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My take is that both stories take place in their own realities and both come across as a bit forced, but I generally prefer Lusamine's unhinged abusive behavior in the original + Lillie's scenes with her. The decision to change that in the Ultra games really sorta muddies up her character & detracts from Lillie's, plus I feel as if a lot of the new stuff like the Ultra Recon Squad were sorta poorly mixed in to the game, being shoved in with little to no consideration for how it changes the story & experience. For all those reasons, I really can't bring myself to say the Ultra games are equal or even improvements, especially when considering Lillie & Lusamine as characters. Both definitely needed more time to cook, though. Sun & Moon feels unfinished & the Ultra games feel haphazardly put together.

Imo, I think players say a rival like Wally is bad because "hEs nOt a JeRk rIvAl". It's still players with the narrow-minded notion that if the rival isnt an a**hole, then he's not interesting. Or if not in your face 24/7, then he or she isnt good.

Just wanted to say I found your channel at like 4 in the morning when I couldn't sleep and saw your Pokemon X and Y video. It was extremely well done, so I can't wait to watch this one and all your other ones as well!! Also, Sword is lowkey one of my favorites in the series as crazy as that sounds. Part of it is because I hadn't touched a Pokemon game in years, and I decided to pick this one up after putting my sick dog to sleep and needing some comfort. I immediately fell in love with the lil fire rabbit and the rest is history. ❤

Your accent switches between rhotic and non-rhotic at an alarming rate

The first 2 times I tried to play the game, lack of information was most stressful. Nowadays only the time makes me tense but everything else is fine. Luckily, I'm not a perfectionist.

I love and play this game, I don’t take it very seriously, I don’t talk to villagers, I have most of my community center done and I’m on year 2, I guess I just don’t care if I experience every single bite of content in the game. I’m also a rpg guy so I get what this type of game really is, it’s relaxin of you let it. Nothing in this game is forcing you to do anything, that’s your ambition driving the bus

i replayed this recently on a emulator to help with the grind, fun times. my only issue was some digimon being locked behind eggs

I love how stress inducing this game is

the original sun and moon have a better story but usum is a better experience as a video game to play i think. i wish there was a game that had the best of both worlds though.

I think what I love about Stardew Valley and what I find so relaxing is that it discourages perfectionism. I'm typically very prone to perfectionism, but somehow Stardew Valley pulled me into a more relaxed mindset the minute I opened my first game. I didn't want to speedrun, I didn't want to minmax, I didn't even want to fish until Willy suggested the training rod tbh because that was hard and I wasn't having fun. The game is just so forgiving when you mess up. I also find the seasonal system relaxing rather than stressful. If I miss something one year I know I'll have a second chance next year. None of this is to shut down people who find the game stressful, to be clear. Just giving my perspective. Everyone has different preferences and play styles.

I loved the story in Sun/Moon. I feel like it was pretty dark, at least by Pokemon standards. Lillie is probably my favorite character in the entire series. I've never played the Ultra versions because of the story changes even if those versions have a lot of improvements.

