I didn’t want to do it at all like I was like “I wanna play other games” so I did but once I finished a second playthrough I had zero excuses to not do it so I did it for both boys Turns out I missed taking photos for one of ketsuban’s outfits which is going to drive me nuts so now I have to somehow recreate it It’s a bit much

Dont think this looks right at all to the og fit. It’s kinda weird when you beat a game but the overworld remains the same and static with only a handful of NPCs acknowledging you did anything I think pokemon needs like a sandbox postgame where it’s like a slice of life scenario where it’s like animal crossing and you get a handful of things to do that change all the time Where am I going Leon gave me a charmander but I have a shiny (illegal) Guess we’re doing genned now

Ketsuban raid chronicles begin I have no clue what level postgame is so let’s do this easy Two Pikachu one with an ash hat Where’s the plot Check the Weald Yep, checks out

Hi hop Ohh this is like the Calem battle where once you do that then you’re allowed to do the plot stuff Sonia wrote and published a book! Why can even you say no to putting the sword back They look worse than I ever could’ve imagined I don’t think I’ve ever been more repulsed by a Pokémon characters design I want to pick them by their haircuts and throw them into the lake HEY, don’t pick those up and get the jingle Buddy has his emergency exit Pokemon as his last Pokémon We’re using a detector to find those pompous haired weirdoes There’s a huge arrow like “HERE IS THE THING”

I might use eternatus these guys are pissing me off Is the cycle of champions and rivalries always ending in losing and the winner feeling like they haven’t won anything at all or am I just projecting onto the fact that hop and Leon are basically already taken off the shelf for the new blank slate replacement of the champion

They have models for the gym leaders in the raid? Huh. Cool. They have a little in game cutscene for the NPCs maxing out Sonia said “I’ll go online and find them” you go girl

Hey quick question why do they let you make these facial expressions for cards (I found a way to make them transparent)

Piers really has the energy of guy who is here only because his younger sibling is friends with the group and now he’s just hanging out Is this whole epilogue just “hop gets his groove back” Why does Dubwool have to turn around to do its kick animation Double edge on steel types He is not cooking

I feel like there’s a lot of characters who have like an ace and hop’s is dubwool and I can’t remember any other Pokémon from his party in spite of the game being played like twice in a row this year

You know SWSH had some really nice looking characters and then there’s these two and I need this game to not show me them in the zoom in The assistant was evil oh no, wow, not like she was a literal NPC design The plot of SWSH needs to take a little inspiration from XY being in france

There’s a minor lighting thing where if you stand in one spot you start glowing which wouldn’t be that noticeable but Sonia and her gran were both wearing white so I got flashbanged The theme is “every gym type has a corresponding Dynamax Pokémon” Yamper needs to hack the door They said “solo” I’m confused as to why this one bit has all these things I’ve seen in no other raid thing

I think if they want these postgame romps to not be like 30-40 min they need to disable fly but having to deal with this clown ensemble of “royals” for even longer would vaporize me If these two got in the gacha game I hope to god the end of service would be a day later Can you imagine if fly worked like old MMOs where you had to wait for the Pokémon to recover for like 2 hours Lol

Yamper status: hacked None of them are even using a clap animation Are they telephatic “Uuuhhh the legendaries are fake” bozo behavior!! “Old history good” you guys didn’t even DO anything “We deserve respect as descendants” no you don’t This “story” is actively sabotaging itself with these two and their limp hairstyles I hope they never show up again Do not speak to me you third rate NPCs Why does it have the DBZ power up sound It has the bass dog music again

My favorite part is i completely forgot to take rocky helmet off Phyllali so pokemon keep getting chip damage The strategy of “leech seed+ sand attack” has served me well for 2 years running since I started documenting playing pokemon games actively versus my passive childhood “play and forget”

The entire plot of this was “some guys were mad that their fake clout was exposed so they tried to drug the magic dog but the other magic dog and the literal champion of the region were right there” That dog just turned 180 degrees and hopped away I liked the old version of the dog music better, they turned up the dog synth too much in this one

Okay what happens if I don’t catch it because leech seed kills it Or rocky helmet could also happen on god This keeps happening I keep killing postgame legendaries on these runs It’s like the slowpoke all over again Mandatory catch

There’s like a 50-50 chance bewear could kill in one go If it’s mandatory what is this catch rate They for real said it’s 10/255 and you will feel that I don’t have anything that can tank behemoth blade and I shoved the master ball into my PC No heavy ball Okay what about dusk Are you kidding me Works all the time huh 100% of 100% dusk ball rates

I’m not going to lie, I rather would’ve had just gone with “you can find the legendaries chilling” like in emerald versus whatever they were trying to do here Piers really went “stop calling me when you have problems” What was the point of making me even go there if Sonia was just gonna teleport me to the end I haven’t said much about it but these dialogue choices are completely the pits where it’s like “I would not say that”

The game: Hey, Hop also has a legendary now, isn’t that cool! Me carrying around Eternatus and Zacian and making curry: Huh, what He is emotion dumping on me in the middle of the battle Look, the dev team is clearly trying to do something with this character conveying it through this medium Yuh huh look my bewear is punching his snorlax he could maybe have picked a slightly better time to say all this Does Hop acknowledge if you just use eternatus or no He does not You know even in terms of competitive meta Zacian completely outclasses Zamazenta from what i understand of competitive Everyone remembers the sword wielding hero, not so much the shield protector
Oh god, no, the cycle continues of the rival giving up and becoming a professor. This is my fault. No, I do not want this character to be goddamn monarchy, abolishing the throne immediately Abdication

All of this is making me wonder right now what the heck the government administration of galar even is No way it’s primarily the league but it seems like Marco cosmos was the largest conglomerate of the commercialized power to the point it was basically a monopoly that ran galar in terms of the monetary tourist trap that the spectacle of dynamax gym battles would be Okay but since Leon and Oleana joint have the place running what does that mean Is Leon basically like the president of an entire country now or just the company (I’m the only one who would ask these types of idiotic questions)

The game finally has the day night cycle working Freedom. Gotta suck if you’re a rival in the pokemon world and you’re stuck with someone who’s a total jerkwad about the entire thing like “what are you gonna do, beat me in a battle?” And then you end up in the insurmountable pits watching them only get better and outright replace you if they find a better rival and your relationship is nothing more than a footnote while you have to find an alternative job that is far away from what was once your original dream because you’ll have to live in their shadow forever otherwise (Which apparently was what happened with Leon and Sonia) Did you not write an entire meta story about that once I mean yeah but that wasn’t because of Hop There’s a type null here Thoughts on battle tower They got Toby fox to compose this song and apparently he snuck in a reference to a homestuck song in it here look at Leon’s costume He got rid of everything but the hat

8/30 Wisteria The title screen changes whenever your character changes costumes too

I FUMBLED no dusknoir for you, lmao Okay so I was messing around with bgxs for cards and turns out you can just like use the one off white background to make transparent images of trainers so technically I can make a ton of Pokémon OCs through this as long as they meet the criteria of: being white The thing that kills me is the hair flopping in the wind like a vaguely large image of something that I don't want to say at all

What about the DLC

Verdict: The gym leaders have brain cells but like the NPCs are dragging down the count I really did try doing the postgame again with Wisteria and I was like… I don’t wanna play this anymore so I closed the game and started playing pokemon masters.

"would you buy the DLC" I am still on the fence my normal philosophy would be "wait for 3rd game imporovements" because it doesn't change the fact the main game is like a dry rotissere chicken and the swordwart shielbert part makes me want to eject the cartridge out of my switch like if I bought the game as is for $60 dollars at launch as is I don't even think it was worth the $40 dollars i spent on it at gamestop the thing is it is like a very good rotissere chicken, the recipe hasn't changed at all, but it's kinda sauceless It's just a boring game. It's a nothing game. It's perfectly fine and playable but like It's just a pokemon game. It didn't dissapoint me, I just didn't feel anything.

Ummm. Idk. I need a break from sword. I feel like I might be crashing out pretty soon for Pokémon related stuff.

Going to be honest i don’t feel like taking notes for every part of the game so I’ll only go with anything new I noticed that wasn’t there before hand or just an outfit supercut because a lot of this game so far is just me doing raids and hoping that I refresh the raid den to not just have the same four ghost mons over and over I’m not keeping dates up, only new date will be when this game ends Wist has no hat. I just saw gyarados spinning aggressively in a lake Biancle… Bioncle… Bionicle.

Why is this weather so ugly, can’t see a thang I wish the TVs actually gave out info or there was a radio I could use to check the weather I think the map does that but I’d love if it was in real time like a schedule The rotom rally gets me watts, so I could just farm my way to getting the ultimate upgrade super early on and still never leave the wild area The payout sucks tho when its only one spot I can make it up with the base pay from a raid We are truly vibing in the wild area Why are there designs on the back of shirts that won’t normally be seen in the overworld because of the huge bag Gorgeist Are all the ghosts I’m getting trade evolutions or something, how absurd

Okay, now that I have her though I can use grass moves for Nessa When can I get the special ghost encounters..? Wandering spirit is such a silly ability, every time I hit I keep going back and forth How come toxitricity protected a random lighthouse Interesting Not many guys know what the heck to do against a shedinja so the AI just spams status moves. Revive is now the funniest thing to use since it’s only 1 HP Also now I gotta think all the time because bug has weaknesses and a lot of Pokémon learn moves that are the weaknesses (dreadnaw the bite Pokémon… idk.) Water pulse spam, I’m getting Misty flashbacks Curse stall!

I need a frillish… Not until surf or a weather condition or a raid RNG luck Man Huh? When did I take 49 damage? It was at full HP… All I did was go into the dusty bowl? Yeah whatever, idk. It works.

Jeez I shouldn’t have used the exp candy S Extreme over leveling on my end because I didn’t know the amount they gave out This might be the most easy game to snap in half difficulty wise in just by using in game resources I got the frillish! I’m trying to rotate out team members so I have more type coverage So I don’t think I’ll be keeping up with using an eviolite since there are wild area encounters that are the trade Pokemon

Onto the fire gym Gonna aim for a Litwick in here The first time I thought there was only 3 mons in general but turns out they respawn The AI will definitely get Shedinja eventually since a lot of mons have bite and fire coverage so I’m benching it for now. The fighting one is after, right? How the heck did people find out all the Pokémon within all the dens and their percentages Just looking on Serebii is making me go “that’s too much to think about I’ll just stick to what I have” Whoaaahh, is that raid battle a charmeleon?! That’s nice I guess. Free exp.

