I completely forgot that Legends Arceus is being released at the end of January. We haven’t received any incredibly in depth gameplay demonstrations (outside of minor five minute or less shallow gameplays) and the new trailers seems to be recycling the same scenes. Now, most recent trailers seem to focus on revealing information about the story (new characters, clans, etc) or revealing other information such as character customization. I’m not even certain if there is more than one major settlement in the game other than Jubilee.
I certainly don’t want to dismiss the game immediately and am interested in seeing GF’s new interpretation of a Pokemon game. However, I am concerned that the game will be an nothing more than an open world fetch quest where you travel a vast, empty space and encounter different Pokemon with limited out of battle movesets (charging, rolling, lightning attack) and limited personalities (friendly, aggressive, skittish).
I was excited earlier on due to the potential of the game but now I’m getting more skeptical with the release date nearing. Any thoughts?
I’m stoked. Pokemon games were never about being innovative masterpieces (except maybe the very first gen games, which were pioneers in their category). The gameplay looks fun, a bunch of really cool looking Hisuian Pokemon, and some new mechanics.
As with most newer pokemon games, I dont really have a feeling towards it other than how im willing to go in it with an open mind. As a person whom has been disappointed with some games in the past, I know as a die hard pokemon fan that not every single game im going to love or be blown away by and thats ok. Its not the end of the world if im not pleased, but I know that I can still find satisfaction in older things that are more fun and appealing for someone like myself. So overall, the only thing im doing in terms of thoughts is just waiting to see what happens.
On the flipside of this, the one thing I am excited for is the possibilities for new merch for Cyndaquil. Already theres been some awesome new goodies being shown for preorders and that makes me really happy as a collector, so thats been what ive just been looking at in this short time before release.
I’m setting the expectations extremely low. I’d rather be pleasantly surprised then feel the level of disappointment that has been consistent over the last few generations of mainline pokemon games.
Seems like some are excited for the new direction but others are skeptical or entering with low expectations. I hope that the trailers just hasn’t done the game justice. I believe this is supposed to be a main line game so I hope it’s executed well.
I’m so hyped about it, I love the specific vibe of japanese ‘open world’ games and if the gameworld is like BOTW I don’t think that’s bad or lazy or whatever. I’m trying to go into it blind though so I don’t know anything other than the original trailer (don’t spoil me)
Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe the game is less “open-world” and more centralized hub zone that takes you out into missions/quests like Monster Hunter?
Regardless, I have it pre-ordered. Worst case scenario, if I don’t like it, I’ll give it to a friend.
I will watch with casual interest, but honestly, I’m more interested in the new Kamigawa set releasing a few weeks later (ironically also influenced by feudal japan) and I have to pick one…
I hope the game does PkMn justice and gives a fresh approach to the franchise, but I’m worried that it’s going to be a bit 2 dimensional in it’s gameplay, because of the lack of promotional bragging Nintendo and TPC have done.
I’ll give it a try. It’s cool that they’re trying something new, and I love that it’s a prequel to DP, but I may have to play it to find out. At least the game wasn’t announced like 5 years ago and there’s not an unrealistic amount of hype.
As I may have said before, I wonder how and if the Switch hardware limits the developers vision to create the game they want. Then again, Breath of the Wild was apparently good, so I’m open to being corrected on the hardware point.
I love the look of the lore of it and the concept behind it but the gameplay/tech that we’ve seen so far doesn’t fill me with confidence.
My biggest problem with SWSH was how limited the world felt; no dungeons, can count on one hand the amount of buildings you go into, no quirky side stories - I fear that Legends will be even worse with its small hub town and not much other than barren landscape beyond that.
Yeah I don’t get how a company with a triple A budget and the highest grossing media franchise brand backing it can put out a game with ps1 graphics like this in 2022. At this point Gamefreak should be scrapped and Pokemon/nintendo should just outsource the main games. I realize that GF has a 33% ownership ~ let them profit off of the games, sure. But if they’re the ones making the main games from hereon out then I just don’t see how Pokemon’s success with video games will be sustainable. I want to be disappointed and mad by how rough this game looks but it’s kinda comedic at this point
I think it has to do less with Game Freak and more to do with the expected turnaround time on these games. Since the franchise as a whole is on a strict schedule, they have to cut corners and sacrifice polish for the games to be ready on time. Just compare the development time on this game vs Breath of the Wild(s). I really do think they are setting themselves up for criticism though. It’s effectively a clone of a 4 year old game but with a fraction of the development time. So while the consumers will expect “progress” to happen between designing of BotW and this game, any shared mechanic between the two games will probably be inferior simply because of the development time allocated. It’s a game that is naturally up for comparison to BotW and if it doesn’t at least meet the same level of quality a ton of people will be disappointed by default. Perhaps rightfully so.
Pokemon games will always be fun because the basic game mechanics are so good. But it’s clear there’s a lot of fan disappointment with this strategy of making the game “just good enough”. It’s antithetical to the basic principles that Nintendo tends to follow of always striving to produce a high-quality and polished game - basically the reason they are where they are today. It’s easy to sympathize with the Pokemon franchise though, they need the constant stream of games to keep the money printers on. It doesn’t make sense to double the development time and sacrifice the opportunity cost of selling related merchandise just to make a game that will sell equally well a bit better. Ultimately though, I think it’s a bit of a short-sighted decision that will sacrifice the long-term reputation of the video game branch of the franchise.
What they really need to do is find a sustainable way to produce high quality games on a strict schedule. I don’t have the answer as to how to do that, maybe it involves scaling back a lot of the features you would typically expect in a pokemon game and focusing on a more basic mechanic. In a way, this is what this game is doing. I’m happy they broke the standard Pokemon model for this game, the video games have been getting stale and cluttered with legacy features that overall drags the quality down. That being said, I stand by my original post here that my expectations for this game are on the ground floor and I am happy to be proven wrong.