Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu! (2018)

YOOOOOOO. Shiny Geodude. And Golem is a Pokemon I really like, too.

True story, I had only caught ONE shiny in a Pokemon game legitimately, back in like 2010. But I caught 2 in Scarlet and now this fella in LGPE. But be progressing to the mean, as it were. For the hundreds and hundreds of hours with no shinies.

PS I named it Toblerone.

I wanted to love this game. I still want to love this game. I love Pokemon and I love the memories I have of playing through the original Red/Blue/Yellow and Gold/Silver/Crystal. I sank hundreds of hours into those games. Any chance to relive a bit of that magic is a welcome one for me. But man, these games are so tedious. I picked this up a long time ago, back when it was released and I bounced off it abruptly. I can't even remember how far I made it but it couldn't have been very far at all. I picked it back up a couple of months ago and as soon as I got to Mt. Moon, I remembered why I bounced off.

It's just so fucking slow. Slow, tedious, drawn out. Pokemon games are criminally guilty of this. Everything is agonizingly slow. Every action, every bit of dialogue, every step taken by the character. I wish like nobody's business there were an option to speed the game up as I do with the FireRed ROM on VisualBoyAdvance.

I think it's safe to say I'm done with this one.

Oof, 17 hours with this game, and I'm really frustrated. A little update, not a review, I don't want to spend much more time with this ...

Pro

• nice visuals
• anime inspired music
• sweet interactions with Pikachu
• Pokemon follow you

Con

• too much focus on catching:
  • trainers don‘ t give you much exp (but they are everywhere) >> they give you Pokeballs
  • you battle a trainer to get this Item lying on the ground >> you get a Pokeball
  • the only efficient way to farm is to catch Pokemon >> horrible catch mechanics
• sometimes long waiting times in fights
• very bad designed menu structure
  • cumbersome and redundant
• you have to meet certain conditions to get into the Arenas (e.g. you have to catch 50 different Pokemon)
  • it takes away the freedom to play the game like you want and disrupts the flow
• the bike was completely removed (and the Pokemon you can ride disappear when there is not enough space ...)

I played every Pokemon game and especially Leaf Green right before that game and in comparison ... that game really is the worst – by far.

I got Let's Go Pikachu on launch day and, having re-played Yellow only about 2 years prior, I quickly tired of the Kanto region. I got roundabout to badge #3, and quit in the whole middle portion of the game with the whole Lavender Town, Silph Co kerfuffle, which just as I remembered, drags on forever.

But for whatever reason, and perhaps all of the Sword & Shield coverage coming up lately, plus a reignition of my love for Pokemon Go, I picked it back up and finally beat the Elite Four last night. Without a doubt, this is my last foray into the Kanto region, and possibly my last Pokemon game for a long while.

Don't get me wrong - I think the game was great and a nice nostalgic return to my youth, playing Red/Blue in late middle-school, early highschool, and of course spending many hours per day playing and trading Pokemon cards, but the formula has definitely tested my patience a bit.

I did really enjoy the new catching mechanic, at least to a certain point, but that's mainly because I despise random encounters which always deincentivized my exploration of the in-game world, and this basically turned it into a (completely luck based) catching minigame that also worked to level up your team.

Of course, playing the catching minigame was akin to fencing with giant salamis, in the sense that it was extraordinarily klutzy and barely functioned at all. Most of the time I found myself frustratingly yanking the Switch off the dock and just using the damn "press A to chuck a ball and roll the dice" mechanic of playing in handheld mode.

I definitely got my fill of Pokemon for the year and so I'll definitely be passing on Sword & Shield, just for now - I still have Alpha Sapphire to get through on my 3DS, but it'll also be some time until I get back to that. The problem with Pokemon games from someone who's played so damn many of them is that trainer battles just get boring to me after a while. Throw random encounters in there too and I'm just too frustrated being constantly interrupted.

They have always been quite linear and I think having a more open-world (NOT an open-world Pokemon game, but more open) with more than just Pokemon battles and gyms and encounters would be pretty neat.

I doubt that would ever happen or else the cultish fanbase would revolt, as is typically the case with any tweak of the formula.

Just my $0.02, but the series is about a decade overdue for some new and interesting mechanics, not just in battle, but in overall tone. Sun & Moon was an interesting departure, but one thing that always bothered me was how every single person in the world ... talks about Pokemon. No one has any problems, Pokemon aren't holding up banks or causing economic collapse, destroying the environment - and of course, everything is just themed around Pokemon, 24/7.

How about a guy who's struggling from depression because his Pokemon was stolen and exploited, and you need to rescue it, then use some mechanic like the training or affection meter (where you pet and feed them from X/Y) to nurse it back to health and make it happy, then give it to the guy as a pet to help him through tough times?

The Pokemon franchise needs a major overhaul.

Yokai Watch changed things up a lot, and while I despise the comparisons drawn, the thing with Yokai is that they were spirits that affected the way people acted, so it was more than "everyone is happy! Happy! Oh no bad bad gang people do bad to Pokemon, must beat their Pokemon and save world YAY!"

I remember one moment in Yokai Watch where this kid's parents kept fighting, a totally realistic and relatable thing for a young child to witness, and you had to remove the evil spirit that was causing it. It was real, it happens, and it was so interesting to me that the whole world was plagued with problems.

Pokemon are held up on this ridiculous pedestal when they're essentially wild monsters that have been caught and trained. Let's see them cause all sorts of problems in the next installment, maybe attacking and eating people. It'd make it a bit more relatable.

Anyway, I'm ripped on caffeine at the moment so I'll stop typing now.