I still think its kinda stupid that you had to pay for a DLC to transfer if one of your pokemon isn’t popular enough to make it onto the base roster like you’re telling me that with all the Charizard push in this game bulbasaur and Squirtle are chopped liver until DLC when alola island scan handed out starters like candy

Currently shedinja is looking like the one who might get PC boxed since I want dreepy and wanderer dusknoir for physical I don’t want an eviolite dusclops. But why is it a 1% encounter dragon Sheesh Got it in a raid den Noice

It’s really funny playing with the Pokémon and then they stop and go “I want curry” but like. You’re a shedinja. Where does the food go.

Okay so turns out I basically can’t catch Dusknoir until the 8th gym because the way the badges are set up gym 7 only lets you catch up to 55 which dusknoir by default is always above Guess Shedinja stays for a very very long time or maybe no dusknoir at all Driftblim is also a potential weak link since I only ever use her to spam gust Really, any trade ghost wanderer would be good but I’ve already used gastly a lot for gen 1 and I like switching teams up

Bea fight Counter doesn’t work Lmao How fast are speedruns for SWSH? Pretty short if you team build before hand I think, right? 4 hours?! Sheesh.

Opal fight Why does this togekiss have insane coverage Now what. The rock gym town selling punk shirts makes 0 sense, if spikemuth had a store these clothes would definitely be there Note to self Find a level cap for flying run That wasn’t fun at all. I keep forgetting about sturdy. I straight up wasn’t paying attention to the bob’s your uncle cutscene, I pressed A and was like “huh, sure, okay.” The skip button needs better utilization. Where does the 2nd dragon come from? Like I always wonder that for a pokemon where the pokemon just gets another version of itself, does it just pop into existence? So like can everyone’s rotom bike touch water or is it just the player’s again? As predicted and pretty obvious by how badly I did with yell fights Piers nearly wiped the team the first try

But he didn’t No encores I really did rely on aftermath and curse stall If it works it works It was scummy but it worked Hold up Does this skunktank really have no attack moves aside from sucker punch Certainly not I’d HOPE not.

Snarl! 8/29

In theory I could do something incredibly funny for the double battle experience and keep self destruct as the main move There’s nothing against the rules saying I cant do that I didn’t buy any extra revives I just went straight to the gym Do I even need them? Considering Piers… Well, I won’t have to rematch him, so I’m fine. I really shouldve gotten rid of flygon, why’s it got crunch Oh cursed body pulling through Disabled! I like how the camera has to zoom back in to show the mini double battle …

Why am I bringing a shedinja to finals Idk lmao I accidentally put an early birthday because I couldn’t remember the exact day (8/29 vs 8/31) Well, it’s nice that Pokémon still has a little birthday celebration sort of thing There are glailie chasing me. Dreepy was my latest and probably member I’ve used the least Like the definition of a benchwarmer Dragapult maybe will pull through for the finale Also late game snorunt means a frosslass but I’m not doing a last minute replacement . No thanks.

You don’t really think about how many pokemon that looked good in 2D look whack in 3D and how 3D onlies will never get 2D alternatives outside of dream world art That said I don’t think I was ever supposed to see and know gigalith had a mouth My Final outfit, a walking advertisement for ghosts

Marnie. I still haven’t bought any healing items Wanna do it like the X run? Eh, I’m good. I might just be tired of sword. Or tired in general. Since you change between elevator rides I assume that must be one slow moving elevator

Insert plot progression here The way I blanked out on rose tower because I was like “this shit sucked my first playthrough” and only went “huh, what” when I was already at Oleana I don’t think I’ve ever NOT paid attention that much to a mainline pokemon game No thoughts have entered my mind during the finals you know when you aren’t going to have any difficulty not because you’re locked in but because unless something stupid happens with a team you’re safe Sword finals so ahhhh boring I started cooking curry in the camp Ohhh if you cook curry on your birthday you get a little candle Cute

Imagine if I stirred the curry so hard i broke the circle button like how I almost did when I used to play smash 3ds You would never need to do that though Gust still hits even when bounce is active You learn something new every day

Insert plot progression here I don’t think I’ve ever felt a pokemon game that had its plot just give up at the end and say “idk” as much as SWSH did What is the point being selective with which cutscenes are actually skipped or not this is a 2nd playthrough I’ve seen all this already is it literally only the ones that aren’t running through the in game engine

Feeling nothing but “mmm. Yep. Sword.”

Oh I forgot about Aegislash AGAIN dragapult vs dragapult Can’t be champion without spamming full restores! Shedinja has taken the benchwarmer role Inteleon has the one move that could be troublesome What is Mr. Rime. Ice??? Oh yeah that’s ice Bye Can curse be stacked What a stupid question, do not do that. And thus the story ends as it began Curse stall

Oh no since my pokemon fainted because of the sandstorm no one celebrated with meeee :( I beat it on the fictional character’s wrong bday. Hooray. Okay, I’m gonna go get some lunch now, bye. Look at all that Sweet Exp...

Mono run: You really need to have self imposed limits or this game can become a cakewalk because I was too busy vibing in the wild area and basically made part of Lategame boring as hell until Piers tried to roundhouse kick my team and that was the only major danger

So what’s next Fairy or flying or normal Why not just keep going with all the types No. What about dragon Dragonite isn’t even until crown tundra Are you joking wasn’t that one of ash’s aces in journeys

Wisteria Oh yeah, no WiFi because no Nintendo account for alt accounts Will that affect DLC?

Prepping up for flying mono run and my ghost mono run What about the SWSH postgame? Uhh. Maybe. I was considering doing the mono runs with the skip cutscene feature. I bet it doesn’t skip all the dialogue though. It doesn’t. What’s the point then?!

Cutscene skip doesn’t even skip the dialogue, only the handful of cinematic cutscenes. What a pointless feature. You can skip them with X but again… Picked Scorbunny for the starter. Sending it to pokejobs immediately. Role is to get to wild area ASAP and catch as many ghosts as possible (avoiding trade evos because I can get them later I think?) Watchtower ruins is where I need to go and I have to check out den 6 (the dens have names???)

Wasted all my money on clothes but forgot gloves Oh well, next time after i fleece trainers Annual means it’s yearly, so what happens in the downtime? I never got that answered. Maybe the minor league…? Hop acknowledges if you have no pokemon on your team at all aside from the 1st one Non raid NPCs suck

Watchtower ruins! It’s a duskull Can I like reroll spawns or something Hmm. And I got booted again.

Tf The slowpoke is immediately here?

Really don’t want a trade evolution when I know dusknoir and Gengar are special spawns but I’m gonna catch this one just in case RNG screws me over with the next raid (using a wishing star so I can have 2 teammates since this area is too high leveled RN) Ah yes The 49 HP sponge How would you find that while playing blind Dumb as hell The plan: do more raids get another wishing star and then get all non trade evos before moving on if possible I’ve got plenty of free time And now I gotta wait for NPCs to do the thing because I lost slowpoke… This is the gameplay loop I’ll have to do for every monotype run so this is just practice. I ended up in a raid with a businessman, woman, and schoolgirl so I just ended up on a galar family outing.

Crazy how you can pretty much almost build up an entire monotype team depending on your luck with raids Did not get lucky, it’s another ghastly. Okay, team of 3 for now, I’ll come back after gym 1…? I accidentally have two now. Box. Taking a second yamask so I can have a Unova one as well. I think I’ve exhausted the spawn pool for pre gym 1 so let me not come back for a bit

me and bede are matching because... i forgor Had to hunt this tumblr post down but anyways Wisteria’s birthday is June 27th so his uniform number is 627

Why Because. An alternate one for Ketsuban would’ve been 8/31 (the boy has many significant numbers associated with him now.) Wait, is the star on the card thing the thing that gets you raid numbers? huh? I can only get one star raids until I get 4 badges They have caps? You can't pick and choose?

stop raiding, go do the plot most of these tutorial bits have gloria, right? the boy might as well not exist. oh yeah, team yell's gonna be a bit of a problem all dark types

no hat wisteria kinda funny how the raids basically gave me the closest mons to the cap ah, normal zigzagoon... can i even hit hop's wooloo, all i've got is payback as a move how is it that i'm landing the critical hit, wouldn't that just be my pokemon

oh boy, i only have dark moves or ghost... curse! hp drain, go! need TMs this is taking forever by the way, you can just walk through the route don't even have to face the trainers

galar really was a game that had no trust in the average player to do any type of exploring and then when there are interesting things you can skip them like i only learned there were new spawns in the wild area during the darkest day after the fact because with the way the game sets it up plotwise why would you go back there

8/20

Yeah, the ghost monotype battle becomes slightly more difficult if curse can be healed by max overgrowth thankfully i have enough mons to outstall so now that I have badge 1 it's time to try checking out the dynamax pool again aw shoot, brutal swing hits all the parties? figuring out what's normal now is the real quiz i really need these ghosts to learn non ghost moves please bike obtained wait i don't even have to walk back i have a convient fast travel taxi now now that i've played the game i know the strats, game changer for real

The dragon guy probably has a thing to deal with fairies right Let’s head in and see what’s up Zero prep time let’s go! And there’s plot. God these trees are so ugly

I really had to come back just to hear hop talk about how cool his brother is What could that red light possibly mean Are raids not canon to SWSH

The game keeps going “so the kids are NOT getting involved in what is clearly the more interesting plot” it’s just Sonia’s big off screen adventure There is nothing else to this plot minus gym challenge, gym! Watch me be overleveled since I’m going into this with level 50s It’s not even disappointing me like X did, it’s just mid. It’s boring me, I can’t muster any emotions on it

GET OFF YOUR PHONE We got double battles in this game now Alright, it’s time to be the most annoying set up ever! Sand attack! Leech seed! Swords Dance! Turtonator’s sand trap is useless since I keep spamming sand attack with my French Leafeon Gen 7 was just full of little gimmick moves and abilities huh It’s really funny because you think it’s gonna be a marathon of battles but no they load up the cutscene and then you can heal in between What is your strategy “I hit fucking hard and I’m annoying because I use sand attack” You fool, using drizzle and snow warning only gave me perfect coverage for the lizard! 🦎

Ice beam, leaf blade, it’s time to lock in. The gigalith probably has sturdy. Whatever. Let’s fucking do this. Oh shit, he set up stealth rock Boy you are the last gym leader why don’t you have a full team of 6 I’m fighting a building.

