And... and as an interesting side effect, if nothing else, I ended up not knowing about any of the news about these games. The last trailer I watched, I believe, was the one that debuted the Dynamax/Gigantamax forms. I've seen some of the more... meme-tastic Pokemon that has been revealed since like the longcat Meowth and Sirfetch'd, and a comment on this blog alerted me to the existence of Galarian Yamask, but other than that, I remain blissfully unaware about anything that's going on in these games. So for the first time in decades, I'm actually going into a Pokemon game basically completely blind about anything that I'm meeting, which isn't a feeling I've had since... since, oh, I don't know, the Game Boy era? Anyway, this means that I'm basically doing a completely blind playthrough about everything that's going on, and that includes my reaction to the plot, to new Pokemon designs, and everything -- and I intend to remain mostly unspoiled. I've gotten a friend to help me edit in the pictures, so I won't get spoiled trawling the net for pictures.
Anyway, this is going to be a super-casual let's play description thing. It's not going to be anywhere as thorough as my playthroughs of the previous games that I did text Let's Plays of on this blog, and especially nowhere as intricate as my Uranium playthrough. It's more of a summary/reaction thing that's going on.
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Anyway... with that disclaimer out of the way, Pokemon Sword! The game opens with your usual "welcome to the world of Pokemon" speech, but instead of a Professor talking about it, it's some dude called Rose, who's like, an announcer in one of those huge football stadiums in Poke-Britain, and he shows off some weird-ass elephant Pokemon that looks like it stepped right out of Dumbo's high-on-acid hallucination. That's not a complaint; I do actually like that elephant.
And then, we're introduced to the Galar Champion, who is the most... well, let's just say that Leon wouldn't look out of place in like, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure or something. He's got long purple hair, he does wacky victory poses, and his fashion sense could only be described as the unholy spawn of a football player, a king, and a Formula One car. I can not take this man seriously with his big-ass poofy cape stickered all over with sponsorship stickers, or his absolutely ridiculous-looking shorts-over-pants look. He's wacky, and he fights some dude called Raishan (who I bet is a gym leader or something), and Leon shows off the gimmick of this generation: Gigantamax, where it's basically Mega Evolution, but your Pokemon grows, and it's apparently different enough that Nintendo wants to market it as something completely different.
Credit where credit's due, Gigantamax Charizard (Giga Charizard? Max Charizard? Charizard-Max?) does look pretty damn cool even if it's honestly not the most creative design out there. It's just Charizard, but bigger and with extra flames. It's a cool cutscene, if nothing else.
Anyway, one thing that Pokemon Sword has is the same ol' habit that the seventh generation had -- Tutorial Town lasts for quite a while, although at least the cutscenes and dialogue sort of move a bit faster than Sun & Moon. The damn hand-holding is still there, though, and Hop stops you after every single god damn block of an area that you go through. And, like, at least in Sun & Moon you sort of have like a rotating cast of characters that stop you, y'know? Here there's just this obnoxious, over-friendly little twit who won't leave me alone.
What works, though, is just how charming Galar is. I will concede that I'm part of the camp who think removing things like the National Dex or older features like walking Pokemon is an absolute crime to the franchise, but one thing you won't catch me complaining about is the graphics -- because, yeah, sure, Pokemon's not the sort of franchise to aim for ultra-realism or any of that shit. It's stylized, and it's meant to look pretty, not photo-realistic. And sure, it's not perfect, but man, the sights of the countrysides of Wedgehurst and Postwick, the fields with the Wooloo running through them, and later on, the massive vistas of the Wild Area and Steampunk London are all pretty damn great. It's just such a shame that the areas themselves don't do much other than look pretty (the routes are, in particular, depressingly linear, although admittedly it's probably because I'm still in the early areas) but dang, these areas do look pretty neat. They really do capture the vibe of a smaller, peaceful town where there's just farms and adorable baby sheep everywhere.
Anyway... it's basically a typical, slow "start your journey" stuff. Mom -- sorry, we're in Britain. Mum gets a bunch of dialogue, you get to explore the two small towns and the tiny routes that connect them, and we get a bunch of quick information dumps about how Leon is Hop's big brother, Leon's got a Charizard, he's sort of a local hero that everyone's a fan of, he's got that Roronoa Zoro shitty-sense-of-direction gag characteristic and he's going to give me my Pokey-mans. Also, my character lugs around a big-ass chunky bag that could probably fit a small person inside. Also also, Hop's already got a Wooloo, which.. is kinda interesting?
