Shreddy Of New York

SPOILER REVIEW (don’t click ‘more’ unless you want them) Don’t buy unless you can get it during a sale or secondhand for $30 or less, this game is worth less than XY’s $40 pricetag. I’ll be covering a wide range of topics to reach all types of players, so if something on the list seems frivolous and unimportant to you, it’s for other players who might have issues with those aspects in a game. To be clear, I did not buy the game but instead watched full playthroughs of multiple people and there are some issues with the game not just at the beginning, but all the way to the end: -ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN: Buildings look ugly, lifeless, and colorless except for the interiors, but when you’re spending most of your time outdoors, that’s kind of an issue. City looks better in XY and lots of buildings are not enterable. Cafes and boutiques have had their interiors removed and are resorted to menus still, despite the menus being a big complaint of Scarlet/Violet. Should have followed Sword/Shield’s world design with 3D textures, beautiful colors, reflections in windows, and actual interiors -TUTORIAL: Very hand-holdy and babied-down even more than LGPE, lots of tutorials still over halfway through. More dialogue and cutscenes than actual gameplay and most of the time the game will not let you explore freely -STORY: Very boring and annoying, lots of new characters that you won’t care about and only 4 returning characters from XY (AZ, Lysandre, Emma, and Mable) -CHARACTER ANIMATIONS: Jarring and/or annoying; talking animations are very strange and seem overexaggerated and way too much toxic positivity with all the fist bumps, especially during the battle finale -REAL WORLD ASPECTS: Too many real-life elements that remind you of the real world when video games are meant to provide escapism (streamers/streaming, younger generational slang, and larger than necessary emphasis on the monopoly of rotom phones) -BATTLE SYSTEM: Not great; you have to unlock from your target to sprint, roll, and open your bag, then re-lock onto target to attack. They should’ve just let us control the pokemon while the trainer is stationary on the sidelines -PHYSICAL EXPLORATION LIMITS: Mandatory QOL features with parkouring are missing, such as you can only climb upwards on roofs but not certain items like boxes of the same height. And you have to time the activation of gliding just right or you won’t get enough height and fall back down to the ground and have to start your climb all over again -SIDE CONTENT/CUSTOMIZATION: No side content outside of ZA Royale, Emma and Mable quests, and Rogue Mega Evolution. Hair colors are good but the hairstyles themselves are limited and do not feel unique. Facial customization took a downgrade from Scarlet/Violet -WISH FROM ZA ROYALE: You DO NOT get a variety of wishes to choose from at the end, you only get 3 and it forces you to pick 1, which is that the ZA Royale will continue -LACK OF BUDGET: Only a $13 million dollar budget, most of which was probably spent on the battle finale cutscenes. The game was reportedly completed since 2023 but nothing else was added or refined up to release. This means they WERE NOT using the extra development time wisely, the game was completed in probably around 1-2 years. Coming from the largest franchise in the world, we deserve better.