On April 14 2023 14:40 lestye wrote: This looks incredible. This looks like its addressing all the criticisms that people had with BotW. (Except the weapon durability people but those people are BABIES)
I think I only had two real issues with BotW. One was actually the opposite of the babies' - I found it irritating that once you found the Master Sword, you could basically just stop worrying about weapon durability. In general, I wished the game had more stuff with a high degree of challenge even in the late game. I get that the mainline "go kill Gannon" quest needs to be dead easy so that any player can beat the game, but I would really have liked a lot more stuff that was hard even fully equipped. Once you get Urbosa's Fury, even Lionels aren't much of a challenge any more.
That's easily addressed, though - you can just make up your own ruleset to play by and turn BotW into a harder game. I disabled the special abilities and started playing by the rule that you aren't allowed to carry inventory over region boundaries. That is a lot of fun and makes the game plenty hard.
The thing that bugged me much more than that were the shrines. Once you have beat your first ten shrines or so, there are very, very few that present anything new and interesting. With a few delightful exceptions, the shrines felt like cookie-cutter content that had been churned out without much love, and that took a lot away from the excitement of having discovered a new one. Especially given the traditional role of underground dungeons in Legend of Zelda games, I wanted so much more from the shrines. I hope so much that they've put a lot more creative effort into the shrines this time around.
I enjoyed BOTW but I'm a big fan of the oldschool 2D zelda formula: 8 dungeons with 8 mini bosses, 8 unique items and 8 final bosses. Link's awakening and the Oracle games are top tier for me. The Divine Beasts and Shrines in BOTW didn't really scratch that itch. The fact that it has a big open world is all well and good but if I want to play an open world game I have 200 other options to pick from, and honestly most of them do it better Hopefully TOTK has more dungeon-like content than BOTW.
As for GOTY, Horizon Zero Dawn deserved that title far more imo. It's hard to beat the Nintendo fanbase at these competitions though.
I'll echo the slight disappointment of quantity (simple shrines) over quality (more substantive temples/ dungeons), although given the enormous map of BotW, I'm not really surprised at the decision to fill the world with quick shrine challenges. I think it makes sense for a huge game, even though it feels very different for a Zelda game.
On April 14 2023 14:40 lestye wrote: This looks incredible. This looks like its addressing all the criticisms that people had with BotW. (Except the weapon durability people but those people are BABIES)
Also i read on twitter this is the first mainline game with ganondorf, zelda, and link together since TWILIGHT PRINCESS?? thats CRAZY to me.
On April 14 2023 19:11 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: I'll echo the slight disappointment of quantity (simple shrines) over quality (more substantive temples/ dungeons), although given the enormous map of BotW, I'm not really surprised at the decision to fill the world with quick shrine challenges. I think it makes sense for a huge game, even though it feels very different for a Zelda game.
I think the fact that the shrines were tiny relative to traditional Zelda dungeons was unavoidable given the huge open-world design they were going for. It would be a slog to have hour-long dungeons in sufficient quantity to make looking for them in the overworld satisfying. I just wanted them to be interesting, and they mostly weren't.
On April 14 2023 19:11 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: I'll echo the slight disappointment of quantity (simple shrines) over quality (more substantive temples/ dungeons), although given the enormous map of BotW, I'm not really surprised at the decision to fill the world with quick shrine challenges. I think it makes sense for a huge game, even though it feels very different for a Zelda game.
I think the fact that the shrines were tiny relative to traditional Zelda dungeons was unavoidable given the huge open-world design they were going for. It would be a slog to have hour-long dungeons in sufficient quantity to make looking for them in the overworld satisfying. I just wanted them to be interesting, and they mostly weren't.
I finally caved and bought Pokemon Scarlet, thanks to the discount vouchers Nintendo has been offering, to save money on the most popular/expensive Switch games. I was apprehensive because of the whole "great game but insanely glitchy with frame rate drops" criticism, and it's still somewhat janky in some areas, but it's not nearly as bad as I was expecting. (I'm about 20 hours in, and so far so good.) Not sure if they fixed the performance with any patches or anything, but it's very playable for me and there's a ton to explore gameplay-wise. Looking forward to playing this until Zelda: TotK comes out. I'm going to Japan for the two first weeks of July, but after that my summer is going to be Zelda and Diablo 4, which is a combo I'm extremely looking forward to
Yeah it's not that bad, Reddit blew up the issues as usual. Close the game after each session to prevent memory leaks and that should fix most of the stutter. The only annoying thing is when you're speeding on your mount and the wild pokemon pop in too late to avoid them lmao.