Anyway, long story short, after a bunch of dialogue, Leon decides to allow me and Hop to pick our starter Pokemon, and we get a neat little cutscene of Grookey, Scorbunny and Sobble running around a little pond and the tree next to it, which.... I really liked. Of course, from day one of Sword & Shield's announcement, I've been on Team Sobble and been completely indifferent about the other two. What will Sobble evolve into? Who the heck cares, I have my sad lizard boi and I love him. He's a sad boi.
I do like how they sort of sneakily made the rival fight to be a stealth-tutorial for leveling up and type advantages. Which, obviously, as a long-time veteran of this game isn't a refresher I need, but your starter will basically gain a level and learn the STAB move after beating Hop's Wooloo, which would be perfect to use against Hop's own starter. Anyway, there's, like, a barbeque scene or something after this?
Anyway, shortly after the whole picking a starter thing, one of the dumbass Wooloo NPC's that have been headbutting a gate ends up breaking through it and entering into the Slumbering Weald. I've played enough Darkest Dungeon to know that anything called a 'weald' has evil fungus monsters and wretched crones, and we have to save the baa baa sheep. The Weald has pretty fantastic, atmospheric music, a neat little mist effect, and we get to meet the obligatory rodent-of-the-region and bird-of-the-region. The rodent's called Skwovet, which is a bitch-ass pain to spell properly, and I'm... I'm not a fan. It just kinda looks dumb, y'know? And I guess it's a regional early-route rodent, but still. The bird's a lot neater, a precious little chickadee-robin birb called Rookidee. A simple design, but one I like.
Anyway, the Weald sequence sort of ends with an encounter with the box mascot, Zacian... but not quite. He's lacking all of the yellow highlights and the sword it's biting, and it's identified as a "???", and all of Sobble's attacks sort of pass through it as it unleashes more and more mist that cover the area and knock me and Hop out. Leon saves us (and the Wooloo), and... this sequence sort of takes a while, but I really do appreciate it a lot. Generally, I really do appreciate how the games have been slowly moving into incorporating the legendaries a bit earlier into the story, making them feel like actual characters instead of literal plot device coupons that show up with minimal foreshadowing and then disappear to be captured. Like Nebby and Tapu Koko in Generation VII, we learn about Zacian very early on, and that's a neat narrative way to make the inevitable encounter with him down the line feel like it's part of a larger story. Somewhere down the line I kinda want to make a comparison in just how I feel the legendaries are integrated into their respective games. But not now.
Then... more tutorial as my character goes through Route 2 towards the Professor's Lab. Basically, long story short, Hop's a chatty fellow bullshitting about Pokemon Centers, shops, capturing Pokemon, as well as the new gimmick in this generation about whistling to attract the overworld-wandering Pokemon. And, by the way, this generation has a mixture of traditional pop-out-of-grass encounters, as well as the highly popular wandering overworld Pokemon from the Let's Go games. Which I really do love. We can skip some of the more tutorial monologues, and I do so whenever I can, but even so it still feels like the game kind of slogs on.
Thankfully, once Hop stops his yakking and his constant "let's race, hurr hurr hurr!" The routes are pretty neat. We meet both Sonia and Professor Magnolia pretty quickly, and man, these characters are so much more interesting than Hop, why am I saddled with him? Sure, they're still kinda bare-bones, but I do like the depiction of what I get of Magnolia being a very chill old lady who's just as happy to document types of tea and take care of her little corgi baby instead of just devoting life and limb to researching the Pokemon world. Sonia's a retired adventurer that once was of the caliber of Leon, but ended up sort-of-trying-to-be-a-researcher, but is implied that she's not very good or motivated? Anyway, long story short, my character gets the Rotom-Phone (it's a literal smartphone), the Pokedex app (no, really) and beat up Hop again, just so that I can impress Leon for him to give me a letter of recommendation to enter the gym challenge. And... the idea of that whole sequence is very anime and kinda neat, but the execution is kinda bland because... well, Hop kinda sucks and I'm pretty sure having Sobble spit water gun like 6 times to beat up Hop's team isn't the sort of battle that 'rocks you to your core'.There's also this absolutely shit way of us getting the Dynamax plot device. XY had our character go through kind of a quest of going through this epic Lucario tower, and the power of Mega Evolution has been foreshadowed throughout the game before you can access it. Sun/Moon had you be picked by the legendary totem guardian of an island, and then go through kind of a local ceremony and be taught a dance before you could use Z-Moves. Here, rocks literally just fall down from the sky, the NPC's handwave with, like, three lines of dialogue, and now I have the Dynamax bracelet.
