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Messages - Ian Sane

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1
Nintendo Gaming / Re: What will Nintendo release in 2024?
« on: March 14, 2024, 01:57:39 PM »
Regarding third party support I figure there is a big difference in attitude depending on if a person has only a Switch or also has another current console.  For multiplatform third party games the Switch version is usually the worst and often costs a bit extra.  So if you own a PS4 or 5 and don't specifically desire portability you'll probably get the game on one of those systems instead.  If that's your situation then the Switch's usefulness is entirely based on its exclusives, which is usually going to be first party games.

2
TalkBack / Re: Akira Toriyama (1955 - 2024)
« on: March 08, 2024, 12:28:21 PM »
I wouldn't have thought of myself specifically as a fan but I realize that Toriyama tied into the changing tastes of my life.  When I was a teen I was into Dragon Ball Z, then as a young adult got more into the original Dragon Ball.  Dragon Quest VIII is really when RPGs clicked with me after earlier attempts to get into the genre and then that expanded into a wider interest in the Dragon Quest series as a hole.  Dragon Quest XI was my first Switch game and I put over 100 hours into it.  I have some great memories where Toriyama's art design is integral and, being visual, is the first thing I would think of when reflecting back.

I guess he's kind of like Jack Kirby, who I never really thought of myself as a fan of but then realized his work was weaved into my pop culture tastes.  I didn't really know who Kirby was until after his death so this time I'm well aware of who this person is when they pass.  So I felt a little sad when I saw the news, more so than I would typically feel for a public figure that I don't know personally.  RIP Akira Toriyama.

3
I've been playing SMTV off and on for a while now.  I'm trying to stick to one game at a time on the Switch but there are certain exceptions and Pokemon and Zelda were allowed to temporarily bump it.  Now I got the Pokemon DLC for Christmas so SMTV got bumped again.  I appear to be at the very end so there's not much left.

The game is really long and pretty hard, at least compared to the typical RPG I would play.  I like it a lot but it's kind of gone on too long and I want to wrap it up.  I've also been resisting switching the difficulty to the easiest setting which would presumably let me finish it quicker but I've been over 100 hours in without doing that so it feels like a cop-out to do it now.

In that sense, I don't really feel like buying a second version of the game.  But the first SMTV ended up becoming pretty cheap.  I paid $50 CAD a few years ago and it felt like a good deal but it has since been marked down to $30.  So if Vengeance gets marked down to a low price, maybe I would consider it.  But then I don't think SMTIV Apocalypse ever became cheap and it's now very pricey.  If I got the game on a low price then I figure I would play through it on the easiest difficulty, just to experience the gist of it without committing another 100+ hours.

Ideally though this should be DLC.  In modern times it makes no sense to double-dip on games when everyone else lets existing owners upgrade.

4
Nintendo Gaming / Re: Switch is so popular people don't even post
« on: January 02, 2024, 01:53:39 PM »
The Switch does have tons of ports and re-releases.  But I don't find it to be a problem because the Switch has strong enough third party support that there are enough new games on the system available that you could avoid the re-releases and still have a healthy backlog of stuff to play.  Prior to the Switch Nintendo would remake an old game and that was it, for like a three month window.  Play this port or play nothing.

I also wouldn't discount PS4 ports even if they come a few years late.  Again, back in the Gamecube days a port of a well regarded PS2 game was a valuable entry in the library.  That sort of thing isn't great if you own all the current systems but if you only own the Nintendo one then that's essentially a new game.  It's the sort of thing that between the SNES and Switch was rare for Nintendo consoles.  Over the last year I'm starting to see the types of games I'm interested in get announced for the PS5 and not the Switch but prior to that I could kind of assume that the Switch would get the games I'm interested in.  And if that's happening for like 80% of the games on your radar then you don't get hung up on the missing 20%.

