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Thread
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The All Encompassing POKÉMON Thread
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08-20-2020, 07:08 AM
#
16502
Kurona
Showa Girl
Join Date: Jun 2018
Posts: 9,064
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Spearichu
Actually Kurona I am curious what is your opinion on Isle of Armor? I am curious because you seemed to really love Sword and Shield so I would like to know your take.
Sorry for the VERY late response; this took me a little by surprise and I wasn't sure how to organise my thoughts!
First of all... hm, did I come across as
loving
Sword & Shield? Because for me it's certainly far from that; in terms of Pokémon games it's very middle of the road for me. Liked it a lot more than Gen 6, most paired versions; wouldn't really rank it near the top though. It's just fun! It's a nice enough game but continues Pokémon's problems of making improvements and changes but not going nearly hard enough with them; and it is a shame that Dynamax is just not a fun mechanic.
The Isle of Armour is... not quite as much as I wanted, and between official marketing materials and a hefty datamine it looks like Crown Tundra is gonna have the bulk of it. As is though, Isle of Armour is just fine. I had a lovely first day of just adventuring around the island, seeing what Pokémon were back and filling in the 'dex and loving the environment. I really have to say right off the bat -- if the Wild Area feels like a proof of concept, Isle of Armour feels a lot closer to how it should have been. The wide variety of biomes and how everything's interconnected works to make it feels both much more interesting and much larger than the base game Wild Area, and with the exception of pre-requisite desert room it all feels very natural. It's... definitely at this point you could say they kept back the actually fun Wild Area back for the DLC, and I wouldn't be too surprised if that was the case unfortunately. Plus as is, it still doesn't feel
quite
as great as it should be -- I compared the Wild Area to a proof of concept, but Isle of Armour feels slightly less like a finished product and more like a very very good beta. There's a very fine line between the two and to some that line doesn't really exist, but to me it feels like while I loved the Isle itself, it could have been a bit bigger and had a little more polish to it. Though that's not exactly unusual for post-BW2 Pokémon games.
The story... eh? It's very characteristically modern Pokémon. Kinda cute, kinda dumbed down, not a lot to it and you forget about it after a bit. You sure do go through some trials, get a bear, evolve the bear and get some honey for it. Kubfu itself is a kind of cute Pokémon though Urshifu feels like too great a departure; definitely seems like it should be a bit more friendlier in expression rather than immediately becoming a rugged rough warrior. I also kinda feel like it shouldn't have been a legendary? It doesn't feel too much like one, and I think if they'd just said it was a very rare Pokémon or something on par with a Pseudo Legendary that would have been fine. As-is it feels like it's a legendary just because it's the DLC Pokémon.
Gameplay additions are where it gets... hmmmm. Like, everything I've described so far sounds negative; but it's more or less "this is at worst fine and probably just needed a little work, still had a lot of fun though". But then Isle of Armour's main selling point compared to Tundra is that it's the
training
one, this is where you'd get these new items and moves and stuff thrown at you for the new content and Tundra is going to be much more about the adventure itself. So right away, move tutors! 18 new moves, all of which feel very very interesting and cool. Some of them are stuff we've wanted for a while like a good physical Ghost move and a decent physical Flying move that most flying-types can actually learn, and then some of them are just scary like a ground-type Scald. That aside though... there's yet another new currency for it. Because Poké Dollars wasn't enough; BP wasn't enough; Watts wasn't enough -- no, we now need to introduce 'Armorite Ore', another new resource that you have to get from defeating Isle raids. This isn't too hard or anything but it is annoying and is yet another grind that adds to the overall exhaustion of Pokémon -- it's made even worse when moves aren't the only thing you need it for; Isle has added an EV resetter... but she costs 10 ore a Pokémon. You only get like one Ore per raid. So this is a big cost for something that should really just be a quality of life press-of-a-button thing, and it's really emblematic of where Pokémon as a franchise is right now. Do this IV breeding, do that EV training, grind BP to get bottle caps, spend hours on this stupid stuff for no good reason just to finally get a single decent Pokémon. It's kind of why I don't bother with multiplayer Pokémon much these days (well, that, and Megas not existing anymore) -- everything's just made so much of a needless hassle, and this is yet another thing on top of that. Talking of which, Apricorn Balls are a thing! You need to gather 4 apricorns, and... then it's a 1% chance to get an Apriball. Why? Wh-- why make it that scarce? What's even the point of introducing this is it's frankly still easier to run the gambit of the Pokémon League again to get a chance of Ball Guy giving you one? Make it at least a 1/3 chance or something; you're reaching weird heights of absurdity here.
It doesn't help that a lot of my optimistic hopes for QoL additions would be here -- Berry Farm? Nope. Isle being a place like Ultra Space where you can evolve your Pikachu into Alolan Raichu, for instance? Nope. More returning Move Tutors along with the new ones? Nope. The added Pokémon including returning starters, and perhaps one or two more new Galarian Forms than just Slowpoke and Slowbro? Nnnnope. I realise this criticism is me being let down by my wishlist not happening, but all of these I think are more than reasonable asks when they're very simple helpful things that were features in previous games, and at worst are what we'd often get from a Third Version. As-is the quality of life additions we really got are new Move Tutors, a Gigantamax soup (which also requires a bit of gathering, though that one's not too bad), an expensive EV resetter, some cheaper EV Vitamins (which costs a lot of Watts to unlock), and an Apriball creator which is almost impossible to get an Apriball from. I'm... just not that impressed with that. Some of these are nice but once again, in typical Pokémon fashion, much like base game, they just don't go as hard as they should have with improvements and they feel the need to tack on high requirements that add nothing to the game but dissuading some away. If you're asking me to do 10 raids just to reset a Pokémon's EVs that I messed up a little, why am I even bothering with this multiplayer when I could be playing Smash or Mario Kart or Battle for the Grid, or literally anything else?
Oh, yeah, and the Diglett thing was a bit annoying. Could have made it things a bit easier.
That got very negative towards the end, but it's very much just an expression with my problems of Pokémon's postgame as a whole and how Isle only exacerbates it. For a more casual player a lot of this isn't a problem beyond running out of Ore for move tutors, but if Pokémon wants to pretend it has a deeper metagame it has to be a bit more accommodating than this. Either way, that's what I thought of Isle! Basically just a much better Wild Area and some nice Move Tutors, if you think that's worth the money; I won't stop you, though I certainly think most of the value of this pack is gonna come from Tundra.
Fuck Sharpedo btw
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Last edited by Kurona; 08-20-2020 at
07:14 AM
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