Y'know, they could've at least tried to make this gimmick be more interesting. Like, I really want to like this new gimmick, but it's hard to do when the game itself doesn't make it feel actually interesting.And then it's capture time, and Route 2 has a bunch of new creatures! I'm unimpressed with Skwovet, of course, but I caught a Rookidee as soon as possible, and, of course, a Yamper because corgis are adorable as shit and I want one. Hoothoots and Seedots are also around here, but I've been catching those since the early '00's. Oh, and also, apparently for some reason my character already has a fishing rod since the beginning of the game. Oooookay? I only encounter Magikarps in fishing spots, though.
Newcomers who I've genuinely never seen before is Blipbug, which... which is basically a geeky little bookworm caterpillar with like a bow-tie and a massive pair of glasses and such an elongated head and... by all rights, I should find this stupid-looking, the way that I sort of am iffy about Scatterbug from XY, but man, this little nerd worm just looks so anxious I can't help but like it. I shouldn't, but it just looks so "oh jeez oh jeez". Silly small worm. I don't feel like it's a design that I normally would like, but man, the model just looks so ridiculous, I can't bring myself to dislike it. There's also Chewtle, the pre-evolved form of Drednaw and man that expression he has on his face with the single chunky tooth and the Charlie Brown eyebrows... Chewtle isn't my favourite design but that face's sure something all right. There's also the Dark-type fox Nickit, which... is still kind of an ordinary animal-turned-into-a-Pokemon, but he's pretty cool and I can totally see him being a popular creature.
Wooloo is also basically the new plot-blocker device, with a bunch of them blocking roads that I can't go through, and after leaving Tutorial Town, a bunch of Wooloo end up blocking the train path, dumping me into the Wild Area. At which point Sonia sort of shows up with even more tutorials, although for the Wild Area, at least it's excusable in that it's a new area.
Anyway, I'm tired. I'll cover my impressions of the Wild Area in the next bit. Overall, though I've absolutely been having fun with Sword. I love most of the designs I meet so far, even if Skwovet is sort of ordinary and boring, and I still don't know how I feel about Chewtle. There's still the little odd bit of confusion since they clearly programmed in walking animation for all the Pokemon that made it through the National-Dex filter into Galar, but cut out the following-Pokemon feature from Let's Go. The storytelling is also pretty tutorial-heavy and I'm obviously not the biggest fan of Hop... but I am having a pretty fun time going through this game.
Random Notes:
- I'll be trying to have a party exclusively of new creatures, I feel, although I'm not purposefully limiting myself at all. We'll see how things go -- right now my party consists of Sobble, Yamper, Rookidee, Blipbug, Nickit and Wooloo. I don't super love any of them but Sobble and the corgi all that much yet, but I'm definitely trying to test these new guys out to see if I'll grow attached to them.
- The Pokemon Center PC's are now Rotoms! This was so unexpected and also adorable, I love it.
- Rotom phone is a lot more quiet than the Rotom Dex. Guess it's in silent mode? Also, are they like mass producing or mass breeding Rotoms now so that Poke-Apple and Poke-Samsung can make smart phones?
- The Pokemon Center now has a counter where you can change your Pokemon's nickname, and also has the move relearner and deleter. It's extremely convenient, and one that still at least makes pokemon nickname changing take a wee bit of effort to make it feel like an event. The days of hunting Luvdiscs to farm heart scales are over, though.
- There's a weird Audino-looking Pokemon in the nickname counter in the Pokemon Center. They don't say its name yet. I'm not super crazy about it, but it's neat to see random new creatures here and there!
- The Wooloo are just there as literal roadblocks, huh? Sleeping Wooloo blocking routes, crazy Wooloo blocking trains...
- Also, the EXP Share is just on all the time, and it's not even an item. I'm not sure how I feel about it. I just feel so neutral about it, y'know? I kinda wished that they at least made it a toggle-able option for the players out there that want a challenge.
- I was about to talk about how we get a new attack in "Power Trip", but apparently it showed up in Sun/Moon as Krookodile's signature move. Well Rookidee knows it!
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