I enjoyed this video and your way of talking through the story. I loved SWSH when it came out because it reignited my love for this franchise, the game although their mistakes and flaws was super fun to me, and the pokedex being amazing, the gym challenge being my new favourite thing was a lot of fun. I agree that this game has some missed opportunities and wasted potential. One thing I don't agree is the thing that your character isn't involved in the story. I think it's a different approach. I've seen a lot of complaints in videos and comments about other gens being you the one who saves the region instead of the gym leaders or the champion. Like, why Cynthia nor Looker help much through the story in gen 4, why both champions in gen 3 do nothing when there are 2 evil team organisations? It’s something that doesn’t bother me, but I’ve seen quite a lot of criticism with this topic and in this one, adults and the champion act like a champion. Leon goes around the region saving people and helping to make you focus on the gym challenge that for once was actually important to the region and made into a big deal. I understand that it's different from other games and makes your character seem less important, but this also enhances the champion's strength. He is the most dominant champion ever and delivers in his actions as the most important trainer on the region. When you become champion, you are the one that takes on everything, enhancing the name of the champion. If this was the case of every game it wouldn’t be as good, but for this game I think it works pretty well, because of how strong the champion actually is. It’s not perfect by any means, but if there is a generation where this could work is gen 8, having important adults that take care of the region and the strongest champion ever. What I feel you can’t do is talk how this is a game, not the real world and because it’s a game they should let you go deep into the story, but when talking about the storming of Rose Tower you bring it to the real world because storming the CEOs office would get you fired, when it’s a game and it works well this way. If you weren’t capable of entering the tower you would complain that they don’t let you in, but when they do, it wouldn’t work in the real world. It feels a little hypocritical to me. And don’t get me wrong I get your point, and as a player of course it’s better to play an active part on the story, but if there was a game in the franchise that could do this and make sense is swsh. I also get the frustration of the story's climax because it seems so stupid, with the 1000 years into the future premise, but after playing the game a couple times and thinking about it, I think Rose wasn't as concerned with saving the region as fast as possible, and wanted to see if Leon felt the same way as him and if the region was a second thought for him or was a priority like it was for Rose. I believe that his character motivation to unleash a new darkest day was driven by this line of thought and the 1000 years into the future was just a bad line of dialogue. The manga like you said clears the plot quite a bit to make it, at least, make sense.There were a lot of better ways to write a story like this, that made more sense and had more cohesion. It's a low in this game for sure. The "postgame" was stupid, the bad hair guys were atrocious and easily the worst part of the game. Thank god DLCs were good, especially The Crown Tundra, which was amazing. Another note you made is that how is this game the first one that doesn't feature a Victory Road, and it's something i personally dont like because i like to explore dungeons, but your excuse to "In a game where battles are a sport how can there not be a victory road?" it's a lame excuse. In a region where the battles are the most important thing, it makes no sense to have a cave where no one is going to see those battles, that's why the "league" is anime style and it's made of a tournament instead of 4 consecutive battles that no one will ever see. It makes more sense lore wise to go straight to the televised matches instead of a random ass cave with some trainers nobody cares about. Let me also correct you in a phrase you said. You said that the anime and manga are concrete evidence of how much is missing in the game and it’s not correct. The game came out first and it has a mediocre to bad story but anime and manga complete what the game started not the other way around. It’s not that is missing a lot in the game due to anime and manga. If this was the case, gen 2 or 3 anime and manga would be the same case because of much sense they put into the story and motivations of archi and maxie and wrap up the story that it make sense. The game has missing bits of story, that’s a fact, but stating that they are incomplete because of the anime and manga it’s not true. Answering your question about voice acting, to me it would've made a bad impression. I don't need it. The was only a moment in Piers presentation that made sense to have voice acting but it wasn't something that took me out. This way i can imagine what there voices would sound and add more personality to their characters. This said, if they implement this in future games, good if not good as well. Wait people hate Hop?lol why he’s the best written character in the game and the best, if not one of the best written rivals in the franchise. Good analysis on Hop’s character arc. I commented things that are just nitpicky, i agree most things you commented, like the story plotholes, lack of exploration or dungeons (like why is the powerplant where you fight Rose not a dungeon?) and more but there are some of your complaints that feel so forced and needed to comment them. I hope I wasn't to harsh with the writing. Good video.

Rodriguez Maria Allen Shirley Gonzalez Amy

Personally I think X and Y had the perfect artstyle, it still had that classic charm of the older games, while having this really cute 3D aspect to it.

FRLG are good but they couldve been so much better

Saying "its a ruby/saphire remake, not emerald" is so stupid imo First of all, the fact thay we let gamefreak slide with the fact that they remake the worse versions of a game is crazy And second, even if ur gonna use the worse version titles, why tf wpuldnt u include the upgrades of the deluxe verion (Emerald), aint that the point of remaking a game?

Likely every kid won't know that we can't catch 'em all in one version... We need to buy 'em all to catch 'em all! Edit: I hope you and your gf stay together forever, like Ash and Pikachu!

Thank you Pris' gf for her noble sacrifice. This video is amazing, Pris, so thank you too! I know I'm heavily biased but I think making her play Dark Souls would be so sick.

I had the same trouble with getting to Saffron when I was a kid as well. Five year old me didn't understand english,so I was stuck after Blaine for like a week. My Charizard was very high level. Guess it's a common problem for brazilians. But gen 2 was even worse. I had no idea how to leave Violet city,so I was stuck with a bunch of level 30/40 mons in the start of the game.

Yay Prezmer uploaded :D

I don't actually have a problem with Lusamine being turned into a flawed hero. The way it was _executed_ was atrocious. Instead of writing a whole new script like Masuda implied during the reveal, all the altered or new lines of dialogue in this game were surrounded by mounds of copy-pasted dialogue from the original games, so it naturally leads to sloppy nonsense like Lusamine saying "Calling me mother? I don't have any children!" followed by "My fathomless love will save even someone like you!" There's also the matter of Lusamine fighting so hard to try to retrieve Nebby when the Ultra Recon Squad _already had a Solgaleo/Lunana that you ended up using to open a wormhole after Necrozma left with Nebby._ It's such a mess. Like, you can tell the Sun/Moon story was specifically written around Nebby and the Aether Foundation while the new elements in the Ultra versions were simply shoehorned into it. I think I was always going to prefer the original story and its focus on dear friends helping each other through their problems instead of one that was centered around stopping a wronged Legendary Pokémon like so many other entries, but it would've been more acceptable to me if it was genuinely original.

