marchionessofmustache (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
marchionessofmustache) wrote2016-11-22 03:38 pm
marchionessofmustache) wrote2016-11-22 03:38 pm
pokey
OK, so I haven't really been posting here the last few days? I think? Because new Pokémon came out XD I haven't been doing much of anything else. I've been making sure to do my KhanAcademy every day though as not to break my stream XD
And Imperial SaGa added a bunch of content and I missed the beginning of some of the events >_> I hope there's enough days left in the event to get all the daily login bonuses, at least. There are two events going on, one is a RSG2 story event, and the other is a Dragon's Dogma Online cross-promotion event. For the DDO promotion, there's just daily login bonuses... every other day is 100kr (!!) and the other days are promo characters of RSG characters in Dragon's Dogma cosplay/roles?
Here is Katalina *_* I think there's a Monica coming up too? I forget, I barely looked at it XD But once I saw the Katalina I was like "Oh, these are actually cool!!"
The characters are useless to me though so I'm just training them quickly and dumping them into jutsu facility lmfao XD But once you've obtained a character, you get them in your little character book thing so you can look at their artwork any time XD
So there are login bonuses for that AND the other event, which has 100kr on the first and last day (kinda common for events) and premium items on the other days (the common ones).
The event isn't really a great place to train and the event shop just has some nice axes but that's about it. So I'm not really bothering with it. Just want the login bonuses XD Might grind up enough to get the cheaper of the two axes at least, though, since I gotta train up these promo characters anyway.
They also added this new type of mission in addition to daily missions... basically it's all-time missions where you're rewarded for reaching certain milestones in the game. And most of them are retroactive, so when I logged in after the update, I got a TON of stuff. And most of the rewards are krowns (kr are the premium currency lol) so I now have enough kr to pay for two 11-man races (which is like... by far the most expensive thing you can spend kr on -- it's a character gacha that gives you 11 characters for the price of 10, and the rarity is always red or better). I'm gonna wait til there's a special gacha that gives only club characters OR they add UNLIMITED:Saga content and there's a series gacha for that, or if there's just some promoted-chance character that I really like ... but they'd probably have to also be useful to the team because at this point I'm kinda 'stuck' with how much I can advance without getting better characters of the highest rarity :\
Anyway, POKEMONNNNNNNNNNN
I've been doing much of nothing but Pokémon lmao. It's really fun... I was not expecting it to be that great since the last two games kinda let me down and I felt like the series was going in a direction I didn't really like, but I feel like it kinda turned around with this one and so far it's been a really great experience. IDK if I'm enjoying it more because I was not hopeful so I didn't have anything to be disappointed about, or because it's actually just really really good. Probably a mix of both.
Almost all of the new Pokeys are super cool and I love them. There are several new bugs and bug-likes which is great. I haven't seen any new mustache pokeys though hahaha. Though the new Ratata kinda looks like it has a little mustache...
There's a lot of cool new features like PokePelago (basically a place to get idle rewards, which you can set up by adding your benched pokeys to it) and Festival Plaza (an place to interact with other players similar to Joint Avenue of BW2). There's also this thing now that wild pokeys will sometimes call for help, and another wild pokey will join the battle. This is usually just cute or useful but sometimes it's a huge pain. Basically since I realized that there are some pokeys you can only catch by having another pokey call them out for help... and some of them have a super rare appearance rate.
There's this one thing that eats Corsolas apparently (its name looks like Meanie so I'm just going to call it Meanie because I can't remember the actual name) and it seems to only appear when you are battling a Corsola and the Corsola calls for help... the Meanie might appear instead of another Corsola.
It took me about 30 minutes just to find one Corsola -_-; And then you have to hope it calls and the Meanie comes out!! They don't always call for help but they have a chance of doing it once per turn if they are alone on the battlefield. So it can happen I assume unlimitedly in a single battle, but... once I was battling a Bonsly to try to get a Sudowoodo to come out and I went through like 40 calls for help where Bonslys came out (and three Happinys...) and no Sudowoodo. Of course, I'm just ASSUMING that's how you find Sudowoodo... but all the other baby pokeys seem to call their parents (Pichu can call Pikachu, Magby can call Magmar, etc.)
I also think it's possible for Eevee to call Umbreon or Espeon... which the idea of catching a wild Espeon or Umbreon is just... so wild lol.
But yeah this feature is mostly cool but when you're trying to get a rare helper to 'drop' it's frustrating as hell -_- especially since the pokey that calls for them is already rare to encounter in the first place. And after a while into the battle they seem to stop wanting to call for help? I had an Eevee and threw one of those... annoying balls at it (IDK what it's called but it flusters them and makes them call for help more) and it called for like 4 helps but after that I went like 10 turns and it never called again?? Usually they call like... idk it seems like more than 50% of the time lol. But I think it might be a different rate per Pokémon, and I think some never call for help? IDK. I thought maybe the effect of the orb thing wore off, so I threw another and it said it had no effect. -_-; I need to buy more of those, too, because I'm out now. I waited to make sure I could get more before ever using them.
But yeah, another really cool new mechanic is Ride Pokémon, which is basically instead of getting Hidden Machines and being forced to teach your pokeys map skills, you now summon these like borrowed pokeys to use map skills, but you can also ride them around!! So like before you'd have to waste a move slot on one of your pokeys for busting rocks on the map. This was usable in battle but it was pretty weak. Most of the HM moves were not useful in battle. And you only get 4 moves per pokey... so when you need to give like 7 different map skills to your team... this gets frustrating fast. Plus you have to make sure your team even has pokeys that can learn the map skill. So you are pretty much forced to use something that can swim, something that can fly, etc. Really frustrated for a game that is all about having 800+ possible party members when you're forced into using ones from certain categories. I mean, you can get around wasting your moves/party members by having dedicated map skill pokeys, but then you'd have to go to a town to swap out your party every time you needed a map skill, then travel all the way back to where you needed it. Get like 40 minutes into a huge cave and realize you need to push a boulder but no one on your team can? Hahahahahaha fuck you.
So this new thing is that you get this like thing that calls "Ride Pokémon" to you, which are pokeys that don't battle but essentially are like vehicles you can summon at any time, and they have map skills. Like you first get a Tauros that can smash rocks. What's also cool is that they travel much faster than your run speed without you having to hold down a button (Tauros is kinda fast but SUPER fast if you press the run button, which is when it also crushes boulders). Riding them is really fun and it also gets rid of the need for a bicycle (I don't know if there is going to be a bike or anything in this game though).
My favorite Ride Pokémon is Stoutland, and not only because it's a giant dog with a huge mustache, but because it runs super fast (like as fast as Tauros while charging!) normally, and if you hold run button, he walks slow and can sniff out hidden items!! And they even use this in cute ways, like you can sniff in these holes and some Pokeys will pop out. I love it!
I have a Ride that lets me swim in the water (now called "paddling" instead of "surfing" XD) but I've also encountered some like... boulders that are blocking paths in the water so I guess either that pokey will get an upgrade later, or there will be a second pokey for swimming (maybe a Sharpedo? XD)
The fishing mechanic is different now, which is probably the most disappointing thing. Instead of getting different types of rods, there's now just one rod, and you can only fish in dedicated fishing holes. Each time you zone-in to an area, a specific fishing hole will have these like ripples coming out. If you fish there, you have a better chance of catching something other than Magikarp (otherwise you are pretty much just going to catch Magikarp...). And it's always the same hole every time. And you can still wind up with Magikarp X_x It's really annoying. So basically to catch a Pokémon in a cave, you have to run all the way out of the cave and back in, go to the fishing hole, fish ONCE, and hope you get the thing you wanted. But you still have like 40% chance of Magikarp or something, and if there's other things in that spot, you have to hope it's not those either. Once you have fished in a rippling spot, you have to zone out to get it to ripple again X_X; And if you approach it too quickly or accidentally get too close to it, the ripple goes away, too. So you have to be careful not to mess that up. Overall the fishing is a huge pain.