I want to snap his rotom phone in half I didn’t even use the alcremie which is fairy type lol Girl take the lab coat off The red lights, the darkest day, the galar particles. But what does it all mean? It means that everyone in this reigon has an INT of like 5 collectively, and Sonia and Oleana are fighting for it most often. That’s cute They’re doing the thing where they’re both on the train in a cutscene again Why is steelix like the size of a worm It’s TINY as shit Malnourished

Can random ice types stop chasing me Abomasnow is huge and it’s tiny in battle I don’t have any ice coverage, better hope no one at the finals is carrying one or I’m toast Can this abomasnow stop hitting every single blizzard, I’m struggling with it more than I did with Raihan Looks like a dark type Actually steel Many such cases Looks like a water type Actually just fighting type Many such cases..

The last battle before Wyndon is the two interviewers from the grass gym route Welcome to capitalism city! Ads everywhere as far as the eye can see! This is not ever grande city. Marcel… isn’t that the Mr. Mime all the way from gen 1 you get in a trade? Oh wow, i have 400,000 poke on me Look at all these buildings you can’t enter! Alright, don’t care. Gimme clothes.

Look at all these clothes you’ll only wear like once since this is the final town until postgame or buying DLC! Who spread these places out like this. Geez. The pokemon have parking lots How in the world are you going to spend all this time building a huge ass city and then there’s still like 5 things to do in it Galar saying it’s world famous and yet there are no cameos of any past character whatsoever checking out the scenes

Wow, that girl who had the bug type thing who was a fan of me, it evolved! Cute.

Semifinals VS Marnie Go Marnie! It’s probably bad I used mostly just bewear to sweep her team, right? The crowd cheering really does add to this all I think I didn’t even buy revives or full restores, I just jumped straight to the semifinals. It’s so different from that time I played Leafgreen in 2022, right? I guess that’s the difference that QOL makes for a franchise. Okay, let’s see if I can’t turn this around with a dynamax of my own It feels like the game is pushing Hop the way that Alola wanted me to really like Lillie and so far my reaction is borderline apathy or a visceral reaction of “go away” and he’s done nothing wrong except be nice to me and talk about his brother who is literally the champion and want to be the champion because it’s literally the galarian way things are done and he wants to live up to the reputation of his brother and I’ve just stepped on him like an ant every time but he also feels like the most nepobaby rival since Calem in my eyes compounded by the fact he’s still like “I’m gonna be a legend! You’re looking at the future champion!” So it is truly mixed. I think he gets better in the postgame. Maybe. But I just want to let you know if he mentions super effective hits during semifinals Ketsuban is legally obligated to blow up the stadium

What the fuck is pinchurin Is that like Pyukumuku’s cousin Funniest lineup, imagine having your all star team and your major rival bloke brings out a pikachu and it hits static on your bird Snorlax (bear) vs bewear (bear) fight to death

HE SAID SUPEREFFECTIVE, KILL BUTTON IS ACTIVATING NOW DYNAMAX BLOW THIS PLACE TO SMITHEREENS

Nah, I’d win. Two hungry teenagers break into a national security level building because they don’t want to pay for food There is also this lanky man who invited his gang too This is just like Sliph Co with rocket and that one guy who has a key except here its an NPC in this huge ass city It’s this guy facing the damn wall Why are we fighting in the nondescript white void Did they not make a building model

Lee’s very important meeting… I really did just talk to every league NPC on the map until I found the guy and he was right there He has different pokemon everytime?

Why are you in the phone booth Bro thinks he’s dr who WHY is that thing clipping through the floor Don’t announce where you’re going, this guy is stupid

Piers is playing a song to get a crowd going (there are no vocals) This is like extreme children’s level of storytelling even by Pokémon level “he’s a bad league staff member” he’s trying to not get a pay deduction from his boss Why am I battling to like… elevator music. The elevator will stop and a trainer will come out Wow, just like an arcade game… It would be really funny if Eric came back again like “it’s meee!” They think they’re aether foundation

Marco Cosmos is literally a monopoly

What the heck is with this music, this isn’t what you’d expect out of a battle like this at all

How does the building immediately not collapse when there are two giant pokemon fighting on top of it Oh yeah, they’re hard light energy projections Why do they explode though Idk Oh, lmao, i blew up but then sandstorm chip damage beat garbordor

This is literally just a lady trying to do her job and these kids decided to just mess around because protagonist centered morality and storylines mean this has to happen

Cannot get over how everyone had broken in and it’s treated as a good thing because in any other setting this would be grounds for breaking and entering and public disruption They couldn’t just delay the tournament a single day because of a problem a thousand years in the future, do you know how dissapointed the fans would be We are going to break into this building because we are hungry

So there’s a subplot of oleana literally having her own “evil” league staff members and it’s never going to be brought up again so. Okay. There’s clear corruption going on, not a single person is going to deal with that at all?

I gave a child a handshake. Oh shit there’s gym leader rematches too? It’s Bede! I’m happy, he figured out his spot in life. I want to imagine that he went on some kind of large stupid off screen adventure in order to distance himself from rose and oleana basically using him as an incredibly ineffective puppet for the wishing star thing. Like he gained light back to his eyes.

Wait a minute Decorate makes the enemies attack go up? Not down? Shit. Im down a Mon! Look, I already know you’re gonna dynamax so I’m gonna too. Hatterene is just a little white alien with a big hat. Bizzare. He’s so ineffectual, he’s charming in his loser cringe fail ways. All bark no bite unless its to hop. Yooo, they remix the gym leader themes, awesome These finals battles are somewhat difficult and I need to think about what I’m doing?! Cool! WHY can I camp in a building What Bea does not have any fairy type coverage for some reason Girlie, its a basic weakness for fighting types I can hear my switch fan fighting for its life, now there’s the real challenge

You know, fire type feels like it should be a super effective thing to fairies Because fairies live in forests in usual depictions In honor of Piers, I won’t dynamax against raihan! Is it another double battle? I guess it would be weird to do a switch up like that last minute, right? It’s singles Raihan is too busy weather switching and I’m out here just ice beaming his team I have a fairy type, she literally had zero usage in either raihan battle and if that’s not an indicator of the difficulty level idk what is Do you think Raihan is eternally mad over the fact that he won’t ever beat Leon and he never gets the chance to again because Leon loses once and then immediately retires after the game is beat I thought that was gonna be a super scary attack but he just took away some of my move PP. oh well Can’t be a gym battle without knowing how to use a few full restores Geez, this is taking so long that I outstalled the dynamax.

There is always someone younger than you who is better than you is the lesson the game is giving It’s not like the elite four at all, you can still just leave lmao I heard if you get rid of all your pokeballs before eternatus the game still gives you one to use but I’mma just use a pokeball Boxed. I try not to use legendaries for my halls of fame anymore. Sucks to replace a long standing team member at the last minute. Heyyy guys its time i brought about the apocalypse A thousand year problem but what if I solved it! Me! For the history books! Galar’s low INT is kicking in again Man who is too future oriented decides to summon mega death satan to solve the energy crisis Imagine if this was Megaman zero… nah, that’s stupid.

This is probably like the ruby sapphire emerald thing where the game says it’s super serious but then you go to a town two routes over and not a damn thing has changed How hard can it be to program NPCs to say other things during the endgame Megaman battle network did it You know what would’ve been neat? When you revisit the Weald the pokemon levels change so im not just running into level 2 pokemon Oh shit they do The dog howling music is back

Two kids go graverobbing The game’s real covinient with fast travel All the NPCs have evacuated (I still see NPCs in their houses…) No, only the NPCs of the one plot important town. Dummy.

Galar being built on top of like an evil ass skeleton dragon monster for energy would be awesome in any other setting but then there’s two magic dogs that destroyed it so idgaf They already did that with alola anyways and Necrozma Chairman Rose does not deserve this cool ass theme, because he’s just some guy Apparently the anime tries to give him a bit of backstory by saying someone close to him died in a mining accident and he wants to reduce the energy problem because of that, and in Pokespe the deadline of the energy crisis is 100 years rather than a thousand years, but it’s still kind of immensely stupid. You couldn’t just have an executive plan to solve things gradually rather than trying to go about the problem single handedly and escalating to this? Like is it an ego thing or a paranoia thing? Why he stanced up though He’s not even evil, he’s just stupid. This entire plan is stupid. Dude, at least use an ultra ball or something, a regular ass pokeball? Holy shit, my character actually showed emotions like: fear Creepy ass alien music happening

Damn, that was easy, one ice beam and one psychic, that things a chump Oh shit, the HAND Oh we can’t use any moves at all What the fuck, where was this absurd presentation the entire game, they’ve got like memory flashbacks and the dogs launched into action to save the world like it’s an anime season finale THE HOWL IS BACK THE GREATEST Oh he looked so sad to lose his sword

Hop is out here doing barely even chip damage, once again I am carrying this group project Yooo, my pokemon toughed it out so I wouldn’t be sad, that’s my GOAT (greatest of all time) Orange girl, meddling kids, magic dog, mystery solving… This is just a Scooby doo plot And he would’ve gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for those meddling kids and their magic dog! The audacity of the player character to catch Eternatus in a pokeball and then proceed to bring it to kick Leon’s ass because you can do that. Leon will comment on if you bring it. Where was that production value for literally the rest of the game, they locked in for just that. SpongeBob time card: 3 days later.

