DranSeasona

The past few months have been pretty rough for me IRL, but in between the sucky stuff I got in some good hauls. Behold my backlog stash…

Hello everyone! Hope you have all been doing okay the past few months. Thought I would drop by to see how things are in Ninfora. I loved finally playing the fabled Metroid Dread… crazy that a game went from whispers of near completion and then basically mythical status, only to end up coming true 15 years later. The NSO expansion pass is a hilarious disaster, and I heard the YouTube video revealing the price now officially beat the Federation Force reveal trailer… in terms of high number of dislikes (and the overall negative-positive ratio, of course). Beautiful.

What I said was mostly me giving my general perspective on the situation, but sure I can provide a list of why I think that way. Here’s a possible list of strengths in no particular order: - Leon is an absolute boss. Furthermore, he has much more presence than some of the champions from previous generations (Diantha, Alder, and Iris were all laughably underdeveloped; and obviously an avatar-intended character like Alola’s playable character is by nature personality-less). I also genuinely struggled with fights against him sometimes which is more than I can say of ANY Champion since Gold/Silver came out. Which leads me to the next point. - Contrary to popular opinion, I did not find the game was insultingly easy. There were certainly ways to make it much easier, but in reality the opinion that player choice should not “have to” drive difficulty is flawed (I sometimes hear this point of view about these games’ approach to difficulty). Not every game needs to be dark souls from the gate, and if you can have a hard time if you don’t take leveling seriously, I see that as a sign that the difficulty level is not inherently bad. Player induced handicap options are only a sign of poor difficulty design when the last sentence I said is not true. As I played with my son and tried to hurry through some days, I ended up struggling if I neglected training. That is not a sign of a “baby difficulty game”. Again, I actually struggled with Leon sometimes, and despite keeping up with leveling. Even taking into account my earlier comment about Gold/Silver, in retrospect that game was only hard when I was 10. Later playthroughs saw me breeze past Lance in the blink of an eye, and even Red was not that hard. - Pokémon designs for gen 8 are fine, actually. Some are very creative (like the Dreepy and Applin lines, but not exclusively; I like lots of others). The idea that Pokémon has been on a decline in creative design has always been a tenuous assertion (you can not like the designs, fine; it’s the outright claim they all lack creativity of “the olden days” which is just silly). Do people REALLY think a pile of sludge is better than a trash Pokémon, or whatever, for example? Sorry but this idea is just not as strong as people want to believe. - The music was also pretty good, overall. I found a few actually memorable, most others at least ambient, and really that’s the most video game songs NEED to be. Not everything needs the weight of the Zelda theme or almost anything Nobuo Uematsu puts out. - Dynamaxing is cool, sorry. Kaiju Pokémon is a great idea. They did a good job with Gigantamax forms, especially. And they loop it in pretty well to the lore of the game. Can it be better? Sure. Does it replace Megas? No. But is it a sign of “laziness” or any more gimmicky than most other Pokémon features? Absolutely not. -Also, has it really never bothered anyone that the very idea of Gyms and Badges was NEVER explained in any meaningful way before Galar? This time there is a reason for it, and not just a believable one, I daresay a GOOD one. Treating Pokémon battles like soccer/football is perfect. -The first “evil” team also plays into this soccer idea, and guess what? They’re not just one-dimensional idiots like every team but Team Rocket and the Aether Foundation. There is an actual point to their annoying antics (stupid as most of the people in this team may arguably still be) beyond the Saturday morning cartoon villain excuse. And that the “leader” is not actually that kind of one-dimensional villain type just adds to the unexpectedly good idea for this game. -Further to the above point, there is genuine character development in this game, contrary to the apparent popular claim. Piers, Marnie, Bede, even Hop (yea I said it) all have real arcs. Are they “mature and deep”? No. Could they have done more with this? Sure. But it’s a far cry from the lazy/non-existent perspective I so often hear. -Also, Chairman Rose may be a flawed villain in terms of execution, but I really do think his general situation and philosophy can work. I liked both him and Oleana a lot. Again, the execution was definitely lacking in certain important ways, but it’s not for lack of general creativity. Perhaps they ran out of time with this part, and I don’t feel how it turned out was game breaking, so I am willing to forgive it. This piece is the most conflicted bit of the game for me: Rose/Oleana had a lot of potential, IMO, and I do wish the part between battling Hop and then battling Eternatus was better executed. But it’s not really awful, either... -Interestingly, on multiple replays the post-game bit has grown on me. Rushed, sure, but again in terms of the world-building the two “celebrities” surprisingly work, and completing Hop’s arc through it was actually quite well done, IMO. -The DLC was also good, I really liked both bonus places and all they offered. Feel free to agree or disagree with any of the above; this isn’t intended to be viewed as an attempt at an infallible defence. My main point is that the assertion that there is nothing good about these games and they represent everything wrong with modern Pokémon is no less an opinion than that they are fine. For anyone to ultimately act like the base view should be that these games are bad and the opposite view must be vigorously well outlined and defended or be rendered unacceptable or something is unfair and silly. That may not be everyone’s intent but with the sheer animosity I can see towards these games, it sure feels like that’s what is being said. People are free to like and dislike whatever they want, and games can be flawed but still have silver linings. At the end of the day, I have no problem with people wanting more, even better, from Pokémon. I can even personally think of good counter-arguments that demonstrate things that are NOT good about Sword and Shield. But I really am sick of the “Pokémon is DEAD” or TPC/Game Freak are particularly bad at making games now narrative. I just do not agree with that.