Pokémon Amie (the thing in the last two games that let you pet your Pokémon to raise their affection) got a sort of upgrade with the new Pokémon Refresh. Gone are the minigames you could play with your Pokémon to increase their enjoyment. I miss the minigames because I really liked them (especially the berry-picker one). But the way it was designed, you could max out your Pokémon's affection all at once (even though it took a while), because feeding a pokey would lower its enjoyment and playing a minigame would lower its fullness so you could just do them back and forth, making to pet them in between, and get to max affection. Max affection gives you bonus EXP, and chance of critical hit or evasion when you should have had none, or recover from status effects out of nowhere, stuff like that.
Anyway, the new version has all the same petting features from before... you still get to pet them and feed them treats (now "beans" instead of the ... pokepuffs or whatever the last ones were called... treats seem to change with every game XD) and watch them eat and stuff and it's very cute and fun. But now their hunger and enjoyment only go down over time and with battles. So you can't just do it all at once. But the new feature is that sometimes after battles, you'll get a 'care' request thing. And you can click it and it will take you to Refresh, where your Pokémon will have a problem and you can groom them or clean them. For example, if they have lint caught in their fur/feathers you can comb it out. Or if there's mud you can wipe them with a towel. There's a hairdryer for when they get wet, and a brush for when they are caked in dirt. Doing these care things will grant you extra affection without raising the enjoyment (which is now raised just by petting), so you can get more affection. Petting won't increase affection while enjoyment is full (and they won't eat treats when their hunger is full), so this is the only way to get extra affection. Plus it's very cute and fun. Also there's a medicine swab that will cure status effects! So no need to waste your berries or items to heal status outside of battle (you still can/should use them during battle, of course).
There's a new café feature that seems mostly just for fun, a lot like the café from Animal Crossing. Basically you can go to a café and order a drink and the barista will chat with you and tell you some lore about the game or just say cute things. There's a lot of different drinks and he'll tell you about the drinks too. Different cafes seem to have different drinks and they might change per day too? Anyway, once per day when you visit a café, you'll get a complimentary biscuit (treats that were a signature from previous games, like Lava Cookie) and beans. Beans are the treats you give in Pokémon Refresh and once you can go to PokePelago you can use them there, too.
PokePelago is another new feature which I really like. I said before but it's basically an idle area of the game that you can check on sometimes, and set up to work how you want it. It's a series of islands you can develop to do different things using the pokeys that are not in your party. When you first start, there's just an island for farming beans. There's a big beanstalk you can shake and beans fall out. Your benched pokeys will play on the island all day and sometimes gather beans. You can also put beans in a basket which will make the pokeys happier and increase their chance of finding beans or even finding playmates, which are wild pokeys who will join you if they enjoy playing with your pokeys on the island (!!!). So basically you can catch Pokémon and farm beans idly with this!!
You can spend beans to develop the islands, upgrading the ones you already use or developing unused ones into usable ones. I have all the islands now I think but most are at the lowest level. You also have to have a certain number of pokeys in your box before you can develop certain islands. I spent like 30 hours focusing on catching various pokeys in the beginning so I have a lot and was able to build all the islands. But I can't upgrade them all yet because I need more pokeys and more beans.
The second island you get is for growing berries (yay!) which is always one of my favorite things. Sadly it takes a lot of fun out of growing berries, unless it gets more interesting later. You pretty much just plant and wait, and your pokeys tend to the fields. I think giving them beans just makes them harvestable faster. Before, in some games, you could make fertilizers, plant them in formations to try to get hybrids, and had to water them yourself. It was a lot more work and dedication but I thought it was really fun. Now it's just... this. But still, it's growing berries which I love XD
The next island is a treasure cave island. You can basically just send your pokeys on an adventure into the cave, and they'll come back out with items. I think one expedition takes 24 hours. Not anything all that amazing, but it's free idle items, so that's cool. The bean basket probably just makes it go faster? Though like 20 hours instead of 24 seems pointless haha. Maybe it makes them get rarer items or more items or something? IDK, I just got it today.
Another island is a training island. Basically you can leave pokeys here to level up or EV train idly! You actually pick the pokeys for this one (the other ones seem to be populated with just whatever you have not in your party) and let them play on the island, and the island caretaker provides them with juice that helps them grow in a certain way, and you choose the juice. So like if you choose EXP juice, all the pokeys playing on the island will gain EXP idly. Really nice for developing all those pokeys that you want to evolve for their dex entries but don't plan on using in your party. So I have 6 in there right now. I think each time you upgrade the island you can have a new set of six, and then you can choose different juice for each set, too.
The last island I can remember (I think this is all but idk) is a relaxation island Basically it's just a hot springs for your pokeys to relax in. You can choose which 6 pokeys to send on vacation here, too. It seems like all it does is raise their happiness. So I put in a bunch of pokeys that evolve by being happy, like Bonsly, Eevee, and Zubat.
The islands are just little single-screen things you look at and can touch with your touch screen, rather than being like in-game areas you walk around in. The little menu sprites of the pokeys are what appears on the screen, and you can poke them with your stylus to see them close-up and view their summary if you want. Overall it's VERY cute and very useful.
I also mentioned the Festival Plaza which I loooooooooove. I loved the Joint Avenue from BW2. I think Joint Avenue was a bit cooler in theme, but it seems this one is better overall maybe. Joint Avenue was a big tunnel that you got to develop into a shopping mall, and it was an actual area in the game world. Every time you interacted with people using multiplayer version, they'd become an NPC visit your Avenue, and they could set up a shop there if you wanted them to. Different players would host different shops, and you could level them up by introducing other players to the shop. As you leveled up your shop, you also leveled up your Avenue and got more features for it.
Festival Plaza is like this, but it's not an area in the game world itself (you just kind of... warp there from the menu and there's no real indication where this is supposed to be lol), and instead of a shopping mall, it's a festival with stalls (which is only different in aesthetics). Now to get new shops, you sometimes will be introduced to them through the festival king or whatever when your plaza levels up.
This is a little sad because it means you just get shops at random, and the NPCs running the shops are just generic NPCs. before, it would be the people you interacted with in multiplayer, so you could have shops run by all your friends. Now, your friends just hang around as visitors. The shops also don't level up, you have to hope you roll a better version of a shop X_x; There might be a way to level them up later, though. Joint Avenue continued to add new features/abilities as you played and leveled up your avenue, and my plaza is only level 15 or so. You can get it to over 100 I think?
Now you get Festival Coins that you can spend at the stalls, instead of just using regular money. And your visitors will randomly want to interact and you'll get FC for interacting with them. most of the time, they will ask you to recommend a shop, and you'll have to guess where they want to go based on the clue they give (I want to go somewhere Pokémon can play -> Take them to haunted house or bounce house lol). Sometimes they'll just want to tell you about their accomplishments (I caught 33 Pokémon in one day!) or ask you questions about yourself, which will fill in entries on your profile (they get deep like how do you interpret love or whatever LOL it's weird). Most of the time it's just free FC, but sometimes they'll ask to be taken to a shop and say "guess what I want" or something and you have no idea what they want and if you take them to the wrong shop, you won't get anything. And sometimes they want to be introduced to another visitor that has a certain ranking. This is kind of confusing to explain but basically all of your visitors have a 'ranking' in each area of the game (and there are a ton, like catching rating, battling rating, fishing rating, etc.) and then all of your visitors are organized into a sort of leaderboard for each one, and the people will get mad and not give you FC if they ask to be introduced to another visitor with a certain rank or whatever and you don't pick someone with a high rank or in the top of the leaderboards or whatever? And you can't really see their individual rankings at the time of choosing who to introduce and it's like... how are you even going to memorize all that... especially since the people you don't mark as VIP will change out regularly so it's always different...