With digital downloads now being the norm I would expect a significant amount of old games available on the eShop.  When music switched from records to CDs or videos from VHS to DVD it wasn't like only new content was available.  Classic content made the conversion as well.  If you went to a book store historically it wasn't like the shelves only had books written in the last five years, there were classics that would remain in print for decades.  Videogames should have the same thing.  The fact that Nintendo made that Mario 3D collection a limited time release is nuts.  Those games should just be "in print" forever in whatever digital store Nintendo has.  So in the modern world a console should have tons of old stuff, it just needs to also have a steady stream of new games.

Something I've thought of is if you loaded up the max SD card the Switch can support (which I think is 2 TB) you would have a fantastic time capsule of video game history since it has so many key games from Atari to the present.  If you were to send something out to space like the Voyager Golden Record a fully loaded Switch would be perfect.

5
TalkBack / Re: 2023 In Review: The State Of The Switch eShop Is Fallen
« on: January 02, 2024, 12:18:37 PM »
I was rather shocked when I discovered there were hentai games on the Switch.  I always thought of that stuff as underground, and relegated to open platforms that don't have any licensing system.  I assume Nintendo does still have a third party licensing system so that there aren't games that are outright viruses on the eShop but it seems like only the most basic functionality is required to pass.  And while restricting games that are not very good is way too subjective usually "no porn" is a pretty standard policy.

Though a lot of the complaints I hear about the eShop don't relate to me because I just never use the eShop interface in any meaningful way.  I use Deku Deals to browse the eShop and it links me to the direct page where I can purchase the game.  I never login to the shop from the Switch itself, I do it all on my laptop.  Now I typically peruse the "recent price drops" page to see what's on sale and it can get overloaded with junk games which seem to go on sale every week (oh look, "Checkers for Kids" is on sale again).  But it's still a relatively easy interface to scan quickly and spot the good stuff, plus you can filter by publisher so that can help narrow it down to the companies that you associate with quality.  Good indie games will need something else to grab my attention obviously but that's kind of a the case with anything indie in general.  Games like that get on my radar from word of mouth and good reviews on sites that I frequent.

On that note Deku Deals will show you the Metacritic score for a game on it's main page as well which makes it easier to spot good titles.  Nintendo would do well to learn from that site on how to redesign their eShop layout.  Now having a third party web site alternative to the proper eShop doesn't give Nintendo an excuse to not offer something better, but it exists and if you're aware of it but don't use it you're suffering for no reason.

6
Nintendo Gaming / Re: Nintendo Year in Review 2023
« on: December 15, 2023, 12:17:40 PM »
My top one was Tears of the Kingdom with 260 or so hours.  It's funny looking at the month-by-month breakdown.  January and February was Pokemon, March was Chaos;Head, April was SMT V (which I've been playing on-and-off for a while now) and then May it's Zelda and that remains until the end of the year.  It's crazy to think of one game dominating so much of my play time.

Another amusing trend was seeing my total time drop significantly starting in September.  The reason is obvious - football.  Typically Sunday afternoon is a good time for me to play videogames but with the NFL eating up that time instead I lose significant hours in the later months.

7
It's odd to see something die that used to be such a big deal but has become so irrelevant that I don't care that it died.  Really it died years ago but in a gradual way.  It wasn't like a quick pull of the plug.  20 years ago if E3 died that would have seriously bummed me out.  But E3 isn't really what was exciting, at least for someone like myself that didn't attend it, it was new game announcements and hands-on reports of the demos for upcoming releases.  These days Nintendo Directs handle the announcements and I'm usually looking for demos I can download pre-release.  If I have to resort to reading someone else's impressions, I'm disappointed.  It's very easy for the general public to experience from the comfort of their home what E3 used to be like for the attendees.  It's really up to the publishers if they're willing to offer a demo and at what point they want to reveal their upcoming game.

Though I do occasionally look at my old Gamepro issue from 1996 that covered that year's E3.  Of course that's the big N64 rollout.  That was the best way to get that info in those days and it's nice to look back, but it just isn't a model that makes sense anymore.

8
General Gaming / Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« on: November 30, 2023, 11:22:45 AM »
Strider 2

Picked this up a while back when the PS3 store was closing as I grabbed a couple PS1 games that are expensive in the retro market.  I beat it in about an hour and not because I'm so talented but because the game has unlimited continues that plop you back into the action as if nothing happened.  The game still has a ranking for how you did in each level (I got a nice 'E' on every one) so there is some objective for avoiding dying.