You know, what's funny is that I really just can't stand the pokemon manga, because while it fixes a lot of characters, it also has a weird plot that in my opinion, most often than not ruins the game's plot. Or at least just does things that isn't "pokemon"

Here's my perspective. First of with why Lillie is dressed up like Nihilego in USUM: Is just reused assets, I think we can confidently just agree this is just GF being lazy on how they present the story. And to my perspective with Lusamine, she's turning to a different outlet to cope with grief. As other people have pointed out, Nihilego could be an allegory for alcohol and abuse. Lusamine in SM could be argued to be an allegory for an abusive parent that's struggling with addiction. And that was really powerful for a lot of people. Now, I don't blame people for liking this version of Lusamine, and even relating to Lillie, just like I don't blame them from expecting these characters to be the same in USUM. But I think the core difference is the outlet that Lusamine took in USUM. Perhaps instead of Nihilego she encountered the Ultra Recon Squad and that gave her another coping mechanism. As I interpret USUM, she's not an abusive parent, but rather a neglectful one. She's hyper focused with work and claims to be doing all of it for her family and Alola, but in doing so she's losing track of what's important. In my eyes, USUM is NOT an abusive parent, she's neglecting her children (and I know is a form of abuse but that's not the point) and turned into a workaholic. As I said, I understand why some people think is bad that in USUM Lusamine is "forgive", but I think the context is what's important here. One Lusamine was aggressive and controlling to her children, directly putting them through stress. The other wasn't there, focusing on her job to save the very family she was losing behind her back.

Whats wrong with the artstyle in lets go?? How smooth brained are pokemon fans? So smooth its mind blowing

Accidentally made wall of text again but TL;DR Rose plotline is bafflingly stupid literally any other way to go about it would have been better and there's no way this thing got through the development process unless it was rushed out last second. Another thing about Rose just summoning eternatus for no good reason is that you could have simply madeit so the energy crisis was coming earlier (maybe something like 5-10 years, or you could instead imply that in 10 years or so there'll just be "no turning back" and the crisis would be guaranteed to happen pr something) and had Rose say something along the lines of "hey man I'm not gonna be chairman forever i wanna like leave a legacy and stuff imagine how good it'll look on me to be THE GUY that prevented an energy crisis by taking down a giant murder dragon". Alternatively you could ditch the energy crisis excuse entirely and make it so Rose pretends eternatus "just showed up out of nowhere woopsie" when the whole thing was just a publicity stunt to make either himself or Leon look better, and based on that you can either take the easy way of making Leon not know about it and make Rose be some sort of crazy PR manager, or you can take the harder high effort route and make Leon be in on it and potentially have them frame the whole incident as the Player's fault since Rose and Leon feel threatened that this new rising talent could upstage Leon and his unbeatable status so they want to tarnish the player's reputation/talent. Or you could make rose have his own player, maybe make him some sort of Rose nepo baby, and since he's not good enough to compete rose wants to practically cheat by framing the other players (but mostly Leon) including our Player Character for random crimes sp they'll be banned from tournaments and Rose's nepo baby or inside worker could succeed. That would also sorta vaguely tie into the whole Legacy theme (calling it a theme is an insult to themes everywhere but i digress) that the game sorta tries to have. Like so many characters have half their motivation be wanting to have some sort of legacy or failing to live up to the expectations set up by said legacy (either their own legacy or someone else's) so having a villain character try to tarnish other people's legacies and try to cheat their way into gaining a positive legacy/reputation, and you could have Hop say something corny like "oh golly i might not be the best battler but i would much rather be a bad battler and have fun trying my best than cheat my way to success! That is like so wack yo!!" to have a nice if generic moral of the story for The Childrens ™️ And I came up with that in like ten minutes, there's probably infinite ways to make it infinitely better, and even with the absolute worst execution known to mankind it'd be much better than this