ANYWAY, introducing people to shops doesn't seem to level them up :\ But as I've leved up my plaza, I've gotten new abilities, like now I can ask people to recommend shops to me, and it seems like they will tell you a random shop they have in their plaza, and you can choose to host it in your own plaza, too. So if you sat around and asked people all the time, you might find some good shops. If it's like Joint Avenue, there will be exclusive shops to each version of the game, so you'll need to probably ask people who have different versions, too...
Another feature I got was to ask people about fashion and THIS IS THE BEST FEATURE lmfao. Basically you can ask people about their outfit and they can let you get clothing items from them. This is great because clothing store inventory seems bad?? And there are clothing items exclusive to each game... and clothing is kind of expensive in general. But I love dressing up the character XD So I really like this.
There's also this new thing called "Missions" which ... are kinda dumb but somehow very fun. Basically you get these "Festival Tickets" which let you host a mission, or you can join other people's mission. A mission is like... a little minigame where you run through your plaza and you have a limited time to talk to the NPCs and try to get... correct answers. Depending on the mission, what this means will be different. For example, there's one called "(Language) Lesson" where you have to run around and only talk to people who speak a certain language (they'll have a little bubble above their head that says Hello / Goodbye / Thank You in their language). If you talk to the correct people you'll get points, and if you talk to the wrong people, they'll tell you how stupid you are and how disappointed they are in you and it will take a long time and waste your time and you get no points. Another example is "Type Matchup Mission" where you have to run around and talk to everyone, and they'll tell you a Pokémon type, and you have to choose a move type that would be super-effective against that type. Choose wrong and they tell you how stupid you are and how disappointed they are LOL. These are fun because they are worth more FC overall. Another one I've seen is type enthusiasts, where you'll get a theme like "find bug enthusiasts" and it's like the language one where they'll have a bubble that says "I love (Pokémon name)!" and you only talk to the ones who love Pokémon of the theme type. ANYWAY you get a lot of FC potentially for doing these. You'll get ranked from 1 to 5 stars based on your score, and then there's a group rating from 0 to 5 stars based on everyone's combined score. You get FC for each star. Some missions don't pay a lot, but the type matchup one is 5FC per star, which is the most I've seen, and if you play on your own it's not hard to get 25FC from getting 5 stars. And if other people join you'll probably get at least one group star, so that's 30FC. I haven't seen more than like 2 group stars though... it seems really hard to get?
Anyway, you can spend the FC at the shops and so it's actually a useful place and not just a "look at all the interactivity!" place. Here's examples of some shops and what they do:
Restaurant - Take your Pokémon for a meal and boost their base stats depending on the meal type
Haunted House - Pokémon finds a random item while challenging the ghost house
Lottery Corner - Get a random item every day, potential to get super rare items
Goody Shop - Buy bundles of useful items instead of money
Dye Shop - Turn white clothing into colored clothing
There are other kinds, too, and there are variations on the shops, like different restaurants with different types of meals, or dye shops that specialize in certain colors. There are also different NPCs that can run them. I like when I get the male veterans because they're hot daddy types XD
But yeah I spent way too long explaining that O_o
There's another new battle mode called Battle Royal (not Royale lmao) which the game literally describes as a "Pokémon Foursome." In this four players each battle each other at once, and once one player runs out of pokeys in their party, the players are ranked based on how many kills they got and top player wins the Royal. Seems fun but I haven't really had a chance to try it yet. Seems like it would be hard to develop a decent strategy for it? You'd want Pokémon that can take a beating as well as Pokémon that can go fast... but those things are usually mutually exclusive qualities XD
Another interesting thing about the game is that the idea of a gym challenge is gone. Now you have these ... trial challenge things instead. It's similar to the idea of gyms, but also quite different. Basically, on each island, you have a series of trials you must undergo (basically like little subquests) before you can challenge the Kahuna of the island, who is kinda like a gym leader. While gyms did kind of function as little subquests with puzzles and stuff before, trials seem a bit more elaborate (well, at least aesthetically) and can contain entire dungeons or minigames. And at the end of trials, you fight a Totem Pokémon which is not really like a gym leader at all. Basically the trials/kahunas are the main storyline instead of the gym challenge. I don't know if there's an "elite four" or whatever at the end (I'm trying to stay largely unspoiled XD) so I don't know what happens after all of this. But I do know that the main story revolves around taking the island challenge where you go to all 4 islands and complete the trials and face the Kahunas. There are also these like island guardian deity things of each island? Like they are special pokeys and apparently finishing the challenge at the island pleases them or something. I'm guessing this will work into the story later.
The first Kahuna is a part of the storyline from the beginning and he has a big belly and a big white mustache:
And basically is quite lovely. One of your friends who is also taking the challenge with you is his son? Grandson? I forget. He calls him "tutu" which I think is a Hawaiian word that is like an affection term for grandparents? So I guess it's grandson. There are a lot of Hawaiian words in this game lol. I'm learning things!
As for the story, I like it so far but the kind of 'main plot' has not really been revealed. Generally in Pokey you have some kind of like individual goal you're trying to accomplish of becoming a champion/taking a gym/trial challenge, and then there's like a plot involving other characters that unfolds as you proceed through that. It's still very mysterious at this point, though.
You have two friends who travel around with you, Hau (the grandson kid from before) who is also taking the challenge, and is super hyper and obsessed with eating malasada. And then Lillie who I LOVE LOVE LOVE and is super mysterious and cute. She protects this weird special Pokémon that she carries in her bag, and some bad people seem to be after it? And she hates Pokémon battles because Pokémon can get hurt and her Pokémon doesn't even know one move (which is, gameplay-wise, impossible XD) and you kind help her out as you travel around, too. She's super cute and I love this little trio of friends. Since the 3rd generation of games, the cast has revolved around a little group of friends that are all on their quests together but for different reasons. Usually there's some kind of friendly rival with a similar goal to you, and then other kid or kids who have other goals and are traveling, and they're all really cool and cute. I really like Hau and Lillie, especially Lillie.
Also Lillie seems relevant to the main plot because they put so much mystery into her Pokémon, and then the game's opening cutscene was just her running away from people who were like... attacking her or something?
Also there's a 'bad group' called Team Skull who... I have no idea what their purpose is yet (they just seem like a petty gang at this point -- stealing and stuff), and there's another like "good group" called Aether, which has member Colress from BW2 (!!!) and they seem to be a scientific research group that's also dedicated to righting Team Skull's wrongs.
However, I'm a little suspicious of them, because I feel like the people chasing Lillie in the opening cutscene were Aether people? But that was so long ago, and you don't actually learn about Aether until way later. It's also interesting though because the Professor and other 'good' characters seem to be very trusting and involved with helping Aether, and the professor's wife is even an Aether researcher. And Lillie seems to be okay with being around Aether people so maybe I'm just remembering it wrong XD I just remember the opening having lots of white.
Anyway I love Lillie and the characters so far and can't wait to see what happens. Aether and Skull seem interesting and I want to know more about them. The Team Skull lackeys are cute and I love their O_O faces they make when you say shocking things. There's also a running gag that no one takes them seriously and it's so cute and funny. Like they'll do something that should be very threatening or alarming and everyone is just like "Oh it's just Team Skull" and goes about their business LOL.
The only complaint I really have about the game so far is that the areas are quite small. This is only a half complaint, though, because despite being small, they feel very 'alive.' So there's a lack of exploration over a large physical area, but the bits you get to explore are very interesting. But many areas are disappointingly small and I am left feeling very unaccomplished afterward. Generally every dungeon and path in the game so far you can travel from one end to the other in like 10 seconds at the most, with a little handful of off-the-path stuff to 'explore' but there's really not any exploration there. It's just "oh look, an item off to the side" or "I can fish here" or "If I step off the road here, there's a place to look for Pokémon." I haven't felt like I really have been able to explore anywhere yet.
