Games/Expansions Pokémon Scarlet Pokémon Violet The Teal Mask The Indigo Disk
Platform Switch
Region Paldea/Kitakami
New Pokemon 120
+7.The return of landmarks!
We kick off with a bit of a reactionary point as far as the chronology of the Pokemon series is concerned, but one I certainly keep close to my heart. When Pokemon Scarlet and Violet launched at the end of 2022, the series had gone almost a full decade without a game that seemed to care about populating its world with memorable cities and towns worth revisiting: Sun/Moon‘s commitment to a cohesive laid-back vibe significantly hobbled the “memorable” part; and Sword/Shield‘s fear of inconveniencing the player in any way ensured that “revisiting” wasn’t on any line of the game’s design document.
Happily, the ninth generation games ensure that the series’ second allegorical visit to mainland Europe is just as geographically fleshed-out as its first. Meaningfully different stock offerings in shops all across the map, important venues/NPCs with immovable homes, and town positioning along well-travelled paths ensure that despite the games’ fully open-ended structure, plenty of built-up map markers are worth a return or twenty. The distinct art design of each locale certainly helps; from the multi-levelled water features of Cascarrafa and kitsch futurism of Levincia to the bustling markets of Porto Marinada and Iberian tile art that lines Alfornada, the landmarks of the Paldea region tick all the boxes for me. But those are just the populated ones, which brings us to…
“Not another Pokemon replay post!” I assume you cry in anguish, promptly scrolling past and continuing to live your life. Well, to that I say:
It was Pokemon Day yesterday and I have nothing else to write about in February;
Nintendo recently announced that Nintendo Switch Online Game Vouchers won’t work on Switch 2 games, they’re being awful quiet about their 2025 Switch 1 releases, and I’ve had a spare voucher sitting around on my account for months;
I wanted to play something requiring minimal attention while bingeing Formula 1: Drive to Survive this past week in preparation for the new racing season, and let’s be honest, Pokemon Brilliant Diamond / Shining Pearl are the most mindless Pokemon games available on the Switch;
I actually never got a chance to write properly about BD/SP, because in 2021 I hadn’t yet started my annual Game Re-Releases countdown.
What do you know; another perfect-storm excuse to play through an old Pokemon game and turn a critical – albeit rather quick – eye on it as we go.
Wow, People Hate This One
It’s not hard to find negative opinions about this one: just about any Pokemon YouTuber or writer around seemed to have a sour impression of Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl when the games launched in late 2021. As far as I can tell those impressions have either been reinforced or forgotten about entirely almost three and a half years later; despite 15 million copies sold worldwide, there aren’t a ton of softening opinions to be found (yet). And the sentiment is rather easy to explain. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: it’s all about expectations.
The Pokemon Company used to set a pretty regular precedent of remaking older games to keep the series’ momentum going, and they were usually well-received. Gen IV remakes were rumoured among fans for much longer than any prior generation, and that hype was never quelled or addressed in any official capacity. Yet last year’s so-called “Game Freak Gigaleak” revealed that Gen IV remakes may not even have been planned at all until the eleventh hour, as the studio was focused mainly on the relatively fresh series direction represented by Pokemon Legends: Arceus – which conspicuously launched a mere two months after Brilliant Diamond.
As a result those very remakes were the first-ever main series games to be outsourced to a new developer, ILCA, and the lack of development time afforded that studio is sadly plain to see in the end result. Am I here to argue that this product does not feel rushed?
Life can be pretty predictable at times, but often it just has a funny way about it. This site may have already enjoyed a slightly more-active-than-usual 2024, but following the traditional post-June hype season lull it was probably going to stay pretty quiet for a few months as per tradition. But suddenly, there is something else to write about.
You see, long after I had given up hope of playing a working Game Boy Micro – let alone owning one – a deal too good to refuse came across my entirely metaphorical desk out of nowhere a couple of months back. I am now, at long last, in possession of a tiny baby handheld console I didn’t even register as existing until long after Nintendo had stopped manufacturing it. And with a barely-believable GBM comes the question “What do I even play on this thing?”