I still had a lot of fun though.  I have the original Strider on the Genesis and the arcade version in Capcom Classics Collection but I'm not very good at it.  I play the arcade one more because I have unlimited continues as I struggle to get to level 2 in the Genesis version.  Strider is very much a set-piece game with all sorts of cool bosses and action sequences and there is a lot of fun to be had in just experiencing it.  I'm not going to take the time to get good at it so the unlimited continues is almost a feature for me, to just experience the game.  Ideally they should have let you restrict it though and set the amount of continues you want.

Something I couldn't help but notice is how the whole presentation is a great representation of what was cool during the PS1 era.  Teenage me would have been all over this.  As a result it created a sense of nostalgia, not for the specific game because I didn't play it at the time, but for the time period.  The graphics also add to that as it uses 2D sprites on a 3D background.  This doesn't really look that good and it looks old and dated, but again I find it has a certain charm to it.  Blocky 8-bit sprites eventually became an intentional aesthetic and I feel like 32-bit polygons have that potential as well.  PS2/Gamecube era polygons look too similar to present day games so they seem just like a lower res version but 32/64 bit polygons look distinct.

Now in terms of the ending, well aside from defeating the bad guy I really couldn't tell you what happened.  The bosses have a few lines of dialog when they appear but it's in Japanese with no sub-titles so I have no clue what they said.

9
General Gaming / Re: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions?
« on: November 15, 2023, 12:12:10 PM »
So over the weekend I beat Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.  So it took me about six months and this was pretty much the only thing I played on Switch, aside from the odd demo here and there and little bit of Addams Family pinball.  I didn't 100% the game but unlike Breath of the Wild I actually did complete every shrine.  I wasn't originally thinking of doing so but realized as I got close to the end game that I was only a few shrines away so I gave it a go.  Had to resort to a map to find the last one though as it was in a cave I had visited at some point but gone past it and forgotten about it.  It was a Shrine quest that some person gives you but for whatever reason I never talked to that person so it wasn't in my Adventure Log.

Ending wise, it's Zelda so it's pretty much just saved the day, everything's great, etc.  The experience of playing the game is where the enjoyment comes from in Zelda, less the story.  My brother had beat the game months before and had warned me about the last boss battle and then he sat dumbfounded on the couch as I almost effortlessly beat it.  He noticed I used a defensive approach while he's more offensive and it seems that my approach was the better one.

This is one of the best games I've ever played but I will say I was getting bored by the end of it and ready to play other things.  The game is maybe a little too big or would benefit from taking breaks in playing it so everything freshens up each time.  Or just don't go for every shrine I suppose.  I was worried that the re-used map from Breath of the Wild would be a problem, but it isn't really and having played both games it is fun to see how things have changed.  But a third game using this map would be overkill.  They had their one chance to recycle things and have it not seem like a cop-out.  Though it does result in a strange situation where I feel like this is the better game but it works best if you're familiar with first game.  So you have the play the weaker first title and if you were to play them both back-to-back it would probably be a slog.  You need a few years between them.

My favourite part of this game that made it better?  Weapon Fusion.  The constant breaking of weapons was such a pain in the first game and while the feature is still here, the ability to fuse weapons with other items makes it fun.  The fused weapons tend to have a longer lifespan and the customizations gives it more of a strategic element.  I think it "fixed" the breaking weapons concept.

10
TalkBack / Re: Nintendo Announces Development Of Live-Action Zelda Movie
« on: November 07, 2023, 07:53:21 PM »
20 years ago I would have been thrilled to see a Zelda movie.  Today? Eh, Hollywood blockbusters aren't made for me anymore.  I'm just not the target audience.  I see nothing but CG and self-referential quips that appeal to younger generations and it just doesn't appeal to me.  But I'm not really bothered by that either.  As long as the Zelda games remain good, that's all that matters to me.

