Is Pokemon Sword as bad as I imagined?

Oh thank goodness it's just 40 Animal Crossing DLC ​​that adds literally every old character and feature to the game like they should have done in the first place. Alright, so when Sword and Shield were announced, some surprisingly poor decisions emerged. with that I initially said to myself and anyone who asked me, you know what? Now I'm putting my foot down either Nintendo pressured Game Freak into making some horrible decisions regarding

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and shield or Game Freak is acting on its own either way I'm not. I want to support this game, but the barrier was finally broken and I decided to give this game a spin to see if it really is as bad as I thought it would be.

I thought to myself that if this is really bad, maybe I can save some poor soul. I grabbed it even though this has been out for a while now and if it's better than I thought then good for everyone involved, there will definitely be quite a bit of talk about the mechanics compared to the previous knights but I also intend to really cover how the story develops. Oh and a couple of things before we continue with this, there are no ads this time, but I also have some limited time t-shirts for this video, if you have any interest in picking one and two to promote my Twitch at the beginning of the video last time it definitely helped so hey I stream on Twitch okay let's start by watching a YouTube style video which is jarring but okay I was wondering how we would get over the weird laptop opening. of the sun and the moon and here we are, so this guy named Rose introduces himself as any other kind of Pokémon professor and then throws this thing away, what about introductory sequences that welcome us to this world of mystical creatures?

Here's one of the silliest we've ever seen. Then we are introduced to the Pokémon champion of the Galar region, who is okay, so I'm actually a proponent of capes. The capes need to come back and this guy is doing the best he can use which I am not a defender of. a cape with tights and biker shorts how far am I in this video? Have I already passed the mark of not saying bad words? okay, well, what is this in the outfit? So Leon here shows off Britain's best terrifying tech for transforming Pokémon into the size of a skyscraper I can't see. how does this go wrong when a charizard decides to unleash a 40 foot tall flamethrower on an open seated stadium packed with humans.

Luckily, Game Freak decided to move away from the surely dead bodies that are now collapsing in their seats looking like Luke Skywalker's aunt and dude, so we're back to reality where our guy is watching his YouTube video when suddenly an action speaks to us. . I'm as confused as you by that statement, but yeah, apparently someone decided to name his kid after a verb for some reason. I absolutely can't wait to meet Sip Grab and Fart like the other main kids in this game. Oh, it gets better, although you might think that if this guy has brothers, they'd probably name some weirdos like that too, but no, this guy's brother is the champion. who was I looking at and like I said that guy's name is leon so basically leon's mom pulled a natural one after squeezing hop here maybe it's just a nickname hopefully it's just a nickname so hop he leaves and I stare at him in disbelief for a moment before I get up and my god I'm fast, I mean I don't know if I'm that fast but I already feel fast like the game of the year in my eyes but then a screen appears load into a Pokémon game and serve me a grim reminder to temper my expectations, so we head to Hops' place.

His mother tells him that his brother hasn't arrived yet and then we run towards the city while Hop protects me from tripping on the tall grass on purpose and then we get to his brother who is busy. posing for random civilians imagine a real life athlete or something doing some crazy big man saiya poses and people going crazy so we go back and leon has a

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for us we have this water tadpole a water bunny fire and the Beastie Boys special. a grass monkey, everyone runs to their respective fields, except there is no trash fire for the bunny, so he just sets the basketball court on fire.

That's my favorite and the only obvious choice here, I mean let's be honest, I like the moody one too, but hey look at this. little bun who is adorable, while Hop decides to continue the tradition of having rivals choose the Pokémon yours is strong against because why not? and then challenges you to set his grass Pokémon on fire. Okay, a couple of things first, the champion takes the last Pokémon, which is. Cool, I actually like it a lot, so at least there's that to choose your Pokémon, secondly, the jump starts with two Pokémon, which is a good way to even the odds, of course, if you lose to it you'll probably you would have to grunt. 40 times in a row, but it's still cool, but the most important thing here is for your Pokémon to level up and learn moves within battle, which is actually a pretty significant game-changer when it comes to close battles, I imagine.

In real competitive things this would be like this. It didn't happen, but I was baffled when my score bunny learned to grill just in time to hop roast the monkey. I have to say, I don't think there's been a line of dialogue from the old champion here where he hasn't opened by saying he's the champion or he has a good Charizard personality, so we head back to my mom's house to tell her that I probably won't see her. for the rest of the game and it turns out that a wulu has carried his burly friend out the door. here in a forbidden area apparently we live right next to a forbidden area so we go look for this little sheep and instead we find this dog with some sausages coming out of his head as much as he wants to put up this battle, he's actually really cool and remember I run through the lavender tower a lot without the Silph scope and the way this Pokémon has no level and our moves don't affect it well, it eventually knocks us out with fog and when we wake up, Hop is dead on the ground for the most part. his body consumed by the nah okay the Pokémon knocked us out just because and this area isn't really dangerous in any way apparently Leon comes in and we tell him about the experience and he's just as confused as we are about the whole ordeal so that now we can finally address the world.

I have to say, it's a little jarring to see Pokémon in the overworld. In fact, I like it and I don't like it at the same time. Part of me loves being able to see what I'd encounter and being able to dodge a lot of encounters if necessary and part of me misses not knowing what's going to show up, but I'd say I generally enjoy the change so I'm saving a little bird blue and I continue with the real Pokémon professor from the Galar region. magnolia, okay, so I wasn't going to mention this, but when we told Leon about the mysterious fog Pokémon, he said, hmm, well, maybe if you get stronger you can come back to try to find whatever it was. , but overall it didn't seem to do so.

If you have an interest in it, then we get to the professor's assistant and she says: Have you come to continue bothering me about finding super rare and unique Pokémon? So I guess this just thought we had gotten into the fog and passed out instead of looking for the legendary Pokémon. Anyway, this is Sonia, apparently she used to be León's rival, as well as being the professor's assistant, so she's the loser. Hop will join at the end of this game, so we continue before. Coming to the end of the walkthrough here, I have to say that, in terms of pure beginnings, Pokémon Sword isn't particularly unique, but it certainly iterates the old formula of average Pokémon beginnings quite well.

Actually, I'm having fun and I really can't. Complaining too much about everything that has happened so far, we eventually get to Professor Magnolia, who is an older lady who lives in this beautiful area. Leon immediately asks the professor about the so-called dynamaxx phenomenon, which is obviously what we witnessed and where Charizard became. godzilla at the beginning of the game but she says no I don't know about that, she stops asking. One interesting thing about this particular region of the world is that to take on the Gym Leaders you need the backing of a particularly high-level and world-tested trainer, which I actually really like while we're still kids in this game, as it is. tradition, I like the idea that not just anyone can go to a gym and try to fight him, obviously Leon would be the person who could try to back us up, but he wants to see us fight again before doing so.

Now let's talk about Hop as a character. The jump is quite annoying. He reminds me a lot of your rival in generation 4. Barry, he launches very fast. everything is overzealous to the extreme and worst of all, the guy is so conceited in his knowledge that he constantly lectures about all the knowledge he gained from reading books and watching his brother, but he chose the guy who is weak to yours despite having the opportunity not to do so. and on top of that, he does all this. I see you learned about type matchups every time he dealt super effective damage to his Pokémon.

In reality, he's more like a mix of Barry and Howe, who are some of the worst rivals in the series. my opinion and ironically after you defeat him he jumps and throws my pokeball perfectly at everything, like what are you a fountain of knowledge or naivety and on top of all that the guy constantly talks about how he's going to become a legendary

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hero or something and it's annoying after a while anyway leon congratulates us on a great match despite it being me hopping the floor with a single pokemon i really wish there were multiple dialogues for this kind of thing besides if you win or lose it would really be cool to see Leon react differently if it were a super close battle or really one sided but hey it's 20 21 that's the futuristic 2077 technology we're talking about right after we get our backup our dynamaxx fuel literally. falls from the sky so we can make our Pokémon big.