On April 14 2023 22:32 Laurens wrote: Yeah it's not that bad, Reddit blew up the issues as usual. Close the game after each session to prevent memory leaks and that should fix most of the stutter. The only annoying thing is when you're speeding on your mount and the wild pokemon pop in too late to avoid them lmao.
YES. If there's one gripe I have, it's that some of the wild Pokemon are seriously too tiny to see or spawn right in front of me as I run and are unavoidable.
Defeated the final story boss in Octopath. A bit easier than anticipated, but maybe I just got better at identifying and utilising the broken stuff. I feel like there's also more broken stuff present thanks to EX Skills and latent powers and whatnot.
The plan was to quickly look at the boss and then continue sidequests/superbosses but I got sucked in and ended up beating + Show Spoiler +
Vide
before even having access to Sorc/Arcanist lol.
Now to wrap up. I ended up getting the game on PS5 because the price further dropped to 45 euros for reasons I still don't understand. So now there's a platinum trophy to farm. Need to finish all sidequests, visit all areas, knock out 100 townspeople (lol), and ofc beat the remaining superbosses.
Absolutely loving the game so far though, will include some more thoughts once I 100% it.
On April 17 2023 16:24 Laurens wrote: Defeated the final story boss in Octopath. A bit easier than anticipated, but maybe I just got better at identifying and utilising the broken stuff. I feel like there's also more broken stuff present thanks to EX Skills and latent powers and whatnot.
The plan was to quickly look at the boss and then continue sidequests/superbosses but I got sucked in and ended up beating + Show Spoiler +
Vide
before even having access to Sorc/Arcanist lol.
Now to wrap up. I ended up getting the game on PS5 because the price further dropped to 45 euros for reasons I still don't understand. So now there's a platinum trophy to farm. Need to finish all sidequests, visit all areas, knock out 100 townspeople (lol), and ofc beat the remaining superbosses.
Absolutely loving the game so far though, will include some more thoughts once I 100% it.
The extra classes are pretty fun to tinker with, and there are some crazy ways to abuse certain moves and deal insane damage. It's mostly just for fun but can be really helpful if you want to beat the post-game boss + Show Spoiler +
Yeah I'm playing velvet and when a friend of mine asked me how the technology was I was surprised to hear that there's some outrage about it. Like sure, some of the objects pop up a bit late if you're going fast, in some areas shadows flicker, but in like 3 room sized areas so far and I've visited 3/4 of the map. There are some frame drops very rarely when it's snowing, but like single frame drops, not noticeable stuttering and overall I was kinda impressed by the technology after skipping a bunch of Pokémon, since this comes very close to the 'realistic' 3D imagination you'd have when you think of Pokémon.
I agree on the criticism on very small mons though and in general the hitbox of the 'bike' is more truck sized, which is annoying when it's your main tool to go from a to b. Some of the world events could have used a bit more work, like the first team star base was very cool, but the other 3 I've fought so far are largely the same including each boss fight, which is a bit disappointing. Imo they should have invested a bit more time to give each boss a more unique vehicle. In general I found these events fun though, even if the rewards are a bit nebulous.
Level differences between terrestized and normal wild Pokémon seems a bit crazy at times. I encountered two wild terrestized? Lucarios lvl 75 in an area where the rest is lvl 34, so these basically solo sweeped the majority of my team including my tanks while I'm 15 levels above everything else in the area. I've had a bunch of these outliers where suddenly a single Pokémon in the region is 20 levels above the rest and while that's cool, it can feel like a bit much.
Also I think they should level the challenges a bit, so far I was higher level than every arena leader and not rarely by 10+ levels. With the changes to exp (which I generally like) it's just very easy to end up overleveled.
