L25-13 - Day in, day out.

I don't need to beat the rest of this.

Honestly, I think in trying to pursue the credits I've sapped a lot of the fun out of this game--so I'm going to stop myself before I lose what's left.

The biggest problem here is the difficulty. There's plenty of self-restrictions you can give yourself, but largely you can make as many mistakes as you want, completely destroying the tension that the original had. Additionally, every level is given 3 (presumably algorithmically generated) difficulties you can select from--nice in concept, but in practice these remove any sort of possible smooth difficulty curve, and the puzzles you're solving at hour 2 are about the same difficulty as the ones in hour 15. And because it's Picross, it's the sort of thing best enjoyed as a means to kill 5 minutes while waiting for the bus, but it's pretty much just following a rote process, so it doesn't really reward any sort of deeper engagement.

It's fine though, I guess? If you play it in a brief context, sure, but it's really not much above any other sort of game you could play on your phone. Cracking the Cryptic is still miles ahead of most other abstract deductive/Nikoli-descended puzzle games for active play, and as far as passive games, I feel like I get more out of daily trivia/word game stuff (crosswords, the DLEs) these days.

Battle music so good and virtual pets so marketable that you might forget how boring it is.

Long time followers may remember my not very positive Pokémon Legends: Arceus review from a few years back, and I feel I owe an apology to that game. Not a huge one—it’s still not a good game—but it does in fact compare favorably when placed next to most other games in the series. At least, if Black is supposedly as much of a standout game as fans’d have you believe. And I am privy to believe them, having played about halfway through a bunch of others like HeartGold, Emerald, and X. None of which I could be bothered to finish, except this one.

Mainline Pokémon is just boring. That’s really the long and short of it. Animations take about twice as long as they should (even with battle FX turned off). The UI in general is way more sluggish and clunky than it should be, with particularly notable pain points being the weirdly slow bag menu and the atrocious PC system which requires an incredible amount of fiddling for what should be a simple party<->PC swap. It takes at least a good 10 hours until you get access to fast travel, so if at any point before then you want to, say, retrieve a Pokémon from the Day Care, have fun spending 15-20 minutes back-tracking across that long-ass bridge. I do not know how anyone gets through these games without emulator speed-up—something that really should not be said about a game released as late as 2010.

The story, which one could generously describe as “good for a Pokémon game”, cares less about doing anything particularly interesting and more about hitting the checklist: we need a rival character (or two), we need 8 gyms, we need a final 4, we need an analogue for Team Rocket. Everything is contorted to satisfy these demands. Sure—Team Rocket in this game is kind of vaguely a PETA parody, but there’s only very slight gestures and minor exceptions towards seeing them as anything besides unambiguously evil Saturday morning cartoon villains. The presence of two rival characters, the wealth of now semi-defunct online functionality, and the almost fully linear layout of Unova just contributes to the feeling that you’re not so much saving the world as you are earning junior scout camping badges, same as everyone else. And outside of major cutscenes, there’s simply no interesting world to speak of, with every NPC having a single line of dialogue somewhere between tutorialization (“you can buy health potions at the shop!”), ham-fisted worldbuilding (“Unova is a long ways away from Kanto and Johto!”), and a facile fortune cookie’s worth of advice (“you must know your team well before facing a strong opponent”). The most memorable part for me was when I got to the graveyard tower, expected there to be a quiet, somber note, and then was immediately thrown into battles with loitering psychics and ghost Pokémon. I’m sure it was more important to have yet another dungeon instead of something tonally interesting.

And the combat system. What a terrible, awful combat system. I would say that it’s busted beyond repair, if the Mystery Dungeon games didn’t Theseus’ Ship it into working. EXP (mostly just a measure of how much you’ve grinded) is by far the most powerful factor in battle, to the point where you can pretty much ignore everything else. Being only a few levels above an enemy will allow you to steamroll them almost every time, even at a type disadvantage. Having two or three Pokémon with high attack stats will carry you through the entire game without much effort or strategy required, and getting them to that point requires even less active attention. Obviously this is done to make it accessible to kids, but unless your age is in the single digits I can’t imagine this not getting boring pretty quickly unless you implement some external self-restriction (at least I understand why Nuzlockes are so popular now). Trainer battles are consistently dull too—the one somewhat interesting mechanic in this battle system is in the Blackjack-esque strategy in trying to get something’s health low enough to capture but not kill it—but trainer battles throw that out the window.

Following up on my point from the beginning, the relative focus towards wild battles in something like PL:A puts it a step above most other mainline games—at least in that case you can treat it as a proper collect-a-thon. In most of these, however, the leveling system overprioritizes keeping the same party around the whole time, with any new additions usually requiring grinding to get them up to speed. This causes wild battles to get more and more pointless as time goes on (and more avoidable with inexpensive repels), so most engagement is restricted to battles where you just need to make the enemy’s health bar go down as fast as possible. Counterintuitively, “collecting them all” in most mainline games is something you only bother with if you reeeeeally want to see that Pokédex full, for some reason.

I’m convinced this whole series is mostly just riding on spinoffs (including the anime/trading cards), character design, and nostalgia to stay afloat. Even as a kid I found these too boring to get anything out of, and I think they’re a big factor of why I was put off of RPGs for so many years, but with broader perspective of the genre, these games really are just miles behind most other big franchises, even its own spinoffs (every PMD game, yes, even Gates, has a better story and more fun gameplay). Pokémon fans have been decrying the stagnation of the series for at least a decade and a half, but I really don’t think there ever was a time when these games weren’t just palette swaps of one another. That isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the world, but it helps if the underlying game is any fun in the first place.

Consider this my review for every past and future mainline Pokémon game; I hope it is a long time until I trick myself into playing one of these again.