Before getting into the nitty gritty of today's segment of the review, I'd like to first point out that I understand and partially agree with Evan_B's assessment. The protagonist might as well not have a face given they have the emotional range of the Animal Crossing villager... at the same time, Mario, Link, and many other Nintendo protagonists might as well be the same way. Nintendo takes this stance on having avatars for the player rather than characters that are complex and deep.
As for Dark Types, they just got a HUGE buff in the form of immunity to Prankster. Yes, Fighting got the short end of the stick, but it's not like fighting types are bad, and two of the best pokemon introduced this generation in the form of
Buzzwole and
Pheramosa do plenty to elevate their respective typings.
otherwise, Yeah, SOS is simultaneously a huge hastle and a boon.
Now that that response is out of the way though... let's get into today's thoughts on some other things the game gets right and wrong.
The Festival Plaza, or as I like to call it, UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH!!!!What's the most important aspect of these pokemon games for their longevity as a game? Trading and Battling. it's what kept folks playing on the playground, it's how they get away selling multiple skews of the same game... it's everything, and while the local method of the quick link is fine, all the online connectivity (you know, the way a vast majority of us tend to play pokemon with others these days?) is buried under an awful feature that requires you stop whatever you were doing to enter, take an NPC dialogue driven tutorial that tells you jack **** of how the festival plaza works, and then FINALLY lets you leave or use the basic functions that the PSS provided, along with all the endless bloated garbage attached to this mechanic.
So, what all do you do in the festival plaza? Well, you have the big trade and battle buttons, but those only work Locally. y'know, the very functions that the Quick Connect provides? the only time you would use festival plaza over quick connect for local play is if you're at a convention or trying to conduct a Pokemon trade at the train platform for Shinjuku station. there's a separate button in the corner for turning on Wifi, which seems to take longer than turning on WiFi did in the games with PSS because of the lengthy attempt to communicate with the Global Link service to perform game sync. (by the way, the Global Link got gutted too. I may get into that in a part three to this review)
So, say for example... you went through the process of getting a pokemon for an online friend of yours and you want to trade it to them. You'd think just registering them to your 3DS friends list would set them aside so the game would let you easily access friends when they're online, right?
Why you gotta be such a spoil sport, Dean?!?
While havin someone on your friend list does tag them as such, they're just mixed in with the riff raff; a list of trainer names that needs to be manually refreshed like a moron jamming on the F5 on their keyboard at walmart.com trying to get themselves an NES Classic Mini this holiday season (heh, topical humor!) until you see your friend's trainer pop up among the riff raff! then you can trade or battle them.
Now, at this point, the PSS system of old would have set aside trainers you've interacted with online or off and allowed you to easily access them again via the acquaintances list. Surely this makes a return, right?!?
... apparently I ran out of budget and couldn't afford Mr. Ambrose to say "Nope!" in the form of a youtube video again. le sigh.
There is a system where you can mark players as VIPs in the festival plaza, but you do this by manually finding them among the crowd of folks, or if you've interacted with them, they might be inside the magical empty Disney castle in the center of the plaza. at that point, you may mark them as a VIP and have them on a separate list where you can see if they're online without having to refresh the list of trainers, which can't possibly be everyone connected to the server at once.
The festival plaza would be bad enough as a worse version of the PSS, but it's SOOOO much more...
WTF does this low rent Wally World actually do for me?!?The real crime is how much stuff is hidden behind this sectioned off part of the game and it's grindy, repetitive tasks. see, several stalls are set up around your disney castle in the festival plaza, and the quality of these stalls and what they do is randomized for every single player. generally, they come in the following catagories.
Lotto shop: These will spit out a random item every day. Bar none the best stall to have if you don't want to grind for festival coins beyond what it takes to fill your festival plaza with these. These also tend to be the best source for rare items like the elusive golden bottle cap! obviously, the more you have around, the more chances you have at winning something that isn't a berry juice or an ultra ball.
Ghost House: a lesser version of the Lotto shop. you actually have to pay coins for this, and you send your pokemon into the haunted mansion and they come out with a random item! the prize pool is slimmer than the lotto shop, and I suppose what pokemon you send in might influence it, but there's no real way to know and as far as I know, no guide has properly documented the best way to game these things.
Bounce Houses: these re a game you can make your pokemon play to get a small sum of effort values in exchange for festival coins. by the way, a lot of these stalls are once every 24 hour dealies, but i think Bounce Houses might not be. haven't done enough testing here to really tell, honestly.
Dye Shoppes: this is an almost useless stall. if you've bought any clothes in white, you can use berries or a large sum of Festival coins to dye your clothes shades that aren't avialable via the main campaign of your pokemon sun or moon versions. usually, dyes made from berries will take about 20 to 40 berries of rare berry types, so uh.... best be using the poke pelago to grow those!
Item Shoppes: spend sums of festival coins (did I mention festival coins are tedious to grind for?) on packs of mundane items you can just get for a wad of Pokeyen at any mart.
Fortune Tellers: They tell you which one of your other stalls in the plaza will give you good RNG on this day. they also will sometimes give you new things you can have your trainer say when they're sent to other festival plazas if you pay enough FC.