Rose has been arrested. Leon still wants the final match, so literally nothing changed whatsoever, that was just a minor plot bump all things considered. Leon’s shirt is 1 because he is number 1 NOT FOR LONG Do you remember the early SWSH leaks that made up a fake plot that was like “Leon’s matches are faked and staged” I’m glad they didn’t make a POC character a fraud I do wish his character had any kind of notable personality traits though aside from getting lost because some SWSH characters feel like talking to a plank of wood and he feels like the embodiment of just being a famous competent celebrity battler with good PR but maybe the postgame will explore what his life is like now that he’s not champion and maybe he gets some hobbies or something Ewww, this theme isn’t intimidating at all, it’s just the hall of fame theme again He does the same face slapping thing his little bro does

Oh god, I do not have anything for Aegislash coverage Yeahhh! Paralysis! I love you! I love status effects! So is it a thing for both brothers to love talking about super effective hits I feel like I’m being patronized, this game feels like it would give me a participation trophy.

Oh shit this guy has type coverage for real ROCKY HELMET What is a dragapult, is that the cannon shooting baby thing It is! Does he not carry full restores I don’t have grass coverage Why is he only using endavour???

Dude this AI is borked. It is fire flying still. Oh… my pokemon toughed it out It’s like David and Goliath over here The charizard has type coverage for everything but electric types Huh?! Yeah let me just heal up pikachu and then work from there Or I could stall. I could stall. It’s getting speedier…

Pikachu, clip this things wings. Thank you Spark. And it was a Crit. That’s my boy. Get off me. Where’s my hall of fame I don’t even get a photo? The credits is a pre-rendered cutscene of a pokemon band. IT’S THE TITLE SCREEN?! They Mike Wawowskied my Lizard.

The first impressions clear verdict: (Base game only) this game is weird. Like I do not know how to describe my feelings because unlike X’s vision and scope being basically done better by every game after it , Sword in my mind has areas that make me go “how is the pop in worse”, “this shit looks like the PS1 (the goddamn trees)” and “there is a much more interesting plot happening offscreen”. The fact that there’s nothing to do in the reigon outside of gym challenge centric stuff really makes me go like “but why though” because Alola had much more going on in terms of side content and that was the generation before it. Pokémon games need some kind of side game distraction thing because otherwise the game is just gym wild area gym wild area gym…. Contests really should’ve been mainstay. (This is where the DLC factors in to make up side content but like it doesn’t fix base galar’s set of problems.) It’s more railroady than Alola but there’s less to do especially if you don’t visit the wild area because at one point I was so good for levels that I just didn’t need the wild area or raids whatsoever. I’m pretty sure not counting like LGPE or a spinoff game this is the shortest mainline game ever. Music department is good (Pokémon hasn’t ever had a soundtrack that would be considered bad) but sound department is bizarre (raid cries, Piers Mike, random flapping noises with some flying types), presentation of battles is wildly all over the place (backgrounds and “energy” animations that feel less cinematic than the predecessor ), lack of new good QOL (skip cutscenes does not skip text walls, you can’t skip Dynamax animations even though their windup takes forever), plot is also barebones and its a weird turn around because for the most part in Pokémon games really do let kids go about into the unprotected wilderness and fight teams and dangerous situations but in this game it’s like “we do NOT want you doing that.” Also weirdly patronizing in some areas, like with how Leon’s final fight still talks about super effective hits.

I don’t remember what I was doing last time Oh this outfit sucks Maybe today will be the day I get to evolve milcery Hate it here, just give me the star decoration!!

Alcremie is a punishment for people who want to do dex completion and don’t have the DLC because its a drop rate chance for only 3 areas and one is in the late game The drop rate is random and it’s not like the pool is just toppings, it’s an RNG nightmare This doesnt even get into the fact that the spin is ALSO time based and if you screw up the spin then you have to redo the entire thing Give me the star sweet Okay so it turns out that the sweet was NOT in fact a battle cafe drop Okay, that makes me feel slightly better It’s a raid drop Maaaan Whatever, a clover sweet is fine too. Drop that. I think the cafes might be hard locked depending on the autosave. I kept resetting and I kept getting a love sweet. Okay. Now it’s time to properly explore route 8.

Route 8 is a bunch of ladders. Seriously, why can my character stop time on ladders? It’s funny but it’s also like… why. I wonder what a Galar only team would be like for me… it would probably have falinks. I feel like the Pokémon most neglected are middle stage trade evolutions. No one is using them unless it’s a nuzlocke. Like they feel like a punishment to the player for not having anyone to trade with. It was a lot better when we had reliable back and forth physical with stuff like DS and Gameboy but the GTS kind of killed friend to friend trading (not that I had any friends who played Pokémon to begin with minus that one after school group that hated my ass—the same ones I gave up my emerald and Leafgreen cartridges to for a zorua. I basically got double scammed.)

Route 8 is TINY, how did I not explore this the first time. The business man’s eyes look like they’d be more on a Pokémon than a person from this game. Weather teams are so annoying, Raihan’s battle is gonna suck. It’s really funny being a trainer and it must suck when your opponent is doing stall and healing spam and things that would be fine gameplay wise but just suck to watch in an actual tournament You can move the control stick camera during camping Why was this told to me halfway through the game. They’ve got a hotel but the sections are blocked off.

Oh. It’s gamefreak! You know, it’s pretty weird that they always exist as NPCs in the game speaking of things beyond the constraints of the game world. The detective event in this hotel only reinforces my point that everyone in Galar has a collective brain cell count of 3 It’s got juice around its mouth and berry bits The top detective is either stupid or humoring a child Who is this aggressively blonde British man in my game Blud looks like an asset you’d find at a truck stop restaurant There’s zero backtracking aside from the wild area since most other spots are blocked off What’s wrong with just letting me go to the town, be told “not yet” and then I go back to the actual story part This on rails thing bugs me. Hop could really do with emoting that isn’t just a copy pasted smile. Like a frown.

Oh, that guys name is Gordie, not Gornie… I kinda miss gym plaques letting you see the other characters who beat the gym or not progress wise I think last time they were seen was gen 4

Oh: this is the item finder. Okay, so uh. They let you see where the holes are. Doesn’t that kinda defeat the purpose of the puzzle then? Don’t forget sturdy rock type ability Not OSHA compliant Way worse Give me some go goggles. Where are these disembodied voices coming from that are encouraging me What was thst

Why we both got sunglasses What the hecl is barbacle What is a stonjourner What was that That’s what the coal thing evolved into Auuugh, he gigantamax Ed and I just shit him with one shot They’re really just in public talking about this at bob’s your uncle The gang is back together… Sorry, you brought back dubwool, but you put growl on it? That’s it? Dude.

STOOOP ENOUGH ABOUT SUPER EFFECTIVE HITS I GET IT Pokémon camping rules because I’m too lazy to go back to a town and I get to eat curry and it’s tasty I gotta feel bad for raichu though, it’s the neglected older child of Pokémon My bike can go on water now. Can I camp on water? No. Obviously not. Why are there glaciers in Britain (Has no geographical skills whatsoever) Sometimes Pokémon will jump at you in the water The baby ones. There’s no surf theme tf Even the water has pop in Maybe overworld encounters weren’t a great idea. Could I have just used route 7 to get here the whole time Can you imagine what a cyberpunk Pokémon would look like? Lol.

At the rate this is going I might actually bring Milcery to the finals with no evolution whatsoever I read the league card for Piers. There’s something to be said about how this story about Spikemuth being a poor town because no one visits often because they don’t have Dynamax and Marnie and Team Yell are working to try and save the town with Marnie being the challenger and Yell all being volunteers to cheer Marnie would’ve been way more compelling if A. We had seen Marnie more than like 3 times or B. It was mentioned beforehand and C. Yell didn’t make up so many roadblocks in the game and blatantly say they would sabotage gym challengers. It kind of comes off as Po Town but there’s no Nanu. It feels like Marnie would’ve been disqualified if anyone higher up complained. Oh yeah, Piers is her brother, I guess he covered for her… and she didn’t know they were the gym trainers either, which again convinces me that galar’s collective brain cell is being hogged by Sonia because she’s actually questioning the plot. Pikachu procs Static so often it’s nasty. Crazy how much work eviolite puts in. This feels like an arcade game with the grunts jumping out of windows and the neon go signs It’s like “we now interrupt your Pokémon game for streets of rage” They’re doing flips and shit “We now interrupt your Pokémon game for the teenage mutant ninja turtles arcade game” I don’t think any session has made me say “what the fuck” more than this segment ever has.

Piers looks like the Dalmatians lady’s furcoat if it came to life or something. So is my switch bugging or does the Piers cutscene have no noise whatsoever. I’m watching a crowd boo what I believe to be interpretive music. All I hear is his feet tapping. Impressive. Joke’s on you Piers, I’ve been taking down Dynamax Pokémon without using my own Dynamax button for some of the fights. I asked friends and uh, no, it’s like that for them too. But why though. Leon’s dealing with a way more interesting plot about wild Dynamax Pokémon and he’s just like “go beat the gyms” no, bro. Let me go do that shit!

The wild area’s got water, right? Let me go check that out… actually, I just wanna go for curry. Yeah, I kinda forgot this place existed for a bit. Okay so I went ahead with evolving Milcery before the wild area. Then I went “Wait hold up” I spun at 12 am but the game gave me a pink one because I did it in motostoke Are you telling me that the methodology is based on in game location time and not the switch time you know what, never mind. Not gonna question this anymore. Whatever.