11
That's the same pricing as the PS5 which is a little expensive for my tastes.  I'll be waiting for sales or price drops if it's $400 for the digital-only model, which wouldn't be the one I would get.

12
TalkBack / Re: John Riccitello
« on: October 10, 2023, 11:44:38 AM »
When Unity backed down on the original idea there were theories that the current model was what they really wanted and that they came up with the ridiculous one as a tactic to "compromise" to what they were really aiming for.  If that was their plan all along then I don't think we would see Riccitello gone.  It looks like it was what it appeared to be, where upper management came up with a ridiculously greedy pricing structure with all sorts of logistics issues and potential legal issues and figured everyone would bend to it, but they didn't and the company's whole future is almost certainly in doubt now.

13
This doesn't surprise me in any way.  Of course if you're looking to acquire other game companies that Nintendo would be the one you're most interested in.  What would surprise me would be evidence of Nintendo and MS having semi-serious talks about this.

Though if MS was to ever purchase Nintendo I suspect I would be done with current gaming.  Like not even necessarily in a grand "taking a stand" gesture, I just figure they would ruin Nintendo so quickly that I would just lose interest and gradually transition to solely playing retro games.  In a way I wonder if my backlog is my subconscious preparing for that day.

14
Lots of a remakes in this Direct, which strongly suggests that the Switch 2 rumours have some weight to them.  Obviously it's easier to fill the backend of a the Switch release schedule with remakes while resources are put towards upcoming Switch 2 games.

But this is one I'm quite interested in because the sequel was never released in North America and I would like to try it out.  Though I probably will wait for a sale of some sort if I can.  The first game was ridiculously short and thankfully I had bought it used for a low price, years after the 3DS had come out.  It was fun but I would have felt cheated if I paid full price.

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TalkBack / Re: F-ZERO Returns Today as the Next 99-player Title
« on: September 14, 2023, 11:39:09 AM »
We haven't had a new F-Zero in 20 years and this is what we get?  I'm getting Federation Force vibes here, where a franchise with a cult following gets ignored for years and then finally shows up again with a spinoff instead of a proper sequel.  I'm not even on NSO so I can't play it.

Not that this specific game is necessarily a bad idea, it's just the PR of it.  Make a new F-Zero game and then later this or even a remake of an F-Zero alongside it and it's fine.  But instead it's like you didn't give the fans what they asked for but act like you did, which pisses them off more.  Spin-offs are for healthy franchises that get regular releases, not dormant franchises where each release is an event.

16
I'm trying to think of how they can get money for games already released.  Like the game is completed and out the door so how does Unity even know how many installs occur to send you a bill?  And for Microsoft's Game Pass, why can't MS just tell them to go f themselves?  "Hi, giant company with more resources than me.  I've decided to retroactively change my pricing structure so that you owe me a bigger cut on something neither of us agreed to ahead of time.  I'm sure you'll immediately comply and not sick your high priced lawyers on me!"

I would assume that the end result here is that no one uses Unity anymore and Unity's attempts to get money for software developed in the past gets soundly defeated in court.  Maybe if they just targeted small indies they could get away with it but it is stupid to try to squeeze Nintendo or MS.  Big companies have the resources to sue and will do so.  I just don't see how this doesn't outright kill Unity.

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Nintendo Gaming / Re: The OFFICIAL Big N rumor thread *bring your own salt*
« on: September 12, 2023, 06:19:33 PM »
If the rumours are true then the Switch 2 looks a lot like the 3DS in comparison to the DS, a successful concept tweaked and upgraded to keep up with changing tech.  Now the 3DS also had the 3D gimmick but Nintendo eventually de-emphasized that by the time the 2DS came along.  It became clear that the 3DS' success was largely due to building on what people already liked about the DS.

That's really what I want out of a Switch 2.  The Switch concept is so well done that it doesn't need much to upgrade it.  You can presumably do better specs now on a handheld so let's bump those up, but keep the hybrid concept largely in tact.  The fact that they're rumoured to be demoing Unreal Engine 5 is great because a big part of the concept was that the Switch often got current games, just scaled down a bit.  If the gap in hardware was too big we would probably stop seeing any of the "miracle" ports we got.  Third party support would take a huge dip if Switch 2 ports were too difficult to do.