Restaurants: these are probably the most important stalls one could have, as the high level stalls have a chance of providing food that will max the effort values of a single stat or have the ever important effect of EV reset! you can only have one pokemon dine per 24 hours, it costs FC, and your pokemon is not allowed to dine if it has maxed out happiness, so better take your pokemon to get the **** kicked out of it or feed it energy roots before using this stall!
What stalls you get is random every time you level up the festival plaza. you level up the festival plaza by grinding for FC. you grind for FC by talking to passers by with red speech bubbles. talking to folks with blue ones just lets you see their battle spot records, pester them to buy the clothes off their back, or buy a random stall in their festival plaza for waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much FC.
You can also grind FC by partaking in missions that allow you to talk to more NPCs within a time limit to grind for FC. a lot of the Festival plaza is just pushing past inane NPC dialogue. not even good NPC dialogue like a trainer or a team skull member might have, no. NPC dialogue that feels like it was put together by a speak n' spell. the tens of thousands of FC it takes to grind your Festival plaza up to the point of having good stalls and all the features is just... amazing. I will take SOS battle ANY day of the week over Festival plaza.
oh, and the NPC that trades stone shard items for Bottlecaps is in the festival plaza. I suppose that's worth noting.
A vacation at the PokePelago. which is pronounced like "Archipelago" but with "Po-ke" in front of it.If the Festival Plaza is a skinner box designed to make you go insane far before you can reap any real benefits from it, then Pokepelago is the skeleton of a mobile game shoved forcibly into Pokemon. while it is entirely a timer based feature that doesn't have a "pay to make the timer go away!" button, it does have immediate, tangible results.
The beans you feed your pokemon for Pokemon refresh and get from Cafes are your main currency here en masse, beans can be exchanged for motivating your pokemon in whatever of the 5 islands you chose to leave them. they can also be used to upgrade the islands themselves. it took me a little under a week and a half to get all the island upgrades in place to maximize their production of resources for the main game. it should also be noted that your island upgrades are also gated by how many pokemon are in your box, so uh... do yourself a favor and catch 'em all or at least perform mass breeding to make these requirements a non-issue.
Isle Abeans is the default island for the pelago. it produces more pokebeans, and beans of higher quality that can be split into smaller beans, or fed to your pokemon via pokemon refresh to make them fall in love with you forever for sharing with them the nectar and ambrosia of the gods. Wild pokemon sometimes show up here as well to come and blatantly mooch off of you.
Isle Aplenny replaces the old berry farms of previous games. having access to this at all times and not having to tend to the berries to ensure good harvest is a godsend, and makes it easy to stock up on helpful berries at the very least.
Isle Aphun basically spits out items every day. these can be the stone shards you randomly get for trading in for bottle caps, or it can be bottle caps, evolutionary stones, or any item you can think of that'd be based on a mineral in a pokemon games. probably the most boring of these islands.
Isle Evelup is VERY important. you assign pokemon in your boxes to stays there, and depending on how much you've leveled the island up, you can have those boxed pokemon gain levels daycare style, or more importantly, passively gain EVs. you can EV train up to 18 pokemon while your 3DS is off, and that alone I feel makes the pelago a worthwhile addition to the game, even if it's a very slow process. 63 play sessions on a fully upgraded Isle Evelup is the magic number you need to maximize investment in a single stat for a pokemon.
Isle Avue is a hot spring for your pokemon to relax in. this will passively raise happiness, and also auto-hatches eggs you cna't be bothered to run around in circles to hatch yourself. cheers. <3
The pelago is a lot less involved, and yet I feel you get so much more out of it.
The garbage that can be ignored.There's so many features that are awesome in each pokemon game that get pulled away, but there are those that people simply forget; fun distractions at best and bloated and useless additions at worst. these are your surfing pikachu mini games, your Pokemon Contests, your poffin making, Pokeathelon, Pokestar studios... Sun and moon is no different. heck, probably every last thing I talk about in this post will be victims of getting cut out from your next games in the series. a vocal minority will miss what I am about to list off. I will not.
The pokefinder is a by and large useless thing put in the game to satiate the appetite of nostalgic millennials that thirst for one of the first pokemon spinoff titles. it however, does little to capture the spirit of Pokemon Snap. there's plenty of grinding for likes like you're some sort of instagram junkie, but there is no true point. the most you get out of this mini-game is some photos on your SD card, a begrudging implimentation of 3D into this 3DS game (by the way, no street pass in this game!), and if you snapped a photo of something you haven't caught yet, you get a seen marker in your pokedex so you can see where this pokemon tends to appear. I also really don't appreciate the game Memeing all over me while using the Pokefinder.
Yeah... that's a thing that happened... MOVING ON!
The QR scanner and Island Scan. The QR scanner lets you get seen credits in your pokedex and build up a meter. charges for scanning QR codes are on a timer, and when you've scanned 10, you may activate Island Scan! For an hour after island scan is activated, and depending on the island activated on and day of the week, you'll get a wild pokemon that isn't in the Alola Dex! it is nice to be able to get legal Johto and Unova starters inside luxury balls and beast balls, but... otherwise, it's mostly throw away. I'm pretty sure that because the island scan pokemon aren't in the alola dex that they're illegal for use in VGC, and Smogon has already banned Aegislash again because it too stronk.