Ok so I wrote a massive wall of text by accident so TL;DR this game is everything wrong with pokemon and it's still ok 5.8/10 Too much -water- lack of dev time. Sword and shield seems like a victim of lack of dev time in a more subtle way than Scarlet and Violet but in a much worse way imo. To me it's clear that they had passion for a lot of this game and wanted to make it good, but at some point they wanted to do too many things at once in the plot and just sorta in general. Now in a mormal game they'd be able to hold it back a bit to solve these creative issues and decide what path to focus on, but here they realized they had to release this within a deadline, said "fuck it let's just get this done we'll make a good game next time" and just sorta did everything at once without really caring about how to make it all fit. Now pretty much all Pokemon games do this to an extent, they try to appeal to millions of different people at once and end up doing very little that amazingly, but this one feels special because instead of trying to focus on multiple aspects at once that different people enjoy about a pokemon game, they sorta do like multiple different takes on the same things at once?? Like you simultaneously have the pseudo open world wild area gameplay and the hallway-esque normal routes, you have the plot dividing itself between a low stakes tournament plotline and a high stakes "pokemon are randomly Dymamaximg and shit's gone wild off screen" plotline and an even higher stakes but incredibly stupid "i am summoning a world destroyer because climate change" plotline, and you can even see this in the Pokemon designs since around half of these are wacky guimmick mons with insane proportions and designs and the other half feel like "generic animal except cartoony and sometimes painted a different color" reminiscent of older gens. As a whole Sword and Shield is hilariously unfocused and lacks direction, in a charming way to me honestly. It feels like it wanted to transition into open world games but was just scared of alienating the playerbase by suddenly going full open world. Can't really blame them though even if a lot of people want pokemon to change half the time they actually change something a large section of players end up hating it. Sword and Shield feel almost like a perfect example of what's wrong with pokemon as a whole: tries to appease everyone at once and be ambitious but due to a lack of dev time or focus it gives up halfway through and seems almost unable to do anything above "good" to save it's life with some major exceptions here and there, refuses to properly use it's great formula and when it tries to change it said changes need to be one comically small step at a time, it'll just add some flashy sorta cool guimmick to the game that isn't nearly as much of a gameplay changer as it pretends to be (but isn't even close to inconsequential so if you dislike the guimmick then good luck, better be luckier next gen), it directly forbids you from participating on the story (only ocationally letting you serve as a hitman or muscle for the characters that actually matter) and it will still somehow be fun enough and have enough new and improved good content in it to feel more than worth the purchase for most people (me included, even though i don't think I've legally played a pokemon game in my life lmfao) despite being such a rushed unfocused clusterfuck 9 times out of 10. But like if i can be completely honest, though i just called it "an example of everything wrong with pokemon" I can't really bring myself to hate or even dislike this game. Kinda like the franchise as a whole it still does quite a few things right here and there, a lot of it's bad parts aren't bad enough to be major detriments to my enjoyment of the game, and the downright awful stuff is so incompetent it gains tons of ironic value while becoming interesting topics of discussion It's practically impossible to call this game "good" without blatantly ignoring it's many flaws, but it's also hard for me to call it straight up bad. What i can say is that it's just a waste of potential due to a lack of dev time, and it's unfortunate that pokemon is seemingly never moving away from this tight schedule of releasing a new mainline game every 2.5 years and a whole new gen every 5 years because this franchise could truly be something absolutely amazing, but we have to settle for "pretty good but flawed", and even then put an asterisk on the word "good" there.

the fact that its wasted potential but still one of the best games is crazy

Z is finally real

It makes sense that the most undercooked game would have the most waster potential, but as stories go I also think it's a pretty weak story. At the time the game came out the overpopulation debate had already started to cool down. In that sense you could say that for example Sword and Shield has even more missed potential as it fumbles a more relevant topic. X and Y has a lot of potential, but I think it needs a full overhaul and maybe we'll see a better realized version in Legends Z-A.

I like both versions.

That title scares me, Wally is my favorite pokemon character of all time.

it really is a bare bones game, isnt it? pokemon camp needed more to do, routes could use more trainers and offshoots, cities felt empty because we couldnt visit shops and houses, and a general lack of reasons to take time to explore/go back to places. and it's got a gorgeous overworld aesthetic (wild area gloom aside, and people who wish it was botw aside) that would benefit from reasons to stick around and figure out how to find a certain item stuck on a ledge or behind a snorlax. part of the reason that i really disliked the DLC was because SWSH would have been THE series that would benefit most from <the updated third game that gets released a couple years later.> Pokemon Spear could updated and patched so many things people have complaints about, and used the DLC content as their reason why people should give galar another chance

The way you pronounce Eternatus had me so confused to which pokemon you were talking about haha.