The Switch experience really works for me.  I get Nintendo games and I get most of the third party games I'm interested in.  Maybe the framerate isn't as good or it shows up later but I get them and they're good enough that I'm satisfied.  So if the Switch 2 keeps that going I'll be content.  Though my Switch backlog is large enough I probably won't buy a Switch 2 until years into its life.  I've only had a Switch for about 2 years so I was late for this gen to begin with.

Though I would like backwards compatibility with both digital purchases and physical ones.  I'll keep my Switch 1 so it won't be like these games will disappear for me but I'd like to just keep one system docked that plays everything.  My DS was essentially retired once the 3DS came out but I played DS games on it as much as 3DS games.  I would love to be able to do that with the Switch.  Also if it's backwards compatible then the eShop will stick around longer.  Nintendo has been brutal with retiring their online stores so early but they'll have no reason to if digital Switch games can be purchased for the Switch 2.

18
How did Quest for Camelot end up on this service?  It's based on a movie so presumably there are some publishing rights issues involved here.  So who goes and obtains the permissions from Warner Bros to re-release a videogame that's over 20 years old that was never very popular that is based on a movie that wasn't very popular?  And this isn't a storefront for individual sales, this is for a subscription based service.  No one is going to sign up for the service for this game but presumably Nintendo will have to give Warner Bros some sort of payment for it.  Doesn't make business sense to jump through this many hoops unless the game itself has a big fanbase like Goldeneye or the old Ninja Turles games.

The only angle I can see is that since Nintendo co-developed it that maybe they will lose some copyright claim or something like that if the game is out-of-print for too long.  Or I wonder if Warner Bros now owns the game and is trying to get figured into Nintendo Switch Online and this is one of the only titles they could offer.

19
General Gaming / Re: Backlaugust 2023! (Forums Aren't Dead Yet?) Edition
« on: August 02, 2023, 11:48:34 AM »
I'm still working through Tears of the Kingdom and I doubt that will be finished in August.  If it is then I'll go back to Shin Megami Tensei V where I appear to be near the end.  That game has been interrupted twice now, first by Pokemon and then Zelda.

I've tried to be disciplined with the Switch where I try to finish a game before I move to another one but I have not been so disciplined with sales so I have a big backlog of physical games that are still sitting sealed on my shelf.  A least half of them are RPGs, which of course means they're long games.  So even if I took the whole time off work I probably couldn't get through them within a month.  The dumbest move on my part was getting into the SMT franchise as I've also bought some games in the series for the 3DS and PS2.  When will I find time for those?

For me the ideal month for backlog clearing would be March.  Football season is over but the weather is still cold and rainy enough that I don't have a bunch of yard work to do.  Without even really trying to find I play videogames a lot during that time.

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Nintendo Gaming / Re: Official Sales Thread
« on: July 31, 2023, 07:35:00 PM »
I know a lot of people don't like the new direction of a lot of Nintendo games but this is the kind of stuff I've wanted for ages. I want it bigger and grander. I can play 3D World in Odyssey and I can play Ocarina of Time in Tears of the Kingdom. I can't play Odyssey in 3D World and I can't play Totk in OoT. I can't imagine too many people look at it that way but the sales this generation speak for themselves.

In 1998, Ocarina of Time was Tears of the Kingdom.  The first time I played it I thought it was the most grand ambitious game in the world.  You actually play the notes on your ocarina!  You can ride a horse!  You plant seeds in the past and they grow in the future!  But then for a while it was like Nintendo decided that Zelda wasn't going to expand much beyond that, which made no sense to me.  I think back to the NES and SNES and us kids tended to regard videogames as an abstraction of a concept that you couldn't quite do with the hardware of the time but as time went on you got closer to it.  I liken it to how the graphics in a game would be all pixelated but the characters on the box would be a detailed drawing.  My assumption at the time was the box was what it was all supposed to look like, it just couldn't be done so you had to have a pixel art version to convey the general idea.

