Pokemon Sword and Shield - Gamespot review 9/10

I place an order on my Nintendo Switch & Pokemon Shield combo, so this will be my first ever picking up a Switch and looking forward what the Switch has to offer. My first Pokemon game was Ruby on Gameboy Advance years ago and never played the rest of the series until now.

@davillain- say, you been a fan of Pokemon for years right, do you still watch the Anime? I just wanna know, how is the Anime now? I stop keeping up with it after Diamond and Pearl ended.

I've never really saw the appeal of it, not that i'm knocking others for liking it, I was just wondering what other people's appeal to the series is. Do these games have turn based combat?

Oh I get the nostalgia thing, I was wondering what people liked about the games is all as I never saw the attraction.

No way is this something I'll even try. Tried Pokémon years ago. Do not understand what is enjoyable about it but entertainment is subjective. Have fun folks.

Listen, i've played every gen and I have no idea why people are so mad about this National Dex thing. How many people fill the national dex? Fewer than 1%? Why should Gamefreak waste those resources?

All I want from new pokemon games is to build a new team, with all new pokemon, and play the game. I have hated every gimmick: Mega-evolves, Z moves, Gigamaxchungus or whatever this one is.

Bugs, framerates and such are absolutely fair game as faults. But can everyone play the damn game first

if only CoD fans could defend call of duty like ninty fans defend their pokemon games.

Gamefreak and Nintendo is lucky.

@evil_loli: I watched it 20 years ago back when we were "on the road to Viridian city" and watched some of the Orange islands episodes. It was always a bit simple though even back then. I stopped following it completely sometime shortly after gen 3/Advanced Generation series. Ash's story should've ended after that, but somehow it didn't, and I was already starting to lose interest when Misty left the show. It's weird to picture it, but when I first started digging Pokemon, I followed the anime, collected the Burger King toys, and the cards. How shit has change. All I know is I wanted closure to Ash's story, and we never got that!

I do not know what's happening now with the Anime itself, but I still somewhat watch Pokemon movies if they happened to be on Netflix but that's about it.

@i_p_daily: yeah its a turnbase rpg, basically your party is your pokemon, at the beginning of the game you get to choose 1 of 3 starter pokemon, then you battle wild pokemon with your starter to level it up so it gets stronger and learn new moves.

(Many pokemon have evolutions as well, where once they hit a certain level, they evolve into a stronger pokemon that looks different that can learn stronger moves, some pokemon dont evolve at all, some can evolve up to 4 times just depends)

The wild pokemon you battle can be caught with pokeballs and then join your party, you can have up to 6 pokemon in your party at a time, once your party is full, future pokemon you catch get sent to your pokebank where you can swap different ones in and out.

Pokemon have different types, water, fire, grass, ghost, phychic, dark, electric, ground, fairy, steel, theres alot of different types of pokemon.

The type of pokemon it is, determines what moves it can learn, (cant teach a fire pokemon surf or water gun, cant teach a grass pokemon ember or electro shock for example) every type is super effective against atleast 1 other type sometimes more, or super weak against certain types, water beats fire, grass beats water, fire beats grass, and so on)

So basically the game is you collecting a shit ton of these monsters and then leveling the ones you want to play till end game, you can battle npcs and thier pokemon or battle pokemon in the wild to get xp to make your pokemon stronger. Theres also 8 pokemon gyms( these are like mini dungeons, you need to beat all 8 to get to the end of the game)

Imo the most fun thing about these games is batteling real people and thier pokemon, when i was a kid you could system link gameboys and trade pokemon or battle each other which has only gotten better with the DS and switch letting you do this wireless with friends.

Now that im thinking about it its one of the only turn based rpgs i can think of that lets you do this, most turnbase rpgs are strictly single player experiances. It really gives you an incentive to catch as many different pokemon so you can counter people that are kicking your ass with thier current party.

Where in persona you can level up a bunch of badass demons with killer move sets, but its only SP so who cares.

Sorry for the wall of text I dont know when to stop sometimes

All good, at least you into great detail with your explanation. I like the turn based combat, and it sounds like most rpg's where you need to level your characters up. For me I just wouldn't be able to stomach it because of cutesy animal looking things.

Hopefully you get a shit ton of fun out of it, it sounds like you will.

