Pokémon Shield (2019)

Revisiting Pokémon Shield with its expansion pass in preparation for Pokémon Violet

Pros

• Pokémon following you in the overworld
• Both of the new areas are like expanded wild areas, meaning there’s more of an emphasis on overworld pokemon than encounters in the grass
• More open world rather than the traditional linear routes

Cons

• Version exclusives. For some reason I’m okay with the base game having version exclusives, but the expansion passes having them rubbed me the wrong way. I think it’s because to even get the expansion, you have to pay for it on top of buying the base game so the double dipping seems extra annoying? It could also just be that I’m salty it was harder to find friends to trade with since I got it when everyone else moved on from the game. Even so, there’s a minimum of 4 separate occasions where you would need to have a friend to trade with to complete your dex: Kubfu evolution, Cosmog evolution, Regieleki/Regidrago, ice horse vs ghost horse

It feels like the expansion is what the main game was trying to be. Really excited to get Violet/Scarlet, bugs and all.

Enjoying Pokemon a lot as I'm plowing into it, finishing the first two badges. My son is really loving watching it too. I ask him to nickname the Pokemon we catch and as such my team is made up of things like Birdy, Fishy, Purply, Ruffy, etc.

Sadly, this game has really kept me from Ring Fit, which I feel guilty about... like I fell off my gym plan.

I can't believe this is the 100th game I've beaten in my life. I couldn't have picked a better one to mark the centennial?

Nah, but seriously, Pokemon Sword/Shield is pretty good. I'm as disappointed as everyone else that they couldn't have done more with the Switch hardware and we didn't get our Pokemon version of Breath of the Wild, Odyssey, Ultimate, and Three Houses like every other freaking Nintendo franchise got. Still though, I had fun playing this game.

I can't say too much that hasn't been said already. As far as where I land about whether it's a good game or not, I pretty much agree with everything Girlfriend Reviews said:

If I could just add a few specific things that ticked me off about it:

• Challenge. Hooooly crap this game is easy. I wrote a research paper in my undergrad about the correlation between the difficulty of Super Nintendo games and how much people generally enjoyed the game. I pretty much found that there's a sweet spot for difficult gameplay, and a game can only be so enjoyable if it's not at all challenging. That's pretty much the thesis of this game. It's so easy. Like you're fighting in a semi-final matchup for the league championship and the other trainer doesn't even have six pokemon kinda easy. Like gym leaders have pokemon that are weaker than the wild pokemon right outside their city kinda easy. Like I didn't even bother dynamaxing because I wanted to give myself a handicap kinda easy. A game can only be so fun when it's do damn easy.
• Animation. A lot has been said about this topic. I'll just add that they weren't even smart about how they used the animations they did make. Raboot, an evolution of one of the starter pokemon, one of the icons of this whole game, can learn double kick and headbutt. When you use double kick, his animation is two little hops, which are really just him being lifted twice on the y axis. Ok, whatever, they didn't program a kicking animation. Can't win 'em all. Then...his headbutt animation is him doing a kicking motion. It actually has a kicking animation, and they chose to use it for headbutt rather than double kick. And this is one of the main pokemon in the game! It's small, I know, but it's just a reflection of how much care they put into the game. Though I will say that in battle, most pokemon actually look really nice in HD.
• Speaking of care, that's my third point. Maybe we've just been spoiled by all the franchise-defining games on the Switch, but it's just so obvious that they didn't put any care into this game at all. Or if they did, they focused on the wrong things. From terrible dialogue to terrible and limited clothing options, those little details that you find in the Odysseys and the Breath of the Wilds just weren't there at all in this game.
• Repetitive. Not just in gameplay, but in so many aspects of the game. I actually like some of the changes they've made to cut out repetitive battling, like party experience and such, but other parts of the game still grew stale very quickly. Like the wild area, for example. I too thought it was really cool for the first five minutes, until I was only running into four types of pokemon wherever I went. This gets better the further into the game you go, but my desire to explore was quickly drained when every wild battle was against the same pokemon. Camping was another repetitive task. Something like 100 different curries, and they all do the exact same thing. Absolutely pointless. Team Yell. More repetitiveness. I'll stop there.

As usual, I said more than I thought I would, but there, that's what I think about Pokemon Sword/Shield.

I played Shield, and I beat the game with Cinderace, Dragapault, Hitmontop, Grimmsnarl, Togekiss, and Toxtricity.

PS, I actually wanted to boycott this game, but I ended up buying it off my friend when he got stuck with an extra copy of the game.

• After thinking about it, I decided to demote this to a 3-star review. The fact that I had fun just really can't outweigh everything bad about this game.