I suppose we could have gotten the professor's bands like any other game, but hey, why not have the required piece literally fall from the sky first? That doesn't feel awkward at all. Well now it's time to go do gym stuff so I bought this game for my wife so she could play with me and apparently that means that what you see on the screen starts appearing after a certain time since she is doing the mission. Well I get the idea and in some ways it's great if you're playing on the internet with your friends but when I can look at my wife's screen and see what she's doing it seems more than a little annoying, apparently there's nothing . way to turn this off are you crazy this is actually a problem a year and a half after the game was released I looked it up and the only way to reliably turn off these stupid little notifications besides turning the switch on and off is to turn the switch on switch into airplane mode, but even when I did, they still appear when I do something notable like catch a new Pokémon.

What people complained about this immediately after the game was released, but I guess that game fan was too busy shoveling 30 dlc at people. We're asked to actually add a real quality of life change to the game either way, we're off to the next town, but our journey is cut short when a pack of Wulu continues to make sure they're the game's ultimate antagonist. by blocking the train tracks, giving us the opportunity to go camping and trapping in a vast wilderness area and actually, that doesn't bother me at all, honestly, as much as I complain about the gaming phenomenon and- com, which immediately launches back. in the thanks of neutrality by giving us a way to access our Pokémon storage box on the go, which is an absolutely fantastic addition to the franchise and I can't really be mad about the Wycombe thing because of its great call, so let's talk. about the super nasty trick that is dynamaxing so there are these little power spots all over the map here where you can fight these giant pokemon called dynamaxx pokemon and you can invite others to attack with you or you can just play with npcs and it's a Such a weird mechanic that I think Gamefreak thought it would be a fun way to do something unique and I can't really blame them for trying, but I don't really enjoy the mechanics if I'm going to be completely honest.

The battles feel almost exactly the same and I'd probably feel better about them if they were just super rare Pokémon or just happened rarely in general, but the Pokémon you encounter feel like they could be almost anything and that makes facing down a little tricky. . A lot of them are a bit ridiculous, on top of that, they tend to be a much higher level than most of your Pokémon team, which is very strange to me,honestly, since it will almost always be an instant power boost for my party and it almost feels cheap.

Find a decent Pokémon at a much higher level with minimal effort, but the leveling speed doesn't stop there. This game is crazy when it comes to earning pure XP. You can catch dynamax Pokémon but you can also run into ridiculously powerful Pokémon on the field that can't actually be caught like I have a level 31 hunter on my average level team of maybe 12 or 13 which is crazy and I'd probably I would have wiped out if it wasn't for the fact that he killed himself, but the XP gain was absolutely shit for my team and I'm not even sure how I like it.

I know it sounds strange, but these wins discourage me so much that I don't even know how to build my team anymore. Dynamaxx battle candies that greatly increase my Pokémon's XP. I can earn XP by camping with them. The whole game is just an XP simulator and I don't really know how to feel about it though I love how fast I can get a team up and running. I'm just not used to it at all. I don't even know if I'm too level at this stage. I guess if I were to sum this all up I'd say that these mechanics seem to work a lot sooner than you'd expect, it almost feels like dynamaxing should have come mid-to-late game, and on top of that this whole area feels like a hodgepodge.

The biomes are almost like a safari zone and again, this is about an hour into the game. All that being said, there is a strict level cap that increases when you start fighting gems and this affects the level of Pokémon you can catch and I actually do. so because as much as this whole process stumped me at first, I'm glad I couldn't invalidate my game by basically catching a level 40 beast with little to no effort, even if there was a chance of that. You don't obey me at this stage, the game definitely brings a new coat of paint to the franchise, even if that code is a little hampered by the dynamax Pokémon in my eyes, I basically went from manually grinding up to a certain level with each Pokémon to choose from who will get it. the work done against these overpowered monsters on this vast field, my goal now is more to get my entire team at or near the capture level cap before continuing and it forces me to level up my team in quite a different way to the previous one. games is an interesting system and I'm not totally opposed to it, honestly I will say that in order to keep my Pokémon alive without a Pokémon Center here I have to set up a camp to make curry, which can get quite tedious if I do it repeatedly. having half my party wiped out by a stronger Pokémon, I guess it's more about how long the process takes than it being actually difficult and I think that's my biggest complaint at this stage, a lot of this grind feels artificially extended by dynamaxx scenes and cooking scenes, which sucks because if you're going to give me a fast track to gathering xp, let me skip the same boring scenes that I've seen over and over again and the most irritating part of all of this is that Gamefreak had the foresight to put in an option to skip scenes, but it only works on story scenes, just like skipping battle animations only works on actual attack animations.

Great options, shitty implementation, so I finally got to moto stoke, which is a cool name for a city, honestly, and it looks cool and this game keeps throwing new things at me. You have your coach card that you can personalize perfectly. You have small jobs. You can send out your Pokémon, which I found quite interesting in its own way, especially with the that way it encourages me to catch different types of Pokémon to help with particular jobs and I didn't mention it before, but as you run around and interact with these little guys red holes in the ground you constantly get a currency known as watts which can be exchanged in the area for some of the best tms in the game, actually these particular ones date back to the older games tms which break in a single use , these tms that break down in a single use are actually known as trs, which of course means technical regimes, don't look it up, that's what it means.

I think this system is a pretty good balance when it comes to getting end game moves because originally you would have a shop where you can buy good things with money and you would have to buy each one to equip your team with earthquakes over and over again, then They made it so that your tms were infinitely usable, so it was easy to spruce up your team now that you have that system mixed in with this one. a new one that combines the two, it's a good decision and now I'm just exploring instead of a police officer going well mate, the land opened up here for a swarm of digletts, you'll have to wait a bit.

The guy just sees a guy freaking out because elevators can take him up and down the city and he politely backs away so as not to interrupt his delirium. Plus, we're still in a world where I have to pay before I see what I can. what to do with my hair in this game which is cool I like how I do my hair and the lady says you can't wear a hat now yeah thanks for warning me about that so I finally head to the gym area which is a gigantic football stadium. I think that's how all the gyms are set up here in this region, but I'm sure we'll find out after seeing this very obvious antagonist character, slick his ridiculous hair back and walk out if you ever need something that personifies jumping, is this scene where he sneers and comments at the guy walking out with his smug look and then proceeds to smugly demand that the check-in worker check him in faster long after he checks in, I talk to the two characters that stand out . here, the first is the guy from before who proceeds to tell me that I shouldn't waste my precious time talking to him and then proceeds to stand alone while looking in a random direction and the second is this girl who I recognize from the internet freaking out over her at some point or another, but she doesn't have anything important to say, so a little thing to note here is that the blonde boy claims to have been endorsed by the president of the Pokémon league who would be the guy from the beginning From the game, Rose apparently owns almost every major business in the region, which yeah, he thinks could be part of a villain plot.

Knowing how Pokémon games tend to do well, it's time for a lot of stories. background, so Sonia explains in detail the legend of some hero in the past and we check all the boxes that make a Pokémon story a Pokémon story some kind of disaster that covered the earth in storms a

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and a shield a young hero with emphasis on the young even though the statue is built to look like conan the barbarian with his thighs like tree trunks and arms the size of cargo boxes, yes, the details are all there, all here, I'm sure which we'll find out more later when the curly blonde guy backed by the president goes crazy and tries to do something stupid before the president comes out and says: no, no, you were the one, this wasn't the way the president team rocket, team aqua and magma, galactic plasma flare, skull, how did we get from those to team, scream, holy shit, I can't even say it?

I'm surprised after the jump, but my god, at least make it rhyme with team scream or something, so these guys basically follow that girl I talked to earlier, whose name is Marnie, and just cheer her on, but also get into fights and that all ends so well that they're not really a group of villains, they're just rowdy punks, so they're like Team Skull, except they're down to earth in a way because Skull still wanted to take Pokémon from people, they were just a bunch of these guys seem to have good intentions and they are just wrong and stupid.

