I haven't even listened to the episode yet, but I had to compliment you on the article subtitle and first paragraph. You're reaching new peaks, James! :)

Slight correction: I assume you meant "Virgil or Beatrice", not "Virgil of Beatrice"? Didn't want the brillance marred by a typo, if so!

I DID! Good catch!

Here is a Pokemon game for Guillaume. You need to collect all infinity gym badges and kill half off all Pokemon.

First time here, I just wanted to mention that the "Isotopes" are already a Minor League baseball team, located in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

And they were named after a Simpsons joke.

Good show, gents.


Cool of you, Gui, to give Xenoblade Chronicles 2 a fair shot after your experience with Xenoblade Chronicles X. I don't have any good advice to give because the game is a blur of systems and anime after spending 130+ hours in it. I'd say don't sweat the small stuff and just take your time with the game in your three weeks of borrowing it. You're gonna be sifting around the menus a lot, so don't think you're doing anything wrong by doing that.


One important thing, you need to check you're Blade's Affinity Chart every time you see a notification that you gained an affinity award. You can't collect it unless you do that, and you can't progress further down an affinity branch unless you collect.

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 FUCK 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.

If we don't want to get stuck with just the original 151, let's expand on my game idea with a more professional-sounding name:

Pokemon  x Odama: Let's Do This! 151 + 100

That way players can enjoy all that Kanto and Johto have to offer!

Will Episode 574 feature listener's E3 predictions, both plausible and impossible? I'll have to prepare. I promise I'll propose nothing as soul-crushing as Mega Man Games As A Service. Only goodness and light and crazy from me.

As far as Star Fox Grand Prix goes, assuming it's true, the more I think about it, the better it sounds. It feels like a game that could use the Star Fox characters in an interesting way that actually results in a good game.

The health system reminds me of nes ninja turtles with the swapping of turtles and each one with their own health.