So I didn't see the old Zelda games as some template to follow but more that they were trying to take the concept of a fantasy world where you travel the land and save the world and put it in videogame form.  So Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom just feels like the series getting closer to fulfilling that concept.  To keep it to some pre-sized bottle and say "Zelda goes no further than this" just makes no sense.

21
The Switch got lots of multiplatform releases with the PS4 despite having inferior hardware.  So I guess the specs just need to be at the point where ports are doable and third parties are willing to do them because the Switch 2 has enough of a userbase to make it worth their while.  Though I have noticed that Japanese third parties have really done a great job on the Switch while Western publishers have had like PS3 ports run like crap.  It's been doable but probably isn't easy, so quick 'n' dirty ports don't turn out that great.

Now there are a few factors that probably helped the Switch.  First of all the transition to new generations these days is slow.  Games would get released for both the PS4 and PS3 for years and we still see a lot of PS5 games get PS4 versions.  The game industry is less willing to just jump into a new generation full on with games that make such use of the new hardware power that they can't work on the older system.  The Switch did come out years after the PS4's release but that didn't seem to matter.

Second of all, Nintendo has to strongest presence in Japan which provides an incentive for Japanese third parties to release games on their system.  The Japanese market loves handhelds and Nintendo has the only handheld.  MS doesn't have much presence there and Sony has catered their systems more to the Western market.  So while someone like Activision might ignore the Switch 2, companies like Capcom, Sega or Square Enix probably won't.  They'll want to have games released for the Japanese handheld market.

My concern though is was the Switch's strong third party support a happy accident?  Did Nintendo put any thought into that when designing the hardware or did it just happen?  Is it something they consider important for the Switch 2?  Nintendo is a very weird company that fluctuates between being geniuses and morons.  My biggest fear is that the Switch successor will be some wacky gimmick system that completely misses the point of why the Switch was successful but the Wii U was not.  You never know with them.  What it should be is a backwards compatible Switch without the Joycon drift design flaw and as good of specs they can cram in there while still having an acceptable price point and battery life.  That's it and it's pretty simple but they don't tend to do obvious things so we'll see.

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TalkBack / Re: Super Mario RPG Remastered for Nintendo Switch
« on: June 21, 2023, 11:53:56 AM »
When I think of what my favourite game of all time is, Super Mario RPG always enters the conversation.  So this seems like a no-brainer but I'll have to see what the price is, since I think of it like paying to replay a game I already own but with new coat of paint.  Another one of my favourite games is Link's Awakening but I don't have that remake yet because Nintendo first party games don't often decrease in price and it needs to be in the impulse buy price range.

So under normal circumstances I would be quite interested if it was the sort of game that shows up in sales with a big discount but because it's Mario, it won't.  Great for people who haven't played it though.  For newcomers it will be worth whatever price they give it.

23
For all the success the Switch has had there appears to be someone high up in Nintendo who is very insistent that Wii-style gimmicks are still where things should really be at.  I think back to how much focus of the Switch reveal was on HD rumble and the motion control elements of the joycons, features that if they never existed would have had no negative impact on the Switch's sales whatsoever.  1-2 Switch was also a major focus.  The game was poorly received and yet somehow a sequel got greenlit and here they are releasing it despite it testing poorly internally and there being essentially no market for it.  And it even gets a physical release!  Someone big at Nintendo is pushing this nonsense and has enough clout that no one can tell him "No, we're not releasing a game that we all know sucks that's a sequel to a game no one gives a damn about!"  Nope, instead they're spending money to print copies to clutter up the cheap bin at Gamestop for years to come.

24
So here's a funny one:

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for the Wii U.

With Tears of the Kingdom out in less than two weeks I figured I should go back and wrap up the earlier game so I would know exactly what's going on story wise.  I had played the game when it was new and did something that I've had a tendency to do where I finish the entire game except the last boss.  I don't really find that kind of thing that fun so I tend to leave games hanging like that.  Zelda in particular has the problem where the story is not usually very interesting and the gameplay I like the most is exploring the world.  So when I've explored the world, I've essentially gotten everything I want out of it.