Being said, though, I've had a lot of fun trying to find all the Pokémon as I try to fill the Pokedex despite all that. I feel like going through the areas the first time, everything seems so small, but when going back and trying to fill the dex, it's like all the areas combine into one giant explorable area. I guess because you're not seeing them as tiny areas between two checkpoints/story events/whatever, but as one big area.
And the only new feature I'm not impressed with is the camera thing. Pretty much it's a super watered-down Pokémon Snap. There are like 'hotspots' for taking pictures, and if you get your 'camera' thing out there, you'll be able to take a picture of that limited area. You can't even move around, just turn a little. There will be a Pokémon there wandering around, and basically you just keep your camera zoomed in on it and wait for it to face you and do a special animation, which can take forever, and then take pictures. No other way to interact, just waiting and snapping. As you level up your camera, you get... better zoom. That's it LOL.
After you take six pictures, you can submit one to upload online (not IRL, like ... a fake in-game "online") and you'll get 'likes' on it (which are just like... a scoring system). So like you submit a picture and you'll get like 2953 likes or something. Once you've gotten a certain total number of likes, your camera gets upgraded. That's it. There are no rewards for doing this other than upgrading the camera? And the pictures you take you can save to your SD card but they are boring and the quality is horrible (like I think they get resized to like 160x90 pixels for the thumbnail or something and then scaled back up from the thumbnail so your pictures are like ridiculously grainy and ugly and have like compression fragments everywhere??? it's absurd) so like there's literally no point to this feature other than the feature itself. And it's not all that cute? Like most of the Pokémon do NOTHING but walk around slowly, and now and then like... jump and smile or something? Some don't even do ANYTHING but like wander in circles. And it takes a ridiculous amount of likes to level up your camera later, like... generally with the L4 zoom, I can get on average pictures with like 1,000 to 2,500 likes. The BEST pictures can get around 5,000-7,000 likes (and I got one with 11,000 like once) but these require 1. a rare Pokémon appear and 2. spending like 5 whole minutes trying to get a good shot of it. And you need 1,500,000 likes to get to the next level of camera................ So this is an obnoxious and annoying feature. If the Pokémon did a variety of cute things or were more interactive or if you got some kind of rewards to use outside the camera minigame, it would be cool. But it just feels so pointless, but I feel compelled to level up the camera because it's THERE, which is annoying lol.
Anyway, that's how I feel about new Pokey. I think I have around 40 hours in the game already (got it on Friday lol) and my team is a little over level 30 each. I named all my Pokeys after US Senators from Indiana (this theme came from the fact that I wanted to name my starter pokey "Donnelly" lol shoot me). There are only 5 current or former US Senators from Indiana that are still alive with unique names (there are actually 6 but two have the same name lol) so for the 6th one I chose Harrison (for Benjamin Harrison) since he became president, and he was elected into the Senate at the same time James Garfield became president, who rivals Ulysses Grant as my fav historical president.
The namesakes with the pokeys that are named that:
Joe Donnelly: Decidueye (Grass/Ghost owl that looks like it's wearing a hooded cape thing, SO COOL, I think it's not supposed to be dead but more like a necromancer?!)
Dan Coats: Grimer (new Poison/Dark form of Grimer that looks like radioactive and super toxic, I love it)
Evan Bayh: Ribombee (BUG/FAIRY it's based on a bee fly and is super cute and has the coolest new move I've seen)
Richard Lugar: Charjabug (Bug/Electric bus. It's literally a bus. I love it tho.)
Dan Quayle: Lurantis (Grass type that imitates a bug appearance. Basically a big plat flower thing that looks like a mantis, super cool and it's like pink and white theme!)
Benjamin Harrison: Araquanid (Water/Bug super sexy giant underwater spider thing like I can't even explain how awesome this thing is it's like 5'11' and drowns Pokémon with its face bubble head thing and like... wow)
^ Though of all arachnid-themed Pokémon this is probably the least sexy. But uh... Ariados and Galvantula are just... GUHH
I might change some out later in the game if I find something even cooler, but I really love all of these. But I mean like you're limited to the pokeys you can find in one area at the beginning, so I have all these early-game pokes. So who knows what I'll find. I found this thing called Wimpod that is so cute but I accidentally made it run away and now it won't come back ;n; but I'm guessing it comes back once a day or something idk???
SO THAT'S MY POKEY STUFF. Gonna go back to playing now lol.
And Imperial SaGa added a bunch of content and I missed the beginning of some of the events >_> I hope there's enough days left in the event to get all the daily login bonuses, at least. There are two events going on, one is a RSG2 story event, and the other is a Dragon's Dogma Online cross-promotion event. For the DDO promotion, there's just daily login bonuses... every other day is 100kr (!!) and the other days are promo characters of RSG characters in Dragon's Dogma cosplay/roles?
Here is Katalina *_* I think there's a Monica coming up too? I forget, I barely looked at it XD But once I saw the Katalina I was like "Oh, these are actually cool!!"
The characters are useless to me though so I'm just training them quickly and dumping them into jutsu facility lmfao XD But once you've obtained a character, you get them in your little character book thing so you can look at their artwork any time XD
So there are login bonuses for that AND the other event, which has 100kr on the first and last day (kinda common for events) and premium items on the other days (the common ones).
The event isn't really a great place to train and the event shop just has some nice axes but that's about it. So I'm not really bothering with it. Just want the login bonuses XD Might grind up enough to get the cheaper of the two axes at least, though, since I gotta train up these promo characters anyway.
They also added this new type of mission in addition to daily missions... basically it's all-time missions where you're rewarded for reaching certain milestones in the game. And most of them are retroactive, so when I logged in after the update, I got a TON of stuff. And most of the rewards are krowns (kr are the premium currency lol) so I now have enough kr to pay for two 11-man races (which is like... by far the most expensive thing you can spend kr on -- it's a character gacha that gives you 11 characters for the price of 10, and the rarity is always red or better). I'm gonna wait til there's a special gacha that gives only club characters OR they add UNLIMITED:Saga content and there's a series gacha for that, or if there's just some promoted-chance character that I really like ... but they'd probably have to also be useful to the team because at this point I'm kinda 'stuck' with how much I can advance without getting better characters of the highest rarity :\
Anyway, POKEMONNNNNNNNNNN
I've been doing much of nothing but Pokémon lmao. It's really fun... I was not expecting it to be that great since the last two games kinda let me down and I felt like the series was going in a direction I didn't really like, but I feel like it kinda turned around with this one and so far it's been a really great experience. IDK if I'm enjoying it more because I was not hopeful so I didn't have anything to be disappointed about, or because it's actually just really really good. Probably a mix of both.
Almost all of the new Pokeys are super cool and I love them. There are several new bugs and bug-likes which is great. I haven't seen any new mustache pokeys though hahaha. Though the new Ratata kinda looks like it has a little mustache...
There's a lot of cool new features like PokePelago (basically a place to get idle rewards, which you can set up by adding your benched pokeys to it) and Festival Plaza (an place to interact with other players similar to Joint Avenue of BW2). There's also this thing now that wild pokeys will sometimes call for help, and another wild pokey will join the battle. This is usually just cute or useful but sometimes it's a huge pain. Basically since I realized that there are some pokeys you can only catch by having another pokey call them out for help... and some of them have a super rare appearance rate.
There's this one thing that eats Corsolas apparently (its name looks like Meanie so I'm just going to call it Meanie because I can't remember the actual name) and it seems to only appear when you are battling a Corsola and the Corsola calls for help... the Meanie might appear instead of another Corsola.
