Category: Pokemon

Pokemon Let’s Go Pikachu & Let’s Go Eevee Officially Revealed!

(Originally Posted Jun 2018)

This is going to be a much shorter post, but for those of you who are unaware, there has been an official Pokemon press conference in Japan, and 3 brand new Pokemon games have been revealed! I’m going to briefly talk about them and give my thoughts.

So first up is Pokemon Quest, a “free-to-start” game available on both mobile and Switch. I really don’t care for this one, but to be fair, it doesn’t seem like it’s aimed at me; any game that relies on micro-transactions is generally a no from me anyway, but this game seems to be aimed more at the younger audience of Pokemon, so it’s not something I’d want to play anyway.

Secondly, there was the reveal that a “Core-Series RPG” will be released in late 2019, there were no further details on this, but one would have to assume this is Generation 8, so we’ll get more information on that much closer to the time, but it’s very nice to know they’re on their way.

Onto the main announcement, the leaked Let’s Go Pikachu and Let’s Go Eevee have been officially revealed, and will be releasing on November 16th 2018 and I could not be more excited. Firstly, if you haven’t seen the trailer, go watch it, but it has most of the features that were highlighted in the leaks a couple of weeks ago, plus a few more. Since I’ve already talked about things like Pokemon Go integration and new catching mechanics in my article last week, I’ll just be talking about the new stuff that was announced last night.

No tall grass random encounters – At first, this concerned me, but a couple of the screenshots seem to make it clear that, instead of Pokemon just popping out of the grass at you, there will be Pokemon actually wandering around the routes and caves, which you can go up to and encounter Pokemon Go style. Generally I think this could breath so much more life into your Pokemon adventure, and actually gives you the ability to hunt down a specific Pokemon you want, rather than just waiting for the percentages to roll in your favour. Gameplay wise, I really can’t tell whether or not I’ll like it until I play the game, it seems like it could be the extra touch a Pokemon adventure needs, but it could also be a bit annoying for things like EV training and shiny hunting.

A brand new Pokemon to be revealed – I mean, how could you not want new Pokemon?

Able to dress-up Pikachu & Eevee – Not really much to say here, I just can’t wait to make my Eevee look fly as hell.

2 player co-operative play – This is very much a feature that I didn’t realise I wanted until I got it. While I will likely go through my own single player experience as well, the idea of sharing my Pokemon adventure with someone is a fantastic idea. Personally, I will probably use it to play through the game with my little brother, since he doesn’t have access to a Switch and I’m really looking forward to playing a Pokemon game with him.

My only real concern is balancing issues in the game, for example, do you share a team of 6 Pokemon? Or do you each get to have 6? Because that would give you a lot more options when it comes to type advantages and such like playing against AI trainers. In addition to this, how will battles actually work? You would naturally assume that every battle would become a Double Battle, but the footage we saw in the trailer showed a 2 on 1 battle, I would hope that’s simply because that trainer only had 1 Pokemon, but you can’t be sure.

Well that’s all the new information we’ve got for now! I am so unbelievably excited for these games, and that excitement is only going to increase over the coming months as more details are revealed. I will do my best to cover any major news that comes out about these games, it’s time like this that make me so happy to be a Pokemon fan, and I’ll chat about all this stuff to anyone who will listen.

Until then make sure to follow me on Twitter @10ryawoo for my raw reactions to all of this stuff, and of course also make sure you give a follow to @lauren_cmonster, for turning these 4AM ramblings of mine into acceptable content.

See you soon!

 

Pokemon for Switch Rumours: Let’s GO Pikachu/Eevee

(Orignally Posted Jun 2018)

*sigh* Ok, let’s talk about this shall we?

Before we get started let’s get one thing clear, as of writing this article, these are NOT leaks, they are rumours, as credible as they might be, there is no information in any of this that has been confirmed by Game Freak or the Pokemon Company. However these rumours have been gaining a hell of a lot of steam, and upon researching them, they begin to look pretty credible, so I think it’s worth talking about.