Since the Gameplay Log got too big, pokemon Sword got it's own Journal. I'm gonna put in screenshots and stuff so this isn't just a huge wall of text like XY was. Maybe I will also find 3DS photos for XY since I still have them saved onto my stuff. Okay so I gave it a page like XY, this is the ONLY time I’m doing this okay, I am not doing this for any other game unless I just start making gameplay logs for every generation and fangames and I do NOT want to do that. Pretty weird how there’s no save game progress screen, it just dumps you straight into the game
I wasn’t a part of the dex discussion on social media, I was a person who saw all that happening and thought “idk, sounds kinda dumb and they’re probably gonna do something dumber” and I was right. The DLC when the game costed $60 would’ve costed you like nearly $100 accounting for tax. You know how much food $60-$70 USD can get you versus one game…? And you might not even replay the game that often to justify the price? It’s way worse being in the wild area without other players though because it’s so big. And empty. And the textures are whack. When did Pokémon switch to its own made up language? Other games just have it be English. I need to get pikachu an eviolite or maybe a light ball if possible The battle cafe is still giving me trouble even after the training session. You kinda get an absurd amount of exp for doing poke jobs and forgetting to check in. Wow. That level 1 genned Charmander is 28 now. The power of labor.
There’s only 3 cafes, I’ve already checked out the two in motostoke and wyndon, I really want my alcremie to have stars, but it’s a random drop. Here’s the thing though. It is purchasable in the DLC. It feels almost like a punishment, right? There’s a way to make things a lot more convinient than relying on base game RNG! Ohhhh, I hate DLC… I’m from the time where most of the DLC was just costumes or extra stuff was a 3rd version game so something about needing the game and then needing to fork over more money feels bizzare. Even though it costs less, right? Third version games costed the same price as the base. But you could just… wait for the third game.
Whatever, let me go do the plot. I should not be laughing whenever Bede is like “yeah I got this” and then Rose immediately beelines to the player Wishing stars are bizzare. Why are random rocks being thrown all over the world and how do they align with the energy crisis Okay. So basically, this entire reigon runs on battling as an energy source. That seems really stupid, because the league is seasonal. What happens in the down period. Electricity, natural gas, water… Leon jumpscare Was there only that one sidequest? No, there was the girl who wants me to deliver the letter
You know, structurally and aesthetic wise, I’m being reminded of that vacation where I was in London. Lotta architecture. That trip sucked too. I got yelled at by people and got called a bitch and a slur and everyone ate my mapo tofu. Raihan’s got the same pose that my elezen does with the little uhhh… you know, hand on the hip. Whatever. Damn they even have the ugly tapestries here too You know, with the whole story being about falsified history, isn’t that also the ogrepon thing Thing is there that ogrepon was shunned and made into a town tourist trap mascot unwillingly and unknowingly but here the dogs are just chilling in the woods How do I know this Because I saw those squidward and skillbler guys in a twitter thread once and lost my shit Why aren’t there any written records of this shit This is like the worlds slowest scooby doo episode ever Basically nothing is here for a replay They don’t even have bike music The towns exist, they sure do; but outside of some stores there’s not much else going on.
They really just have a sleeping Pokémon and the team be like “we can’t let you through because they’re cute!” Awww…. But I’m still gonna pummel ya. The world does have a complex on Leon and it’s when Hop is sad because Bede says “you’re making your brother look like shit” and Hop has an inferiority complex because his brother is too much to live up to reputation wise He still keeps getting lost though. Ohhh, her name was Opal, not Pearl… Is that the first time I actually know all the gym leader names without having to look some up? I struggle with them outside of gen 1,2, and 5. I don’t have anything curry wise but I do know that there’s a ball shaped like Leon’s head Yo, my starter evolved and he looks like the guy from monsters inc Holy shit I can stop time on ladders Togetic makes a very noticeable flapping sound oh it slows down depending on it’s hp What a interesting audio detail
Double kick is just a hop. Is it like abstract energy or something? How did people figure out galarian yamask the first time? Doesn’t it have that absurd requirement of having like 49 HP exactly? Oh my god, the fossils are worse than I could’ve imagined They’re In PAIN. Route 6 seems like the best place to do multiplayer NPC curry but I completely botched the flames The artist class in this game looks like he NEUTRALIZING GAS Hey why is a desert temple in Britain Oh I completely forgot I had the amulet coin on, I beat the shit out of hop and I stole his money HE GOT RID OF WOOLOO NOOOO
Can Opal teleport? It feels like she’s just popping up She got magic Mary Poppins She’s right though, he’s battling for his brother and not himself The gym challenge is about having fun Oh it’s a pachinko machine Tilt controls? I don’t think that’s OSHA compliant. Also, if it’s normal fighting you still get super effective hits? I thought it would be neutral. Hitmontop keeps missing the attack and Bewear also keeps missing What the hell was that Oh, the music gets muted depending on if you’re in the menu Let me setup! I wanna setup! Rocky helmet is really doing the work right now, I’m glad I decided to put it on leafeon because bewear can’t use it b/c klutz I know sirfetch’d vs pikachu is probably a bad matchup but I want him to star in one battle but his defense is so bad Pikachu… I really need an eviolite Big vs Bug The battlefield got weird?! What does that mean?! Hey Bede thanks for having a team of mostly psychics and fairies so I can easily sweep them Public defacement! Crime! Criminal! So rose is like a father figure to Bede but I don’t think Rose sees it the same way at all Do all of these children have insecurity problems and are just masking it well? NOT THE DOG HOWL WHY are they presenting it like THIS Sonia got a BRAIN BLAST.
The girl was a ghost?! A town based on fae that has mushrooms and atmosphere and stuff. Cool. I don’t have fairy coverage though… I have to take an exam. I’m not gonna look up the answers. Fairy is more like a magic type alongside traditional fae trickery. I might need to train up a steel or poison type because none of the teammates could learn any TMs I had. Eh? Don’t I want a challenge? Idk. Got the name wrong. I don’t pay attention to trainer NPC names like that… lol. These quiz questions are hard so you know what, I’m gonna set up with some leech seeds and sand attacks Thank you leafeon Oh yeah, Mawile lost the weakness because of fairy type.. You know what, why am I getting asked questions I’d have no way of actually knowing though?! Fae trickery! Deceit! The game was rigged from the start! Sparky, let’s hope that eviolite was worth carrying you all the way here Yeah she’s uh 16 years old she just looks like a grandma THAT WORKED?! So pikachu is not only faster, it also managed to proc a paralysis on the dynamax pokemon It’s like David vs Goliath over here but Goliath is a giant cake Her hands are either super dry or super wet, that’s just how old people hands are. Man, I miss grandma. Yo I just witnessed Bede get whisked away… now that’s what I call pink. Hey, the thing those guys are doing sounds way more interesting than what I’m doing. I’d love to go check out the power plant.
Hop is doing this thing where he’s team swapping instead of sticking to his guns Bring out the T posing spinning bewear I was mad about XY being easy but this game being easy doesn’t bug me at all because now I know they’re always gonna pull this kind of thing off I know the game is probably gonna try guilt tripping me and go “don’t you feel bad for hop? All he wants to do is be like his brother!” And I’m going to be like… “you need to gain your own independence away from your brother’s shadow. This is for your own good.” and begin slowly opening the locker door. Bro, don’t heal me, stop smiling. Seriously. Just get mad. I swear that bottling up your feelings is NOT doing you any good. It’s kinda weird the starters in this game aren’t dual type. I feel like Cinderace would’ve been a fire/fighting if it was introduced in an earlier gen. Alright, I’ve mentally checked out for today, I’ll properly check out route 8 once I get to the next town and see if they have any new clothes. Current Status:

It turns out, that in fact, you can make a new save just by using the profile feature. So for anyone who’s ever wanted a multiple save file pokemon game, switch profiles are your way to go. Bede is COOKING Hop right now he pointed out he has NOTHING to say about himself it’s just me or his brother The British boys are fighting!! GET HIS ASS BEDE
Hey, you think it’s weird that Charmander is valid in the Galar pokedex but none of the other kanto starters I probably shouldn’t be using a clearly obviously generated pokemon, but Charmander is cute, and this gen introduced a way to rename pokemon. But it doesn’t work if it’s already been named… what the heck. Damn you, Pokegens.com… It’s kind of weird seeing some pokemon you associate with one type of environment just vibing in the wild area It makes me feel like I just have safari zone permanently on Maractus should be in the desert, not just hanging in the grass Pokemon being almost to scale makes you realize “damn, some of them are really tiny!” Like Rimbombee.
If you asked me to get the names of leaders from SWSH I’d probably say “uhh, Raihan, Melody, Gornie, Allister… Onion, Bea. Nessa, Kabu, Milo, Piers, …Pearl? .” I don’t recall the rest. Is that all of them? But I know two of them are version exclusives. They don’t have designs for all the minor league guys. So the characters are very memorable for SWSH design wise so far, personality wise they’re pretty good minus ONE guy but like, Milo and Nessa got some flavor text dialogue where one’s a farmer and the other might be a fisher girl? Idk, she looks more like she’d be a baseball player based on the way she pitched her pokeballs. I think I like Kabu very much for being an excitable shonen hotblooded guy but subdued because he is old. Does this guy in hammerlocke have the FEAR technique?! NO wayyyy God, there are barely any good clothes for boys. Appalling. Even when I checked the DLC lineup they still have nothing. I’ve only worn a hat like once so far and nothing I’ve seen has been better than that hat.
Woah, the battle cafe guys are almost in their 40s level wise and I’m only in my 30s… I probably should’ve trained instead of beelining here so I could evolve my Alcremie. I might need to go back, I hope the other cafes don’t scale level wise… Oh god, they do scale, badge wise, they expect you to start doing double battles and stuff
I’m a tad bit underleveled, maybe i should do some raids? I think they give out rare candies or their equivalent. Lmao, I really got randos to do this raid with me and I was like “I’m gonna go big” meanwhile this dude gets the thing in one shot So if this sandalit is male its going right to Wonder Trade Lmaoooo BEGONE This is kinda fun, I look for the giant death ray and then I go fight things Would it be nice if you could hit the skip dynamax cutscene button Probably It would be like fighting game Intro skips Oh so it’s not guaranteed to get a catch Weird I saw a team of players roll up to a bug pokemon with max level shit like ENOUGH you do not need rayquaza to kill this bug Melvin evolved. It’s like an alien. Man, this bug is so… weird. Is it supposed to be like a UFO?
None of the boys I’ve come in raids across wear anything different from the main fit and hat Raids are kinda fun because you just goof around and they give you exp candies like its basically like an official solution to rare candy GameShark hacks It’s kinda funny that there’s no outside punishments for using trade Pokémon over the level cap during raids I need to upgrade my bike so I can speed through faster So far if I’m comparing my X playthrough to SWSH so far SWSH is winning the mid off and here’s the reason why You can actually do things in the game that aren’t reliant on online Raids? Camping? They have in game NPCs to do it with you XY is winning in terms of fashion though, this is DIRE for boys Girls are always getting better clothes in these games huh like they get all the hair and makeup and boys get none of that shit Not much done progress wise but I should probably stop, my battery is low but so is my tablet so one takes charging priority over the other.
See. I’ve almost hit the 4th badge point and I recall when I got the 4th badge in X things started going downhill for my playthrough.