It took me about 30 minutes just to find one Corsola -_-; And then you have to hope it calls and the Meanie comes out!! They don't always call for help but they have a chance of doing it once per turn if they are alone on the battlefield. So it can happen I assume unlimitedly in a single battle, but... once I was battling a Bonsly to try to get a Sudowoodo to come out and I went through like 40 calls for help where Bonslys came out (and three Happinys...) and no Sudowoodo. Of course, I'm just ASSUMING that's how you find Sudowoodo... but all the other baby pokeys seem to call their parents (Pichu can call Pikachu, Magby can call Magmar, etc.)
I also think it's possible for Eevee to call Umbreon or Espeon... which the idea of catching a wild Espeon or Umbreon is just... so wild lol.
But yeah this feature is mostly cool but when you're trying to get a rare helper to 'drop' it's frustrating as hell -_- especially since the pokey that calls for them is already rare to encounter in the first place. And after a while into the battle they seem to stop wanting to call for help? I had an Eevee and threw one of those... annoying balls at it (IDK what it's called but it flusters them and makes them call for help more) and it called for like 4 helps but after that I went like 10 turns and it never called again?? Usually they call like... idk it seems like more than 50% of the time lol. But I think it might be a different rate per Pokémon, and I think some never call for help? IDK. I thought maybe the effect of the orb thing wore off, so I threw another and it said it had no effect. -_-; I need to buy more of those, too, because I'm out now. I waited to make sure I could get more before ever using them.
But yeah, another really cool new mechanic is Ride Pokémon, which is basically instead of getting Hidden Machines and being forced to teach your pokeys map skills, you now summon these like borrowed pokeys to use map skills, but you can also ride them around!! So like before you'd have to waste a move slot on one of your pokeys for busting rocks on the map. This was usable in battle but it was pretty weak. Most of the HM moves were not useful in battle. And you only get 4 moves per pokey... so when you need to give like 7 different map skills to your team... this gets frustrating fast. Plus you have to make sure your team even has pokeys that can learn the map skill. So you are pretty much forced to use something that can swim, something that can fly, etc. Really frustrated for a game that is all about having 800+ possible party members when you're forced into using ones from certain categories. I mean, you can get around wasting your moves/party members by having dedicated map skill pokeys, but then you'd have to go to a town to swap out your party every time you needed a map skill, then travel all the way back to where you needed it. Get like 40 minutes into a huge cave and realize you need to push a boulder but no one on your team can? Hahahahahaha fuck you.
So this new thing is that you get this like thing that calls "Ride Pokémon" to you, which are pokeys that don't battle but essentially are like vehicles you can summon at any time, and they have map skills. Like you first get a Tauros that can smash rocks. What's also cool is that they travel much faster than your run speed without you having to hold down a button (Tauros is kinda fast but SUPER fast if you press the run button, which is when it also crushes boulders). Riding them is really fun and it also gets rid of the need for a bicycle (I don't know if there is going to be a bike or anything in this game though).
My favorite Ride Pokémon is Stoutland, and not only because it's a giant dog with a huge mustache, but because it runs super fast (like as fast as Tauros while charging!) normally, and if you hold run button, he walks slow and can sniff out hidden items!! And they even use this in cute ways, like you can sniff in these holes and some Pokeys will pop out. I love it!
I have a Ride that lets me swim in the water (now called "paddling" instead of "surfing" XD) but I've also encountered some like... boulders that are blocking paths in the water so I guess either that pokey will get an upgrade later, or there will be a second pokey for swimming (maybe a Sharpedo? XD)
The fishing mechanic is different now, which is probably the most disappointing thing. Instead of getting different types of rods, there's now just one rod, and you can only fish in dedicated fishing holes. Each time you zone-in to an area, a specific fishing hole will have these like ripples coming out. If you fish there, you have a better chance of catching something other than Magikarp (otherwise you are pretty much just going to catch Magikarp...). And it's always the same hole every time. And you can still wind up with Magikarp X_x It's really annoying. So basically to catch a Pokémon in a cave, you have to run all the way out of the cave and back in, go to the fishing hole, fish ONCE, and hope you get the thing you wanted. But you still have like 40% chance of Magikarp or something, and if there's other things in that spot, you have to hope it's not those either. Once you have fished in a rippling spot, you have to zone out to get it to ripple again X_X; And if you approach it too quickly or accidentally get too close to it, the ripple goes away, too. So you have to be careful not to mess that up. Overall the fishing is a huge pain.
Pokémon Amie (the thing in the last two games that let you pet your Pokémon to raise their affection) got a sort of upgrade with the new Pokémon Refresh. Gone are the minigames you could play with your Pokémon to increase their enjoyment. I miss the minigames because I really liked them (especially the berry-picker one). But the way it was designed, you could max out your Pokémon's affection all at once (even though it took a while), because feeding a pokey would lower its enjoyment and playing a minigame would lower its fullness so you could just do them back and forth, making to pet them in between, and get to max affection. Max affection gives you bonus EXP, and chance of critical hit or evasion when you should have had none, or recover from status effects out of nowhere, stuff like that.
Anyway, the new version has all the same petting features from before... you still get to pet them and feed them treats (now "beans" instead of the ... pokepuffs or whatever the last ones were called... treats seem to change with every game XD) and watch them eat and stuff and it's very cute and fun. But now their hunger and enjoyment only go down over time and with battles. So you can't just do it all at once. But the new feature is that sometimes after battles, you'll get a 'care' request thing. And you can click it and it will take you to Refresh, where your Pokémon will have a problem and you can groom them or clean them. For example, if they have lint caught in their fur/feathers you can comb it out. Or if there's mud you can wipe them with a towel. There's a hairdryer for when they get wet, and a brush for when they are caked in dirt. Doing these care things will grant you extra affection without raising the enjoyment (which is now raised just by petting), so you can get more affection. Petting won't increase affection while enjoyment is full (and they won't eat treats when their hunger is full), so this is the only way to get extra affection. Plus it's very cute and fun. Also there's a medicine swab that will cure status effects! So no need to waste your berries or items to heal status outside of battle (you still can/should use them during battle, of course).
There's a new café feature that seems mostly just for fun, a lot like the café from Animal Crossing. Basically you can go to a café and order a drink and the barista will chat with you and tell you some lore about the game or just say cute things. There's a lot of different drinks and he'll tell you about the drinks too. Different cafes seem to have different drinks and they might change per day too? Anyway, once per day when you visit a café, you'll get a complimentary biscuit (treats that were a signature from previous games, like Lava Cookie) and beans. Beans are the treats you give in Pokémon Refresh and once you can go to PokePelago you can use them there, too.
PokePelago is another new feature which I really like. I said before but it's basically an idle area of the game that you can check on sometimes, and set up to work how you want it. It's a series of islands you can develop to do different things using the pokeys that are not in your party. When you first start, there's just an island for farming beans. There's a big beanstalk you can shake and beans fall out. Your benched pokeys will play on the island all day and sometimes gather beans. You can also put beans in a basket which will make the pokeys happier and increase their chance of finding beans or even finding playmates, which are wild pokeys who will join you if they enjoy playing with your pokeys on the island (!!!). So basically you can catch Pokémon and farm beans idly with this!!
You can spend beans to develop the islands, upgrading the ones you already use or developing unused ones into usable ones. I have all the islands now I think but most are at the lowest level. You also have to have a certain number of pokeys in your box before you can develop certain islands. I spent like 30 hours focusing on catching various pokeys in the beginning so I have a lot and was able to build all the islands. But I can't upgrade them all yet because I need more pokeys and more beans.