Maybe, but I have a couple thoughts on that. 1) My son loved Pokémon Sword and Shield and really connected with the characters and even the story-lite to some degree. He gets easily bored by some things and does not like everything I play with him, so it’s really not just a matter of “kids’ll lap up anything”. I think that says something if it can actually bring in some interest for the next generation. 2) To be honest, I have replayed Sword and Shield a lot more than you would expect. And every time I replay it, I appreciate a lot of the choices they make a lot more than even I expected. I think the truth is that despite some flaws, it’s not a total disaster and is in fact quite solid in some ways. But many people get so caught up in the negativity that they refuse to see anything good in the games, and honestly I think that is a real shame. I mean, even the Colo games could be a real slog at times; they certainly were not perfect, either. With all that said, I’m all for a new direction at least for some instalments. It seems at least from the initial look that the Arceus game might actually provide that, which is both surprising and potentially great news. So we will have to see on that front.

That’s the one I got, too.

That’s a pretty standard practice, with intellectual property law, actually. I’m not saying it’s necessarily the best, but realistically speaking if they create all the assets and the tools, in many cases they can legally own the finished project. I mean, I really don’t think tools like this (or others like RPG Maker) are meant to be seen as belonging to the player for the most part (outside things like story and scenario). The main appeal is helping would-be hobbyists and maybe future professionals break into the field.

You have a lot more seniors/older adults on average, right? It makes sense that AZ distribution would specifically be taxed, given the national recommendations for who should receive what vaccine (as in, generally older adults have the smallest of the already pretty small risk for AZ). As I said, we cannot pick which mRNA we can receive at all, here. Our “choice” is “wait until you’re called up to apply for one of the vaccines given out by the health unit” or “wait until your local pharmacy/health provider has a stock of AZ and your age group is green-lit to get it”.

Why would there be a Direct on the horizon? E3 is only about a month away, right? I would suspect this is a Labo-like project that is being rolled out in a similar fashion, so them randomly announcing it isn’t that surprising I don’t think. I am cautiously optimistic for this thing. I am suspicious that this is just a development tool dabbling kind of thing, so probably won’t do very much fancy stuff. But we will see.

The maritime provinces have had a generally better rollout than a lot of the other provinces. In Ontario it’s been a slow drip-feed, and you take what’s available that day if you’re going through the health unit. It’s also a tightly controlled list of people allowed to sign up for the mRNA ones, for some reason (probably a supply issue). But if you’re cool with Astrazeneca, you could just go into many Ontario pharmacies at this point and get the shots (for adults). But even then there’s a supply pressure so getting one is not guaranteed, and there’s been all sorts of frustration across Ontario due to how this rollout is happening.

My understanding is Mario had been calling out for Luigi after the recent update, prior to the announcement anyway. I just updated my Mario and he has been silent, so appears this has stopped.

What did you think of Bowser’s Fury (assuming you did that already)?

That’s Steve Buscemi saying that, right? I’ve seen that quote in, like, two or three videos on YouTube lately.

The Arceus game totally came out of left field. The potential there is staggering. I’m a bit meh on the DP remakes but the Legends game surprisingly excites me.

I don’t know about most of whatever they were going on about in the video (the discussion was pretty sporadic), but certainly I can agree that this is a good excuse to test out a potential 3D Mario evolution in a less committal way than a full-fledged game. With that said, I can definitely see this spawning a new open world Mario game, but honestly with Nintendo’s track record, I think calling it a “direction” would be too generous. It seems to me pretty arbitrary what game mechanics stick for more than one iteration and which just kind of get thrown to the side after one go. They experiment but then always go back to the standard and generic style; what “works” in their mind, from what I can see. It’s why there’s a gazillion New Super Mario iterations but few true 3D experiences in the first place. But I would definitely love to see a full game using this kind of gameplay.

I “beat” Bowser’s Fury last night. It’s pretty fun running around in an open world again and fighting Bowser as Giga Cat Mario is pretty fun, too.