On the flipside I really enjoy the roster, a lot of Pokémon are viable and my starter is actually good for once and has been acting as my 'Oh shit' button a lot. There are a lot of changes that make getting 'good' Pokémon a lot easier, including early access to training weights, IV increasing boosts that are readily accessible, nature changing herbs and craftable tms and while these aren't lying around everywhere, they are found often enough to make you want to keep your team instead of just exchanging everything later including your starter on. Wild Pokémon running around really adds to the atmosphere and it's genuinely fun to just see a bunch of lower evolutions hang around with a higher one. The map is decently pretty and has enough different areas to stay interesting and I enjoy the mini-stories around team star and the herbs to my surprise.
Overall a very solid Pokémon imo, I'd rate it 8.8/10 with silver being a 9.1/10, red a 9/10, sapphire an 8/10 and white 8.5/10.
How is the postgame though? I played through gens 5-7 after pokemon go's release and I ended up enjoying breeding stuff to take on the battle tower/chateau/whatever they have. The games are short enough that I feel it needs some robust postgame to be worth the money.
I really disliked the dens of sun/moon. It felt like forced multiplayer. The AI controlled "allies" make for a very frustrating experience. And the combat mechanics are too different from the base game that I love. Having to subscribe to Pokemon Home to access my old mons makes it more expensive than a regular game, even if I will only subscribe for 2-3 months.
For me the Pokemon post-game is completing the dex. With 400 entries in the Paldea dex you'll have a nice challenge set out for you. I had to use the free 7-day Nintendo Online trial to get the trades done which is a bit annoying but got them all eventually
There have been gens with a battle tower that I really enjoyed, I'm not sure this game has one, I moved on to FE as soon as the dex was completed.
The game story is (or at least) feels longer than other games. The story is also pretty good and interesting. (except for team star, which doesn't make sense and found most of them annoying, but I guess it's passable). But the main story and it's secrets are cool.
The post game would be capturing the legendaries, completing the pokedex, you get to fight the gyms again, and there is a new tournament called the "Academy ACE tournament" or something like that.
There are also Tera raids online (and offline but you need to connect to online to update it, I think it doesn't require switch online to update, but you'll need it to play with other people). New pokemon are introduced in those online raids and they are HARD. Like really hard. You'll need specific pokemon with specific skills and tera types. There is a reddit group with makes it easier cause randoms often are hit or miss.
For example there is a raid now to capture Typlosion this weeked, which is not capturable in the base game.
They are also doing a raid to capture 2 legendary paradox pokemon (paradox pokemon is a game's story term)
Some people complained you can't re-battle the elite 4, but you kinda do in the ACe tournament.
_________ Since I'm fond of this community... I have a family switch online subsription with I believe 3 spots available. If you PM me your email I can add you for free. I believe I have around 7 months left, so you could play online for free for that duration. Just make sure you make good use of the online features!
That's a nice offer. I might PM you when the Pokemon TCG gameboy game gets added to Nintendo switch online, if you still have a spot free at that time I'd take it Right now I don't have a use for it though.
Beat the Octopath super boss, woo. A lot harder than the rest of the game but I guess that's the point of a super boss.
Great game overall. Big fan of the day/night cycle addition, mostly due to having 8 path actions available in 1 party. The latent powers and EX skills were nice additions too, though some of them a bit broken. Step ahead is also broken imo.
I found it funny how Agnea is pretty much the only character that has a 'normal' story while in the previous game it was Prim (the dancer) who had one of the darkest ones. Completely missed the link between Agnea's story and the final boss/other characters though, will have to look that up.
Can't really think of any negative points tbh. In the first game I remember being frustrated because the final boss required some specific H'aanit captures that had a super low spawn %. Now I don't really have any complaints. Hopefully they make a 3rd
On April 24 2023 18:40 Laurens wrote: Beat the Octopath super boss, woo. A lot harder than the rest of the game but I guess that's the point of a super boss.
Great game overall. Big fan of the day/night cycle addition, mostly due to having 8 path actions available in 1 party. The latent powers and EX skills were nice additions too, though some of them a bit broken. Step ahead is also broken imo.