The second island you get is for growing berries (yay!) which is always one of my favorite things. Sadly it takes a lot of fun out of growing berries, unless it gets more interesting later. You pretty much just plant and wait, and your pokeys tend to the fields. I think giving them beans just makes them harvestable faster. Before, in some games, you could make fertilizers, plant them in formations to try to get hybrids, and had to water them yourself. It was a lot more work and dedication but I thought it was really fun. Now it's just... this. But still, it's growing berries which I love XD
The next island is a treasure cave island. You can basically just send your pokeys on an adventure into the cave, and they'll come back out with items. I think one expedition takes 24 hours. Not anything all that amazing, but it's free idle items, so that's cool. The bean basket probably just makes it go faster? Though like 20 hours instead of 24 seems pointless haha. Maybe it makes them get rarer items or more items or something? IDK, I just got it today.
Another island is a training island. Basically you can leave pokeys here to level up or EV train idly! You actually pick the pokeys for this one (the other ones seem to be populated with just whatever you have not in your party) and let them play on the island, and the island caretaker provides them with juice that helps them grow in a certain way, and you choose the juice. So like if you choose EXP juice, all the pokeys playing on the island will gain EXP idly. Really nice for developing all those pokeys that you want to evolve for their dex entries but don't plan on using in your party. So I have 6 in there right now. I think each time you upgrade the island you can have a new set of six, and then you can choose different juice for each set, too.
The last island I can remember (I think this is all but idk) is a relaxation island Basically it's just a hot springs for your pokeys to relax in. You can choose which 6 pokeys to send on vacation here, too. It seems like all it does is raise their happiness. So I put in a bunch of pokeys that evolve by being happy, like Bonsly, Eevee, and Zubat.
The islands are just little single-screen things you look at and can touch with your touch screen, rather than being like in-game areas you walk around in. The little menu sprites of the pokeys are what appears on the screen, and you can poke them with your stylus to see them close-up and view their summary if you want. Overall it's VERY cute and very useful.
I also mentioned the Festival Plaza which I loooooooooove. I loved the Joint Avenue from BW2. I think Joint Avenue was a bit cooler in theme, but it seems this one is better overall maybe. Joint Avenue was a big tunnel that you got to develop into a shopping mall, and it was an actual area in the game world. Every time you interacted with people using multiplayer version, they'd become an NPC visit your Avenue, and they could set up a shop there if you wanted them to. Different players would host different shops, and you could level them up by introducing other players to the shop. As you leveled up your shop, you also leveled up your Avenue and got more features for it.
Festival Plaza is like this, but it's not an area in the game world itself (you just kind of... warp there from the menu and there's no real indication where this is supposed to be lol), and instead of a shopping mall, it's a festival with stalls (which is only different in aesthetics). Now to get new shops, you sometimes will be introduced to them through the festival king or whatever when your plaza levels up.
This is a little sad because it means you just get shops at random, and the NPCs running the shops are just generic NPCs. before, it would be the people you interacted with in multiplayer, so you could have shops run by all your friends. Now, your friends just hang around as visitors. The shops also don't level up, you have to hope you roll a better version of a shop X_x; There might be a way to level them up later, though. Joint Avenue continued to add new features/abilities as you played and leveled up your avenue, and my plaza is only level 15 or so. You can get it to over 100 I think?
Now you get Festival Coins that you can spend at the stalls, instead of just using regular money. And your visitors will randomly want to interact and you'll get FC for interacting with them. most of the time, they will ask you to recommend a shop, and you'll have to guess where they want to go based on the clue they give (I want to go somewhere Pokémon can play -> Take them to haunted house or bounce house lol). Sometimes they'll just want to tell you about their accomplishments (I caught 33 Pokémon in one day!) or ask you questions about yourself, which will fill in entries on your profile (they get deep like how do you interpret love or whatever LOL it's weird). Most of the time it's just free FC, but sometimes they'll ask to be taken to a shop and say "guess what I want" or something and you have no idea what they want and if you take them to the wrong shop, you won't get anything. And sometimes they want to be introduced to another visitor that has a certain ranking. This is kind of confusing to explain but basically all of your visitors have a 'ranking' in each area of the game (and there are a ton, like catching rating, battling rating, fishing rating, etc.) and then all of your visitors are organized into a sort of leaderboard for each one, and the people will get mad and not give you FC if they ask to be introduced to another visitor with a certain rank or whatever and you don't pick someone with a high rank or in the top of the leaderboards or whatever? And you can't really see their individual rankings at the time of choosing who to introduce and it's like... how are you even going to memorize all that... especially since the people you don't mark as VIP will change out regularly so it's always different...
ANYWAY, introducing people to shops doesn't seem to level them up :\ But as I've leved up my plaza, I've gotten new abilities, like now I can ask people to recommend shops to me, and it seems like they will tell you a random shop they have in their plaza, and you can choose to host it in your own plaza, too. So if you sat around and asked people all the time, you might find some good shops. If it's like Joint Avenue, there will be exclusive shops to each version of the game, so you'll need to probably ask people who have different versions, too...
Another feature I got was to ask people about fashion and THIS IS THE BEST FEATURE lmfao. Basically you can ask people about their outfit and they can let you get clothing items from them. This is great because clothing store inventory seems bad?? And there are clothing items exclusive to each game... and clothing is kind of expensive in general. But I love dressing up the character XD So I really like this.
There's also this new thing called "Missions" which ... are kinda dumb but somehow very fun. Basically you get these "Festival Tickets" which let you host a mission, or you can join other people's mission. A mission is like... a little minigame where you run through your plaza and you have a limited time to talk to the NPCs and try to get... correct answers. Depending on the mission, what this means will be different. For example, there's one called "(Language) Lesson" where you have to run around and only talk to people who speak a certain language (they'll have a little bubble above their head that says Hello / Goodbye / Thank You in their language). If you talk to the correct people you'll get points, and if you talk to the wrong people, they'll tell you how stupid you are and how disappointed they are in you and it will take a long time and waste your time and you get no points. Another example is "Type Matchup Mission" where you have to run around and talk to everyone, and they'll tell you a Pokémon type, and you have to choose a move type that would be super-effective against that type. Choose wrong and they tell you how stupid you are and how disappointed they are LOL. These are fun because they are worth more FC overall. Another one I've seen is type enthusiasts, where you'll get a theme like "find bug enthusiasts" and it's like the language one where they'll have a bubble that says "I love (Pokémon name)!" and you only talk to the ones who love Pokémon of the theme type. ANYWAY you get a lot of FC potentially for doing these. You'll get ranked from 1 to 5 stars based on your score, and then there's a group rating from 0 to 5 stars based on everyone's combined score. You get FC for each star. Some missions don't pay a lot, but the type matchup one is 5FC per star, which is the most I've seen, and if you play on your own it's not hard to get 25FC from getting 5 stars. And if other people join you'll probably get at least one group star, so that's 30FC. I haven't seen more than like 2 group stars though... it seems really hard to get?
Anyway, you can spend the FC at the shops and so it's actually a useful place and not just a "look at all the interactivity!" place. Here's examples of some shops and what they do:
Restaurant - Take your Pokémon for a meal and boost their base stats depending on the meal type
Haunted House - Pokémon finds a random item while challenging the ghost house
Lottery Corner - Get a random item every day, potential to get super rare items
Goody Shop - Buy bundles of useful items instead of money
Dye Shop - Turn white clothing into colored clothing
There are other kinds, too, and there are variations on the shops, like different restaurants with different types of meals, or dye shops that specialize in certain colors. There are also different NPCs that can run them. I like when I get the male veterans because they're hot daddy types XD
But yeah I spent way too long explaining that O_o
There's another new battle mode called Battle Royal (not Royale lmao) which the game literally describes as a "Pokémon Foursome." In this four players each battle each other at once, and once one player runs out of pokeys in their party, the players are ranked based on how many kills they got and top player wins the Royal. Seems fun but I haven't really had a chance to try it yet. Seems like it would be hard to develop a decent strategy for it? You'd want Pokémon that can take a beating as well as Pokémon that can go fast... but those things are usually mutually exclusive qualities XD
Another interesting thing about the game is that the idea of a gym challenge is gone. Now you have these ... trial challenge things instead. It's similar to the idea of gyms, but also quite different. Basically, on each island, you have a series of trials you must undergo (basically like little subquests) before you can challenge the Kahuna of the island, who is kinda like a gym leader. While gyms did kind of function as little subquests with puzzles and stuff before, trials seem a bit more elaborate (well, at least aesthetically) and can contain entire dungeons or minigames. And at the end of trials, you fight a Totem Pokémon which is not really like a gym leader at all. Basically the trials/kahunas are the main storyline instead of the gym challenge. I don't know if there's an "elite four" or whatever at the end (I'm trying to stay largely unspoiled XD) so I don't know what happens after all of this. But I do know that the main story revolves around taking the island challenge where you go to all 4 islands and complete the trials and face the Kahunas. There are also these like island guardian deity things of each island? Like they are special pokeys and apparently finishing the challenge at the island pleases them or something. I'm guessing this will work into the story later.
