Temtem (2022)

Been a while since I said hello! I've lurked a bit, but I've been pretty busy with work and such. Hope everyone has been well. <3

I finished the main campaign for Temtem earlier! I'll need to work on a review at some point, but I mostly need to get back to Xenoblade Chronicles 3, which I haven't touched for like a month. Gotta finish this stuff before Pokémon!

Is anyone planning on picking this up next week?

I know I posted some about it when it was first publicly launched on Steam like two years ago, and I played for a while, but I ended up dropping it (not because I didn't like it, but...me and sitting at a PC to game) for the time being.

It's a shame it's launching so close to Pokémon, but I feel like it's something I'd sink time into over a while as opposed to just playing through a Pokémon game and then being done with it.

This early access Pokémon-like game has been on my radar for a long time now, but I just found out something interesting about it that differs from its inspiration. That change is that it has entirely left out randomness in battle such as critical hits, missed attacks, etc. in an attempt to make the game more skill-based. I actually don’t feel like this is as good of an idea as it intuitively sounds, and it’s sort of an interesting topic.

Some of the most exciting moments in RPGs are things like lucky critical strikes or dodges, or like your Pokémon snapping out of confusion or waking up early, etc.. For one player to get that, someone has to be on the receiving side of it, which sounds unfair, but in the long run the best players should be able to skillfully overcome the odds more often than not. Removing that kind of uncertainty from battle sounds to me like it would make battles become stale more quickly, drop a whole extra dimension of risk/reward strategy and surprise from the game, and rob the game of a different kind of skill of being able to adapt / plan / work around unlucky rolls.

Thoughts? I guess the thing just becomes, if you want your game to be static and predictable in a vacuum like chess so you can focus on mind games and pure strategy instead, it had better actually be exciting enough on its own merits to make that lack of random chance make sense. And for that I guess I can’t comment on this game, but for Pokémon, I think random chance is certainly not a bad addition to spice things up in a simple formula that’s mostly balanced in favor of player agency over luck.

Wanted to do a short(ish) update now that I've had 30 minutes or so to actually get into some battles, capture some Temtem, and experience some other things. This really isn't spoilery, but if you intend to play and don't want to know anything about it, I guess don't read this?

~Battle music is hella good. Actually, the music in general is nice, but the battle theme stands out.

~Capture animation is really cool. Temtem are kept in cards (kind of reminds me of a digitized Card Captor). I haven't failed in catching one yet, so I'm not sure how that looks.

~My team just hit 6, and so far, most of them have some pretty cool traits (think Pokemon abilities), like being immune to poison or sleep attacks.

~Battles are smooth and the animations are really nice. They're all double battles as well. So far, anyway.

~Stamina and the wait option. So you have stamina instead of PP, which you can raise by having the Temtem wait a turn, and then deplete stamina with attacks. This is what I've gathered, anyway. It hasn't been officially explained to me.

Only issue I've run into is tamer and random battles making me think that the game is crashing. You'll be immobile in the grass for a good 15-20 seconds before the battle starts. This happens with just about every battle, though, so after it happened two or three times, I realized it's just a buggy aspect at this point. Not a big deal. The battles themselves are fine.

I picked this up for the early access on Steam yesterday. I'm not an MMO fan, but from what I've gathered, I don't think I'll really dislike that aspect, if it's forced, when it comes to this game. I might even actually enjoy multiplayer. It was also kind of an excuse to use my PC more, because I'm predominantly a console gamer but built a tank of a PC a couple summers ago and barely use it.

Between the capacity limits and trying to address some things on my PC and laptop (and do typical adult duties around the house), I didn't get very far. I made my character, followed the professor to his lab, and picked my first Temtem. All of that ran quite smoothly with no issues, but I haven't even gotten to a battle yet.

The capacity thing itself wasn't too terrible. First time I started it up, around 5:30EST, I was around 11,500 in the queue, and only waited about 10-15 minutes. A queue of around 6,000 a few hours later took a bit longer. I read that there were a lot of connection issues earlier in the day, but I didn't run into any. The devs were throwing out updates all through the evening and early morning.

I've been looking over type charts, and the match ups are pretty interesting. There are 12 types, some of which are mirrors of the Pokemon equivalents (like Nature being weak to Fire and Toxic, and strong against Water and Earth) and some that are original, like Digital and Crystal. Gonna take a bit to learn them all, but that's kind of exciting.

I know the Pokemon comparisons are going to be unavoidable, but I think this already has enough customization options and personality that it's going to be able to stand on its own eventually, without the Pokemon crutch.

Edit to add that I was using a PS4 controller to play. I used mouse and keyboard when starting up and making my character, but quickly switched over. This isn't really a jab at the controls--I'm just not much of a PC gamer, so mouse and keyboard just isn't comfortable to me.