I played this at the dentists office while waiting for my parent to finish up. Don’t you think it’s weird that dentists and doctors have to go to dentists and doctors?

The wild area being the only area where the camera can be free moving is a choice.

Set me in an open world and my objectives will be ignored so I can min max grind and do dumb shit just because I can which is how I ended up in the wild area being attacked by a level 45 Briviary which is how I was in GI skipping from Liyue all the way to Fontaine despite only being in the Liyue MSQ because there wasn't any kind of roadblock telling me that I couldn't go that far despite the fact it made zero sense story wise. There's a plot, I guess I'll do it. I think a problem with dialogue in these games is that when you give the player more options than yes/no but NPCs don’t react and when you have fancy rendered cutscenes where the player moves without a persons input but then stands around in non rendered cutscenes it looks stupid.

I’m not expecting GF to have branching dialogue options like Persona or Fallout or alternate story pathways because there’s no point in that when they say for the next game only one of those paths was canon or the paths both lead back to the same thing. Don’t even get me started on voice acting, do you know how many different languages Pokémon games are even in? The only Pokémon game you’ll ever hear voice acting in is Masters. Pokemon isn’t really a game franchise anymore to begin with. Even if the console games didn’t sell well, there’s always the bucketloads of merchandise that they have like TCG and plushies and collabs and mobile games. See why I call it existential capitalist dread sometimes?

Why is the sound direction in the game like this where every time a Pokémon gets big their voice is stupid compressed or is it just my headphones, like, try imagining that happening every time they try to load in a voiced cutscene.

I learned that the milcery evolution item is a random drop so I backtracked to the cafe instead of going further I like not having to deal with constant wild battles and I have to run into mons That being said— I got distracted so now I’ll never know what I was writing.

Is that a rock on wheels

I hope the clothes aren’t a daily rotating thing like XY did. I can’t play every day. Oh, the glowing ones give out watts. Camping is good because I can play fetch The Pokémon cosplay has never been more blatant with poke kids It really is weird now thinking about Eevee getting pushed to this extreme mascot status Gen 1 really has a lot of those huh

Having the map be preloaded means I spot hop before he spots me Oh boy, so unless I go back to wedgehurst station I will get that message every time huh. Galar people might just be stupid actually How was that geoglyph made? Pokémon? Yes. The game feels like it has zero trust in me being able to go places . Wow… pikmin

The wooloo have like no collision whatsoever and it’s kinda distracting What do people do if they’re allergic to pokemon in things like this, do they just have to suck it up? I just have that strong of an aura The bug gets one chance during the gym match and if it’s not worth it irs right back to the box There’s a league HQ and you do gym missions now

You know, knowing the gym leader guide guy was a ashita no Joe/Tomorrow’s Joe reference the entire time does really remind you that Pokémon is basically boxing (you might recognize that one frame which has been referenced of a person slunk over in a chair with the dramatic lighting hanging over them, that originated from this show.) His name is Dan as in Danpei They finally brought it back

Where is this guys nose Milo has such a baby face. We’re at the British club now

It seems that the strategy is not to have a giant battle but to survive I might be in danger if it’s permanent Nope Lmao I like how milo outright said “go sequence break and catch a high level Pokémon” After the dentist i took a nap and i got roasted twice by my family for napping. No one understands the value of a good nap.

Anyways I thought about Leon and how the game NPCs are really kind of like “wow hop is crazy good because he was endorsed by Leon” no one has even mentioned that he’s his brother. I have this weird kind of thing where I haven’t paid attention to social media for pokemon stuff outside of Japanese artists who mostly post about food or music of the day or FF14 twitter discourse so when i saw people powerscaling the trainers on my timeline I’m kinda like… eh? Because powerscaling is one of those things where I go “this is basically elementary playground fighting where the answer boils down to nuh uh, my character is stronger because… um… yes.” So I’m here hearing about people trying to figure out if Leon or Red is better just because Leon is said to be the strongest and so is Red. But no one would think that if the game didn’t insistently say that Leon’s the strongest, right? I feel like this phenomena is called artificial hype, and the same thing happened to Cynthia, because my impression of Cynthia is just like, she showed up like maybe once in DP looking at some ruins, maybe spear pillar or that was a platinum thing, and now everyone ever goes “that piano scared you like crazy when you were a kid, right?! Undella Town Trauma!” No, I’m pretty sure I had Dialga on my first diamond hall of fame and I locked in when I ran into her in Black. People will try and say that Red also has this kind of hype but he’s the first playable guy ever for pokemon, do you know how much of a gap of time that is? Do you know how long he has had in the cultural longevity of Pokémon? If he was introduced now, it would be pretty stupid, but he has history. You can’t really go into a long established story and say “hey, check out this guy, he’s the actual strongest now… because we said so!” I think this might be a problem based on something I’m not thinking about, like I think the anime said that Leon said he was the strongest in the world? It feels like insecurity on the writers end on how popular he would be so they prop him up instead of letting the audience decide. Whatever.

Okay, I’m doing more thinking because Milo told me to go to the wild area and how does that make sense on an ecological level at all?! How is this place sustained? (Pokemon is a world of technomagic, don’t think too hard about It, they don’t even know where eggs come from.) Okay. Yayyy.

I wonder if you can have multiple save files in SWSH with new user profiles since i can do that with ACNH. After this session I’ll check. They give you the bike this early?

That fox has a little mustache looking like sniper no swiping over here lmaoooo Did they get a new art director after gen 7, this is absurd. Trainers distinctly look more uh..Pixar like, I would say. My characters eyes still looks like they’d be drawn by Sugimori but I haven’t really seen that face style on many other characters. There’s clearly an effort to make the human characters more distinct looks wise, which is a nice thing, but we’re also 7 gens in so now the new gens would stick out more with this new direction. Like that Iono girl, if you put her next to a person from gen 3 pre ORAS she might look like a collab character. (Doesn’t masters do this anyways with having everyone be together…?) Every time i see sableye i get worried it has wonder guard hacked on for no reason… it’s just a minor thing of mine.

Rotom love motors, but my bike is a pokemon now… They do this with Scarlet and Violet too, why am I complaining. Why do I have to wear this outfit though… (they did that in alola with ride outfits too…) what’s wrong with my custom clothes. I can change the colors, but they all look whack. Meh. And they dont even show up when im in battle.

Hop is funny, he’s really like “we’re gonna fight if we come any closer” so I left. It must really suck in universe to just be ignored every time though. I like how pokemon act like cats and beat the shit out of feather toys. The pokemon eating is funny too, like, what are they holding, they are just staring into the distance. Now that I’m thinking about it, you should be able to have phone calls since you have a rotom phone. Pokejobs are weird, they do not get paid for labor. I’m lazy and I don’t wanna backtrack for a slowpoke I can’t even evolve with the DLC. Nope. I’ll wait for a taxi. Hop. It’s a single badge. It’s not that impressive. You know what, maybe I’m being too hard. Dude clearly wants his friend to be super impressed and I’m not playing along in an outside universe perspective since I’ve played so many pokemon games that he is not making the best impression on me. If he mentions type advantages again though I might lose it.

FUCK EVERYT TIME?!

I think the game explicitly programmed in his pokemon surviving at 1 HP just so he could say that. Hop, the reason I am stronger is because you are an NPC. And I have no life, so I spend a bunch of time feeding my pokemon curry and fighting every single pokemon I run into instead of running away. Get on that grind.

I miss when pokemon bridges in gen 5 had that thing with shadows either being feathers or ducklett, seeing the floating cotton pokemon was nice too I guess.

Why does hulberry’s theme sound like that IS THAT ROSE IN HIS BOXER SHORTS Wait, you’re telling me I can just use the flying taxi anytime I open up the map? I thought it was like… an overworld NPC…

Wow, this is really just a blatant “BUY OUR DLC PASS” thing, no wonder that nurse was so aggressive. Oops. I was gonna catch it and wonder trade it but it’s gone now. No, it absolutely HAS to be caught?! Well, this sucks, my Pokemon are too strong to not one shot it. Caught it.

Oh boy, I forgot about how the wild area lags… lol. Being able to bike wherever is just absurd because now the whole time I’m just speeding through these spots i used to take a while to get through Im glad the digging bros only cost 500 watts for the first go, i thought i had to pay every time they dug. Actually if you sequence break and catch something like a pseudo legendary before gym 2 thats insane Do they not have the badge cap with like traded mons for self caught wild area Pokémon What are the speedrun strats, is that it? It probably is something like wild area RNG, could be wrong though quick ball or timer ball No fucking way. I might need to do that tbh for the second run It’s amusing though because literally in session 1 i was complaining about pop in and the wild area is nothing but pop ins. There is effort, but it’s also kind of weirdly jank.

The dig bros have not gotten me another fossil yet I really want one of those fucked up looking things

Yo, Rose doesnt give a shit about Bede, but he immediately beelines to talking to me The mines in this game are really called mine 1 and mine 2? At least call them like Rocky Cave Mine or something… I like how the NPCs can walk past the roadblocks like team yell means nothing to them. These certainly are houses with NPCs saying things. I question the sanity of this world sometimes. Ah, Nessa. I do not want to remember the insane internet reaction to you. Galar is the most gym centric reigon ever, like they treat this super seriously, this is their lives.

None of these are OSHA compliant, what if the pipes get rusty? How is all the water cleaned? That looks like incredibly strong water, did I sign an injury contract? I’m thinking about all this because the battles so far have been pretty mindless. I thought there was a spot that was blocked off but it turns out i didn’t catch the stairs. The presentation is crazy good in gym stadiums. Like they have the cheering, and the music, and the look of the place, the rotom camera… there was clearly a lot put into this spot. The crowd cheering whenever you get a hit in. I’ve mostly been hitting sucker punch, so it’ll be crazy if I get it in Okay, pikachu, go fight that thing I stalled. Not me using the weather rain effect with my big pikachu to do more lightning damage Oh, he goes piiikaaaaa, having the voice clips from LGPE recycled was a good choice, but I wish the stats were like the partner ones, I heard they were stupid jacked. Aww, I missed the little victory animation

As for the dumb speedrun Strats, apparently there’s a level cap. DLC is fine though, nah. Is that krabby artwork from the beach at dusk from explorers 2? I remember seeing that in a music ost rip video once. (Why doesn’t Nintendo/TPCi have a music streaming service anyways, smash does not count, like, just make your own app if you don’t want to pay Spotify, or stop making soundtrack collections JP exclusive.)