The first Kahuna is a part of the storyline from the beginning and he has a big belly and a big white mustache:
And basically is quite lovely. One of your friends who is also taking the challenge with you is his son? Grandson? I forget. He calls him "tutu" which I think is a Hawaiian word that is like an affection term for grandparents? So I guess it's grandson. There are a lot of Hawaiian words in this game lol. I'm learning things!
As for the story, I like it so far but the kind of 'main plot' has not really been revealed. Generally in Pokey you have some kind of like individual goal you're trying to accomplish of becoming a champion/taking a gym/trial challenge, and then there's like a plot involving other characters that unfolds as you proceed through that. It's still very mysterious at this point, though.
You have two friends who travel around with you, Hau (the grandson kid from before) who is also taking the challenge, and is super hyper and obsessed with eating malasada. And then Lillie who I LOVE LOVE LOVE and is super mysterious and cute. She protects this weird special Pokémon that she carries in her bag, and some bad people seem to be after it? And she hates Pokémon battles because Pokémon can get hurt and her Pokémon doesn't even know one move (which is, gameplay-wise, impossible XD) and you kind help her out as you travel around, too. She's super cute and I love this little trio of friends. Since the 3rd generation of games, the cast has revolved around a little group of friends that are all on their quests together but for different reasons. Usually there's some kind of friendly rival with a similar goal to you, and then other kid or kids who have other goals and are traveling, and they're all really cool and cute. I really like Hau and Lillie, especially Lillie.
Also Lillie seems relevant to the main plot because they put so much mystery into her Pokémon, and then the game's opening cutscene was just her running away from people who were like... attacking her or something?
Also there's a 'bad group' called Team Skull who... I have no idea what their purpose is yet (they just seem like a petty gang at this point -- stealing and stuff), and there's another like "good group" called Aether, which has member Colress from BW2 (!!!) and they seem to be a scientific research group that's also dedicated to righting Team Skull's wrongs.
However, I'm a little suspicious of them, because I feel like the people chasing Lillie in the opening cutscene were Aether people? But that was so long ago, and you don't actually learn about Aether until way later. It's also interesting though because the Professor and other 'good' characters seem to be very trusting and involved with helping Aether, and the professor's wife is even an Aether researcher. And Lillie seems to be okay with being around Aether people so maybe I'm just remembering it wrong XD I just remember the opening having lots of white.
Anyway I love Lillie and the characters so far and can't wait to see what happens. Aether and Skull seem interesting and I want to know more about them. The Team Skull lackeys are cute and I love their O_O faces they make when you say shocking things. There's also a running gag that no one takes them seriously and it's so cute and funny. Like they'll do something that should be very threatening or alarming and everyone is just like "Oh it's just Team Skull" and goes about their business LOL.
The only complaint I really have about the game so far is that the areas are quite small. This is only a half complaint, though, because despite being small, they feel very 'alive.' So there's a lack of exploration over a large physical area, but the bits you get to explore are very interesting. But many areas are disappointingly small and I am left feeling very unaccomplished afterward. Generally every dungeon and path in the game so far you can travel from one end to the other in like 10 seconds at the most, with a little handful of off-the-path stuff to 'explore' but there's really not any exploration there. It's just "oh look, an item off to the side" or "I can fish here" or "If I step off the road here, there's a place to look for Pokémon." I haven't felt like I really have been able to explore anywhere yet.
Being said, though, I've had a lot of fun trying to find all the Pokémon as I try to fill the Pokedex despite all that. I feel like going through the areas the first time, everything seems so small, but when going back and trying to fill the dex, it's like all the areas combine into one giant explorable area. I guess because you're not seeing them as tiny areas between two checkpoints/story events/whatever, but as one big area.
And the only new feature I'm not impressed with is the camera thing. Pretty much it's a super watered-down Pokémon Snap. There are like 'hotspots' for taking pictures, and if you get your 'camera' thing out there, you'll be able to take a picture of that limited area. You can't even move around, just turn a little. There will be a Pokémon there wandering around, and basically you just keep your camera zoomed in on it and wait for it to face you and do a special animation, which can take forever, and then take pictures. No other way to interact, just waiting and snapping. As you level up your camera, you get... better zoom. That's it LOL.
After you take six pictures, you can submit one to upload online (not IRL, like ... a fake in-game "online") and you'll get 'likes' on it (which are just like... a scoring system). So like you submit a picture and you'll get like 2953 likes or something. Once you've gotten a certain total number of likes, your camera gets upgraded. That's it. There are no rewards for doing this other than upgrading the camera? And the pictures you take you can save to your SD card but they are boring and the quality is horrible (like I think they get resized to like 160x90 pixels for the thumbnail or something and then scaled back up from the thumbnail so your pictures are like ridiculously grainy and ugly and have like compression fragments everywhere??? it's absurd) so like there's literally no point to this feature other than the feature itself. And it's not all that cute? Like most of the Pokémon do NOTHING but walk around slowly, and now and then like... jump and smile or something? Some don't even do ANYTHING but like wander in circles. And it takes a ridiculous amount of likes to level up your camera later, like... generally with the L4 zoom, I can get on average pictures with like 1,000 to 2,500 likes. The BEST pictures can get around 5,000-7,000 likes (and I got one with 11,000 like once) but these require 1. a rare Pokémon appear and 2. spending like 5 whole minutes trying to get a good shot of it. And you need 1,500,000 likes to get to the next level of camera................ So this is an obnoxious and annoying feature. If the Pokémon did a variety of cute things or were more interactive or if you got some kind of rewards to use outside the camera minigame, it would be cool. But it just feels so pointless, but I feel compelled to level up the camera because it's THERE, which is annoying lol.
Anyway, that's how I feel about new Pokey. I think I have around 40 hours in the game already (got it on Friday lol) and my team is a little over level 30 each. I named all my Pokeys after US Senators from Indiana (this theme came from the fact that I wanted to name my starter pokey "Donnelly" lol shoot me). There are only 5 current or former US Senators from Indiana that are still alive with unique names (there are actually 6 but two have the same name lol) so for the 6th one I chose Harrison (for Benjamin Harrison) since he became president, and he was elected into the Senate at the same time James Garfield became president, who rivals Ulysses Grant as my fav historical president.
The namesakes with the pokeys that are named that:
Joe Donnelly: Decidueye (Grass/Ghost owl that looks like it's wearing a hooded cape thing, SO COOL, I think it's not supposed to be dead but more like a necromancer?!)
Dan Coats: Grimer (new Poison/Dark form of Grimer that looks like radioactive and super toxic, I love it)
Evan Bayh: Ribombee (BUG/FAIRY it's based on a bee fly and is super cute and has the coolest new move I've seen)
Richard Lugar: Charjabug (Bug/Electric bus. It's literally a bus. I love it tho.)
