So, some of you might remember me posting a
review of Metroid Dread a month ago or, if you are really stalking me,
Pokemon Sword in another thread three years ago. Well, weeeee're back, with Pokemon Legends: Arceus. How does Gamefreak's latest stack up? Did I really spend a full month playing it? Lets find out...
Well, exploring PLA's maps was great, I made a real go of catching as I went since completing the Pokedex was a big part of the game, and though that messed with story pacing, it also left me appropriately leveled for late game battles and seems to be how playing was intended. Though you won't find anything too interesting in the maps, the core idea of finding and catching new types of Pokemon was enough for me. Sadly, there were only five maps, with t of three of them not feeling too comfy, but it was still a good time.
The standard Pokemon combat mechanics are the base of battling in the game, despite speculation otherwise, though the agile/strong system changes things up slightly and other mechanics like status effects and surprising Pokemon have been changed or added to further fine-tune battles. The game's main "gimmick," alpha Pokemon, has the politeness to fuck off and you can feel free to ignore it if you want, which is another pleasant change. With the game's new Pokedex mechanic, which requires you to perform tasks with a Pokemon rather than just see or catch it, battling takes on new importance as you try to see your mons doing specific attacks or specific styles.
Note however, as a specific caveat to the above, that you do not battle boss monsters with standard battle mechanics. Instead you chip away at their health by throwing bags at them in an arena battle while they try to kill you. The politest thing I can say about this is that you only have to do it six times total. The least polite thing is that it sucks, I hate it and I had so little desire to do it that I just said fuck it and left rather than get a 100% Pokedex upon learning that I'd have to do one last one in order to catch Arceus.
And yeah, there were other downsides too. The "early game", which includes the first 60 to 80 percent of the main plot, is very easy. If you take your time catching all the mons then you breeze through the few plot battles, most of which feature NPCs with only 1 to 3 Pokemon. Speaking of which, don't expect a lot of battles with other trainers, trainers don't even exist in the overworld and plot based battles are few and far between. Instead your team's tough tests are all about endurance, how much work can you get done before having to rest up at a camp, etc.
And due to the Pokemon series' grueling development pace the game feels half-baked, like they forgot to give it adequate play-testing. There's tons of "why did they do that" questions here. You rest by pressing A at a tent, but you can ALSO rest by walking to a guy five feet away from the tent and asking him to rest. When you want to leave a level you have to ask the professor to go home, but if you walk to the level exit (always close to the prof) it also asks if you want to go home, but if you say yes it will warp you to the professor instead of just leaving. And you can't just warp between levels with fast travel or the professor, you have to go back to town and deal with a thirty second loading screen in order to go to a new one.
Another sadly returning part of the series is the glacial pace of text scrolling, which made a lot more sense on the Gameboy than it does on a tv or tablet. Its infuriating waiting for characters to talk, especially when you are doing things like, for example, Path of Solitude, which wastes a solid 20 seconds of slow text scroll (complete with multiple ways to fuck it up and waste even more time) each time you do it. And if you want to 100 percent the game you have to do that nearly 250 times, for what its worth. Characters in this game literally cannot walk and chew gum at the same time, either, leading them say their lines, do hand gestures, and then same more lines or move, in a very janky and embarrassing fashion.
There's also the recurring series issue of not enough death animations, so characters still get up and then fall back down whenever defeated. I can understand not having the time to fix this for all Pokemon, but the main character does this too, like couldn't they have at least bothered for that? Though, in fairness, the attack animations are all vastly improved from Sw/Sh. Sigh.... and they didn't add enough human models either so you STILL get the issue of two identical people standing next to eachother regularly in the game. Also, my game crashed literally everytime I returned to town after completing a story chapter. Not a big deal since it autosaves when travelling, but why has that not been fixed yet?
Having experienced nearly all the game has to offer, I have to accept that it cannot replace real mainline Pokemon games. It has a few flaws that I think make it less long-lasting. Constantly changing out mons to get their dex completion left me with way less of a tie to my "main team" who would get boxed for hours at a time for me to train other monsters, and playing the game "properly" (exploring areas in order) messes with the story pacing. It is a great one-off and I hope it gets a sequel, but its clearly cannot be the franchise's main tentpole going forward.
And yet, despite four paragraphs of complaining, I still loved this game. Hell yeah, way more than Sw/Sh. I managed to get 125 hours out of it in a month, despite having full-time job AND going on vacation for a week, so I guess that means I liked it, right? Fuck yeah, 2 out of 2. If you like this sort of game definitely play it and even if you aren't usually into it you might still want to give it a try.
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