A minor excavation campaign revealed some potential candidates: Advance Wars feels like it was made for this machine, and it’s been a real long time since I played through Final Fantasy Tactics Advance – with no sign it’s coming to Nintendo Switch anytime soon either. But would you look at that, Pokemon Leaf Green just so happens to turn 20 this year, and for a decent chunk of my life I told people it was my favourite Pokemon title. Across multiple forms of public transport and various hotels and other locations, I’ve been working my way through a long-overdue playthrough; let’s see how it holds up then, shall we?
But first:
It’s So Tiny!
The Game Boy Micro feels so miniscule in 2024 that it’s barely believable. The thing is a quarter of the size of my phone, which was already the smallest device capable of playing games in my life. Picking up the tiny AyaNeo Air Pro after a session with the Micro makes it feel bulky and cumbersome, to say nothing of the even larger Switch OLED. Of course back when it came out it was competing with a fleet of already-small dedicated Game Boy handhelds, but let’s not understate things here: even compared to those, this one is an almost cartoonish miniature.
Games/Expansions Pokémon Sword Pokémon Shield The Isle of Armor The Crown Tundra
Platform Switch
Region Galar
New Pokemon 89
+7.Into the slipstream
If you had to summarise the entire legacy – the highs and the lows – of the main eighth generation Pokemon games in just one word, “streamlined” would be pretty close to bang-on. Just about everything Pokemon Sword and Pokemon Shield did for the series seemed hell-bent on trimming fat, tucking in corners and straightening out paths. This post will come back to this theme repeatedly, but we start with all the miscellaneous quality of life improvements that make going back to older generation games just a little bit tougher after playing Sword or Shield.
The headlining improvement in this area was surely the ability to access the player’s boxes from almost anywhere in the game world, swapping a Pokemon out from storage into the party with a couple of button presses on the clean new user interface. A one-button save shortcut, the entirely fresh autosave option, non-intrusive activities to allow boxed Pokemon to grow (goodbye Festival Plaza and good riddance), combining the Affection and Friendship stats into one mechanic, wild Pokemon models visible in the overworld (a welcome feature brought over from the Let’s Go spin-offs), a proper audio balance menu, bikes that can surf, and the consolidation of several useful features traditionally locked to specific cities into the most useful Pokemon Centers in history all add up to a smoother moment-to-moment experience than ever before.
As of right about now I’ve been playing Pokemon for 20 years. Out of the 809 Pokemon currently available in a Pokemon game at the time of writing, these are my 20 personal favourites (with another 20 honourable mentions for good measure). The list can and will change, but it’s been coming long enough, it’s easy to understand, it’s Pokemon hype season, let’s go. .
20.Tentacruel
There are all kinds of reasons why a Pokemon might make anyone’s personal list and I’m no exception. As someone who started with the first generation in the late 1990s, when I was all over the games, trading cards and anime, Tentacruel didn’t really stand out for me initially. Evolving from the extremely annoying, common-as-salt Tentacool, its only moment in the spotlight came in that one anime episode where Team Rocket forced a gigantic one to appear and wreak havoc.
But fast-forward a decade to my period of highest engagement with the main series Pokemon games, when I would put in literally hundreds of hours breeding, training and battling Pokemon teams with my friends across Pokemon Black, White, Black 2 and White 2, and Tentacruel started to become a real staple on my roster. In just about any competitive game or sport my default strategy is to slow down the game and play defensively, controlling the pace where I can, and Tentacruel used to absolutely excel in that role. Throwing down some Toxic Spikes, burning attacking threats with Scald, and healing off damage in wet weather with the Rain Dish ability and some Black Sludge was never not satisfying for me. I’m sure my friends hated it though. .