Dan Quayle: Lurantis (Grass type that imitates a bug appearance. Basically a big plat flower thing that looks like a mantis, super cool and it's like pink and white theme!)
Benjamin Harrison: Araquanid (Water/Bug super sexy giant underwater spider thing like I can't even explain how awesome this thing is it's like 5'11' and drowns Pokémon with its face bubble head thing and like... wow)
^ Though of all arachnid-themed Pokémon this is probably the least sexy. But uh... Ariados and Galvantula are just... GUHH
I might change some out later in the game if I find something even cooler, but I really love all of these. But I mean like you're limited to the pokeys you can find in one area at the beginning, so I have all these early-game pokes. So who knows what I'll find. I found this thing called Wimpod that is so cute but I accidentally made it run away and now it won't come back ;n; but I'm guessing it comes back once a day or something idk???
SO THAT'S MY POKEY STUFF. Gonna go back to playing now lol.
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Also I miss my DS but I guess it would be too old to play pokemon anyway? But all I know of Pokemon is that my friends play it and I don't have it, and Team Rocket (haha yay) and only a few cute Pokemons I like.... and basically I don't really care about Pokemon except to collect lots of Pokemon even though I know none of them so IDK what my problem is. I just like collecting crap I guess xD
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I'm horrible at being brief so here is my description of the game as short as I can make it:
The main game is a series of chapters (four) in which you play 10 quests and then the chapter 'closes' and you have to do the 'story' quest for that chapter, then you'll move to the new chapter. Your emperor dies and you select a new emperor from the members of your army. When you beat the game, your emperors are revived fully and the game starts over from the beginning. Which 10 quests you take are up to you, and each quest is like a mini-story, and there are many arcs in which the quest you take will unlock another, some even branch into many different quests depending on how you beat them, what you say in the story parts, etc. The main story itself even has 4 different story routes too. The story is just a jumbled mess of crossovers of all the other SaGa games. There's hardly any original characters and it's like random story elements from all the games got mashed together.
Outside of playing the story mode, you can play history mode (take on any quest you've done before) to get S rank on them, build up your army by hiring characters, build up your town by leveling up facilities (sacrifice characters to go work there), send characters on training/studying missions to power them up in various ways, etc. There's also regular events which include mini-stories where playing the quests drop like... quest currency that can be used for rare items in a quest shop, as well as dropping promo characters.. then there are trial of gods events where you spend these fight token things to attempt a trial, which is just a series of battles, and there's leaderboards and you get items and money and stuff the more you clear and the higher you rank, and then now there's a "combat" event where you actually face other players' parties (controlled by computer, though) and there's leaderboards for that, similar to the gods' trials.
Anyway, the characters are all individual units so like regular Katalina and Dragons-Dogma-outfit Katalina are two different characters. So it's not like Katalina herself is getting another outfit, but you have a completely different character which is... Katalina in another outfit LOL. Usually they have some kind of unique attributes or something, too. And even within regular characters there are different versions of them lol and you can have multiples so like you could have 50 Katalinas if you wanted to (I've seen people in the Combat event with parties all of one character it's funny XD)
But yeah the quests are essentially just a little set of paths your characters walk on and you can split them up to try to get all the treasures if you want. The battles are turn-based battles similar to Romancing SaGa series. And you're supposed to build up huge armies so you can use one party while one rests, or to use in events or whatever, or exchange when a quest boss has certain weakness or whatever.
There's various things that require premium currency (that you pay IRL money for with a Japanese credit card and bank account lmao) but the cool this is that the premium currency is actually available in-game. There are like... .achievement-like "missions" that will reward you with it, the events reward you with it (and there's always like 1 or 2 events running at any given moment), and then daily login bonus has premium currency every few days. So you can save up the premium currency over time. So there's nothing available to pay players that isn't available to free players. The only thing pay players have an advantage with is they can get stuff faster if they want to pay for it, and each day you can get a very small discount on hiring a new character at random if you use paid currency instead of free.
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And like the different outfits are like... completely different characters LOL so like Dragons-Dogma-Outfit Katalina is a separate character from regular Katalina (and there's like... 3 versions of regular Katalina too, and like probably some other weird versions idk LOL because she's popular)
Anyway all characters from Imperial SaGa are just cameos of characters from other SaGa games. And other SaGa games are like... actual turn-based console RPGs, not this like... weird online pay for money crap XD Katalina originally comes from Romancing SaGa 3 which is a Super Nintendo game. It was never released in English but there's a full fan-translation (it's not that great, but it's at least fully completed and makes the game playable, but I mean games used to have crappy professional translations back then too XD). The guy in my icon is from that game too LOL Most of the other games have been released in English. I talk about all of them so you might have gotten Imperial SaGa mixed up with another?? XD
But yeah I love getting extra costumes too LOL. Sadly the promo characters are a bit weaker than purples so cool-outfit Katalina is completely worthless to me -_-; I'd love to have the gold Katalina, though.
And yeah new Pokey is for 3DS only so you'd need one of those. There are over 800 Pokémon so there's probably more you would like you just haven't seen them yet XD Like the ones that are popular and you see everywhere are usually just the original 151 from the very first game on GameBoy because those are the ones popular with hipsters. Pokémon Go only had those ones XD But uh yeah you can definitely focus on just collecting tons of them in the game too XD It's one of my fav things to do, you get essentially a bestiary called Pokedex and you can try to fill it up by collecting every single one XD A lot of them you can catch but some you have to evolve. And it's fun figuring out where they all are. Once you've seen one in the game (either by running into it in a random battle or by battling an NPC trainer person who has one) you get a little map that shows all the places it can be found.
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But outside of catching there's lots of ways to get new ones and many you'll have to use those special ways, such as evolve (which can be done in a huge variety of ways, like trading with friends, giving them special items, being in special areas, etc. there's a ton), hatch from eggs (like certain 'baby' Pokémon can only be obtained that way), get through some kind of special in-game story thing, or trade with friends who have other version because those ones don't appear in your version or whatever. But yeah if you like collecting crap the game is ALL about collecting crap XD Like, not only can you collect 800+ pokeys (well, in each game it's like... a subset of all the ones that exist... this one has like 302 I think? And that's just the "native" ones, there are ways to get non-native ones like after you beat the game or by doing special things, so it probably has like around 500 total), but there are tons of like... item collection and stuff you can do.
And then on top of it the game mechanics themselves are like... surprisingly strategic and deep, and there's a really huge competitive (and casually competitive) community for the game. There are always online and irl tournaments going on, which you can play very casually, and in this newest game there's even a way to host your own tournaments in-game. And if you even hate playing with other people to the point you even hate random matchups against other people, once you beat the game there's always some kind of like... challenge area where basically they have competitive-level computer opponents and you can try to get win streaks and compete in a variety of ways there and win trophies and stuff.
There's so much crap to collect that you pretty much will never finish unless you play for like 5000 hours and participate in events and crap. But you can kinda set your own goals/limits... like I just like to collect all the native pokeys in a game (since getting the entire 800+ or whatever usually means owning multiple games, going to limited-time-only events, etc., but you can tell the game to only show you native ones in your completion thing) and get certain sets of items or whatever.
The main campaign is like SO easy though. Like you will easily beat every opponent without even having to think about it. But for me the fun is in finding and collecting everything so it doesn't bother me at all XD But the competitive modes (whether you're doing the 1P or multiplayer) are super hard (in a good way). I always rank bad in competitions and I can never get all the trophies in the challenge areas. But I like to train teams of pokeys I like rather than the strongest ones. So I could probably do better if I went purely for win/strategy but ... with 800 pokeys to play with, I don't want to limit myself to just the big strongs.
But yeah Pokémon is sooooooo fun hahahaha. Especially if you like to collect stuff. And it's super cute.
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