You say that like it’s a bad thing, Shamus. Or like that wasn’t the intended design choice of the developer, or precisely what makes it so unique and fun. What’s next, a complaint about Fallout being a stat/skill-raising game set in a nuclear wasteland? =P
Not that Brawl is flawless by any stretch…
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~A.H.
On a beach in the southern area of Sinnoh where Pokemon Diamond and Pearl takes place, there’s a little hut. Inside is a man who offers to analyze the footprints of your little elite squadron of critters. Sounds a bit suspicious to me, this guy definitely gives me a faint Miss Cleo kind of vibe. But I figure I’ll humour him. He probably doesn’t get many visitors.
One by one, the screen goes black and then fades back in again, I assume to save on the animation budget. Probably easier than having to sprite those little monsters walking around while some fat guy stares at them.
Anyway, then he describes how your little pocket monsters feel about you based on their footprints. On hardwood flooring, no doubt.
After enough training, all of the responses should sound the same; they’ll all be proud to have you as their trainer. But if you have a team of creatures of varying rarity, level, personality and so forth, the descriptions can be pretty varied too. I think this is important, because now each of them has a voice, an identity, and most importantly: a soul. And hearing what they thought of my time with them, according to some fat, friendless guy in a hut on a beach, that made me want to improve and be a better coach for this little team of multicoloured monsters. We still had a ways to go before the Pokemon League, I might as well get to know my allies on the way.
It got me to thinking of them as more than just a team in fact, or just a faceless cash-cow franchise for a giant Japanese corporation. Now they weren’t just dumb animals repeatedly shouting their own names. Now they’re my companions, with thoughts and feelings unique to them, and for the most part they were happy to be traveling with me.
After spending that much time with these weird little things, it was nice to hear this. It was pretty rewarding, made me feel like my time was well-spent instead of wasted on some children’s video game, and gave me an incentive to try and connect with the more “neutral” members of the team a bit better.
I gotta say, I appreciated that a lot more than the casino and dress-up minigames.
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~A.H.
“Violet Hill”
Today I decided to catch “Azelf”, a Legendary Pokemon in Pokemon Diamond/Pearl. The game denied me this more times than I bothered to remember. I won’t explain everything that happened, or even make a summarized bullet list of how it went down, because such an article would dwarf even my more long-winded contributions to this blog. My epic thesis on Why Halo 2 Is Dog Shit wouldn’t be this long. And it would be filled with twice the rage.
What I will say is this:
There needs to be a class of Pokeball between Ultra and Master. When the monsters get to Level 40, they become too much for Ultras to contain, but that’s where the “treadmill” ends, and they just keep coming in at higher and higher levels. Here’s a graph to explain(determining the point at which a specific class of Ball’s effectiveness at catching Pokemon ends, in relation to the average level of Pokemon per area):
The other thing I’d like to add is that, when I say I AM GOING TO FUCKING DESTROY JAPAN, it is merely a product of the frustrations born from the previous point. It’s nothing personal Japan, I love your culture and your people. But when you put something this frustrating in a game that’s designed for children, for the brief moments it occurs you make me less sympathetic for you guys circa 1945, if you get what I’m saying. I’ve sobered up since writing this article, but no moment in any game should make me yearn to see an entire civilization eradicated.
Either give us another, improved class of Ball above Ultra and below Master, or just give us more than ONE Master Ball for the TWENTY fucking Legendaries next time, Jesus.
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~A.H.