19.Lycanroc
A recent addition, Lycanroc was always going to have a decent chance at standing out from the Sun and Moon crowd thanks to its heavy presence in the marketing and its three amazing form designs – one of which served as a promo for the two Ultra games – but its refreshing niche as one of the only properly quick Rock-type Pokemon around makes it a lot of fun to use in battle.
I rarely double up on Pokemon between playthroughs unless I have a good reason, but after putting nearly 50 hours into Sun‘s Battle Tree alongside a Midday Form Lycanroc, grinding for Battle Points and trying to beat the secret boss Red, I didn’t hesitate in adding the Dusk Form Lycanroc to my Ultra Sun team a year later. That +1 priority Accelerock move is too rad.
So the Pokemon series is set to resume regular programming in a matter of days with Pokemon Sword and Pokemon Shield. At long last, we will be treated to a region based on the United Kingdom, with all the rich historical and cultural inspirations that implies. This has poured petrol on the never-quite-dead embers of the theory that someday Game Freak will let us return to the Kalos region, based largely on the south of France and made famous by 2013’s Pokemon X and Y. After all, England and France have a long and, ahem, storied history together, and to this day Kalos is the only region to star in just a single main series Pokemon game release…
Now I don’t actually believe for a second that Sword and Shield will be the first games in a almost two decades to give us a full prior region to explore on top of the fresh one. But I do believe there might be some significant Kalos references in there. Of more importance, lately it seems that something inside me will break if I don’t play a Pokemon game every half-dozen months or so. In fact, since the dreaded 2015 – the only year without a new main series Pokemon game in the last decade – I have done at least two full Pokemon playthroughs per year (Yellow and Sun in 2016, then Red, Silver and Ultra Sun in 2017, followed by Crystal and Let’s Go Eevee last year). And I still don’t feel like I’m ready to say goodbye to my 3DS, even if Nintendo definitely is.
mmmm, 240p
Long story short, I decided to pick up Pokemon Y all the way back in April of this year and give Kalos the second go-around that I’ve given every other Pokemon region by default thanks to customary re-releases over the years. It’s been long enough and my Pokemon-playing habits have changed a great deal since October 12th, 2013, when I picked up Pokemon X for the first time. This could be a bit of fun, I thought. Cue a few months of on-and-off playing, a few more months of on-and-off writing, and a whole lot of fresh perspective. Here are my unsolicited thoughts. .
Games Pokémon Sun Pokémon Moon Pokémon Ultra Sun Pokémon Ultra Moon
Platform 3DS
Region Alola
New Pokemon 86
+7.It’s the simple things
I’m starting this one with a catch-all cheat for the first time since my Gen IV post because the seventh generation Pokemon games rolled in at the end of the series’ 20th anniversary year with a swag of smaller changes that truly gave the traditional Pokemon flow a boost in playability. Some of them were flavour-leaning, such as the huge list of Pokemon who suddenly learned new (usually really cool and/or signature) moves on whatever level at which they happened to evolve, the long-absent return of music tracks specific to the time of day in-game, or the (once again) greatly appreciated minor stat boosts bequeathed upon a couple of dozen older Pokemon to bring them more in line with their designs (e.g a bit more Special Attack for Noctowl, much more durability overall for Corsola and the celestial rock twins).
Other, more immediate changes came under the “quality of life” banner, and they were received with open arms by the community at large. The headliner for long-suffering competitive players was the IV Judge feature no longer requiring a visit to a particular NPC to access, nor an intimate knowledge of six specific phrases. Simply open your in-game PC after a certain point in the game, tap an icon on the summary page of your intended Pokemon, and there’s a graph of all six of it’s hidden Individual Values. Laughably easy. In addition, each time you caught a Pokemon in the wild you now had the option to add it to your party right then and there, rather than send it to a PC box. The bottom screen of the 3DS also started pulling more of its weight this generation, displaying new information such as all combatants’ current stat boosts/drops, not to mention the predicted effectiveness of a move on an opposing Pokemon as long as said ‘mon had been encountered before. Someone at Game Freak was paying attention.