Name aside, I don't really care for them, plus I'm too level, so it's finally time to hit the ballpark here and man, it's actually really cool. Honestly, this is probably one of the most cinematic moments in a Pokémon game for me because of course you can list the world spinning around and some legendary Pokémon coming out and yelling at everyone while people look scared, but I mean, I don't. HE. this moment in the stadium felt so cool, so much more grounded, every gym leader shows up at the same time except one of them and honestly they all have really cool designs, even this baby-faced guy who looks like a little kid was tied to the god of Arnold Schwarzenegger's body.

This is cool, I wasn't expecting to say that at all, so I initially thought the gym system was different from previous games because it seemed like it was presented differently. I thought it would be something where I would perform a task for the sun and the moon. Island Kahunas and then run back to the main stadium and moto Stoke to take on their leader, but it's just the standard gym puzzles with trainers scattered on your way to the leader, which yeah, I'm fine with that, so after this cut scene. We meet again with León and the president, who still doesn't have anything very important to say, but the president has his own theme song, so yeah, this guy is definitely a villain, so we figure out a way to fly right away that involves carry a crooked knight. to places you've already been, so he looks a lot like the sun and the moon again, which is cool, although it's a little strange that there's no flying animation.

I'm not complaining, although I must honestly say that I actually am complaining. having a great time, I don't know if that's going to change, but the fact that my expectations were close to zero probably helped this game change them quite a bit so far, so I'm still on some minds with some really cool music before I meet the guy Blonde and curly. from before, whose name is bead beady baid, yeah, it has to be bead, it's bead, anyway, he's super confident and that's all pretty much the reiteration of every kind of smug, arrogant, overconfident villain you see in these games, he uses all the psychic Pokémon, which makes me wonder if he'll be the missing 8th Gym Leader in the future because, as always, Gym Leaders stick with one type to try out for the challenger medal, for some reason. reason they hit his cheeks before blah blah blah, I was soft on you, blah blah, I have memorized your attack. style, yes my attack style was to use two moves on a Pokémon, at least their battle music sounds like a Mega Man song, so we arrive at the city of Grass Laters, which is less of a city and more of a stadium with a handful of buildings around it. the challenge involves herding wulu around the map which isn't much of a challenge but it's totally fine it's the first gem i'm not expecting much facing milo here he's great although his team consists of two grass pokemon against my fire .

To begin with, yes, but the music is pretty good and I enjoyed this whole experience, so we headed to the next gym where we were met with a shout from the team threatening a guy over his bike. Their reasoning is that they can use it to chase gym rivals with it until I got tired, yeah, so I beat them up and then the guy who said, "Hey, these guys were trying to steal my bike, guys, here you can use my bike, use it now, no, it's okay, Jesus, then we run into Jump, who flies off as easily as ever." In fact, I decimated it so much that it gives me a revive now, if that's not a statement of dominance I don't know what is, so we continue across this bridge full of feathers because apparently feathers and bridges in the Pokémon games They are common. topic, then we get to the next gem city, which attacks me with the worst song I've ever heard in a Pokémon game.

Fortunately, the president is here with his manager. She seems particularly strict, which makes me wonder if she's really the evil one who inadvertently makes Rose do something stupid or if Rose has hired her because she knows how stern she is. She's here too, but who cares, so I head to this town, which actually feels like a real town, although most of the houses here are pretty boring. However, there is a lady who says that if a gym leader loses enough times to a challenger, her gym is demoted to the junior gym circuit, which is interesting to me.

I like the concept, but she makes me wonder if the leaders here change too. Their Pokémon depend on the challenger's strength. It's interesting now something that I didn't mention before and that seems super strange to me is the fact that you can buy these gym uniforms and at first glance I thought, "Oh sweet, I want to make my uniform different for gym battles, except for gym battles, you have to stick to the basic white uniform to be able to buy the uniform for outside of the gyms, but not in them, it doesn't seem like it would be an obvious addition, so we are faced with nessa's fun house water pipes. and take it out without problemsagain, the dynomax thing seems cool in the gym battles in particular, but all the ones I've casually fought before make it less impressive overall, plus it's worth noting that I love the idea of ​​the audience singing during the last part of the The gym battle theme is pretty cool, but it doesn't really match how the song sounds, which sucks, so we move on to the next gem, as always, the game actually moves faster than I thought, but I'm okay with that too, so Blast again by shooting his entire team on our way through some minds.

It's worth noting here that Bead has made a pretty consistent statement about collecting wishing stars, the things that are used in conjunction with dynamaxx bands to make Pokémon great. I'm sure it's nothing bad. is happening here, so we continued through the cave, taking out more team members, and eventually ran into the third gym leader, who sent some of his members out to run. As often as these guys run, you'd think they'd be in a better situation. way, but who am I to judge? This is actually the first gym leader that I really enjoy personality-wise because the reason he's here in this cave full of water Pokémon is to better train his fire team.

I do not think it is like that. It works from a technical perspective, but I respect the idea behind it, the guy is a machine who wants to make sure he's in top shape at all times and I enjoy the idea that he's not just chilling outside somewhere in his spare time, so that we return. to the hotel for the night and meet Marnie. She wants to test her team against yours, which of course I don't have to say much here, but I really, really like her battle music. Something to keep in mind here is the day and night cycle. in this game it seems to be event-based rather than system clock-based, which is strange considering we've had a system clock-based loop since generation 2.

Well, it's not system-based for some of the games. previous ones, you set it on the cartridge and it memorized it still it's pretty unique. I wonder if the later game will go to the system clock? Well, the fire gem is actually located in Moto Stoke, which is interesting, but to satisfy my favorite gym leader so far, the challenge here is probably one. One of the most unique and intelligently designed systems I've ever had the pleasure of playing in a Pokémon game, so instead of doing puzzles and fighting trainers your goal is to catch wild Pokémon, you enter a double battle with one of the gym trainers. here and the trainer attacks your pokemon and tries to prevent you from catching the wild pokemon.

This is an extraordinarily clever idea that could have been executed since generation 3 or so with the existing mechanics and I have to applaud the developers for coming up with the idea that the battle royale is also quite fun, since I never expected the arcanine Normal-sized guy received a dynamax water attack from a 5-level Gyarados. higher than that, I still don't know how that happened, but the battle was fun or as fun as it can be for a 6v3 afterwards, Kabu modestly accepts his defeat and explains that he needs to keep training, which is very admirable, which bothers me . and I know this is just a Pokémon thing, but the fact that hop is always a badge in front of me as a rival always makes these kinds of victories feel minor in my eyes, like I feel even worse about kabu after that he got hit literally twice in a row and it sucks knowing that I'm always in second place, which is something I've literally never felt in the previous games even though the phenomenon occurs quite frequently.

I don't know, maybe I'd feel better if I saw that hop showdown actually went to the end or something, then at least I'd have the satisfaction of knowing I'm a lot better, although I guess with how much the guys fought me, I should know that it feels bad to take it. These Gym Leaders with funny personalities on their second loss of the day are fine, like the game is listening to me. Bead comes to challenge Hop and actually wins, as I find out that when I reach the gates of the next town, something tells me. Unfortunately that jump won't go away, but maybe it'll stay behind me for now, at least well, Hammerlock is man, it's cool, the whole place is built around this gigantic castle that rises into the sky with several towers and posts. outpost, looks amazing, probably one of my favorite cities in a Pokémon game, damn that's back to back, favorites slow down the Pokémon sword, so we meet Rose and her evil sidekick, who proves that Rose may be a helpless idiot who is being manipulated by someone who looks like a Disney villain, she pushes the bill aside to talk to him about his whole wishing star gathering, to which Rose pays no attention and then explains excitedly that you should meet him at the castle so he can basically outline his idea of ​​helping the world.