The way these eyes look on Ketsuban… not a single thought is in those eyes. What are Galar particles. That’s some technobabble. I like how Rose is like… I wish I could do something. I feel like despite what little I know, he might care. Or I’m stupid and don’t read into lines. Not Sonia giving me the TM for Retaliate. Girl, what did Nessa do to you. Now I’m reading too much into lines.

You know, I feel like maybe these little spots could use buying food or something or a battle instead of being a place only visited once, like, there’s not much to do in Hulberry once the badge is gotten. This might’ve been a good spot to get the fishing rod since there’s so many fishing holes here… but I picked the water type, so I don’t need another pokemon. Hop is back. You know, it really really feels like this game doesn’t trust me to be able to know where to go when I can just open the menu and find the story objective right there. Bede’s kinda funny because he’s like “oooh you are a little weakling, oh, you are a poor baby and my pokemon would suffer from fighting your weak ass” okay put em up. I like his theme going “BEDE” or whatever they do. I saw galarian ponyta and I immediately remembered that 24 hour stream where I saw Serebii going watching and reporting every time a new pokemon showed up on screen, sword and shield was a social experiment. This fight is actually making me grin, I missed this energy so much from watching this guy try to be cool and completely fail.

But every time I see hop I frown. What went wrong.

Why is Stunfisk a bear trap now? I was trying to think about how I like how caves dont spam zubat or variants at me every 5 minutes and then the thing spawned on my foot. Double kick is just a hop… I like how the yell guys start rocking out in the screen if you idle I can hear corvisquire’s wings flapping in the bgx of the yell song.

Okay so I feel like Hop is putting himself into the position of being the champion just by being Leon’s brother But like, does he actually want that? If so, I will shove him into a locker. I will have to wait and see.

There’s really something to hear a guy say “most people give up at gym 3.” Skill issue.

Nooo, sawk runs like crazy, pokemon would be scary if they were real… Like pikachu is an electric rat. He feels as if he’d be a greatly unpleasant thing as an invasive pest.

Amulet coins do not stack. Sad. Ma’am i am in danger that pokemon is running to me i don’t have the time to fight your yamper People complain that alola felt handholdy and like a tour but even alola had more side areas, it feels like the only place that hasn’t been road blocked is the wild area and even there there’s still some with the level caps. The game would be super fast if it didn’t exist, it’s starting to feel like it. Because most of my playtime has been goofing in the wild area.

Go Marnie. Is it cheating to use a wonder traded in pokemon that can handle the gym weakness? Nah, they have in game trades that do the same thing. I’ll be honest, I was so confused when I saw that we went in a circle back to the gym, but I guess it makes some amount of sense because we started here, so eventually we’d come back? It would be really good to see the gym challenger number drop by one by one in the waiting lobbies, that would be epic. His logo looks like a little samurai helmet

Do I get to keep the wild pokemon? The answer is yes. The gym trainers sucker punch you?!

I like this middle aged man who is on the grind Looking at him jog brings me a bit of joy His animations are also dramatic

The music is dynamic like how Unova had the final gym pokemon theme when the music gets triumphant or the low hP theme Ah. A non evolved pokemon would have a harder time… oops. The mission for the centipede thing is to survive Gotta suck for the audience to watch the challenger stall out by switching all the time and sacking his Pokémon

Damn, the wonder trade mon isn’t even good Well, this is why it’s only here once. Galar is really built on dynamaxing I wonder what it was like years ago…: Man. Apparently people are inspired by me now to keep going with the challenge. Okay, gonna stop here for tonight. Next session will be gym 4? I’m like… 7 or 11 hours in, I didn’t read properly.

Session #1 They have auto save now. Undefeatable champion leonnnnn with his charizard! He's the master or whatever. Does he have stealth rock and stone edge coverage though? Why are these people all in awe in the intro, this is something they see all the time, don't they have dynamax every time in these sports stadiums.

I have a dad in this game? So it turns out you can skip cutscenes in this game with the skip movie option…? Minor things: the pokemon freeze whenever signs are read There is STILL pop in, i noticed this in lumiose but now its almost built in. Having a screenshot feature is nice versus me having to always take a photo with my phone or tablet

Huh. So this is what it’s like to have a famous person in universe actually be famous. I hate it. Oh, they do call em first partner here (BUT I SURE AS HELL WON’T). Kinda funny how this game and SUMO and XY do address what happened to the 3rd starter with another guy taking them, some games usually ignore the 3rd starter entirely (Gen 1 implies that it would be Green(girl), Oak (Unused Oak Battle), or Daisy (Zensho), Gen 2 doesn’t since Lyra or Ethan don’t take the starter when they’re not selected and Kris was persona non grata until Masters, Gen 3 doesn’t since there’s no extra, Gen 5 doesn’t for BW2 since it’s only the PC and Hugh.) Charizard in the overworld looks so static, also, short as hell. Lmao. Auto save will be on for the most part but what’s with it saving every time you exit or enter a building Sheesh

Hop’s theme sounds like Mario kart music, Okay, so there’s more production value in making things look high fidelity but the skybox looks notably… circular. It might be because it was moving around dynamically. Everything is still abstract, pokemon don’t make direct contact, energy field type of ahhh attacks. (It’s always been like that.) like tail whip isn’t actually a tail whip, it’s just the pokemon rotating with a swish. (that makes NO sense.) ( I am not getting into the same old washed out arguments about battle resolution and colosseum and XD, this is the only time I’ll bring them up unless I see something I get annoyed by) Having in battle cutscenes is nice but do not talk to me about type advantages, Alola literally let you know what moves were super effective too.

Glad that the pokedex project managed to expand beyond the point of it just being a random thing some old guy gave to 2 kids (being facetious, doesn’t know PLA lore) Exp share is on always, no comment. Once again the game gives you dialogue options where you have to do the thing when I explicitly was like “nah, you go save the wooloo.”

WHY IS THE SONG HERE ADDING A WOLF HOWL TO IT LIKE AN INSTRUMENT 🎻 losing my shit lmao They did it again and now it’s got drum and bass Greatest song of ALL time

What if a pokemon game was dedicated to being serious and was just unintentionally funny shit They have BRITISH terminology in this game and I don’t know what “pants” means Wait does SWSH still even have mystery gifts available (the answer was no) What will they do when the eshop ends and there’s no way to buy the expansion pass

Anyways, the game just gives you the balls without a dex so I guess for my 1st 1 route only catch I’ve got Wooloo. So sometimes pokemon glow now and they pop in the overworld which i think started in LGPE But do I still get battles when running through grass? No, i have to run into the overworld mons but depending on how i run there’s new mons popping in Okay, interesting, guess that’s a neat tidbit.

Pokemon have interesting reactions, like the squirrel guy runs away from me I remember this fangame i played Pokewilds did the same thing

Why is charizard shorter than a grown ass man Stand up straight

I can get dripped out as soon as I enter the first town so I’m off to waste all my money I like how Leon’s talking about how he always gets lost and charizard just… inches into the screen. Sonia! I know her! I feel like this is the generation where you start seeing other artists take over design wise more so than alola because if you put Sonia next to anyone from gen 1-4 she’d stick out tremendously just with her hair alone being so decorated. I don’t like the rotom phone because the rotom dex in alola was one of a kind and now theyre basically finding all these rotom to shove into devices. It is something that would be a team plasma plot point. Are all the rotom actually willing to be in the phones??? I’m talking to Sonia and she’s basically a failed Gen 1 rival like the Spaceworld one was where he’s just assisting the professor. Obviously not personality wise. Could you imagine?

Yooo, you can read books in here. I get excited over the dumbest shit.

They give you the fishing rod by default?! Also, there’s an adventure guide that actually stores tutorial info, good. There’s a fascinating story on Sonia and Leon unfolding about their absolutely mangled rivalry based on this house of what I assume are her parents What happened How badly did she lose? I like how Hop was like “time to tutorial” and he got immediately cut off by his brother

Eeuuugh I don’t want that pokemon, it looks like the nerd emoji Some pokemon give me a visceral reaction of not fitting what I want but I’m sure someone out there has this Melvin sneedly looking thing as its favorite I could’ve gotten the glamrock KISS zigzagoon instead of this…

1 route run you’ll RUE the day No repeats btw (I break this rule immediately the next session) Having a restore feature is nice because you don’t have to item manage like crazy. How are these pokemon already reaching like level 7… hmm. The numbers might be a bit inflated, I haven’t even gotten to gym 1 yet. I feel like this game is going to be one of those games where the starter has very lopsided levels.

Basically, i think after playing a bunch of pokemon rom hacks that do go “we have all of them!” The maps end up incredibly bloated. The trainer battle them having the pokemon title screen theme in it in kinda interesting, I guess… uh. Why though.

Galar has a fascinating league system because it for real is professional sports and you have to be sponsored like in a bunch of fanfiction I’ve read about people getting their mons from like companies and brands That being said, Hop is now a nepobaby You know how Leon’s house has a bunch of trophies? There’s only one in magnolia’s house. And it’s silver.

Hop out here like “my legend is about to begin” no it’s not, watch out, the protagonist is coming Most exciting pokemon battle out there “tackle tackle tackle” What of the fishing hole (there’s only designated spots now?)

How exactly do you uh… whistle? Idk. There was a Yamper just standing out in the overworld and I thought it was an NPC but nope, dog was as confused as I was. I don’t like the evolution so i won’t use it This bug only has struggle bug Yo this yamper just beat all my pokemon up The switch mini might not be able to do the whistle thing Ugh.

Yay, camping gear, now I’m on a train, both of us tapping our feet. Cute. This game has some cute details. Hmm. Not sure how my 1 route run will deal with the wild area but I’ll figure it out. So there’s some NPCs for lets go here as well. No clue what thats about. So now you can automatically use the storage without a center, eh?