Great video! :) I'm also a big fan of New Snap and you demonstrated it so well. Some remarks: - Wonder why Beheeyem (22:44) does this thing with its arms? It's actually mind controlling the nearby Golurk. If you hit Beheeyem with an apple, it will make Golurk run at you. A different Beheeyem will summon more Golurks that come flying like rockets into the area. Another example of natural behavior and cool animations, Golurk just being a golem controlled by some psychic Pokemon. - True, taking pictures is the central gameplay element. But saying that the game is bad cause you're "just taking pictures" is like saying that Super Mario is bad cause you're only jumping and running. Mario is much rather about precise arcade gameplay and Snap is mostly about exploration. You're constantly having thoughts like "can I get these two Pokemon to start a fight? Why does this Pokemon look sad? What happens if I do this or that..." and the game constantly rewards you. - I want to stress out the crazy amount of content and the love in detail in New Snap. There's so many different maps and almost a thousand different pictures to collect, but there's also everything else: various settings, online-stuff, editing pictures, quests and achievements, a beautiful photodex and map dex or even the depth of the photo evaluation algorithm (just an example: when two Pokemon interact, it often counts as a synergy multiplying the other Pokemon bonus by 10 and allowing you to use mid-placement, focussing in between the two Pokemon for perfect placement score. There's a lot of stuff like this allowing you to take esthetically better pictures, although it does take a lot of time to get into this). To me it is a really complete and well-thought-through game :)

Non of your arguments about the map "feeling" new holds up when you can easily bring up a person who played botw alot and who can realise nothing much significantly changed on the surface (outside of the main dungeon locations), and the only means of enjoying the surface past some sidequests is just zooming across the map, this is no longer exploration, its just hunting for new content. The novelty of the familiar will fade and the game fails completely in making engaing new places to explore The new content in totk is worse than what they made in botw. The depths and sky islands combined dont compare to the diversity of places and biomes in botw hyrule. Even content wise the depths is lacking severely, outside of some zonite collections, amibo armor loot that makes no lore sense, and lighting up some roots, its got nothing of substance, that justifies its size, it even reuses the main dungeon bosses, even botw didnt do that. The sky and depths dont feature anyhting like unique npc, ancient towns, or ancient zonai ghosts, only rarru and minaru in this game. Nothing can be learned from their culture other than they liked mining alot Imgaine if hyrule was just a desert, and that was botw's whole map, people would shit on it, that's how the depths feel past the novelty of lighting up a few roots

I think Wally would benefit from having a battle with you after you get Norman's badge. That way he'd have a battle after Badge 2, Badge 5, and Badge 8. It'd be pretty evenly spaced and make him less prone to disappear from your mind.

Megas were the best, and Terras are the worst gimmick IMO. Gigantamax was a nice middle ground. Kinda feels like they're evolving backwards.

In the original Ruby & Sapphire, Wally is at the very end of Victory Road. Emerald put him at the beginning for some reason, though he does come from the interior.

Dude as cliche as it is to say you really deserve more subs. This video is very well put together and your argument is well thought out and evenhanded to the strengths and weaknesses of both Emerald and ORAS. Very well done!

I personnally loved lusamine in SM and series,ultra isnt that bad,but they sorta made it feel like children were wrong wich was incorrect

Thanks for reviewing our game Anglerfish. We explore kind of the same concept in a slightly different direction in our new game Security: The Horrible Nights, which has a demo out on Steam. This time it's not just one thing that changes when you die, but a whole new story that starts.

I think Wally is a good character, but whether he's a good or bad rival depends on how you define that character role in the story. Like maybe Game freak needs to come up with "first partner" term for rivals cause he'd for sure fall under that. I think the take that HE considers YOU a rival, but the feeling isn't exactly mutual is a good one, and I think the distance between the two of you during the game really makes the relationship feel even more one-sided compared to Blue or Hau. Idk. Wally breaks the rule of "show don't tell" in the sense that we barely *see* his growth until the very end. Even though we're able to call him or hear about him on the radio, those were obscure features that the average player wasn't incentivized to explore in depth and was therefore likely to miss out on. But at the same time, Wally's disappearance and irrelevance to the Aqua/Magma plot is what makes him him, and especially in the originals this is done to highlight his independence - while you were out saving the world, he was studying the blade. I really think that the added cutscenes in ORAS with him in Petalburg and outside of Victory Road help bridge the gap between his original appearances and help the player remember him. While I would have liked an intermediate battle after the 5th gym I have a lot of respect for the decision to NOT include one since I feel like it also would have undermined the buildup to the final battle somewhat.