Re: RE: Pokémon Sword and Shield

Hoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo boy.

All right, look.  I know I implied last time that I would use this slot to gripe about Gundam Build Divers Re:Rise, but then I played through some more Pokémon Sword.  How much more?  Enough to clear the main story, and get within inches of clearing the “postgame” …and probably would have if the game hadn’t experienced a fatal error and crashed to the home screen, prompting a rage quit/decision to wash dishes/continue watching Parks and Recreation.  Speaking of, I’m super into Parks and Rec now.  I regret not watching it when it was on-air, but blame my TV and its utter inability to properly tune to NBC.  Certainly not me.

I’m at risk of losing the plot.  So let’s talk about Pokémon Sword.

Ahem.  I said let’s talk about Pokémon Sword.

(But I fucking love that show, though…)

I’m lucky that the game came out in 2019.  If it came out last year, or 2017, or possibly even in 2020, then it’d be the most disappointing game I’d played.  Since it came out in the same year as Kingdom Hearts III, it narrowly avoided having the crown set atop its head.  And even then, it wouldn’t be that painful of a blow.  KH3 feels (not is, but feels) so bad, it’s as if it murdered everyone in my family, even those that are already posthumous.  Game Freak’s 8^th gen installment just feels like walking on carpet that gets progressively more annoying to tread, but the good news is that the carpet’s only three feet wide and you can just sidestep it to soothe your soles.  And/or soul.

I’ll contend that the gameplay is the saving grace here.  For what it’s worth, at least, because there are still some niggling issues.  On a personal level, I hate Dragon-types, so I was happy to hear/know that I could counter them with Fairy-types, who were specifically designed as a hard counter.  Blessed are the devs, then, for making Dragon/Steel-types as roadblocks for the main campaign, or otherwise loading dragons up with Steel attacks.  And Steel-types are a hard counter to Fairy and Ice, AKA the only types (besides Dragon, bizarrely) that get the super-effective damage multiplier against them.  Perfection.

It’s still Pokémon, which is good.  But it’s still Pokémon, which is bad.  I recognize that there’s a deeper metagame to it, but there’s no real incentive to learn and no teaching in the campaign.  The only thing that matters is using type advantages to bully, if not one-shot, everything in your path.  I’m 30+ hours in (most of which was spent grinding out Max Raids), and the most depth to the combat has come from using my mons to buy time/tank/stonewall enemy attacks so I could heal the team to full.  The only time I’ve gotten close to a game over is when I had to do a doubles match with Hop -- again, past the 30-hour mark -- and his team wiped early enough to turn it into a handicap match.

I dream of a day when we have a mainline Pokémon game that expands on combat options and considerations.  Positioning on the battlefield, attack range, terrain, having more than four moves at a time…something more overt besides type advantages.  It’d be a drastic overhaul of the franchise that’s long since established itself, but there are people who’d be willing to learn and evolve alongside said franchise.  As it stands?  There are, in my estimation, three ways to get something out of the game: 1) catching ‘em all, 2) breeding stronger, better mons, and 3) challenging human opponents.  As long as you’re moving toward that third point, you’ll probably be better off.

If you’re just in it -- in this game, specifically -- for the story, then you won’t be better off. 

I mean, all of the signs were there in the gameplay -- evidence that Sword and Shield were rushed or undercooked.  Some of the late-game towns are tiny.  The gym challenges become less and less involved; you start out with cute little minigames like rolling sheep to a goal, while the last few boil down to trainer battles you’ll steamroll -- the last of which basically throws you into a single, bland room featuring two copypasted NPCs beside one another.  There’s basically nothing of substance in this 2019 game, and for you diehard fans out there, you may remember the devs putting out major characters and events in games up to eight years older (like riding the Ferris wheel with N…or, hell, N in general).

The core reason why I’m writing this post is because of something genuinely infuriating about the way SwSh’s story is told -- namely, that you are forbidden from seeing the story.  There’s a mystery about why Pokémon are suddenly turning gigantic and running amok, which is accented by the Power Spots that lead to Max Raid battles running dry (with the grim consequence of forcing you to go back to the original, much slower grinding method).  There’s the mystery of the two heroes who saved Galar from the Darkest Day, why only one of them was mentioned in the past, and all sorts of historical context.  There’s a good story in there about the popularization and glorification of major sporting events, which could have been a mirror to the growth of the eSports initiative and how it affects gamers on a large and small scale -- the personal and the professional.

But it’s not.  Nothing is.  The infuriating thing about this game is that whenever there’s a chance to get into the plot, everyone acts as if that side stuff doesn’t matter.  Only the main story, that being “shuttle you to the next gym battle ASAP”.  Like, there are giant mons running amok, and Leon comes in and says “I’ll handle it!  You guys just focus on the gym challenge!”  And I’m like, “Um, no?  This a literal big problem that needs tending to.”  Even if the assumption is that Leon -- as the Galar champion -- is doing it to protect the kids he endorsed from danger, there’s still more to do and address, right?  Let us learn what’s going on.  Have us question/go after Chairman Rose sooner than the final hours of the main story.  Let us be active participants in the plot.

I get it, though.  The reason why so much gets shoved onto the sidelines is because showing it instead of telling us about it would take time, effort, and resources.  I mean, imagine how nuts it would be for the Wild Area -- the much-touted massive, open-world expanse of the game -- to have giant mons running around, if only for a little while.  But I guess that wasn’t feasible, and thus Dynamax mons are locked behind Max Raids and gym battles.  It’s such a bummer.

