okay let’s talk about the- fµ¢£- what are we talking about

apparently there’s a thing we should talk about

I am of course infuriated at being awoken from my deathless slumber to talk about whatever the hell this is, and moreover I am, as always, personally offended that this broadcast was not scheduled with my specific time zone in mind (it was at 2 am NZT). Naturally, I will be seeking spiritual retribution against Nintendo, the Pokémon Company and Game Freak by The Usual Channels in due course. In the meantime… let’s see what secret intelligence has just landed on our doorsteps.

• blah blah, Unite stuff
  • I still haven’t played Unite at all; I know people want me to have opinions about it and I just don’t, because I’m a huge fraud
• blah blah, Pokémon Café stuff
• blah blah, Masters stuff
  • jesus, has this really been out for two years?
  • I have no opinions about Masters either because I have never bought, and will never buy, a phone that is not the absolute $#!ttiest on the market; I sincerely tried to play it when it first came out and it just does not function on my phone, at all
• Pokémon Go is getting its first Galar Pokémon, apparently via some kind of Hoopa-related shenanigans
  • that’s nice
• okay, here we go, Timey Diamond and Spacey Pearl news
  • yes I’m still calling them that; no I’m never going to stop; shut up
  • My initial read of these games was that they are, in a fairly literal sense, Diamond and Pearl for the Switch, with nicer graphics and maybe a few other minor modernisations, and so far that’s still what I’m seeing here – but those minor modernisations do include a couple of conspicuous fan-favourite features, namely:
    • Walking companion Pokémon, the beloved signature of Heart Gold and Soul Silver, since then only ever fully implemented in Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee – this one is sure to excite a lot of people.
    • Character customisation on the model of generations VI-VIII – everyone loves clothes shopping for your Pokémon trainer avatar, right?
      • Sure, you’ll put character customisation in, but you stILL WON’T LET MY BOY CHARACTER WEAR A DRESS, WILL YOU, YOU COWARDS-
  • fµ¢£in’… Pokéball stickers are back… I guess… whoohoo?
    • I dunno, was this something people loved and missed about generation IV? I mean, I don’t fault them for putting it in; if your mission statement is a “faithful remake” of Diamond and Pearl then you’ve gotta have them, I just genuinely don’t know who cares about this feature.
  • The Sinnoh Underground, unlike the overworld, appears to have been fairly significantly reworked, which is a surprise.
    • There are these underground grotto areas (“Hideaways” is apparently the official term) with rare Pokémon in them, with different habitat themes – like there’s a forest area, and a snow area, and a lava area. I quite like this; the underground is one of the most unique features of Sinnoh as a region, but I never felt like there was a whole lot to do there.
      • Voice-over suggests that the wild Pokémon that appear here will be influenced by your secret base decorations, and that some Pokémon will only appear in Hideaways – I think this is probably going to be Timey Diamond and Spacey Pearl‘s solution to Pokémon that were only available in the original games through esoteric methods like the dual-slot mechanic or Poké-Radar, or perhaps even a few Pokémon from generations I-III that couldn’t be caught in Sinnoh at all.
    • Obviously there’s new secret base swag.
    • The map of the underground looks pretty different as well, and there’s new map artwork that suggests the layout of the underground will more closely resemble the “shape” of the Sinnoh overworld.
    • The mining minigame looks like a pretty one-to-one reproduction of the original, though.
  • It looks like contests are back, but it’s not immediately clear to me what changes have been made to them, if any.
  • Still not clear to me whether any changes are being made to the story. There’s a segment of the trailer that focuses on showing off the new models and battle backgrounds for Team Galactic, but I don’t think we see anything that indicates a new plot or chapters.
    • Although… there are a couple of shots that focus on the Celestic Ruins and the wall art inside, which is an interesting choice, since the original Diamond and Pearl didn’t really explore those ruins or elaborate on their significance, as far as I can remember – that stuff mostly came to light in Platinum. That might hint at some minor rewriting to integrate some of the changes that Platinum made to the original story.
• And the part we’ve all been waiting for – Legends news!
  • “This is a tale of a time long ago when the lives of humans and Pokémon were still separate” – which is an interesting way to put it, in the context of that myth from the Canalave Library that people keep quoting at me about how humans used to live much more closely with Pokémon and even marry them (which must be true, because it’s text from the game, in a context that the game explicitly presents as mythical, and everyone knows that all myths are always true in fictional worlds)
  • Sinnoh is apparently called “Hisui” in this era, which seems odd but is possibly a reference to the fact that Hokkaidō hasn’t always been called Hokkaidō – the original Japanese name was Ezo, and the native Ainu name is Yaunmosir (more information in that linked Twitter thread). The voice-over clarifies (just in case the name confused anyone) that this is the same region known in the present day as Sinnoh; I have to imagine there’ll be some in-universe significance to the name change.
    • The town we saw in the first trailer, apparently the sole human settlement in Hisui, is apparently the future Jubilife City (analogous to the real city of Sapporo, the largest city on Hokkaidō).
    • We’ve already seen that the player characters wear a symbol on their clothing that looks suspiciously like the Team Galactic insignia – apparently this is the symbol of the “Galaxy Expedition Team,” an equally suspicious name. We’re also being introduced to three leaders of the expedition team:
