Tag: misc

would it bother you too terribly if i made a list of all region’s pokemon with links to your entries for easier navigation? i’m ocd like that and thought i’ll make it for my own enjoyment (?) but sharing is caring and all that

If you like, I guess?  There is actually a search bar at the bottom of the main page that you can use to find entries on specific Pokémon; I’m not very fond of it because it’s a bit useless and seems to only search for stuff in the tags of a post, not in the text itself, but for this purpose it works just fine.

I don’t usually enjoy compilations, but there’s this one on Youtube called “10 Years of Pokemon” that’s pretty gosh darned amazing. Any thoughts?

Meh.

To be honest, it’s just not easy to sustain the level of intensity that this video seems to be aiming at for as long as it tries to.  I sort of find myself thinking “I’m five minutes in, and there’s another three minutes of disconnected clips of big Pokémon attacks to go; am I really being given a reason to care about this?”  There were also a lot of points, particularly in the first half, where I found myself really questioning whether the extremely dramatic music was an appropriate fit for the clips being shown, several of which are much quieter in tone.  So… yeah.

i was looking into x&y’s animation sprites in detail, and I think they give away a lot more about pokemon than the previous generations, what do you think of this? I love how archeops looks like it’s struggling to fly, how water pokemon look like actually being in water (eelektross looks hypnoticing) and how pokemon stand by, it shows a bit of their personalities imo (standing there, swaying, dancing…)

I love these.  Earlier battle animations did a lot to show off the Pokémon’s personality to a greater extent than static sprites and art, but the constant movement and attack animations of X and Y are so much more fluid and expressive that there’s just no comparison.  You mention Eelektross, whose possession of the Levitate ability just makes so much more sense now that we can visualise him that way; I’m also a huge fan of the way Blastoise levels his cannons to fire, Inkay and Malamar spin and rotate, Espurr and Meowstic lift their ears when using special attacks, or Flying Pokémon in general make wide swoops and dives.  Some of them aren’t great – like Salamence just kinda… hangs there in the air, not bothering to flap his wings like most Flying Pokémon do… which looks a bit odd.  Xatu also can’t help but look a bit ungainly in flight. For the most part though, I think the animations are well done and help the atmosphere a lot.

Do you see pokemon continuing in making new regions or will Game Freak take a break and add some variety to their usual such as past history of the older regions or the future.

Well, my standard answer to this kind of question is that I expect Game Freak to continue doing what’s been proven to work in the past unless they explicitly tell us otherwise.  Things like the basic format of the game are part of their tried-and-tested recipe for success, and although I might like them to do something different, I kinda doubt they will.

Anonymous asks:

So what do you think of the mystery dungeon games?

Well, I only ever played the first one and have incomplete secondhand knowledge of the plot of the subsequent titles, so anything I say here applies only to Mystery Dungeon Red/Blue and should be taken with a grain of salt.  I like the feel of them a lot.  It’s nice to have Pokémon games that are just about Pokémon, without any of those pesky humans to get in the way (even if the plot felt it was necessary to have humans exist… somewhere else… without ever really explaining their relation to the world we were actually playing in…).  It’s just cool to have Pokémon working together to solve their problems and protect each other, although some more effort could have been spent on explaining why exactly their problems seemed primarily to be “other Pokémon” (“they’re really mad at everything because of the natural disasters, okay!”).