Using the energy source located within the wishing stars to replace natural gases and carbon. Interesting but not too interesting. The half-hearted interest only continues when I reach the castle vault, which is not filled with treasures beyond my wildest dreams, but with some tapestries that Basically, let's say there once were two young heroes who wished on a star, then something bad happened, then they looked at a sword and shield, then they became kings, what a beautiful story, I'm sure it won't be repeated in hop form and I, although sonja here points out that, strangely enough, we only worship to a hero, so maybe hop will die.

Can you imagine I would easily crown this the king of all Pokémon games if Hop Boy were mortalized by the hands of a cruel disaster? You know, some people pointed out in my Kotor 2 video that he would probably be a Sith in real life. I really don't know where they got that idea from, honestly, oh my god, I think he might be falling for me, no more. Angry noises from the team, chaos ensues and Hop appears all depressed. I like that, it's actually a nice change of pace. Something tells me that he will still beat the next gym before me, so we pass through this area and arrive at this dusty ass. city ​​and here he is hop again ready for battle now I know you're thinking ah this battle will be the same as always but you're wrong he has a silly bird that looks as stupid as him with him no but seriously the jump is complete .

The lineup has changed, except for him starting after being hit by Bead. I actually really like that development because this guy went from pushing his wulu tear away and acting like he was going to take it to the pokemon league to catching any strong pokemon he could find and that says a lot about his attitude as it says that my team and I are the best and we are going to knock out everyone on the way to defeat my invincible brother two. I should become stronger by any means necessary, even if it means kicking Pokémon with less potential from my party, is that a revolutionary idea?

No, I mean, how did his come about and even though much later in the sun and moon, I don't remember him having a whole new alignment as a means of becoming more powerful? Honestly, the guy would have thrown out his headline because that would have really sealed the deal with how distraught he was about losing for good development overall, although also something that's pretty interesting is that my wife just stopped by the ghost gym in this one. stage, but for me it is the jewel of the fight. I didn't realize the version differences extended so deeply and I think I'll try to keep an eye out for more changes like that if I can, so you'll have noticed in the last 10 minutes or so. from this video i have followed a very simple formula gym route to next gym gym route gym route gym and I want to make this perfectly clear this is the perfect pace for me hints of story as I make my way through the gyms and accelerate my The team is excellent.

I've never liked it when a Pokémon story fills in on itself because most of the time they just aren't written well enough to justify wasting my time. I understand that many times they are written to appeal to younger people, but as an adult fan who has played the franchise for 25 years, I prefer to just work my way through the gyms and strengthen my team. That's not to say that a Pokémon story absolutely can't be written to appeal to both kids and adults, I mean, look at Shrek, I'd still watch it today, but given the history of the Pokémon series, I'm not too excited about when the The game inevitably turns to story time before I can continue my excursion to the gym, so the fighting gym has the same kind of challenge as the ghost and shield gym, basically you have to take these cups of tea to give them one turn to the bottom, which is done by twisting your control stick, nothing extraordinary but still a bit neat, the gym leader here uses a machamp that powers up into this hulking monstrosity that mirrors the special. form that the previous Gym Leader had with his Dark Souls boss centipede are apparently known as gigantamax forms and there are only a handful of Pokémon in the game that have the potential to achieve this.

I really like the idea of ​​some Pokémon moving even more. but getting them is much harder without the DLC, unfortunately, so if you had a machamp, you most likely wouldn't be able to reach the form that the leaders of this gym achieved unless you were very lucky to find one that is already gigantimaxed in form. the wild area after collecting all the gym badges with the dlc, although you could feed a normal machamp a special soup or whatever to make it reach that shape that kind of hits, but whatever, we go out again so as not to jump which is very nice, instead we have sonia who is here to research more about dynamaxx and is also doing a mural on the runes of this city when suddenly an explosion sound is heard in the distance from the direction of the rune, and it turns out that Bead has decided to destroy a bunch of Ancient Graffiti is the best way to get more Wishing Stars to do this.

He has borrowed the president's Pokémon, so he slits the throats of each of his Pokémon in hopes that he can slit his throat too, but there are no dice, so the president and his assistant. Come running to scold Bead, don't destroy the ancient ruins, little beater. My favorite part of this is asking if they got in the way of a simple Pokémon lightning bolt, which is the funniest Pokémon-related insult I think I've ever seen in a game. It turns out that justice does exist when they take away his star wishing beads and tell him that he can no longer participate in the gym challenge.

Impressive, but now I have to try to predict the trajectory of the tragedy here. Or Bead kidnaps the stars they desire. and he uses them to try to prove that he knows what he's doing while unleashing disaster or rosa or his assistant used the stars to do the same thing except more evilly I lean more towards the latter, although he said that sonja then launch into this. mini speech about how Beat has no family and how the president took him under his wing so Beet has only fought to make the president proud so maybe Beed will go down the path of proving himself or getting revenge we will see a lot of that after.

This, the mural crumbles, revealing a pair of perfectly placed statues that basically depict the same type of images as the tapestry depicted in Hammerlock. I like how Sonia makes this expression like it all makes perfect sense now, but then she says, "Hey, it's the same as the tapestry. I don't know what this means, good research, so we take a ridiculously short trip to the next town in Gyms Balloon Scale Oh again, this is one of the coolest cities I've seen aesthetically I really love the look of it, so we continued through this mystical city grabbing some items talking to. a man who wants to be a Pokémon meeting Marnie grabbing a man's love ball and then we start with the gym challenge, which is your standard trainer chain, but with the added touch of quiz questions, if I answer something right , I get a stat boost, if I answer something wrong I get a decrease, well that's fine, I guess if you stick with it it doesn't matter if you're right or wrong, ah, the old George Zimmerman defense, so yeah. , the questions this brigade of old ladies ask range from what is fairy week 2 2. what was the name of the previous coach 2. what is my favorite food for breakfast sorry, what am I supposed to be? to know that, I mean, if you're going to ask me a trivia question and you want to make it difficult, why not do something like what kind of Pokémon appears in this route or something, so I continue towards the caveof the old woman from Opel where she is ready to fight a hernia.

I was hoping to get to see her crawl around at the speed of two snails pushing three snails, but I guess we'll just have to settle for her taking a nap in the middle, well, her questions aren't much better, since she just tosses me around like there's a little boy in this town who told me before all this that she always tells him to wear more pink and tells me I should wear more pink too, so which one is she? Her favorite color is purple, so instead of test questions, why not just have her spin a wheel of advantages and disadvantages and whatever it lands is what my Pokémon gets?

That seems just as fair but more fun, so after getting our badge, Opel tells us. that we failed her test, which means that she has been looking for a replacement gym leader since a strong breeze is a level 4 danger to her in her old age. Let's think for a moment who wears pink is overly dramatic and tends to assert himself in a way that becomes annoying, yeah right, so he'll probably take that gem and turn her into a psychic, which is more or less in line with what that I said before, but we're still missing a gym leader, so we meet Hop again, who seems to have returned. to his old self, although with a new team again, we face him because I don't know, I think the sixth time before he runs to the next gem, I guess we should enjoy the idea of ​​him being after us for two whole years. gems, which is better than nothing, well, after a long walk compared to the route to the Opel gym, we arrived in this quiet snowy town.

I really like this place, damn man, it's like three cities that I've really liked now, well, the gym. for me the rock gem again differs from the ice gem on the shield. I'm not going to lie, I probably would have preferred the ghost and ice gems because I like the look of the gym leader a lot more than the one I have, plus the ice seems a lot easier to use. thrash over rock unfortunately I'm not ready to rock with my team. I guess there hasn't been a single type of grass that I've really vibed with.

I can't get gibble yet from the shield, which is the type of ground I want and I still can't get into a coma, which is the type of main fight I'd be interested in anyway. Hop is here in front of me again, but he actually lost in the gym, which is exactly what he expected to happen. It's perfect, not alone. promotes further growth of your character, it actually makes me feel better about my own achievements, a fan of the game well done, so rock gym has me navigate through everything using these blowtorches so as not to fall into traps, which which seems like a pretty standard gym setup since almost However, in any generation I tried to cleverly work my way through the sturdy boots, but that didn't work, it would be kind of fun if I did, although even if it didn't make sense I'd say that in general This gym kinda sucks since basically if you fall you just do the same thing again from whatever checkpoint you have to last.