      • Professor Laventon, our Professor Tree (eh… lavender is a flower, it still counts)
      • Captain Cyllene, the leader of the survey division, who (as others have already noted) looks and sounds like she might be an ancestor of Cyrus, the boss of Team Galactic, though the voice-over assures us that she’s “our biggest supporter”
      • Commander Kamado, the leader of the whole expedition
  • The world of Legends looks extremely pretty. Like, I don’t know anything about the technical aspects of video game graphics, and I haven’t played fµ¢£ing Breath of the Wild and I don’t want to, and I’m sure there are people somewhere out there saying that the graphics look like $#!t. But I think it’s pretty.
  • There are apparently at least a couple of regional forms and regional evolutions in Legends: Wyrdeer, an evolved form of Stantler, Basculegion, a ghostly evolved form of Basculin, a psychic Hisuian form of Braviary and a fluffy Hisuian Growlithe with a rocky horn.
    • Basculegion is apparently created when a Basculin is possessed by dozens of souls of its dead schoolmates that seize control of it and drive it on to greater heights – which is (and I’m going to use a technical term from media criticism here) fµ¢£in’ metal.
    • If these Pokémon are unique to Hisui, but don’t appear in Sinnoh, does that mean they’re extinct by the time of Diamond and Pearl? I suppose it’s possible that Timey Diamond and Spacey Pearl will feature them in order to retcon them into present-day Sinnoh, but I kind of doubt it; I’ve gotten the impression that adding post-generation IV Pokémon is not part of those games’ objectives, and if they were in the remakes, I don’t see why the trailer wouldn’t have just said so. If they are extinct in the present, that’s… surprisingly sad.
      • To be clear I would 100% agree with that as a storytelling choice; Pokémon should engage with the fact that extinction is real and terrible and lasts forever. I’m just surprised they’d do it; I kinda expect them to wriggle out of it somehow and clarify that actually these Pokémon do still exist in modern Sinnoh and we just didn’t see them for… some reason.
  • We can sneak up on Pokémon using Stealth Mode. I don’t remember whether we’ve seen this before and I don’t care, because one of the silliest little things I most liked about Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby was that it had Stealth Mode.
  • We’re seeing a few shots of some of the really old ruins in Sinnoh. Remember that this game is probably set (based on clothing, architecture, technology, etc., as well as the real historical timeline of the Japanese colonisation of Hokkaidō) in the mid-to-late 19th century. Whoever built the ruins of Mount Coronet, Celestic Town and other ancient sites of Sinnoh, they’re probably long gone already by the time we get there.
    • It was basically guaranteed we’d see stuff like this, but I’m still excited to see it because I like old stuff.
    • Look, I’m an extremely bad archaeologist in real life so it’s nice to have a chance to roleplay being good at it.
    • Interestingly, we’ve been told that Wyrdeer “has strong ties with the local people and has been treated with great respect in this land since ancient times.” Our people are recent arrivals in Hisui and don’t know anything about the local Pokémon. The “local people” haven’t appeared in any promotional material so far, and the ruins imply that they aren’t around anymore – but maybe there’s more to this region than meets the eye.
  • We can FLY
    • I mean… yeah, we can always fly, but we can use a sort of hang-glider thing carried by the regional Braviary form to actually fly over the landscape – kinda like using the Eon Flute in Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby except we’re flying over the actual open-world scenery (which, again, is very pretty).
    • The regional Stantler and Basculin evolutions likewise seem to be rideable Pokémon following the Alolan tradition.
  • This game has a crafting system, which I think it kinda has to, since the entire conceit is that we’re exploring an untamed wilderness and it wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense to be able to buy Pokéballs at every rest stop.
  • There’s some freaky $#!t going on
    • It looks like there’s some kind of celestial phenomenon that can drive Pokémon mad – weird flashing lights in the sky, red eyes, berserk state, the whole deal, and these enraged Pokémon will try to beat the $#!t out of you, the player, not just your own Pokémon.
      • Humans have not fully figured out how to live with Pokémon yet in this period, and the results can be… unpredictable.
      • A couple of characters in the trailer comment that Pokémon are “terrifying creatures” – Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kanto anymore.
  • The speed stat seems to have been reworked to allow much faster Pokémon to act twice in a row before their slower opponents can get a word in.
    • Our Pokémon can modify their attacks with two fighting styles – “strong” and “agile” – to manipulate the new turn order mechanics. Strong style gives you fewer but more powerful attacks; agile style gives you more but weaker ones.
  • As we’ve already seen to some extent in Sword and Shield, different species of Pokémon have different behaviours – some are friendly, others are shy, others are aggressive.
    • It’s cool, it’s immersive, no notes.
  • Filling out the Pokédex isn’t just a matter of catching Pokémon – we’re also supposed to observe a range of different behaviours to learn more about how they live.
    • I genuinely kind of love this; the Pokédex quest has gotten slowly de-emphasised over the past several generations of Pokémon games and it’s always felt a little too neat and clean to be a good representation of ecological field work. A more complicated Pokédex quest that asks more of the player and rewards us in different ways is something I’ve wanted from Pokémon for a very long time.

okay that’s that, wake me up when the next game’s out