Pokemon Sword
So I decided to stop letting my preconceived notions about this game from before launch continue to keep me from playing it. I’ve been a fan of Pokemon ever since I chose Bulbasaur on Pokemon Blue back in the late 90s. I’ve played every generation since, and have always loved the charm of the series, and the “gotta catch ’em all” attitude.
Enter…. Sword. Well, everyone knows what the series is about. You’re a kid, and you go around beating up adults to prove you’re better than them, and you stop some baddies along the way that are abusing pokemon to achieve some goal. Well you’re still a kid beating up adults, but there’s no baddies this time…sort of.
I’m going to bash on this game here for a bit. As a long time fan, I was expecting a lot out of this generation as it made the jump from handheld to console. Never has a mainline Pokemon game been on a console, only spin-offs. What we have here feels really uninspired. There is NO voice acting. None. Not even fake language being spoken over the text. There’s usually a pretty lackluster story in these games, but at least there is some. In Sword there’s almost nothing. There’s nothing going on besides your travels to the “stadiums,” this generations version of gyms. You just go place to place. There’s a group of people called Team Yell, but they’re not bad guys, they’re just groupies for a fellow trainer named Marnie. They’re completely harmless. The new gimmick, Dynamaxing, replaces Z-Moves and Mega-Evolutions completely. You essentially make your Pokemon extremely large for three turns, and every move is akin to a Z-Move. It becomes a strong move based on the element of the base attack. However, my non-dynamaxed pokemon could usually one or two hit oppenents pokemon which were dynamaxed. It didn’t really feel all that impressive for all the visual flashiness of it. There aren’t many people in town, that is unless you count the swaths of people that essentially live inside the stadiums 24/7 packing the stands. I think I see more NPCs in the stands for one stadium battle than I was able to interact with in the game many times over. Where are they all from? Where do they live? Are they all tourists? I never see them around town. Speaking of the stadiums, they have some interesting “challenges” you have to complete before you get to the leader. Essentially puzzles to complete. Well in one you’re given dowsing rods that can tell you where pitfalls are. The description says they will vibrate when you are close. So I thought the controller would vibrate, but it just shows little circles around the rods on the screen. Missed opportunity. They could have also made challenges that factored in the gyro functionality the Switch offers, but they didn’t. A few water battles I had happened completely over land. And finally, a bad guy finally emerges in the last hour of the game. There was no lead up to it at all, all of a sudden there was just a bad guy. 90% of the story actually existed in the “post-game” after you become the champion. All in all, the story just felt completely absent and some design choices made this feel like another handheld entry, dating back to the Gameboy Advance days.
There was some good things. The music was very well made, and fit into the scenes and maps well. I found the towns to be very cute and pleasant to explore. The 3 dungeons of the game were pretty. However two were identical as they were both caves/mines. The other was a forest. I really liked the forest town with all the fluorescent fungus everywhere. Lastly, you get fast travel and a bicycle very early on, which was nice.
Overall, I believe the negatives outweigh the positives here. I personally would have loved to see the post-game story integrated into the main game to beef it up a little. The inclusion voice acting and motion controls would have made it feel a little more like a console game, versus a handheld entry. GameFreak left a lot to be desired in its console break out for the powerhouse franchise. Let’s hope Pokemon Legends can do the franchise some justice on the Switch.
