal song signalling everything’s going to be alright. sure, i believe you, game i’ve just met for 10 minutes. on that note, there’s a gimmick here where vocals come in when you do the obligatory mega evolution/z shmove/dynawhatever mechanic. or limit break if i wasnt trying to pigeonhole this into pokemon so badly. other jrpgs learn from this please! im deducting points tho because the audio is clearly too high quality to be coming from a cassette player. da diegetics...
upon setting out, you realise you’re going to spend a lot of your time in a fairly humdrum open world, encountering wooden npcs, getting into double battles (colosseum/xd fans eat your heart out) where your monsters have like 8 moves each (half of them unusable while you watch your AP bar filling), being rewarded with like 5 different currencies stuffed into the same menu as your level-up moves. a type system where hits aren’t merely “super effective”, they cause shit like stats dropping, contact damage being taken, induced type changes, leech seed, you name it. and you get some bonus AP? did that sound overwhelming? should pokemon be overwhelming?
a looooot of thumb twiddling in a game where i had both difficulty sliders turned all the way up anyway. i think pokemon is smart in being dumb. you get 4 moves. they are always accessible (unless you have 0 pp. but then you just have to get it up) and predictable. you only get exp and money. i didn’t find the strategising in this game particularly rewarding or necessary, so a lot of the complexity just felt a headache to trawl through. your tms can only be sorted alphabetically, and you get so many of them that i just… stopped wanting to look there. yes my room is still messy.
idk. id probably forgive the excess here (it is an open world game) if i had a stronger reason to keep going. i found the writing somewhat stale, but the political bent funny. area music unmemorable but still vibey. quests sorta boring, but passable. the monsters are cute. i like them. i could finish this and have a decent time. but i probably wont! (it is an open world game)
oh also they added scald to this game. and made it 90 base power. im just saying.