After 100+ hours and beating Delirium with several different characters, I'd say I have this game pretty well beaten. Really, I had it beaten quite a while ago, but more runs to unlock more stuff with new characters is just so addicting!
Not gonna say too much. It's Binding of Isaac. It's a fucking fantastic rogue-lite, perhaps the best out there. The Switch port is absolutely fantastically done. The game looks beautiful, runs perfectly, and all of the new content that the '+' entails add that much more to mess around with! Verdict: Highly Recommended. As stated before, it's Binding of Isaac. If you like rogue-lites, chances are you've already played it a long time ago. If you do like rogue-lites and haven't played it yet and have a PC or a Switch, then I cannot recommend picking up this enough.
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In order to unlock all the stuff in Pokken Tournament to play with my best friend who loves Pokemon, I had to beat the story mode all the way through. It's an awful long story mode at like 5 or 6 hours. You've gotta win like 110 matches! If you don't, you'll be short 2 playable characters and like 10 support sets (not to mention like 16 stages). Luckily, it's not super difficult. If I can beat it, it can't be that hard of a fighting game
The game looks beautiful. All of the Pokemon rendered in beautiful HD never cease to look awesome. The game controls really well, too. For a game that just uses 6 buttons and the D-pad, it's pretty damn complex. What with all of the switching between field and dual mode when certain attacks land, special counter-attacks as opposed to normal attacks. I don't play 3D fighters ever, really, so I can't really comment on its complexity compared to other things in the genre, but I think you could spend a lot of time getting really good at Pokken if you wanted. One last miscellaneous note: The special Pokken Tournament controller is a bunch of wank. The D-pad is so inaccurate it's awful. Maybe it's my fault for getting familiar with the Pro Controller first, but for something that's $30 new, that thing is nowhere near as good as it needs to be for such a specialized controller Verdict: Recommended. I can certainly see why it outsold Street Fighter 5 for a good while of last year. It's a really great fighting game with a great theme. It makes some mistakes with gating content, but that's not the end of the world, really. My only hesitation in recommending it would be that the Switch version which has like 5 or 6 more characters comes out in like a month or two, so you'll probably wanna wait for that with how much this game'll run ya for a new copy. The Poke-mania continues with Pokemon Black 2! I've always loved the main Black and White games, so I figured it was high time I played the sequel/remix! I tried to catch every unique Pokemon I saw, but I didn't especially go out of my way to find them. I did all of the main and just about all of the post-game, and it took me just about 50 hours.
On a narrative level, the 5th gen story will always be my favorite. The concept of "should Pokemon be held in captivity" was a fascinating one, that I'm not sure they can ever really repeat. That said, the direct sequel to that story is fairly well told. There's still not nearly as much dialogue as there would come to be in X/Y and Sun/Moon, but it's still interesting. Your rival isn't quite as boring as Barry, but he's nowhere near as memorable as Hau or Gladion. The pacing is much better in this game than the first B/W games. With a 300-strong national Pokedex, you're always running into new Pokemon in new areas. The difficulty curve is also feels very smooth. All the way up the champion, I always felt that the trains I fought were just strong and smart enough to keep me on my toes. It never felt like the game was just wasting my time. Original B/W felt like you hit a brick wall when you got to the elite 4 where you just had to grind for hours (as I've had to do in my last 4 playthroughs of that gen), but this game happily didn't have that. The strange thing was that the game gates off a lot of the best TM's until the very late main story or even the post-game. You don't get Thunderbolt until RIGHT before the elite 4, and you can't get Earthquake until the post-game. Being thunderbolt-less for so long made life quite a bit harder than it needed to be This game tries a good few new things on a mechanical level that I thought were, if not a good addition by themselves, at least interesting ideas. The habitat list that shows you specifically what Pokemon (that you've already seen) appear in each location is SUPER helpful for hunting down specific guys. Invaluable for a full-dex run if you weren't gonna just look it all up on Bulbapedia like I do . The medals effectively function like achievements. Just like real achievements, they don't really add anything to the game, but it's very interesting to have them in a Nintendo game, let alone a Pokemon game. You've got Pokestar Studios, which is kind of a puzzle-mode. It's something you can just do whenever, so it's not forced into the main game really, but again, it's cool it's there. Lastly there are also a LOT of triple-battles and rotation-battles scattered throughout all of the normal trainer-battles you fight. Given that there was like ONE of each in B/W, it's nice to see that B2/W2 actually tries to put them in the game more. Verdict: Recommended. It's a good game for Pokemon fans, but perhaps not the best introductory game to the series given its difficulty. A very good follow-up to the original 5th gen though, and a good innovation on the traditional 3rd Pokemon game trope Nintendo likes to do so much. I know Ultra Sun/Moon won't be a sequel, but I hope they try new things in that one just like they did here I wanted something a bit slower to play than Ys III while I was away at a con with some friends a couple weeks ago. Now 3 weeks and 105 hours of game-time later, I'm finished with Pokemon Moon. The absurd amount of time I spent on it should belie just how much I fucking loved this game. It bucks so many trends of normal Pokemon games, it's astounding that this is by far the one I've loved the most for its gameplay.