Yeah, but the review was written by an idiot.

My guess is that a 7, maybe 8/10 would make more sense for this game. Personally not interested.

@i_p_daily: Simple retro RPGs, my boy is really into Pokemon and Ive played a decent amount of Sun on the 3d's. I think the collecting also plays a huge part in why people like them, along with a huge variety of Pokemon and mostly great artwork.

I can see the appeal from what people are explaining, I just couldn't get into myself. I might try and get my son to play it again, but first I have to get him to play the 3DS again.

@i_p_daily: i think RPGs have to be your favourite genre to be a big pokemon fan.

and the second is that you had to have grown up with pokemon from the start in 1999.

i think those 2 things are what define most huge pokemon fans.

of course some people like being competitive and play wifi battles. and others saw the concept of pokemon and thought it was cool. then of course all the bandwagon people who play it just ride the hype wave(this is me btw :) )

I'm just gonna quote my comment on the article here:

I'm surprised of this score. I'm a huge Pokémon fan, I own every main line Pokemon game and I have every Pokémon in every form in my Pokebank (aside of shinies of course). This is thze first game I won't get, at least not at launch. USUM was bad, but this is even worse. They got rid of over 400 Pokemon and almost 100 attacks. It is short and simple. Skipping most trainers while rushing through the game still allows you to one shot gym leaders ace Pokémon. It looks MUCH worse than lets Go Pikachu Eeve. It still uses the same models from the 3DS despite saying their better models is the reason for the lack of Pokemon. It is 14 hours long. Its animations look really bad, the meeting with the legendary boy Pokemon looked worse than your average fan video. He just turned around using the forward moving animation xD Hesck the entire world freezes when you interact with it like climb up a ladder. The performance is horrible despite the bad graphics, it lags on so many spots. Postgame is almost non-existent. This is by far the worst Pokemon game. And this at a 20 bucks higher price. How does this deserve a 9? You seriously think this is on par with DQ11 and Persona 5? lolz

The worlds biggest IP, Pokemon, deserves better. We fans deserve better. The game shouldn't be made by Gamefreaks that care more about their own IPs like Town hero than Pokémon. Give it to a dev that cares!

Interesting coming from GS reviewer Kallie Plagge has to say this on Twitter regarding the score:

I'm gonna set the record straight. She makes overarching claims about the Pokemon community. Many Pokefans catch them all and enjoy having as many different combinations of Pokemon as possible so Dexit does affect that. The competitive community is somehow the sanctuary away from the toxic casuals? Come-on now.

@davillain-: From what I've seen she's not wrong.

Pokémon community is super toxic, just like Fire Emblem, Souls, Zelda, Monster Hunter, Destiny communities and many more.

I played through gens 1-4 as a kid, along with the remakes of gens 1-3 more recently. Never any Black/White, X/Y, Sun/Moon. I'm looking forward to playing this, but I also could care less about the competitive scene and metagame. Don't really care what they took away, I'm not attached to any of it.

To be fair, many online fan communities are toxic. The online Pokemon fan community just so happens to be one of many. Online fan communities have a tendency to lash out against creators over the smallest little things.

Of course, no game or developer should be above criticism. But there's a difference between constructive criticism, and shitting on the hard work of the developers and trying to make the game crash and burn.

It wasn't bad back then, then it is now. Older Pokefans often don't like changes.

I do like changes. But they didn't really change the game. Just just removed a lot of beloved features.

But Game Freak created the IP... does he WANT the Fallout situation to happen to Pokemon?

I don't know what they want. They don't own it though, so maybe they just get bored of creating so many Pokemon games for Nintendo. Maybe Nintendo should demand less of them? Or, as I said, find a dev that actually delivers.

Again, you want the Fallout situation to happen to Pokemon? Because that won that series fans with praise, didn't it?

@i_p_daily: This is the thing about Pokemon and the fandom: having grown up as one of the first-generation fans, I can tell you the reason why Pokemon took over the world is partially to its cultural significance. Pokemon was pure escapist fantasy to a child in the 90's. While we watched the original seasons of the anime and collected the cards while turning on our Gameboy's, we all dreamed of the fantasy of how amazing it would be if Pokemon was something real and kids can all set out on their own adventures on a quest to being the Pokemon Master. Pokemon really hyped us up back in the day in the form of escapism.