NOTE: This post is designed as a much shorter follow-on to last year’s revisitation of Pokémon Silver Version via the 3DS virtual console service, so I recommend you read that bit here first.
Nintendo are a bunch of crafty bastards. Releasing a game like Pokémon Crystal at the end of January 2018, without any big-name new release competition to speak of and a bunch of potential customers in holiday mode, was a bit of a guarantee to ensnare people like me. I picked up Crystal on the 3DS Virtual Console because it was cheap and I figured I’d get to it eventually. In actual fact, I smashed through its main content stream – all the way through Kanto and Red – inside two weeks from launch, almost exclusively in the down time between events over a coastal family holiday. This despite completing – in a manner of speaking – three Pokémon games on 3DS last year (Red, Silver and Ultra Sun) and having the gall to complain about all the great new games I wasn’t playing. This series is my kryptonite.
As luck – or something else – would have it, Crystal is a lot more divergent from Silver than I remember it being, making it just as worth writing about. Yes, it’s still largely the same story, but compared to its prototypical predecessor Yellow, the third Gen 2 game packs quite a bit of extra meat on the bone of Gold and Silver, in both obvious and under-the-hood ways. Also, unlike in my Silver run, I decided to go all the way through Kanto in Crystal this time around, because why not? I was in deep enough. All of this extra gameplay left me with the following quick thoughts. .
I was a few paragraphs into writing this when the SNES Classic came out and ruined everything. I came back to the post afterwards and, naturally, it then turned into several thousand words.
2017 has been an insane year for new release videogames, a fact that has become even more true over the last few months. And yet my most anticipated release date of September 2017 was the 22nd, when Nintendo and the Pokemon Company would – at long last – release Pokemon Gold and Silver on the 3DS Virtual Console (Incidentally just about the only acknowledgement by the big N this year that such a service even still exists – sorry Switch owners). Patched up with wireless trading/battling functionality and wrapped in that gorgeous 3D-compatible faux-Game Boy Color shell, just like Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow last year, they presented a mouth-watering nostalgic proposition for me on paper. In fact as a testament to the sheer value that “comfort food” media can have, I even purchased and finished the VC version of Pokemon Red a couple of weeks earlier when it went on sale in anticipation of the newer re-releases, even though I had already given my full attention to Yellow in a similar manner in 2016.
Unlike Yellow, I no longer have access to my original Pokemon Silver cartridge, so I haven’t touched the original version in any form for almost fifteen years. In light of all the Pokemon generations that have come and gone in the years since, not to mention the glut of YouTube videos, podcasts and articles on the internet praising the second generation for all its once-groundbreaking qualities, I was more than ready to give Silver another go. And then write something about it, so I could feel less guilty about all the hours spent not doing anything else. This post will probably be a little scattershot in tone, and the “screenshots” will be poor and DIY in nature, but I’ll at least try to keep my thoughts aligned with the order of the game’s events.
Yep, another concert post! What a time to be alive.
I’ve lived in Australia for 17 years now, and been a tourist to these great shores before that. But last night marked the very first time I had the pleasure of entering the Sydney Opera House. My reason for doing so was not exactly standard for the venue, mind you, but it was certainly worth the wait. The long-hyped orchestral treatment of the music from the Pokémon series had finally arrived in our backyard, and the event did not disappoint.
It was a bit of a sore spot for me that I had never seen the famous Sydney Symphony Orchestra live in any capacity, not least of all because that meant I’d missed both 2011’s Distant Worlds concert (music from Final Fantasy) and 2013’s Symphony of the Goddesses (music from the Legend of Zelda series). But I was never going to miss this one, and there were very obviously hundreds of others who felt the same, because there was a real excited buzz in and around the iconic Darling Harbour venue. Continue reading →
Vagrant Rant 