The devs didn’t take advantage of the Switch’s extra power at all, which ends up crippling the storytelling here.  Limited cutscenes, limited cinematography, limited animations, no voicework; the stuff that we’ve been taking for granted in games for over a decade are important, hard to do without, and all the more glaring when they’re missing (as they are here).  They’re elements that really could have helped bring the game to life.  Hop and Sonia get a few expressions every now and then, but they’re barely worth remembering a month down the line.

And really, Game Freak could have gotten away with…let’s call it a “minimalistic” approach…if they delivered where it really mattered.  If there was an actual story here instead of an obsessive focus on “go to the next gym, go to the next gym, go to the next gym” with all of what can charitably be called the plot squeezed in between battles like the cream of an Oreo cookie, then maybe I’d be satisfied.  Maybe I wouldn’t have had to bother with this post, and thus could have filled it with bitching about this anime I’m more or less hate-watching.

But Game Freak didn’t deliver, and it shows.  When the plot actually does kick in, it’s Squeenix levels of stupid.

So here’s how it works: back in the days of old, Eternatus -- a Poison/Dragon legendary -- nearly destroyed everything by instigating the Darkest Day and making giant Pokémon run amok.  It was stopped by the dream team of Zacian and Zamazenta, AKA the doggos you see on the games’ boxes.  But they didn’t outright kill Eternatus; at most, the big baddie only got sealed away, albeit with all the Dynamax-triggering energy it contained and/or absorbed over the ages.  Chairman Rose wanted to exploit that.

His plan?  To awaken Eternatus -- presumably by shooting Dynamax energy, culled from the region and the Wishing Stars that fell from space, straight up his draconic asshole.  But rather than let it run wild and free, he wanted to have Leon capture it.  It’s still a Pokémon, after all, so the reasoning was awaken legendary god-beast => have sports ace in a cape beat it into submission => capture and tame it => have the ace use it to power civilization for millennia.  Rose points out that it’s necessary to adopt such drastic measures because in a thousand years, Galar will run out of energy, and as the chief supplier of it, he has to take responsibility.

*sigh* Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan.

A round of applause for the chairman, everybody.  Here we have a man who 1) is willing to summon a nightmare creature from centuries ago and capable of turning an entire region into a ravaged hellscape, 2) tries to rope the local sports hero into enslaving said nightmare creature, 3) summons the creature anyway without the express endorsement of the sports hero because he didn’t want to wait that long, “that long” being an extra day, and 4) is trying to solve a crisis that won’t exist for a thousand years, but will fuck up the region in hours.

That’s what’s really irritating here.  Rose is acting under the assumption that putting a leash on Eternatus -- an unproven method, with risks the size of Jupiter -- is the only way to save the world a thousand years from now.  And it’s like…dude, we have a thousand years to solve this crisis.  Think about how far we’ve come (in the real world, or the fictional universe) in the past thousand years.  There was a time when everything people read -- at least among those who could read -- had to be prepared by hand through processes two steps shy of torture.  Now I can basically carry around a library in my pocket, and add to it with a few thumb presses.  You’re telling me the head of one of the biggest corporations in the Pokémon world can’t think of any solution besides tapping a suprademon?  More to the point, you’re telling me that he can’t at least push for the R&D of means that, even if they won’t work now, will help lead to the inventions that will save the world without dooming a continent?  Elon Musk, this man is not.

But what kills me the most about Rose is that some of it -- maybe all of it, however stupid -- could be forgiven if he actually had a presence.  He doesn’t.  Prior to his brief stint as the villain, he’s barely even in the game.  His motivations are hinted at, but that skews more towards his role as a sensible CEO trying to keep the lights on.  He doesn’t have the charisma, he doesn’t have the shock value, he doesn’t have the dynamism to support such a dumbass plan, let alone his heel turn (before he turns himself in and vanishes from the plot).  The only reason to suspect him of crimes against humanity is because he’s a businessman, and hundreds of games prior have trained gamers to assume he’s a villain.

I can’t help but think back to one Pokémon generation prior.  Remember Lusamine?  Yeah, she was the head of a big organization, too, but she had style.  Came off as the good guy at first, but showed signs of being unhinged.  Showed her true colors with aplomb when the time came, whether it was going gonzo when confronted or revealing her collection of frozen Pokémon.  More or less abused her children for her own gain.  Obsessed over her goals, and crushed anything in her way under her stilettos.  She was a bad mamma jamma, is what I’m getting at here.  Meanwhile, Rose is just there, until he isn’t. 

I don’t get it.

I don’t get how you allow such a massive drop in quality.  Okay, sure, Pokémon games have had weaknesses before, but they’ve had their strengths.  Each progressive generation should be a chance -- the chance -- to build up instead of break down.  Pinpoint what worked and carry it forward while scrubbing away the stuff that didn’t.  Revamp.  Push forward.  Grow stronger. 

They didn’t here, and they absolutely should have.  There was no better opportunity.  The land was fertile, and ready to provide a bountiful harvest.  Millions of eyes were on the next production, precisely because of the promise the very first mainline console entry held.  Instead?  The devs did…did…I don’t even know what they did.  Rushed it?  Maybe.  Ran out of resources?  Maybe.  Got lazy?  Maybe.  Got complacent?  Maybe.  Underestimated the workload?  Maybe.  Maybe all of those happened simultaneously.  I’d believe it if it did.

But what I don’t understand -- which is something I’ve said many times before, for many other cursed 8^th console generation entries -- is how you seemingly forget how to tell a good story.  Stronger hardware and solid narratives are mutually exclusive.  The former can help the latter by way of enhancing presentation, sure.  But you don’t need to know a damn thing about coding or modeling to know how to write a story with a beginning, middle, and end.  Unless you’re modern-day Game Freak, apparently.

*sigh* Guess we’ll just have to wait for Gen 9, then.

I said Gen 9.  Gen 9.

But I’ll take it, though.