I just saw this on Reddit and thought it was neat, so I’m posting it here.
As of last month, Pokemon Sword/Shield has sold a total of 16.06 million units worldwide, making it the 5th best selling Nintendo Switch title so far. It’s currently riding close behind Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey, but with two expansions announced, and how long these other titles have already been out, I’m sure this list will look a lot different a year from now.
I think we all saw that coming in its release. It was the first major gen release through a switch title, so I knew even if there was backlash due to national pokedex loss, small post game play, etc it was going to sell like crazy. Could also account for why the new cardset has been seeing quite an uptick as well, with all the new pokemon and arts and all, but regardless Its pretty cool if you ask me! Im actually pumped for the new expansions with most of the legendaries being available!
As a way to measure how much and how many people love Pokemon, yes, it’s a total win. As a way to deliver a proper game, it is not. Sword and Shield is the worst, laziest and lower quality Pokemon game to date, and it’s also the most profitable one. So it reinforces the pattern of delivering a crap game, exploiting people’s love and passion for the franchise, because they will buy it anyways. Anyone who argues this game is not s**t must be on drugs, for sure. If this is the path future Pokemon games will take, it’s a dark one.
Having gone to several prerelease tournaments, I got to hear from the players and they initially loved the playability.
Has that opinion drastically changed now?
PS…getting off the drugs is just a saying,unless you’re really on drugs lol.
I dont mean playability, but animations, textures, climate changes, dialogues, plot, field of view, map designs, difficulty level, etc. In other words, it’s a very rushed game. So a rushed game shouldn’t be praised cos it sold a record amount of copies or made X amount of money. As I said imo that only shows the amount of people that truly loves this series and are willing to buy any game released by the franchise. The game itself is a loss to Pokemon. That’s my view.
Everyone can have their own opinion on what they thought of the game. In reality though, it is by far the most controversial and criticized game in the franchise. www.metacritic.com/game/switch/pokemon-sword
Metacritic compiles ratings for games from critics and users. Video game critics average out to ~80/100 which is good but nothing to write home about. More importantly user reviews put the game at a 4.6/10.
I personally have a lot of criticisms of the game. But putting aside how I feel and how any one person here feels, the truth is that a significant chunk of people were dissatisfied with the game. The sales really show the power of the franchise, because from a critical reception perspective, the game doesn’t even come close to either Breath of the Wild or Super Mario Odyssey
Not surprised by this. Game Freak could probably sell a piece of cardboard with a penciled-in “Pokemon” logo and hit record numbers at this point. That’s an exaggeration of course, but I still feel like the game was incomplete. There’s more hand-holding in this game than I recognize from any other game, the battles, majority wise, are pretty easy. That said, I did like the environmental factors they added (being able to be surprised by Pokemon AND see them). Wish they fleshed it out more to make the room feel bigger though - I felt like XY did a better job in that department.
The only thing that has me kind of wincing is the fact that it follows by Breath of the Wild which, as it stands, is a MUCH better and more fleshed out game than S&S.
But I digress. It’s a fun game, but definitely feel that it shouldn’t pass BOTW in sales.
great team-building opportunities (you can play through the game a dozen times and use entirely unique teams every time);
interesting new Pokemon;
significantly easier to level up Pokemon with implementations like the Wild Area and much better level scaling
Cons:
horrendous storyline (the postgame story actually should have been the regular story);
graphics are still well behind other franchises;
I think Dynamaxing is pretty corny
In my opinion, it’s a decent game. It’s not one of the best games in the series or anything, but I certainly think it’s better than Gen 4 (which I could not stand), and a legitimate argument can also be made that it’s better than Gen 6, which was forgettable to me.
People certainly have a right to their negative opinions, because there are plenty of things to criticize about Sword and Shield, but let’s also keep in mind that groupthink is a powerful thing, and many people already had their minds made up that this was going to be a terrible game months before its release.
Personally, I’d give it a 6/10. Hopefully, Pokemon does a better job with Gen 9.
This isn’t true. Sun and Moon had just as much, if not more, hand-holding.
As for the battles? All Pokemon games have easy battles. It’s Pokemon. Difficulty has never been the franchise’s strong suit.
I also wish people would stop comparing it to BOTW. They are two completely different games and two completely different franchises. It’s like comparing apples to rice.
I feel like Game Freak hasn’t produced a complete game since BW2. Sun and Moon was, in my opinion, objectively the worst set of games that Pokemon has ever produced. Worst new Pokemon, worst story, insufferable characters, and the hour long tutorial were enough to make me not even want to finish the game. I’m not even gonna get into how terrible the graphics look on 3DS. At that point, Game Freak should have just waited until the Switch had been released and developed for that platform instead. I almost missed out on Sword and Shield because of how much of a turn off those games were.