The gameplay was… flawed in a number of ways, though (and here I will remind you that I’m going purely off the first titles in the series; many or all of my complaints may actually have been addressed later, I don’t know).  Adding new Pokémon to your team happens entirely at random, which is frustrating.  The dungeons themselves very quickly start to feel like they’re all the same – you wander through a randomly generated maze hitting anything that gets in your way until you reach whatever it is that you’re there for.  Tactical positioning doesn’t play nearly as much of a role as you’d think.  Sometimes your companions’ AI just does incredibly stupid things, like running off down a long corridor in pursuit of… something… and not being able to find you again.  Some moves are either crazy overpowered or completely useless: Silver Wind just damages everything on the screen (in addition to its side-effect of sometimes raising all the user’s stats), so sometimes you just die before you can even get close enough to attack whatever is using it, whereas your companions’ AI has no clue how to handle some support moves like Reflect, and will spam them every time you take a step until they run out of PP, which is not really helpful.  Each Pokémon’s level-up move list seems to have been directly copied over from Ruby and Sapphire without any consideration for how the strengths and purposes of the different moves are changed by the radically different demands of the battle system – I can understand not wanting to review every Pokémon, but surely it would have made sense to tinker with the ones available as player characters (I played as Psyduck, whose level-up list is appalling compared to what most of the starter Pokémon get, with no real advantages to balance that).  In short… there’s a lot of evidence in there of a general lack of effort in adapting the existing material of the Pokémon franchise to the game mechanics implied by the new concept.  Maybe it got better; I don’t know.  I hope so, because it was a very cool idea.

Ok I know this isn’t pokemon related, so you don’t have to answer it. Were you impressed with kreia from Star Wars knights of the old republic 2?

I have just convinced Jim the Editor to play this game, so I will avoid going into detail lest I give things away, but Kreia is one of my favourite characters from any video game ever.  I mean, in a number of ways she’s kind of a bad person, but her personality and beliefs are very interesting, particularly in the context of everything else that’s going on in the Star Wars universe, she’s the mouthpiece for some of the game’s cleverest ideas, and she’s a compelling (not to mention pretty badass) female character who isn’t defined by her relationships with male characters (the Exile being canonically female).  What more can you want?

*cough*omegarubyandalphasapphire*cough*

All right, all right; I get it already.

(This counts as my answer to ALL readers, past and future, asking about Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby)

So, I’m not that excited, I guess because Ruby and Sapphire just don’t have the same nostalgia value for me as they do for younger players, but I am very interested to see how they handle the story.  A somewhat expanded treatment is surely to be expected, and they’ll probably draw on material and dialogue from Emerald, but they can’t lean too heavily on Emerald either because the paired game structure dictates that Team Aqua have to take the lead in Alpha Sapphire and Team Magma in Omega Ruby.  Hopefully we can expect to see a slightly more nuanced portrayal of both teams’ motivations and plans (as well as of some other characters, like Steven – speaking of which, who will be the Champion, I wonder?).  

I’m also curious whether contests will return, and in what form – will they give contest statistics to all the 5th- and 6th-generation moves that never had any, or create something completely new that has more in common with, say, Black and White’s musicals?  Ruby and Sapphire were the generation that introduced the idea of interacting with Pokémon in that kind of way, so it seems only fitting that a return to those games will result in something fairly spectacular in that department.

In any case, seeing Hoenn on the 3DS is going to be a pretty huge deal – I can’t help but wonder whether some of the cities will look a little bland next to the varied and often eccentric settlements of Kalos, like Laverre with its fairytale aesthetic or Anistar with its… big-ass sundial whatsit… In fact, X and Y have just been such a huge step-up from their predecessors in such a wide variety of little ways that bringing Ruby and Sapphire up to speed with them seems to me like quite a daunting prospect!

Oh, and secret bases?  Hell yes.

Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby strike me as odd titles to go with.  I think probably the reference is to the logos of Team Aqua and Team Magma – Team Aqua’s would pass for a capital alpha as easily as a capital A (which looks exactly the same), while I guess Team Magma’s kinda looks like a capital Ω?  If you squint a bit?  Alpha and Omega placed in opposition like that tend to represent “the beginning and the end,” particularly in Christian iconography (come to think of it, Alpha and Omega would have made way better titles than X and Y for two games themed around life and death, but what’s done is done).  Maybe the titles hint that the games will play up the importance of Mount Pyre and the Cave of Origin?

Probably I won’t do a playthrough journal in the style of what I did for White 2 or X, because honestly that $#!t’s getting kinda old for me and it’d be a little weird with a game where I already knew at least the outline of the story.  I’ll probably think of something fun though.  We’ll see.