I think the popularity of Pokemon also comes from the contrast of our own reality. In the real world there's a lot of dark things going on yet in Pokemon it was all about making friends and traveling the world. That is a concept that still appeals to me this day. I know the very essence of Pokemon has grown a generation of people hooked on the wanderlust of traveling the world. I know there are major Pokemon fans out there that travel a lot now because Pokemon peaked those interests in them at such an early age.

I think nowadays the appeal of Pokemon is reaching more adult audiences, because the franchise is well-aware of its fans growing up with it. I think Pokemon Go is a perfect example of a mobile game designed with the idea of "Pokemon in the real world". That's why Pokemon Go swept the world away.

Pokemon ultimately comes down to community and bringing people together, because it addressed a dream fans have had for so many years.

For your son I recommend starting him out with watching the first couple seasons of Pokemon. The anime is how most of us fell in love with the series in the first place, and that is a good starting point since there is no better way to explain the appeal of the IP than watching that first season. If the cartoon show peaks his interest in the series, I'd gradually bring the games into the picture.

This will probably be Death Stranding all over again, mixed with a little bit of No Man's Sky.

In the past, fans used to complain about critics giving a game low review scores.

Nowadays, fans complain about critics giving a game high review scores.

What timeline is this?

That's because Pokemon is a "media mix" or multi-media franchise, not just a video game franchise. While it started out as RPGs, it's expanded into anime shows, trading cards, movies, mobile apps, and merchandise such as toys and apparel. The Pokemon franchise is spread across multiple different media, releasing well-made products in each medium, and tying them all together around a simple easy-to-grasp concept, "gotta catch 'em all".

What are you even talking abou? New Vegas received better reviews than 76 xD

I don't know that most of the people complaining would actually want to complete the pokedex, but I'm a bit disappointed because some of my favorites aren't returning and I would have loved to incorporate some of them into my team.

It's definitely not the end of the world and I'll still play the game but let's just say that Gamefreak isn't making lots of sense with their explanations for the N Dex's absence.

@lebanese_boy: I'm not insulting you by saying this- but why would you play a new Pokemon game and catch old pokemon/pokemon you've had before? I dont understand that. There is no appeal to me to do that

Which was handled by some of the ORIGINAL FO developers (Josh Sawyer, Chris Avellone)? When you look at fan reaction even before 76 (Fallout 3 and 4, both handled by Bethesda are quite disliked by fans of the original games), they would rather take Interplay's (the ORIGINAL FO publisher) disaster that is BoS on the PS2 and XBOX.

@Shmiity: Well it's not complicated there are pokemon I love (example: nidoking) that I would love to go catch and raise again while following a new story in a new region. I mix my teams all the time so I never have the same team twice. I generally love to mix new and old because not all the new ones appeal to me and because I just love to play like that.

We still have some oldies in these games so not all is lost.

It's ok if that doesn't appeal to you, different strokes for different folks.

right now on twitch there are more people watching pokemon than star wars. even though star wars is on 3 platforms.

Just for reference, I picked this one up yesterday and I've been having a lot of fun with it.

I appreciate that they really cut down on the hand-holding this time, and they added several great quality of life improvements (unlocking fast-travel in the first few hours, remote access to your PC boxes, experience gems to really cut down the grinding while evolving everything, etc.).

I also feel that the difficulty is improved from the previous few games. The gym leaders are still idiots, but the Dynamax system still makes for interesting fights with more typing/timing considerations. The trainer battles have been pretty good so far, and some Pokemon have been a huge struggle to catch. You can also easily stumble into much higher level Pokemon that you can't capture, which adds some much-needed tension to travel in the wild.

So yeah, even with some weird issues with the wilderness zone (some slowdown, some pop-in - maybe due to the servers really struggling with millions of concurrent players?), it's probably the best Pokemon *game* of the last few years.

The game is great so far of what I've played. Feels like a modern console Pokémon experience.

I'm not really a pokemon person as a disclaimer.

I'm really enjoying the bugs/glitch videos and demonstrations of reused content and stuff surrounding this game. It won't really get a backlash though, bc it's pokemon.

Relic to the past for most people. Also nothing else to play really.