Another point, people put on their rose tinted glasses when they think back to the games they played as a kid. Red and Blue were slow and full of glitches but the story and concept was revolutionary for the time. How cool would it be now to 10 year old you to turn your Charizard into a 100-foot tall version of it? It’s easy to forget that these games are marketed towards younger people and that we aren’t the target audience anymore. Unfortunately I couldn’t find anything related to sales data demographics but I would assume >70% are being sold to kids or parents of young kids, despite what the manchildren on Reddit would have you think.
Sword and Shield are leaps and bounds ahead of Gen 7 and I thoroughly enjoyed playing them. As an adult with a job and free time I have no problem spending $30 dollars for another 15-20 hours of content. However, I do have a problem with the Pokemon Home system, I think it’s predatory and should be a free service. Frankly I’m tired of everything across the entire tech industry becoming Software as a Service. But that’s just my opinion.
The pros you mentioned are present in every other pokemon game, apart from the new lvl up thing, that makes the game even easier. It’s a good mechanic but should be optional and the game should be more challenging for it to be justified. I like how pokemon spawn now, and the Wild Area idea, but it’s so shitty made it looks like a bad joke. They cut the national dex to put all their focus on the animations, and the result is laghable. So much potential thrown to the trash only to release the game sooner and make profit. For a game “aimed” for old players, it’s insulting. Hey but you can cook curry and wear new hats!
I should have prefaced that with the games I’ve played. I did not play Sun and Moon.
And as for battles, I’m basing this opinion on Nuzlocke challenges. X and Y so far has been the easiest by far whereas Pokemon Black and Pokemon Emerald have been the toughest.
There’s nothing to compare with BOTW, I agree, at least from a game concept. But when you consider what each game offers as a whole to gamers themselves, I think the idea of “game experience” can be compared - BOTW is a better game.
Either way, I’m bouncing from this conversation. I’ve learned that topics like these only add negativity that is relatively unnecessary. I know debating topics helps share ideas and opinions, but unless any of us actually do anything - it doesn’t change what’s happening. Even the nay-sayers still buy stuff and add to the problem. I only got to play it because my roommate bought it.
I do, however, appreciate what @thane stated: For many people, this may be their introduction to Pokemon and they will surely love it. Sure, we can criticize it, but let’s not make the potential mistake of shouting down people who enjoy it.
It’s still a fun game, after all. I enjoyed it and there are many valid reasons for criticism. Both can be true.
I liked it but I’d like any Pokemon game, and that’s the problem. It most definitely was rushed, even to the point where you can see a developers cursor move across the screen in the closing credits… If you followed the development of the game you may have also heard about the 3D models controversy. They were almost making excuses before the game came out saying how they had to remake all of the Pokemon models, which turned out to be a complete lie. They were ripped straight from the 3DS games. People have also been asking for following partner Pokemon (similar to the HG/SS games) for years now and there were already walking animations for every Pokemon in the 3DS games files, but they still haven’t managed to implement them. I’m guessing beacuse of issues with how following Pokemon would interact with the more complex 3D terrains they have now. But this really shouldn’t be hard for a studio in 2020 that’s working for the biggest media franchise in the world.
There are tons of things I don’t like about Sword & Shield, a lot of them you could maybe pass of as choices made on purpose to introduce younger kids into the games. But one thing you can’t pass off is that Gamefreak have showed incompetence in trying to develop modern Pokemon games. The attack animations, overall graphics and frame rate are all objectively awful for a 2019 game. People that datamine the games quite often taken the piss out of Gamefreak’s coding and decision making.
The next games will most likely be remakes of Gen 4. If they screw up a remake of a DS game then I actually give up. With all that said, I’m not even that intersted in the graphics. If Gamefreak went back to 2D and actually started making good games again I’d be over the moon. They just need to stop with these vacant copy-paste rivals that exist solely to compliment you. Add something at the start of the game that asks “have you ever played a Pokemon game before” so they can cut out all the pointless tutorials, maybe even add a hard mode if they’re feeling adventurous. Then focus on creating a fun Pokemon adventure instead of a longed out story. I don’t care about a silly pretend villian storyline. I care about remembering a river I spotted earlier, coming back to it when I have surf to find an abandoned power plant where Zapdos resides. There’s nothing rewarding exploration or curiosity like that in Sword/Shield, you’re just lead to the Legendary and forced to listen to more dialogue. It’s like they don’t even know what made their games great anymore.
I feel like this is obvious…but this game has the most vocal detractors out there. Just look at the posts in this thread, the replies to every Pokemon tweet, and other threads. Some people have legitimate criticisms of the game, but the vast majority are just butthurt #BringBackNationalDexers that will now draw on everything possible to hate on Pokemon. That does not mean it is the most controversial or criticized game in the franchise. It has a small group of people who are very vocal about how much they dislike the game. As we see with the sales numbers, this small but vocal minority has absolutely no impact on sales.