The Zygarde cell mess. HOLY WOW, the Zygarde Cell mess. on one hand, I'm glad they decided to make you work for your free legendary pokemon, but Zygarde and it's various formes are kinda overcomplex. it's interesting havingg a pokemon you can essentially break apart and reform at your leisure to get different natures and IVs each tiime you reassemble it, but having to go around and get all the individual legos for this monstrosity all over the world is a bit much. Zygarde 100% is at least ridiculously good when you give it rest, Sleep talk, Thousand Arrows, and Coil/Dragon Dance. it's basically like if Blissey had good offensive and physical defensive stats. Pokemon formes tend to stick around, although usually they find ways to abridge them in future titles, so... expect the hunt for the Zygarde cells to go away, but for a full Zygarde cube that can construct and deconstruct Zygarde to be a regular feature.
Pokemon Refresh: The new EXP Share to destroy game balance.The Sequel to pokemon-amie recieved just enough tweaks to make it a mass-exploitable feature that players will ban in their challenge runs. although it goes a great way to showing off pokemon's personalities through cute animations and a hand icon that gets brutalized in various ways for touching pokemon it really shouldn't, the 4 big changes to Refresh from Amie have gone leaps and bounds to make this feature broken.
For starters, the simple prompt for care after battles. it's a small thing, but having a reminder to use the feature after battle goes a long way in making the player use it more often. it reminds you that you can care for your pokemon after every scuffle, and goes a long way to building that affection.
Care removing status ailments is a HUGE part of game balance. this all but eliminates the need for status healing outside of battle considering that dabbing your pokemon for 15 seconds not only saves on those items, but also ups affection. (by the way, affection and happiness are two different things. a lot of players don't realize that.) Considering outside of the early parts of the game, I always had a pokemon with aeromatherapy in the party, I pretty much was able to turn all my status healing items into more money to fuel my bid to buy a ton of clothes I will never wear.
the removal of fun related mini-games and face recognition. the two parts of amie that drove me away from the feature are gone now, so that makes me more willing to use it, especially given the fact that the features that replace it are much quicker to take advantage of.
and finally, the potency of Beans vs. the cupcake things from X and Y. Particularly, the Rainbow beans that Poke Pelago produces. they will instantly bring your pokemon from affection level 0 to level 3. at level 3, your pokemon can get extra critical hits, dodge attacks that they normally shouldn't be able to, have a higher critical hit ratio, and get an EXP boost. this single feeding of a rainbow bean will pretty much make your pokemon far more potent for the rest of the main game. far more of my pokemon have maxed affection than in X and Y because I literally feed them 2 rainbow Beans and I never have to touch them in pokemon refresh again. of course, I do like to pet and care for them and see how they happily react so... there's that.
Z Power and thinking outside the box.Many reviews I've read have declared that Z moves are a well balanced or even an underwhelming thing where they seem to not do as much damage as people expect. I'm here to tell you that's because these individuals simply did not do enough experimentation with thier Z-move of choice.
The important thing is that Z moves add additional base power to the move you're about to perform, and get rid of extra effects of the move. this is very important to consider considering that many of the most powerful moves in Pokemon have strong drawbacks to them; the charge time on Solar Beam and Sky Attack, the recharge for Hyper Beam/Giga Impact, the sacrifice required to use Explosion, the multi-target on earthquake that effects allies. these all have existing work-arounds in the forms of hold items or some sort of setup that requires additional turns, but Z Crystals give you a single shot of a power boosted version of these potent attacks. That, of course, isn't even the most potent application of Z power.
Where Z-moves TRULY shine are the support Z moves. Z-splash, for example, is a better attack boost than Swords Dance. essentially a physical version of tail glow. Z-belly drum fully restores your HP and then performs the belly drum attack, meaning you can belly drum more than once per battle or even use it as a way to restore your health after you've boosted yourself to maximum attack. Z-Geomancy when it becomes available will be a FRIGHTENINGLY devastating boosting move, putting the likes of Smeargle and Xerneas at +1 attack, +1 Defense, +3 Special Attack, +3 Special Defense, and +3 Speed. Eevee's Extreme Evoboost is equally as awesome. Silvally is actually being used more with Darknium-Z than any of it's memory discs because Parting Shot not only lowers the foe's offensive capabilities and switches in a new pokemon, but it also fully heals whatever comes in instantly. these sorts of power plays are what can swing a competitive battle's momentum back in the favor of the player, and that excites me way more than over-designed and gimmicky mega evolutions that break the game.
In the next part of the review, I'll be discussing the quality of the new pokemon in a generalized sense, balances done to old pokemon, and deeper thoughts on the game's scenario, the alola region, and the level design therein. until then...
To be continued...
Topic: Pokemon Moon: Thoughts from someone in FAR too deep. (Read 48151 times)
