This review will be split in two main parts, the first will be an out of context review, meaning I will review the game simply as it stands on it's own. This is for people who aren't necessarily huge Pokemon fans and don't care about how the game fits into a larger gaming context. The second part will be an in context review where i look at how the game reflects off of my expectations as a fan and game consumer. To finish I will talk briefly about what i hope to get from future games in the series.
Out of Context Review:
Let us start out positively. The game runs as game freak wants it to run. I noticed no frame drops or slow downs in the 35 hours i have played so far. No game crashes, no install issues, the game works (is the bar low enough?) The new Pokemon in the game are fine, for the most part. I should point out here that I am normally highly critical of most new Pokemon so the fact that I actually found about 30% of them likable is surprising. However the middle and final stage evolutions for the 3 starter Pokemon are all incredibly disappointing, becoming all too humanoid and off putting by the time I was a few hours into the game. When you add to this that some new Pokemon are version exclusive as always, that there are a limited number of Pokemon available to catch from older games, that legendary Pokemon aren't available to catch until very late in the game, that most of the coolest Pokemon either don't evolve or evolve once into some weird looking thing, I found it very hard to find 6 fully evolved Pokemon that i wanted on my team to join in my adventure.
So how is the adventure? well... it's rather boring. The game suffers from endless pauses to gameplay so that one-note characters can talk about things that I don't care about or teach me things that i already know. There are far too many cases of me just wanting to get to the end of a conversation, it finally ending, me taking 3 steps, and a new conversation starting automatically. I found myself begging the game to set me free and just let me play. When I finally made it to the open Wild Area of the game I thought that I might have gotten my wish but there just isn't much to do in this area. There are wild Pokemon, obviously, and the camera is finally free and fully controllable, but ultimately it just feels like you're passing through to get to the next town. Graphically the game varies massively, from stunning caves and forrests to the down right ugly textures found in the Wild Area, I found myself happily surprised on occasion but mostly shaking my head at pixelated models and muddy backgrounds. Model animations are oddly stiff and characters frequently walk and turn in place, battle animations also feel lacking and game music also leaves much to be desired. The game's structure is overwhelmingly linear, outside of the wild area. There are zero decisions to make as to where you want to go, there is no exploration and there are no dungeons to get through. You literally just walk from one town to the next doing what you're told. If you try to go the wrong way you will be stopped by a dumb looking member of the badly named team "YEll" every time. This is their main function in the game, no joke, apart from blocking your way at every turn, they don't do much of anything in the game, which i was happy about because as I said, they're real stupid.
Pokemon Sword is also not a challenging game. During my playthrough I made an attempt to keep myself under levelled by not catching very many Pokemon and I picked the starter with a dissadvantage in the first two gyms. Although this kept the game more interesting than it would otherwise have been during the first half, I only ever lost one battle because I didn't want to walk back and heal up before a gym. When you finally make it to the final league, the game is once again interrupted to wrap up the tedious story that takes a weird turn out of the blue and lets you catch the strongest Pokemon in the game (easily, with a single Pokeball) right before the title match, just in case the game wasn't easy enough. In the end, Pokemon Sword fails on story and technical criteria while adding very little to gameplay and was overall hugely disappointing.
In Context Review:
I am a huge Pokemon fan. fan of the anime, fan of the trading card game and of course a fan of the games. I got my first Gameboy advanced with Pokemon leaf green which is my favourite game to this day. I have since played Pokemon Ruby, White, Y, Omega Sapphire, Sun on Nintendo hardware and bought a Switch console in part to play Let's go Pikachu. If you add the time and money spent watching and re-watching the animated series on VHS, renting and watching the movies, collecting and trading hundreds (if not thousands) of cards, replaying games, and playing ROMs on emulators, I have invested a lot (some might say far too much) in this franchise.
I Remember being very impressed with the jump from the DS systems to the 3DS systems with Pokemon X and Y having over 450 Pokemon included all with 3D models and spread evenly throughout the game to make the world feel real. With the inclusion of the original starters for nostalgia and the random trades to make filling the Pokedex a reality, it seemed like a great game. So when it came to making the next jump, to a Nintendo home console, i was excited.
The first game I played on the Switch was Pokemon Let's go Pikachu which was surprisingly enjoyable despite the glaring omission of wild battles, so i was primed for their return in the next game in the series. As the first trailers for Pokemon Sword and Shield were revealed, I didn't see much to get excited about. Not a ton of cool new Pokemon, not a discernible improvements in graphics, animations of world building. The new Dynamax feature didn't interest me (and turns out to not be such a big deal, which i was actually happy about.) Then the news broke that not every previous Pokemon would be featured in the game, as in, would not be designed into the game, not even to trade over from older games, simply not there. My initial reaction was something like "well that's okay as long as the games are good, I understand they can't do everything with limited time and game size, and i'm sure they'll at least have my favourites and still probably about 600 total" however as i read and considered other reactions i realised that it shouldn't matter whether MY favourites were included if it meant others weren't, that just seemed selfish. As more news broke and the developers claimed that work had to be focused on new animations and model and that was the reason for the reduction in Pokemon, despite animations and models looking all too familiar, my scepticism grew. Then i remembered Pokemon X and Y, released in 2013 for a much much weaker system had 457 different Pokemon not including different forms or mega evolutions. Then I remembered that games for home consoles are more expensive so the new game would cost about 50% more than previous titles. Then I remembered that Pokemon is the most profitable multi-media franchise in history and that far less profitable games look way better and don't seem to recycle models or animations from previous games. If the developers needed more time or money or programmers, they have no excuse for not investing it to make the best games possible. They don't need to half ass development and they don't need to lie about why content is missing, they have the money and resources to make it better. In the end, there are (only) 400 Pokemon in the game and somehow they have left out almost all of my favourites (my poor Dragonite.) I have no idea where all those resources went, why wasn't the whole game open world like the Wild Area? why did the Wild Area look so much worse than the rest of the game? How can the biggest game series in history, 6 years in the future, on more powerful hardware have less game content without even providing a substantial improvement to graphics, story, game length or anything else. Where have those resources gone?
Pokemon: Breath of the Wild
I hope Game freak takes some time off to reconsider the direction of the series instead of spitting out one game a year. I would be okay to see sequels to Let's Go or even Generation 4 remakes as long as the next new game is a substantial upgrade from what we got this year. I want the upgrade to be as large as the jump to the 3DS. Give me a fully open world game, give me a huge world to explore, give me 18 gyms, one for each type, why not? Make them scale to the player so you can take them on in any order. Give me 900 free roaming Pokemon in the over-world and make a seamless transition to encounters and battles. I basically want Pokemon to go the way that Zelda did in Breath of the Wild. I don't even care if they steal their engine, it looks and runs great on the Switch, they can even steal the map, I don't care, just add a few Pokemon centers, gyms, wild Pokemon and trainers, a league to finish, keep the climbing and swimming mechanics and just set me free in the world of Pokemon. Even if you don't want this exactly, there is no reason why we should be expecting anything less than a game of this scope.
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