Either way, we face Gordy, who is the beefier version of Milo since the beginning of the game. He gives me a little more trouble than the other leaders, but I haven't had a Pokémon knocked out at this stage by a gym leader yet. I must say it's strange to receive Rock Tomb so late in the game as my reward tm. I guess I was always associated with brock's tm. in the first gym in Kanto at least in fire red and leaf green, okay, so you know, when we leave the gym there will be someone waiting for us here, it's just the formula.

Honestly, I have to admit that I don't mind because it keeps the story in the back of the player's mind while they collect badges. The problem here is that Sonia wants to take us to a restaurant and I don't, there's an old tapestry on the back wall of this Denny's, are you kidding me? That's what they came up with. I mean, if it cost me 10 more minutes, I'd rather they listen to a customer talking about something. hidden runes that have just been discovered, I mean, good Lord, and there's not even an explanation like the owner not coming out and leaving.

My uncle was an alternative collector before he walked on and he wanted me to have this. I chose to display this timeless. piece of art here, my pride and joy, my restaurant, it's here, imagine walking into an Applebee's ordering all you can eat, chops or whatever and then taking a look at the countless piles of sports memorabilia just to see the statement rights located on the back. wall between a University of Michigan flag and a Detroit Red Wings hockey puck. I'm very distraught about this, but it's only getting worse. We are sitting here in front of the bathrooms because there will never be bathrooms in a Pokémon game and in Sonia's game. like yes, the two heroes used to bathe here they say: do you two think you could be the new heroes?

What do I mean? This plot wasn't very subtle to begin with, but Jesus Christ, why not make the ancient heroes one on one? photo replicas of the main character and jumping at this stage, that's the only way I can think of to make it less subtle than this, but yeah, this whole conversation gives us an excuse to grab Hop by the ankle and shake him to get the lunch money again. a Pokémon battle, at what point do you realize you just lost at the gym I faced, probably never, so we head down the frozen river route before encountering more loud grunts from the team harassing exactly to the same doctor who is apparently in a cross country? trip to provide me with bike parts, since defeating him gives me an upgrade that allows me to ride a bike on water another 20,000 ways to do this upgrade, but yeah, I guess doing the exact same thing is the easiest, so I cycle through bike this frozen waterscape fighting.

Fishermen and swimmers who are dressed as if there were no freezing temperatures. I understand you designed a male swimmer model and a female swimmer model, but did you really have to spray them where the hail falls when they're not wearing a shirt or bikini? I guess so. It makes as much sense as the tropical beach chairs and the normal berry tree here too, so we get to the next town where the dark gym is supposed to be and the door is closed while Marnie is hanging around the corner literally with a view of everyone complaining that the city gates are closed and she says oi kami so i walk 10 feet around the corner and she says i know of a secret entrance to this place the secret entrance is an opening in the wall with no code secret access with no sewers or tunnels, just a hole in the wall with a Pokémon center in sight.

We can try to make sure it's convenient, but you could have easily had the aforementioned password or like a sewer system that actually has a small underground city with a Pokémon center. Attached, just man, try, that's all I ask, so the real town of Spike Move is Marnie's house, which means the Yell team is located here too. The music is decent and the look is great, but in the whole city there is no one besides these screaming team. Keep challenging yourself as you make your way towards the gym leader, basically the whole city is a gym which is a nice concept but I really feel like the whole place is a missed opportunity, like when you beat a couple of grunts one of them he says, I followed him.

The new Yon signs, the neon signs point in one direction because it's literally the only way you can go besides the way you came. getting to the gym later, it's literally the most basic gym in the game, on par with many early gyms from previous generations, why not have CD characters that offer to sell you upgrades for your Pokémon if you buy the right one? If you buy the wrong item. hurts your Pokémon or gives them a disadvantage in the next battle, a bit like the fairy gym, if you refuse to buy, fight the merchant or what if someone mugs you for an amount of money you have to chase before of others attacking you?

What if the team members you yell at and defeat end up joining in and cheering you on, adopting a new color scheme before it leads to a small turf war between the old and new members, which might even spill over to the rest of the team? game where you become almost a mafia boss type entity that inspires your particular faction of gang members to focus on whatever option you choose. You could have them focus on helping people or you could have them focus on making money for you or you could have them focus on something in between.

Two, I don't know, the possibilities presented in Pokémon games are potentially limitless, and yet this is what makes us understand. Just as confusing as the layout of the gym city is this scene introducing the gym leader, listen to this, this sounds like a boo. It looks like they're booing him but it also looks like they're applauding happily. Well, okay, this whole place is closed because Team Yell is actually made up of Gym Leaders from Spike Moods Gym and they decided to try to suit up and help out. Expelling Marnie with her challenge, for whatever reason, locking down the city means that other trainers couldn't stand in her way challenging the gym here, so if we go with the lady from Nessa's hometown who told us that there definitely seems to be some kind of Galar region regulations on gyms, like they demote a gym leader for losing too much, which makes sense, but they're fine with an entire gym just closing down to kick the prodigy out of their city or whatever.

I mean, why don't they have any? The officials stepped in to clear this whole thing up, so yeah, we fought the gym leaders in probably the most interesting gym fight in the game compared to the rest, so at least he starts off by saying yeah, this gym kinda sucks. , but then he goes into full rocker mode and starts yelling into his microphone about what moves his tactically genius Pokémon have, plus he doesn't dynamax Pokémon which means we don't either, it's actually not that bad since the dynamaxism has become obsolete at this stage and Lastly, the gym music is unique compared to the rest, which I really appreciate.

Overall, it's a horrible gem - a poor implementation of what could have been new ideas and the only saving grace is the differences between this leader and the rest, so it turns out that This Guy Is Marnie's Older Brother, Which explains a lot: he wants her to take over the gym instead, but she aims to become league champion, so after defeating Piers, she prepares to face him in the meantime at the start of the city. An explosion is heard outside. This is the third explosion of the game. This guy comes running into town after the gates opened to tell me there's some trouble on Route 9, so we run out and Leon is here to investigate.

Here's something that Actually, I love being a kid in this game, as always in Pokémon, but in every other Pokémon game, every adult depends on some 11-year-old kid or whatever to take care of the horrible problems they have. Full-fledged adults generally create it, as it has always been. a silly trope that makes me resent the adults in the game. In this one there was a major problem with the power plant before and the president tells us that the adults will take care of it, that's great and basically the same thing happens here with Leon, he says, hey buddy, I'm the champion, don't worry for none of this, just go ahead and complete your challenge in the gym, that's perfect and that's all I honestly ask because the adults have now told the child that they will solve the problem.

It's a disaster, even if I get involved now it's because I, the child, have chosen to do so. This is much better than adults. Please kid, you must go to the forbidden cave with the ancient Pokémon beast and take care of it. Elite Four, the league champion, the gym leaders, no, no, no, no, they're busy, they have to do it, so what's happening is suddenly there are more wild Pokémon dynamaxing around the area and Leon is chasing them. is deleting, which is fine for me because it saves me. of having to watch three minutes of cutscene per battle so we head to the final gym the dragon gem well we ran out of ideas so this gym is just three double battles in a row followed by the leader also fighting and it bends, here it is.

The deal: This guy is supposedly the leader of the dragon gym, like everyone has said 24,000 times, on top of that, he claims to control the weather before he starts. This guy has two dragon Pokémon, the other two are ground and rock and the only weather he controls is Sandstorms, that's a very good fight, I've said it a thousand times, but gym leaders are limited to one type of Pokémon is pretty silly to prove that you're a competent opponent, all you usually need is a single Pokémon tocounter most gems. but this is the first time in this game where any of my Pokémon fainted and he took out three of them.