Turns out I was really close to the end because I wrapped things up in one afternoon.  Prior to storming the castle I did the Xenoblade 2 mission (which I guess downloaded at some point?  Didn't remember anything about) and found a shrine as a warm up.

This game is really hard when you haven't played it for five years and don't remember the mechanics.  Somehow the button mapping seems completely different than anything else I've recently played.  As I expected I was getting destroyed by routine enemies.  As a result my approach to get into the castle was stealth.  Still had to beat Ganon though and I'm rather surprised I did so since I was so inept at the combat.  I barely beat his first form and took three or four tries to his second.  I had to look up how to use updrafts which are required as I just don't remember how the game plays at all.  The horse in the final battle also kept running in the wrong direction.  Is this a random horse or one the ones from my stable?  If so I was training a new one up so maybe it picked one I hadn't tamed yet?

But I'm happy to have wrapped it up.  Ending is not much beyond "hooray you saved the world!" which is precisely why I so often don't have the drive to beat Zelda games.  Though now I'm a little more hyped up for the sequel, having gotten that little taste of the gameplay again.  It will probably be really fun when I'm learning the system again and not throwing myself into the final boss battle without remembering how to play.

25
Pokemon Scarlet

I completed the Pokedex yesterday.  I don't have online but my brother does and he has Violet so I was able to get the version specific Pokemon by linking with him locally.  The one tricky one was the third starter, but he got it from a co-worker and bred a new one for me.

This is the only Pokemon game I have ever filled the Pokedex in.  Now I don't play every game.  When I get a new Nintendo handheld I tend to get the first Pokemon that comes out since then and then generally lose interest and never get others until a new system.  So I've had Blue, Ruby, X and now Scarlet.

Lots of focus has been on Scarlet's bugs and general jank.  It's a shame because there's a reason this is by first complete Pokedex and it's because this feels like the Pokemon game I imagined as the logical progression of the series, when I assumed it would get a console release back on the Gamecube.  You explore the world and can see Pokemon out in the field doing their thing in their natural habitat.  This is what I always wanted.  It's what I hoped X would be as a proper 3D Pokemon and was disappointed to find that it wasn't.

Now regardless of that and the bugs, it still has some clear design issues:
  • Tera Raid Battles do not provide experience so they're not that useful.  They do give you items and you can catch Pokemon using them but since you can't level up your Pokemon with them, I find I didn't do them often despite them being all over the map.  Grinding to fill my Pokedex was a chore at the end but if I could have used the Tera Raids to do it I think that would have been more fun.
  • Area Zero has no map.  That makes it very difficult to find your bearings when you're in there.  That just seems unfinished to me.  Also when linked with my brother we could not see each other in Area Zero.  That's just an unacceptable bug and without a map it made it even more difficult to tell each other "hey, there's a rare Pokemon over here.  I'm, uh, near the big rock I guess."
  • There is no way to mark anything on the map aside from one destination.  A few times I found something I knew to come back to later and I couldn't remember where it was.  Part of the game includes finding ominous stakes around the world.  There is no indication where they are, which I'm fine with because I want to look over the whole map to find them.  The problem is there is no indication of where they WERE.  So I need 8 but I've found 6 or 7 but that was weeks ago and I don't remember where I already found them.  So I see on the map areas where I think they likely would be and I find nothing.  Was there one already here and I should look somewhere else entirely?  Can't remember.  If I could have marked the areas where I already found one it would have made it so much easier to narrow down where else to look.
  • I barely used the sandwich system which seems like something they focused on that isn't that useful.  The shops in the towns tend to focus a lot on this so the towns just aren't that interesting.  There are lots of buildings that you can't access and the shops are the same sandwich shops or item shops that you find everywhere.

Still it's a great game but one that seems half-baked and unfinished.  In that sense it shows how strong the Pokemon concept is that if you make a halfway decent open world game out of it, it's a lot of fun.  I can't help but think that a later game building off of this will be really amazing.  So if you're interested but don't intend on jumping in right this minute, it probably makes sense to see what the next Pokemon game has to see how it improves.

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