you know, the problem is that at the same time I tried to play Xenoblade 2 I was playing a game with much better game feel on the overall in the form of Final Fantasy 14. there's so many little things, like... jumping. Jumping feels better in FF14. the combat feels snappier and isn't convoluted. The maps don't confuse me. the UI is far cleaner and customizable if you don't find it clean enough, The Quests are presented in a far cleaner manner with a far more robust quest log that will open the map for you around where your objective is if you check it. The Fast Travel options make far more logical sense, and the main story is presented in far more of a compelling manner in spite of the fact that FF14 and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 employ very similar tricks to how their main Story progression happens. Yes, it's a game with a monthly sub, but it's so much more polished.
I legit was having more fun grinding Tiger! Tiger! during my time with Xenoblade Chronicles 2 then I was playing the rest of the game.
EDIT: HOLY JESUS **** THE POKEMON DISCUSSION.
I was actually going to take a nap and then that rolled around and like... I'm thankful for James being on this show to understand and fathom just how self-destructive some of the ideas posited here are!
Pokemon is a game that when played multiplayer, should give the sort of buzz a 1 on 1 fighting game does, but in the accessibility of a TURN BASED MEDIUM. Some people have the minds and competitive spirits, but maybe not the dexterity to play such a game, and that is why the chess-like pacing of competitive pokemon is a compelling thing for some fans. You alienate a lot of folks if you attempt to make a live game with the level of mechanical deepness that pokemon has absorbed via osmosis over the years.
The reason that Black/White are my favorite games in that franchise are because there was a certain delight in having all new pokemon with ZERO repeats, even if some of the stuff it introduced fit familiar archetypes that previous pokemon might have. I feel that James is absolutely CORRECT in the idea that just regurgitating the original 150 nostalgia raw is a horrible decision, especially given how much they have done so ad nauseum over the years. the original 150 were heavily favored when it came time to decide which pokemon would recieve Mega Evolution. the original 150 were EXCLUSIVELY chosen to receive Alolan Forms. Heck, even during Diamond and Pearl, many Gen 1 pokemon were favored to receive evolutions or Pre-evolutions! of the 79 evolutionary lines (retroactively 78 thanks to Tyrouge tying Hitmonlee and Hitmonchan to the same family of Pokemon), 43 of those lines have recieved a typing update, a new Evolution, a Mega Evolution, or an Alolan form. some multiple times. some in the same game. one of those is going to headline one of those two games and has had a merch line introduced based on it's various evolutions, old AND new.
I posit that an original 151 only reboot would serve to piss people off, be INCREDIBLY regressive, and yes, make for a game that'd get incredibly boring, given that I already thought that X, Y, Sun, and Moon were milquetoast in presentation and clearly lost a lot of it's presentational flair with the move away from beautiful 2D Sprite based art to these models ran through an ugly pixel filter. This of course, after they made models that were so heavy in tris in their meshes that they would regularly tank the framerate of the poor 3DS.
A Pokemon Yellow Sequel-Reboot nonsense that looks like it's being run through the 3DS Emulator Citra to get 1080p visuals and Pokemon Go style touch-to throw ball style controls will not impress me. I'm not saying a revisit to Kanto can't be interesting. heck, from the way the leaks made this sound, it's more of a sequel with Red and Green/Blue as tentpoles to the narrative. Kanto 20 years on sounds like it could be interesting, if anything!
but at the same time, the series has been dabbling in the lazy writing rut of "infinite alternate universes!" and even introduced the Ultra Beasts, pokemon that are from alternate dimensions. this is a perfect way to introduce invasive species into the wilds of Kanto, or mess with the encounter tables some! there's tons of potential here, and to just outright ignore so much progress to placate to jaded 90's kids that started talking about pokemon again for 0.05 seconds because it was on their smart phones is bone-headed and I want to know if it's Junichi Masuda, Satoshi Tajiri, or some sort of shareholder fuckhead who I have to talk about long and hard with to see that this game goes to the "Or Later" part of the "2018 or later" forecast to steer this project away from being boring trash.