I found it funny how Agnea is pretty much the only character that has a 'normal' story while in the previous game it was Prim (the dancer) who had one of the darkest ones. Completely missed the link between Agnea's story and the final boss/other characters though, will have to look that up.
Can't really think of any negative points tbh. In the first game I remember being frustrated because the final boss required some specific H'aanit captures that had a super low spawn %. Now I don't really have any complaints. Hopefully they make a 3rd
OT3 would be awesome, although I can't really think of what things I'd want improved for next time!
I've been chipping away at Pokemon Scarlet and I'm really happy with the game. They did a great job filling the world with tons of quests and Pokemon. Goofy characters, funny dialogue, bright environments, nice day/night cycles for finding different Pokemon, a solid all-around Pokemon game.
Any lag/glitches aren't detracting from my experience or pulling me out of the immersion. I'm about 90% done with the game (I'm completing all the main storylines and catching almost all of the Pokemon, but I'm not going to bother trading for any Violet-exclusive ones), and besides the occasional "I didn't mean to run into that microscopic Pokemon so now I need to spend 15 seconds killing it before I resume roaming the world" situation, my only other less-than-exceptional note is the usual "this Pokemon game - like most - is insanely easy". The trainers throughout the world don't scale up at all, which is something I would have liked to see.
Just for fun, I've tried beating this game with only my starter Pokemon, and I've had absolutely no trouble at all. I've never needed to switch to a secondary Pokemon during a battle due to my Skeledirge being knocked out. The other 5 weaker Pokemon on my team only exist to help me catch weaker Pokemon that my Skeledirge would otherwise one-shot (and to earn their own peripheral experience and evolve into new Pokemon, filling up my Pokedex). Maybe the end-game champions/battles end up having a huge increase in difficulty, but so far the game has been very easy. It would have been nice feeling motivated to create a well-rounded team of different element types, but even water Pokemon can't kill my fire starter fast enough. I don't really care that much though, as I've enjoyed spending more time traveling and exploring.
My retro backlog is starting to build up again, including Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp and Final Fantasy I-VI Pixel Remaster Bundle; I don't know if I'll have any time to play additional Switch games between Pokemon Scarlet and Tears of the Kingdom / Diablo 4 though. I'm pretty sure that May through August is going to be just TotK and D4 for me.
I have Violet if you decide to get the exclusive Pokemon.
As for challenge, what I did was rotate my team. I know I wanted different teams for the endgame/raids, so I switched my team very often, so I always had lvl appropiate teams for each area. I also switched pokemons depending on the Gyms/star bases I would face. finally I didn't use items, neither hold items nor potions/revives. With this style I actually foundthe game to be decently challenging. Still not to hard, but specially the elite 4 and 1 or 2 gyms caused me trouble. It was really fun. But yeah Skeledirge is busted. He has very good defense, great atacks and good typing.
On April 24 2023 23:51 [Phantom] wrote: I have Violet if you decide to get the exclusive Pokemon.
As for challenge, what I did was rotate my team. I know I wanted different teams for the endgame/raids, so I switched my team very often, so I always had lvl appropiate teams for each area. I also switched pokemons depending on the Gyms/star bases I would face. finally I didn't use items, neither hold items nor potions/revives. With this style I actually foundthe game to be decently challenging. Still not to hard, but specially the elite 4 and 1 or 2 gym/star bases caused me trouble. I was really fun. But yeah Skeledirge is busted. He has very good defense, great atacks and good typing.
Yeah the levelling needs some fixes. Either implement full level scaling (which i guess is a minor challenge due to evolution/new move thresholds) or make the world a bit more linear like the old games. I know everyone loves open world nowadays but I don't mind my Pokémon games being linear.
Straight from the start you got to choose between 2 gym towns. Both of them were low level/easy as they could both be your 'first gym battle'. So the first one was appropriately levelled, and then you got to the second one and it was a stomp. I actually looked online to find a sensible order to do the 18 challenges in. Still got into lots of silly situations.
Team Skeledirge here as well, and just like DBP I used the other 5 spots on my team for mons that still had to evolve into new dex entries lol. Was super excited to find cool pokemon like Larvitar early on but never ended up using him and just benched the tyranitar as soon as it evolved...
EPT
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