Pokemon: Sun & Moon - Nov. 18th

Twilight Sparkle said:

You need a water type for surf (and dive now?) bro, and in most generations the water starter is the strongest water type in the game anyway.Gen 1, 3, and 4 all have rock types as the first gym you go against and Gen 6 has rock as the second gym, which means taking the fire starter is just handicapping yourself, and you don't even need a fire type for a balanced lineup. Everything fire is strong against can be covered with ice and fighting except bug, and the games with bug gyms have always had them pretty early. I think Gen 6 is the only time I actually bothered with a fire type in my lineup, mainly because volcarona is absolutely amazing.

Click to expand...

• Good characters. S/M (can't believe that's the abbreviation) has some alright characters in it, lacking the cringiness from many of the characters of X/Y. Each of the major characters are enjoyable with very few of them being less-than-tolerable.
• Great level design. All of the overworld traversable environments (routes, towns, caves, etc.) have fantastic level design. You'll never feel like you're lost or you can't figure out where to go, and there's lots of TMs or other items hidden cleverly on each "level" that rewards serious exploration. The caves are much more tolerable in this game as well; there are fewer of them and they are shorter, meaning less time spent running into Zubats.
• Decent variety of Pokemon. 6th gen did this absolutely retarded thing where the only Pokemon available to you before getting the National Dex were the Gen 1 'Mons with a selection of the new 'Mons and a handful from the other gens. Alola really steps it up with about 250 different Pokemon you can catch before you hit post-game, including all of the Alola forms.
• Rebalancing. Dark Void, Gale Wings, and Trickster got nerfed, while a lot of old, forgotten Pokemon received stat buffs, including a big handful of Gen 3 shitmons. (Second year in a row they buffed Ariados but unfortunately he still sucks.) Makes competitive play more interesting and even makes PvE easier by allowing you to feasibly beat the game with "bad" Pokemon without having to overlevel them.
• Great aesthetic. Alola is a definite contender for my favorite aesthetic. There is an area in the game which is sort of like a post-apocalyptic Pokemon town that you can explore that includes a destroyed Pokemon center. It was really dark and gritty, not something I expected from a Pokemon game.
• Better difficulty. S/M are some of the more difficult Pokemon games, but for good reasons. FR/LG are notorious for being the most difficult because they ramp up enemy levels faster than you can level up your own team, forcing you to grind. But in S/M, the difficulty comes from an improved AI. While rando trainers still suck, experienced trainers and boss trainers will use more complicated strategies on reminiscent of competitive scene strategies.
• Very little grind. The party-wide EXP. Share is back, and they ramped up the amount of EXP given for killing any evolved Pokemon. You can easily stay at-level with the content by battling most trainers, and if you go out of your way to find and battle every one you can, you'll find yourself as high as 6-10 levels above current content.
• Competitive play improvements. Super Training is gone, but EV Training is now faster than ever with S.O.S. battles and stacking EV point multipliers. With a little bit of preparation, you can completely EV train a Pokemon in under 10 minutes. On top of that, you also get a "farm" that you can send Pokemon to in order to EV train them idly. Takes longer but you don't really have to do anything and you still have full control over which EVs are gained. You can also max out your Pokemon's IVs by turning in bottle caps to a merchant in one of the towns if the Pokemon is level 100.
• No need for HM slaves. There aren't even any HMs in the game. You get an item that allows you to call a wild Pokemon to you which will perform a task that was traditionally serviced by an HM. For example, Rock Smash has been replaced by riding a Tauros that can run at high speeds and break through rocks. (These Ride Pokemon also serve as mounts, with some going Mach Bike speeds, including a fast Surfing Pokemon.)

• Technical grievances. Battle lag is really common under certain conditions. Most of the time, you'll have a stable framerate in a 1v1, but in Double Battles, 1v2's, or 4-man free-for-alls, there can be huge frame drops. (Which sucks, because the 4-man free-for-alls are really fun but lag the worst.)
• Music is not memorable. Seems like GameFreak will never beat their record of 4th gen's music. The music in this game tends to fall into categories of annoying or bland. There's only one track I've liked so far (Gladion's theme).
• Sometimes the camera sucks. This was a problem I had with the demo, the camera was retardedly pointed at the ground under me instead of an angled zoom that allowed me to see my surroundings. This has been fixed in almost all areas of the game, with the few remaining offenders in very insignificant areas early in the game.
  
• Fishing changes. You can no longer fish wherever you please. Now, you have to find designated fishing spots, which are identified by underwater rock clusters, and there is only one rod. This wouldn't be so bad, except it means that the pool of fishable Pokemon per area is now extremely shallow (pun intended), unless you happen to fish on a "special" spot, which are these infuriating bubbling locations that disappear most of the time you get close to them.
• S.O.S. battles. These are great for EV training but suck for Pokemon catching. Any time you fight a wild Pokemon, there is a chance that they will call for help and another wild Pokemon will join the fight. The lower their health, the higher the chance is that an ally will show up. The game does not let you throw a Poke Ball if you are facing 2 wild Pokemon, which means that what will happen a lot of times is you will get a Pokemon down low because you want to catch it, it will call for help, you kill its ally again, it calls for help again so you still can't try to catch it... repeat until you get lucky.
• Battle against the main villain/climax of the story. Starts hype as fuck then quickly becomes really disappointing.

Koushirou said:

I was worried when we got the Exp. Share so early again, thinking that this was going to turn into another easy plow like X/Y.

Click to expand...

k^M said:

Only part of it I loathed after finishing was team skull, about as retarded as it can get for the evil villains but I haven't played since red/blue so whatever happened after team rocket is an unknown to me.

The call for help did suck, but I had enough multi-hit spells that usually killed both (or one + half the other) so it wasn't very awful. Not sure yet whats in post game but was fun having the mounts.

That said, what the fuck magicarps. I have not fished up a single different pokemon yet, does anything else exist?

Click to expand...