It's actually a big battle and I would have been in trouble if I had a full team, so we beat the guy and Hop enters. Challenge next, unfortunately, we then go outside and Sonia is given a lab coat that makes her a professor. People have been doing all this wrong going to school and stuff, just buying a lab coat, it makes you a teacher right away, so I check my papers. as I have been because I always have access to more of them after beating a gym, each time the requirements allow more and more Pokémon to join the jobs, as the first jobs have a maximum of 3 Pokémon allowed to join and then continue. going up little by little, like after the 7th badge, I could send like 9 or 10 Pokémon to a job.

Well, after the 8th gym, I can send a staggering 30 Dragon Pokémon to a job. There aren't 30 Dragon Pokémon in the game, at least not without DLC. and even if you collected all 28 or so that exist in the base game, you'd have to hunt them down and trade them. I know you could argue that I can only get duplicates, but are you crazy? I don't just I don't just want to. to catch random unwarys, there are also an incredible number of dragons. I know I can send a single Pokémon to a job, but strangely enough, disaster seems to be brewing around me with these dynamic Pokémon reflecting the past catastrophe that struck Galar. region, but again as a child I was told to continue my experience in the Pokémon league while the adults took care of it and again I appreciate this, it's almost like I was proving my worth as a trainer before helping with something so dangerous, while in previous games it would.

Go save the world before taking on the Pokémon League and I feel like it's just a design philosophy that never evolved until now because in the first two games that worked, you took out Team Rocket, foiled their plans and moved seamlessly to Al endgame to face the league worked there because Team Rocket was almost a mafia type entity that was just a group of and it wasn't so much that it was some ancient deity that had returned to take over the world or whatever. It started to get silly with sapphire onwards, although since impending disaster always had to be thwarted primarily by you as a kid who didn't even have all his badges most of the time, I'll point out that I think black and white did.

They had them. pretty decent job of merging everything together, although to some extent now that we're completely out of focus, let's get back to the dynamaxx raid battles. I kind of swept this all under the rug of boring earlier, when I touched on this topic much later, when you get to the 5 star raids, they become more difficult and interesting, but also almost impossible to do on your own and it's not because lack of skill on my part, but because the game requires you to have NBC allies if you don't go. When searching for other players online, you do this a good 95 percent of the time because the npcs are actual trash with the intelligence of low level wild Pokémon.

I tried my hand several times with my wife in some five star raids and out of the 10 or so battles we attempted, we managed one successfully because the NPCs bring Pokémon that are either weak to the type of Pokémon we are facing or as a literal magikarp and when a Pokémon faints four times, you lose the battle outright, there is no last man. without limiting respawns to zero and hoping that the last couple of Pokémon can survive and win, and I haven't figured out if Gamefreak just didn't care enough to program in anything resembling intelligent AI decision making or if they made the AI was like that on purpose. silly just to encourage online play, I'm honestly leaning towards the latter because the battle tower has some pretty well written AI that pits you against each other, but these npcs completely cripple this entire effort the vast majority of the time, even when somehow However they manage to bring a half-decent Pokémon against our enemy, they will spend their turns using moves that increase their speed or similar a good part of the time instead of getting a discount that slowly breaks these giant Pokémon shields and the worst part of all this is that There are such simple solutions to make raids good or at least better.

I could choose to take four of my own Pokémon. I could choose to start the battle with just my wife and me. We could have literally taken out several of the Pokémon ourselves. 2v1, but even that is out of the question since I can try to start a battle with just me and my wife and the game says "Hey, you only have two, you want us to find you some NPCs" and I say no, no , No. I don't want that and the game doesn't start so I think if I start it now it will allow us to play without npcs, I mean it just asked us if we wanted them and still the battle starts with one and two in Trailer sends his piles of royal fluff and last night's leftovers in the hopes that they don't get hit by a Pokémon the size of Wisconsin, but the fun of the raid battle doesn't stop.

There, of course, it doesn't, because after having wasted an hour trying to reroll for a successful AI team, one discouraging fact still looms over the player. These battles are fundamentally flawed when you go up in Pokémon raid difficulty levels. start putting up shields as i mentioned before, shields are barriers that range from two to five ticks, as far as i can tell, a standard attack takes away one tick, a dynamaxx attack takes away two, so if a pokemon puts up a shield of five ticks, it will just break. If all four Pokémon attack the shield and if one of those Pokémon is dynamaxed, this means that if an NPC decides to fool around and start making useless moves, you'll have wasted some shield tick destruction potential.

I initially thought that after taking a hit or two, put up a shield, but it's much worse than that when they reach a specific HP stage, so basically, if a Pokémon has 95 of the HP needed to reach that HP stage, shield from the battle, then if the Dynamax Pokémon continues well, it does a minimal amount of damage as there is an invisible barrier that prevents the enemy from taking further damage despite being hit by a very large and powerful attack that should decimate its health . This is by far one of the worst systems from a fundamental level that I have ever witnessed. into a video game, especially one that has had a year and a half to balance and fix, and this is my biggest problem with Game Freak and Nintendo.

We now live in a time where games are released early. Well, it's not my favorite, but I understand. The problem is that we see indie developers working hard most of the time to balance, fix, and make things as good as possible when problems arise, but the bigger a game gets, the more likely they are to do so. Throw out any quality of life patches and focus on including additional paid content. Instead, I refuse to pay for downloadable content for a game that, after all this time, still hasn't been updated with changes that would benefit players from a company as big as Game Freak.

In fact, if I were a more cynical person, I'd say that they haven't fixed these things to encourage people to buy Nintendo online so they can catch these dynamaxx Pokémon, but I'm not saying I would never hint at that gamefreak intentionally. hasn't fixed raid battles to sell more nintendo online subs and anyone who thinks that gaming fan hasn't intentionally fixed raid battles to sell more nintendo online subs is obviously overthinking this whole ordeal , here comes the torkle, right now, that wild ride is It's time to cross these snowy mountains full of sneakers to the city of London.

It's the most impressive so far in terms of scale, although aesthetically I prefer some of the other cities, but it's still a cool city at a glance. That said, it's empty, I mean, we've had the technology to have large groups of npcs hanging around for a long time. Now look at Paris in Pokémon x and y, lots of people moving from one place to another. This city is a ghost. town of occasional npcs that appear like it's cyberpunk 2077, I guess the switch just can't handle draw distances over 10 feet or hear me, the game was developed for the 3ds and nintendo forced game freak to port it to the switch when it turned out that the change was successful, that's my conspiracy theory, oh wow, so many people, that's a little intimidating now, from the way things have sounded up to this point, it seems like we were going to go through some kind of semi-final process where we face Marnie and jump before the winner of the matches faces Leon.

Part of me wonders if losing to them would just restart the battles as if nothing happened or if there would be some kind of alternate universe where these guys continued. face Leon instead, I will never know with 100% certainty because I have too much pride to lose with these suits, but something tells me that fan of the game didn't come up with a story that has branches and alternative endings if a gun to their heads, I still like to face my rivals in a real official capacity rather than just before facing the league. Is there a league in this one with an elite four?

If there's an account, will he reappear as some sort of elite four since he fell off the radar after he was kidnapped by Grandma or will he just be Leon, I guess we'll find out, so yeah, it goes pretty much exactly like I said with Marnie and then jumps into very easy battles, nothing compared to the eighth. gym doubles, I will say that the music for both fights was incredible, so after our semi-finals we met up with Hop and Leon and made plans to have dinner at a fancy hotel while several hours pass and Leon still hasn't shown up. up, which worries about the jump while Pierce comes in to tell us that Leon was going to be late since he had to go through the pink tower first for something.

This worries him, he jumps for whatever reason, which means this will be the transition to our final story. One bit before we fight, Leon Piers agrees to take us to meet Leon at the Rose Tower and says that he will gather the team and shout to make a fuss for some reason, I mean at this stage Leon isn't in any trouble, he just seems . Like he's going to meet with President Rose, I guess, so why bring in a bunch of punks to come up with whatever? I'm already ready for how stupid this will inevitably be, so we go outside and the whole gang is here.

