Arindam Roy

This is the best Pokémon game in the main series, period! The most interesting thing about it is that most people wouldn’t expect it to be that good, but it is. Let me explain! Pokémon games’ development and progress has been weird. When you compare Gen 5 with its predecessors, you won’t find massive upgrades in gameplay or graphics. Sure a little bit of 3D effect was added on the DS at the cost of a bit of lag, but nothing crazy changed from gen 1 to gen 5. One thing sure did……the PLOT, and for the better. Gen 1 to gen 4 plots were pretty satisfying, but Gen 5 took it to the next level. The characters were amazing, story was on point, and the game was long enough to have our moneys worth. And finally, the main player wasn’t treated as the GOAT from the get go, and we had to make our way up to gain the respect. The roster of B&W was also a bit strange with some extremely good ones and some of the trashiest that pokemon has delivered, but trust me, you won’t mind. The sad part is that right after Gen 5, the 3DS was introduced and Pokémon X and Y released promising a ton of graphical upgrades, and delivering on it. But where it definitely broke our heart was to see the pathetic massive downgrade in storyline (B&W had set a very high standard in hindsight), and no difficulty nor challenge whatsoever. That has pretty much remained the case post X&Y. Trashy games with improvement in graphics, until we got our saviour in the form of Legends Arceus, which I think is the close contender for #1 spot. You should play this game if you’re a pokemon fan, and even if you are not.

Let me start by saying this game is NOT terrible. It is overpriced, I would pay $20-30 but it is what it is. Let’s start with the good things. 1) Exploration - the game has a branched progression unlike the linear progression of its predecessors. This gives you some flexibility into indulging with your preferred paths first. If you are bored of the gym mechanics, you can very well enjoy the team star bosses and titans first. Not only are they fun, they are a couple of points more challenging than the gym battles, especially the team star bosses. 2) Pokemon Roster - this game gave well deserved evolutions to Dunsparce, Girafarig, Primeape and tried to make some trash pokemons like Delibird more relevant. Overa, you have a lot of flexibility in choosing your best 6. The new pokemons are quite good and some have great designs like the rock salt one, the dog pokemons and others. 3) This game runs on the same engine as Legends Arceus, so its a sign that TPC wants to move in that direction and thats a good decision. Open world exploration suits Pokemon games much more. Now on to some serious issues I have 1) Lore, dialogues and Character Dev - I don’t understand why every character is just hype and excited all the time. The protagonist is treated as a celebrity from the get go so character progression is out of scope pretty much. The dialogues are painfully long and verbose, quite unnecessary and might I just add quite foolish for the most part. I’m pretty sure you won’t remember any character after you’ve played the game except maybe Arven because of his bond with his dog pokemon. Others are just “there”….. I really think if the dialogues are made shorter, more meaningful and maybe with voice acting, things would be much better. After 10 mins into the game, I started to spam the ‘a’ button on the dialogue screen and still didn’t miss much. You can not have a great game if this basic isn’t taken care of 2) Battle Mechanic - just like the story, the battle mechanic feels painfully long. Why do you need to wait for everything to happen sequentially? Sets up the terrain, lowers stats, increases stats, gained health, loses health for poison, everything happening sequentially and you have no option to speed it up. How am I supposed to have 1000 battles and enjoy them if this keeps happening? Why can’t all the actions happen together and their summary appears on the right of the screen in a quick manner ? Similar to pokemon showdown? The tera raid battles are actually better that way because minor actions happen quickly and the experience is much better but even that is ruined with painfully long animations. It just ruins the “fun” and becomes so repetitive. Legends arceus was much better in this aspect and Sct Vlt went 2 steps backwards. 2) Real time decisions - Why did they take away the real time boss battle concept they introduced in Legends Arceus? They were so fun, you had to stay on your feet and they were so challenging especially the Arcanine one. By now, pokemon fans have given up hope for any real time battle mechanics throughout the game but atleast for select portions or boss battles, keeping some real time mechanics wont be too much of a pain for devs I suspect. 3) Graphics - I personally do not keep graphics at the top of my things to critique but this game is worse than Legends Arceus in the way it looks and feels. I’ll just keep it at that. I don’t think you should pay $60 for the game unless you are a die-hard fan who doesn’t want to miss anything.