With 300 Pokemon, this is by far the Pokemon game with the largest regional Pokedex out of any of the other main-series games. What this allows for is that you're ALWAYS finding new Pokemon. A new area is a new land filled with Pokemon that probably aren't found anywhere else, and there were always new Pokemon to find, catch, and battle. On top of that is a relative lack of trainers to battle at the pace earlier games loved so much. At least it felt to me, that I never had nearly as comfortable an amount of money as in the previous games. This could've just been because I was buying so many more Pokeballs than usual, but I chalked it up to less trainer battles, because it felt like I was spending a lot more time fighting wild Pokemon than wading through trainers. These two factors combined made for the best paced Pokemon game I've ever played. A few other things added to this enhanced pace and feel. First, with no gyms, only island challenges, the pace of exactly what you're doing changes up a fair bit. While it is just more Pokemon battles of just a different flavour, I felt the island trials did actually shift the pace up a lot compared to the trainer-filled gyms with walking gimmicks the series is so accustomed to. The other thing that shifts up the pace of the wild battles is the SOS-system. I know some people really hate the SOS system, but I honestly loved it. It made something which is usually just a nuisance, wild Pokemon battles, and turned them into actually serious encounters. Unless you're really overleveled, a Pokemon calling in a buddy for help can really fuck up your day once a 2-on-1 battle starts. Especially if you don't have any super effective moves that can hit all opponents at once, if they're calling help every turn, you can really get in some hot water. For example, trying to catch a Magby, those little bastards called for help like EVERY turn, and it effectively wiped my team more than once trying to catch one. That's the kind of experience no other Pokemon game has been able to offer, and I loved it for it. Now I didn't finish the Battle Tree (as my main team really wasn't suited to that tier of competitive fighting as I wanted to use only new Pokemon), but (with some help with trading from AlienJesus) I did get a living regional Pokedex, so I've done more or less everything the damn game has to offer. Going through that, there have been a complaint or two about the design of where and how Pokemon appear that really annoyed me. A LOT of the new Pokemon have only 5% appearnce chances in their respective single map/area they appear in. This effectively means that unless you're in an area for a really long time, or explicitly looked up their location on Bulbapedia (like I did), you may never even see any of the new guys in the wild. On top of that, you have things like about 10 Pokemon who only appear in the wild when they're called into another Pokemon's SOS battle, and others still who can only appear (with like a 10% chance) when an SOS call is put out during a specific weather affect. Shit like this made some Pokemon an absolute nightmare to catch, and it really didn't feel like the game respected the player's time. Granted, no one HAS to go out and catch a Goomy or a Gabite, so I don't begrieve the game toooo much for that, but what I do begrudge it for is never telling the player about these appearance conditions. The Pokedex just says "they appear here." It never says "they appear here only when called into an SOS (etc)." Inadiquately informing the player like this really annoyed me. You have a few other instances where a more traditional RPG UI really would've benefited the game. Most explicitly with "side-quests" as the internet is calling them (which I think is a bit of a generous term). Occasionally you'll run into people who want you to run around an area and find their NPC Pokemon for them, or to show them an entry of a certain Pokemon in your Pokedex. The game doesn't track these people or where they are at all, so if you forget, you're gonna have a hard time remembering they exist, since there's never anything different about how those NPC's look. This is especially annoying with the Zygarde cell-collection sidequest, where the game never tells you which ones you've picked up or where. With the very dedicated effort I put forth to finding theme, there were still 2 I could just never find Some more miscellaneous comments: -The Festival Plaza and the Poke Resort are both cool, but they're a bit more complicated to figure out than they really needed to be. They're a nice centralization of features other games have had, but they're really only a big boon if you already know how they work. -Regional Pokemon are a fantastic addition. It's an ingeneous method of adding what are effectively new Pokemon without actually making the Pokedex any bigger and I really hope we keep seeing it in more games. -Z-moves are a fantastic edition. They're way more situationally viable than Mega Evolutions, which look cool but I think are in practical terms almost always a terrible decision. The departure from any new mega evolutions in this gen implies to me we've seen the end of them, which I'm totally okay with. -Ride Pokemon are obviously another fantastic innovation over HM's and something the series has needed a long time. My only complaint about them is that I spent SO much time ONLY travelling on the itemfinder doggo one that all I heard was his music theme, and none of the really nice locational themes for the most part. -This game has some of the best music Pokemon ever has had, especially with a lot of the unique trainer ones (like Guzma's and Red's). -Getting rid of the super-training (the speed bag EV training thingy) from Gen 6 was really dumb and I have no idea why they did it because that was a fantastically intuitive way to EV train O.o -The narrative was very good for a Pokemon game. I didn't enjoy it quite as much as 5th gen's, but it was head and shoulders above 6th gen's storyline, and definitely a contender for best Pokemon storyline. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is the shake-up the series has needed for a long time. Despite its missteps, it's by far the one I find most fun to play, and is the only one I've ever played (and I've played them all) that has actually made me really want to pick up the 3rd game because I just haven't had enough of Alolah yet. Any RPG fan I feel will at least get some enjoyment out of Pokemon Sun/Moon, even if they didn't enjoy it quite as much as I did. |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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