I still understand why they are framing. This looks like it's going to be a big showdown even though the only information we've gotten at this point is along the lines of "Hey, your brother's in the tower." Well, here to prove these future earnings correct, it's the president's assistant who says, "Oh, me." I'm afraid I can't let you do that. You see that the monorail is locked and can only be unlocked by select staff who have a specific key and I have given that key to one of the specially selected staff members you are concerned about. facepalm so hard that your hand goes through your skull by accident, why even have a main conflict like you're literally going to facepalm it so hard that you're basically using the same villain logic as Pokémon Red?

So why even have a plot that people will still buy your game, I promise Pokémon is literally too big to fail, as long as you make something resembling a game fan attempt, just forgive me, then turn around and run away, my willpower is being undermined in real life by a video game yes, he runs away, you fight him, run against your battle, run against your battle and then run very far this time, then you reach the monorail station where joins you with his three clones, so Pierce pulls his microphone out of his and then starts shouting words with no instruments around, this attracts the eight people in London to run down the stairs and stomp on the gang of clones until they Let's get the key to chaos.

If this sounds stupid, consider someone who wasn't. I wrote the script for this game, yeah we're having fun, this is the best summer vacation ever, what a jarring theme for what's supposed to be a terrible situation, well this just keeps dragging on while Pokémon continues to be Pokémon in this elevator and the bad guys appear. to tell us how Rose Tower is the base for a group of subsidiaries that do business in the Galar region because corporations are evil. I wish I hadn't called this a mile away, but unfortunately we continue up the elevator while being interrupted occasionally by several. members of the insurance and construction agency before we get stuck in the space to the top floor here the assistantStan Rose who is angry enough to summon the entire city of Pittsburgh to attack my Pokémon.

Fortunately, I have a large frog that evolved from a penis, so "We're good, well here we reach the end of the line and the president is discussing things with Leon, apparently they didn't realize that Pokémon the size of skyscrapers were fighting behind them. Rose explains that in a thousand years the calamity or whatever will come to the Galar region again and if they don't prepare for that inevitability humanity will be doomed, okay, actually you have my attention, but this is all that comes from this lion says yeah well people a thousand years from now it's like a thousand years from now let me go fight in the championship buddy and then we'll go back to the hotel you know literally all of this would have been resolved with the mere existence of cell phones, true, but apparently we forgot we had one and we jumped too and so on. they did docks and marnie too and everyone oh well, I hope nothing interferes with the championships tomorrow, so here's an interesting point of order when One challenger manages to beat the challenge I beat, then they have to fight the gym leaders to a finish. grade again, basically every leader here is placed somewhere in a tournament bracket along with the player and each round someone is defeated until the last man standing gets a chance to face the champion, which is actually a cool concept, truth be told, so it's almost like an elite three now, except I have some familiarity with the upcoming enemies, honestly, I'm not opposed to that, although that being said, this whole tournament group is a bit flawed, I mean, if you have eight Gym Leaders and there are nine competitors, typically, how does that work?

I mean, I guess a gym leader just chooses not to participate or something and I couldn't help but notice that Opal isn't here backstage, which also makes me wonder what Beet is doing, that didn't take long and My prediction about that he would transform into the psychic gym leader instead of the fairy was wrong because he only uses fairy now, but you barge in here to basically beg him to fight you claiming that you'll quit being a pokemon trainer if you lose. I'd say I enjoy that he's gone from being an overly smug jerk to a desperate shell of his former self, but it doesn't seem like he's learned any humility and that he's just doing this out of desperation, either way, slap in the face. .

The last time before the audience demands that he not retire or whatever, he agrees to this and then goes back to being a fairy later, whatever that is. I guess this makes more sense for an elite four than the three I would have had to face, although I have yet to do that. I wonder what this would have been like if there had actually been eight Gym Leaders plus the challenger. I mean, it's got to be a strange group, so first we face Nessa, who gives me more trouble than I thought. Honestly, though that may be partially. because I had my fire pokemon in front after these rankings were updated showing the fire gym leader lost to the dark leader, the dragon gym leader obviously beat Milo's silly grass team and the fight beat the rock, which seems about right, so we'll face it. fight and then pass the dragon because there is no way for the dragon to lose control to the darkness.

You know, I thought it was cool that the wrestling gym leader's bare feet made these smacking noises against the stone because you know she's barefoot, but then she does the exact same thing. Anyway, she also sounds on grass. I don't know why these guys don't have full teams of six, since this is supposed to be a big, serious match where they aim to become champions, but I guess no one has. Gamefreak's ability to think so much about this sort of thing, I guess it wouldn't have mattered with the fighting gym later, although seeing as I literally took a single shot at each of their Pokémon, well, dragon man beat dragon man dark, so it's time to see what this guy does 1v1, so what does the master of all dragons do?

He sends a fire turtle. I don't understand, I almost feel like they decided to shoehorn the entire climate by changing this gym leader's appearance, but then I realize that. There are few if any dragons that actually change the weather this way, but yes, we made it through, albeit much more slowly than the fight leader, so now we finally reach Leon. I have to say I'm pretty excited. this showdown, uh, yeah, attention to all the Pokémon invited to the stadium, so I was arguing with Leon about how something bad was about to happen in a thousand years in the future or something and uh, he didn't want to listen, so I made it happen now. you're welcome, I'm out of witty banter, this game has broken me, oh yeah, we have Pokémon control, we have a new untested mechanical control, we have eight gyms, control, okay, send it, so Leon comes out to try to stop it. the president cause the so-called darkest day again and jump and run into the forest at the beginning of the game to capture a legendary Pokémon.

I'm surprised, even though I haven't gotten a master ball in this game yet. I'm waiting for Hop to pull one out of his and go look. I snagged one of these at Rose Tower, so we headed deeper into the forest before discovering the legend of Zelda. In the background we hear the legendary Pokémon continue with its best immigrant song. impression, we then grab an actual literal weapon to use against Rose, which only makes me more excited at the possibility of a Pokémon weapon, so we fly back to Hammerlock, where the center of all this madness is taking place.

This is where Ryhan, the dragon gym leader, tells him. to say that they have evacuated the city so there is no need to worry, this is blatantly false as I literally cycled through half the city doing the exact same thing they were doing before because it was the only time you needed to remove gradually to the NPCs and I can't even do that now. I'll stand here menacingly and pretend to evacuate more people so that Rose's assistant goes from being belligerently arrogant to complaining about you helping her save the president. Apparently the dumb bastard decided to wake up the former Pokémon that caused the darkest day with his energy to harvest said energy so the world can still have power or something, the energy is now causing the Pokémon to become energized and sweep across the city. region.So we get to Rose, who explains that they've been feeding wishing stars to the ancient Pokémon to awaken it in hopes of harvesting its energy and then controlling it with Leon's help.

Furthermore, the world can continue with eternal energy. It is a noble pursuit. with the wrong antagonist and I guess it's not the worst motivation in the world as much as I hate to admit it, although the fact that he's done it way before is a little shortsighted, but this guy's music is epic. Yes, the president apologizes before letting you go to see how Leon has been doing with this ancient Pokémon, this Eternatus. I'm willing to bet he didn't catch it, so we head up and yeah, they didn't catch him, but Leon tries to catch him. a normal pokeball, well that doesn't work so I fight next and I'm physically unable to throw a pokeball so I guess I don't have room to talk, then it gets big and the game shows that 2v1 dynamax raids are possible, wait, we can. attack, so yeah, it doesn't matter, we summon the sword and shield of the legendary wolves to come and fight with us in the game.

We check to make sure we have four bodies here before we can continue fighting again. This is basically an interactive cutscene that shows off a garbage mechanic I needed. to be reworked in the early stages, I imagine it's probably cool for kids, though hey, we can eventually try to catch this thing, so I do what Leon did and throw a normal pokeball at it, but mine works because I'm better and it explains why didn't we do it. He gets a master ball, then Siff and his wolf friend jump into the sun. Three days pass and it turns out that Rose turned herself in to the police for doing what she believed in, so it's finally time to face Leon Gamefreak who has managed to gather a solid 20 npcs to cheer me on my way to the match, which impresses me.