I’m not going to discuss all the details about how these rumours came to light, or how solid their sources are, I’m just going to talk about what these rumours say, and what I think of them.

Pokemon Yellow remakes for Switch

Would I prefer gen 8? Yes. Would I prefer gen 4 remakes? Absolutely. Do I hate the idea of new gen 1 remakes? No I do not.

The last time we visited Kanto in a main series game was in Fire Red and Leaf Green on GameBoy Color in 2004, Two thousand and four, that’s 14 years ago, I don’t understand this bile in the community about Kanto being “done to death”, yes it was in the Johto remakes too, but Gold & Silver Kanto is very different to the original. On top of that the GameBoy Color is very old technology at this point, older than Gen 4 on the DS, and it doesn’t really do Kanto justice as the “definitive” edition of the region.

Finally, there’s the personal note that, I didn’t become a Pokemon fan until 2010, so I’ve never actually played a Kanto game, and while I know roughly what to expect, I’d love to have my first real experience of the region be on the wonderful Nintendo Switch.

Pikachu and Eevee will be the versions

A hundred times yes, I’ve never really had an opportunity to use a Pikachu properly in any of the Pokemon games, so I think I’d have a lot of fun using it for the first time. While Eevee is one of my top 3 favourite Pokemon, it’s in the header for this site for christ’s sake, it makes so much sense as a starter Pokemon given the options you have with it, and having an entire adventure with Eevee as my partner will be a wonderful time. On the subject of choice however…

Only the original 151 Pokemon will be available

This to me, is the clearest indication that these will be side games, because in order to make this work, they’d have to essentially undo all of the balancing they’ve done to these Pokemon over the years, since so many of them have got evolutions now and made their pre-evolutions much weaker in comparison. If they were to go this route, I’d also like them go all in with it and put Special attack and defence back into one stat, and maybe even get rid of all the types that were added post gen 1, just for this game to really capture that authentic Kanto feel.

Pokemon Go integration

Whether you like this or not, it absolutely makes sense, Pokemon Go was one of the biggest trends of this generation back in 2016, and while it died down a bit in 2017, this year it seems to be getting quite the resurgence, with more and more events and support coming out for the game on a regular basis.

In addition to this, Sun and Moon didn’t get quite the boost that Game Freak were hoping for from Pokemon Go when they released in 2016, so bringing in those fans with this game, could easily get people hooked on the more mainstream series of Pokemon games, in time for generation 8 to drop with a massive boom in a year or two.

However, mechanically speaking, the main sort of Pokemon Go integration that was being talked about is the catching mechanics, and this makes for an interesting discussion if you ask me, because if you were to just copy/paste the catching from Go, into this game I think it’d be awful. However, if you were to combine the two, taking all the variables that increase your catch chance from the main series games (health, status effects etc.) and combine that with the throwing mechanics that Pokemon Go has (Nintendo loves their motion controls after all), it could make catching Pokemon a lot of fun.

Announcement soon, releasing this year

Personally, I think one of the purposes of this game is for Game Freak to test the waters with a lot of new ideas they’ve come up with and see what sticks, to eventually put into future main series games.

Regardless, I am so excited to see what’s next for the Pokemon franchise, and I really hope we get some sort of announcement soon to clear up all the confusion in the community right now, but I think it’s important not to get too critical or analytical in a time like this. A dose of skepticism is healthy of course, but don’t let it cloud your joy and excitement for the next major step in this awesome franchise.

Well there you go! This was a bit of a brain dump that I wrote at 3AM, so I hope it all made sense, there’s just been so much buzz about this over the past couple weeks I couldn’t stay silent on it any longer.

As always, make sure you share this about, and keep and eye on this space as I will be posting here once any new information is revealed. If you want my live reactions to stuff like this though, check out my Twitter at @10ryawoo, and of course the wonderful @lauren_cmonster for stopping me from sounding like a lunatic….sort of. See you soon!