The game usually lags when too much action happens at once, but they manage to pull it off here at an impressive 55fps, making the final battle. It's pretty good music, it's good as always, actually the music in this game probably has some of my favorite themes in any Pokémon game, which is saying a lot since Pokémon games have historically had pretty good music, anyway, this guy has a pretty solid lineup that he manages to get down. most of my team and the final part has me fighting fire with fire just to assert my dominance, which led to both of our Pokémon fainting at the exact same time, that was pretty cool, then Leon crowns me champion and launches his hat in the air. the credits roll and that's it, well, no, no, there's no more after the credits, hey, yeah, okay, then I'm the champion.

I wake up at my mom's house and eat my sugar-glazed mini wheats. God, I love sugar glazed mini wheats. My mom caresses. She hits me on the head and sends me off with my mini pizza for lunch with chocolate frosting and Eminem pizza dessert, but then the kind old teacher stops by to give me my own Master Ball. Today is going to be a good day. I decide to go. I played in the woods before finding my good friend Hop waiting in the clearing. He explains that some force drew him here and I agree because there are no options so we have another battle before Sonia comes in and gives me a signed copy of it.

The book she wrote doesn't have many pictures, so I get bored, so this man with penis hair and a man with shield hair walk in in their butler suits and tell Sonia that they gave her book a review of one. star on the Barnes Noble website because it's full of lies sword word shielbert no, no, I'm done, no, I'm serious, I'm not going to wade through this afterthought, this rigmarole of tedious gameplay and story neatly packaged with a small Bow accented with a lipstick kiss from Game Freak. save a brief description because i actually went through it with difficulty and you literally visit all the gyms again and fight a dynamax pokemon before tweedledee and tweedledum piss off the shield pokemon on top of the tower from before and that's it, you whip your master ball in not sif. and these two morons are so impressed that they copy and paste Diamond's exact same dialogue about never having seen such an amazing battle that they turn into jumps, chase after the shield Pokémon, and claim their participation medal for this entire game, somehow consolidating Taking his place as the vaguest definition of the word hero ever shown in any media, you fight him one last time even though it was a couple of hours later at most and his Pokémon are now close to or at level 70. .Then he says he wants to help people. as he can and for some reason his preferred profession is becoming a Pokémon teacher, which is like the tenth most useful thing you can be in terms of traveling and rescuing people wherever you find them, but that doesn't matter because this way the story .

It is repeated with Hop becoming a teacher and his rival becoming a champion, which is the opposite of what happened with Leon and Sonia. The ending of Pokémon Sword is good, it's a Pokémon game, it has some very high highs and some absolute valleys. The story exists. The mechanics are naturally pretty fun when the extra stuff isn't crammed in. The problem with the Pokémon formula is that it's as addictive as it is and I'm totally willing to concede that at the end of the day I'll probably have fun with any Pokémon game, every time. and when it doesn't hinder me too much while I'm trying to catch Pokémon and make a team, and that's the biggest problem with criticizing something like Pokémon, because let's face it, is it okay that Gamefreak left it out? 231 Pokémon and then I never slowly added them back during updates and they still managed to get 30 DLC out at all.

It is not a horrible practice. Honestly, God can't blame anyone for choosing to boycott the game over the hell I did for a year. and a half, but I had such a bad time that I was afraid to start the game every day? Not forming a team is fun. Catching Pokémon is fun, and as long as a Pokémon game follows that formula with a minimum of obstacles, it will be difficult. outright saying that it's bad, but it still has many drawbacks that make it difficult to recommend it over older portable copies of the other games in the franchise.

One of the biggest things that I mentioned only a small amount throughout this video is that this game is terribly unpolished when it comes to quite a few things, the draw distance is horrendous, it's like the switch doesn't evenI couldn't even handle more than 20 entities on the screen at any given time and 20 is generous, the game came out in 2019, not 2004. It's somewhat forgivable when you're in the wild and Pokémon are spawning, but it's downright ridiculous in cities bigger when you look around and feel like a game fan predicted kovid. Plus, every Pokémon center could very well be a clone I talked to. all the npcs and i think maybe one of them offered to give me something or a trade or something maybe they all look the same regardless of location regardless of what the surrounding area looks like the only real difference is what items are Do you sell.

It's a bit embarrassing when you think about it, the npcs and trainers are randomly placed in areas where they don't make much sense, like the part where I talked about the trainers who were clearly dressed for the tropical weather in this frozen tundra, the animations as usual. they're completely horrible, like there's almost never any proper facial animation to express what's happening. There are so many scenarios where the game says something is happening via text, but you can't ask the character animations to keep up. What is this early access indie game? This is embarrassing for the amount of money this franchise makes.

It's even more embarrassing when Gamefreak said that the reason so many Pokémon are removed from the game is because they have to put in high-quality animations for every Pokémon that these high-quality animations consist of. of Pokémon jumping a little in battle to convey a kick or kicking to convey a punch, this is particularly irritating when Game Freak went on to explain that they would have to remake all Pokémon models for the Switch, yes, you have to do that. It's literally called creating a $60 game, it's called having the funds to do exactly that.

How is this an excuse from a developer of one of the biggest franchises in the world? I know the amount you can sink into a Pokémon game can only go so far, but holy crap they recycled sun and moon movement expressions for a lot of the npcs again adding more cement to my idea that this was a 3ds game . I mean, I still felt like someone immersed in the sun and the moon just with the way various things were being done. presented as po town, where team Skull trashed the place, while many of the settings in this game have a wow factor initially, the paint peels off when you realize how superficial everything is and the worst problem with all of this is that could be honest.

May God forgive these transgressions if many of the decisions made around the development of this game shined to perfection if you could wear different uniforms during important matches if all Pokémon from previous generations existed if dynamaxx battles weren't the most boring job or be further hampered by rubbish level AI and a shoddy battle system if any sort of effort was put into the most basic decisions regarding the animations, but having said all that, I know it's a bit difficult to change this with how much I just gave it, but I had fun there. There were amazing musical moments in the city aesthetic, there were amazing fights and interesting mechanics, there were so many things to do even though the game was so optimized in the way it handled the gem system and the way you literally focused. in the gems until the story grew.

In my opinion, the ugly head was probably the best way to structure a story. I've always said that I just want to do gymnastics stuff in every game, and Sword and Shield does it masterfully, so Pokémon Sword is just as bad as I

imagined

. No, but it was close. I would sum it up again, but I really don't think I need to repeat myself and the biggest problem is that people are going to buy the next one and the next one and the next one. You've nailed the fundamental things that make Pokémon what it is and I can't deny that, as much as I want to, I still have fun with each version even though some are superior, it just sucks that we're at the mercy of whim of the game. a monster that is slowly destroying the series, making its fans engaged.

I didn't buy Sword for so long because honestly, God didn't want to support the decisions the company made with the game, but I realized that I could be a small voice on this platform and that if we have enough of them maybe we can eventually carry this franchise back to what it could and should be. It's easier to justify a portable series of 40 games that have flaws and options that were obviously phoned in. It's much more difficult. to justify the same series making bad decisions and costing $60 on a main console with 30 dlc, I guess we'll have to see how Pokémon Breath of the Wild Shadows Die Two comes out thanks for watching, it feels weird coming out of a three and a video of half an hour with one insignificant and a half but well, more videos for you, less work for me anyway, I have some t-shirts, you know it, I know it or you don't know it and I'm doing well, now you are.

I guess I still have a tick where I stream every Monday, Tuesday and Friday at a certain time on the list. Somewhere I have a Twitter where I remember to tweet things that aren't videos. Every once in a while I have a discord where people chat. I chat. you chat I mean you can you are invited and I have a patreon and that's all have a good time