Hmm. There’s multiple wild area zones so how do I load in the encounter? Do i just go with “first one?” What if it’s a big one? Now I gotta try being selective.

Anyways, guess it’s a Mincino. Really does feel like I’m gonna end up accidentally with a mono normal type of team. Okay so you can rotate the camera in the wild area, pokemon uh, chase you sometimes Do i consider the pokemon that are in dynamax raids separate from the area? This is somehow wildly more complicated than i thought it would be.

Who says you have to stick to pokemon from your own save anyways Oh? They’re quite overleveled here? Oh my. Okay, so maybe i won’t be able to do the 1 route thing Who’s genius idea was it to make a loud noise be the cry Sounds hilarious

It’s neat you can see other players running around in the wild area so as long as the servers are up people will still be toying around with that Okay, so raids are important. I think the one route rule will be for routes only and I’ll just do whatever for the wild areas. Some pokemon just chase you in the wild area??? Tyrogue wants to throw hands. Hey, i don’t think British curry has apples in it. Berry! Someone really wants to make like a cooking mama pokemon spinoff with all the stuff they keep adding to games

Greatest raid of all time, what do you MEAN I can have a kaiju battle between a sheep and a giant egg It’s really kind of funny just walking up to players and when you talk to them they give you random ingredients

I got a leafeon?! Unova mon’s are too high level to evolve to be worth carrying the entire game… nope. I could probably use the raid candies but at that point it’s basically the equivalent of hacking in rare candies for a rom hack (except this one’s official.) It traveled across time and space to get here and now it’s going right back out to another person’s trade

Who is trading over their whole ass cinderace Man, this is just like the last time where I saw that one guy who didn’t bring their pokemon to the e4. Wonder trading has not changed at all, people still send in random garbage Ahh, the joys of wonder trade and blatantly hacked pokemon I’m getting way too damn distracted by the prospect of wonder trading

WHAT IS THAT It’s like a centipede with a mustache gen 8 has the designs of all time You can just barge into people’s camps Why though Zero privacy restrictions at all At the very least you can’t chat in this game but like its definitely weird having a random player run up to you and just stare Pichu baby!!

Wait, the wild area stuff was pretty fun, now i dont wanna play the game anymore, lol. You can send your pokemon to do labor?! Remember when pokemon quest existed? They get updates in CN for every single generation while meanwhile we still just have gen 1.

Someone wonder traded me an amulet coin, mine now. By complete accident, all my pokemon are male. Nothing funnier than me taking all the 1000 animal crossing new horizons screenshots I had and instantly reducing the number down to 178 so I can take photos of SWSH uninterrupted The earbuds are in this town and they bring up the shrinking thing because oh yeah, I guess they'd need to bring it up since pokemon grow big in this game This is fun, like, way more fun than I had with X so far. Roadblocks still exist as per usual (how does Leon get lost when most of these towns are straight lines) but I guess justifying it with people excited to see the challenge and a huge ass bird works

Oh, ball guy is real… Is this the first time it’s been treated as like an actual professional sort of thing rather than the gym leaders mostly having hobbies outside of gym work? (Remembers gen 5) never mind. This is the first time they’ve been defined as in like, a large thing that everyone knows about rather than it just kinda being there (remembers gen 5) FFS, I’m saying that this being largely televised isn’t like a normal thing (remembers elesa’s runway arena). Sports. It’s like sports now. We’re basically in a pro league. Having major and minor leagues is interesting but outside of the version exclusive gym leaders we don't get to see them all, do we? Uniform number 599 is for the date of the Nintendo power magazine that first mentioned missingno (I remember seeing a tumblr post that had an earlier forum date but I'm never going onto tumblr again.)

So one of my challenges for this run is to use no gen 1 pokemon whatsoever (no variants either— minus Pikachu, I love him), and I guess the one route rule is a bit dead on arrival because of the wild area.

Yo, this game’s got side quests just like i wanted from XY. Nice. There’s technical machines which are infinite, then the records are like the way TMS were before, neat. Do you remember when there were plot leaks where it was like “Marnie’s part of the royal family and team yell’s her bodyguards” and then it turns out that was just people making things up You know, with there being type uniforms and all, this would probably be a really good game for a monotype run I only bought flying and normal uniforms, because, you know, bird/normal type.

While most pokemon trainers and their stories are compelling, Hop being all gung ho about being a legend just because of his brother is not endearing me in the slightest. I want to wipe the floor with him. I like Marnie more currently because she could’ve been a mean girl type and encourage team yell but instead shes like “guys stop that RN” and they do. Like in everyone’s eyes currently it’s just Hop and I’m the afterthought, but that makes sense, since as far as everyone else is concerned I’m just some guy who happens to be friends with the guy who’s the champion’s… brother.

They give you fly this early in the game with the taxis Free flying taxis When I watched twilight wings, I feel like I didn’t get much of Galar, but playing, I understand now that my impression of people having an insecurity issue over Leon was correct. The entire reigon basically worships the ground he walks on. ...Maybe a monotype run would work out more… Pokemon camp is fun because the Pokemon get to hang out and eat curry all at the same screen at once

So there’s some plot stuff where the game is going “we really want you to know Rose handles energy here and he's a good person” Escape rope is now a key item instead of needing to buy it all the time

So they have NPC tents just in case you aren’t online which is useful because I don’t get how I’d have that otherwise because visiting random people’s tents feels uh. Weird. Ah, holding A is how you help with the ball throw. I’m in the mines, once I get out I’ll probably stop for this session Ugh, Bede’s just as annoying about being endorsed as hop is Haha, seethe little British boy

Sidenote:

Basically coming from this after playing X and I know a majority of the fanbase was like “because SWSH killed my grandma okay” and this shit’s hitting different and I’m having fun again instead of feeling like I’m dragging my feet in mud You really don’t know how mid something is until it feels like Plato’s allegory of the cave where you’re looking at shadows of a good game

Minor aside; dexcut mention This is probably another vapid take I have: Eventually they were gonna need to cut Pokémon or limit the roster (even if the animations thing was another divisive statement) . SWSH just ended up being the scapegoat for it. I know it was probably for the sake of balancing and they’re reintroducing mons with every gen but they couldn’t just have a rotating banlist or something like yugioh?

(Horror realization: they’re gonna ensure all the new mons get onto switch 2, right? They wouldn’t be that uh… short sighted and say “hey we’re downsizing again?”) Technically the first dexcut began with RS because they didn’t know how to make Gb And GBA cross compatible and it would’ve been the first game with just new Mons but the devs decided they’d let in some mons. Gen. 3 does let you fill out the full dex for the price of 2 games and 1’s a remake, 2 colosseum games, and a spinoff storage box. Don’t forget timed exclusive store deals! Then it’s Wi-Fi deals for gen 4, spinoff manaphy egg, spinoff other legends for rangers 2, and pokewalker exclusives plus if you were lucky maybe someone would actually take your GTS offer. Gen 5 was fairly limited to just the Unova dex unless you did Dream World but since that's shut down now the roster is truly Unova only until BW2 which then added Dream Radar but if you had no 3DS you couldn't get the extras, plus most stuff that was above. Very dumb distribution wise. But they made a point that people could bring all their Pokémon from game to game with transferring like Pal Park and things like changing encounters based on the GBA game that was in slot in things like DPP and how the logo was "gotta catch em all" (which was actually not a term in Japan at all, it got made up by 4kids, the OG term was just "Get pokemon!" which you do.).

Then the announcements roll in and uh… not a great start! Whole fanbase had a civil war, which side are you on, "let’s have all the mons now and forever" vs "cut them out"! The cut team won obviously but now Pokémon’s got this weird itch in my brain where if I think too hard I think “man, the poor game devs get rushed to hell and people either call them lazy or kiss the ground they walk on.” No nuance or in between, crunch cycle is terrible. And the alternative of solutions for all pokemon in one game now rom hack wise aren't really feasible because putting 1000+ pokemon within a single game encounters wise sucks as evidenced by all dex games having to split encounters between day, midday, night, or putting in other weird spots that start making no geographical or level sense whatsoever because it makes no sense for a unova mon that evolves at level 50 to be a catchable encounter at level 15, that's just babysitting. Plus having to remember every single mon and their type and all the moves they have that they can use starts becoming a game of memory and quite frankly I'm not gonna remember that uhhh… Weavile has a new move like Poison Claw that has a bonus effect of giving a pokemon toxic poison or any pokemon past gen 7's type because I haven't seen all the pokemon when they decide to make the new reigonal roster tiny so they can put in just old pokemon. But you know, every single pokemon is someone’s favorite even if it’s a pokemon I’ve never considered in my life or you know, living dex challenges, and things I didn’t think of because less pokemon means less options…And getting the natdex was just like getting a virtual certificate, right? I don't think I've ever done it because I've had no friends to do trades with. Pokemon Home could've at least had an interactive minigame like my pokemon ranch did so the pokemon aren't just sitting virtual purgatory forever, though, because there are some pokemon that people used to enter their halls of fame in older games that were basically stuck there until the DLCs came out and will continue to be stuck there unless you pay the monthly fee (same thing happened with bank minus the fact you could actually have all your pokemon in whatever 3DS game was out at the time with zero restrictions).

Honestly, my complaint lies more in the fact that pokemon will arbritarily hype up new features and then take them away for the next game. Like, the journal in DPP which let the player know what they did last, why wasn't that a mainstay?! Why weren't contests or secret bases or following pokemon a game feature that was in the base game instead of being a datamined thing like in sumo. They don't even have day/night music sometimes, or the fame checker which really would've helped me remember important NPCs, or the safari zone (reasonable enough with all the mons you can get) or the game corner (reasonable because underage gambling isn't allowed anymore), or dexnav (reasonable since you have ability mints), or the difficulty settings (which was only in one game with a stupid method that I wouldn't want back), or the amie minigames, or cutting out certain moves (why cut RETURN which is the one move that gets stronger with friendship which is a wonderful thing), or battle frontier (which is especially egregious since they said it was cut because "kids these days are too busy on their phones"), or rematches with vs seeker and phone calls in general (hasn't been seen since ORAS), and why is seasons locked to just gen 5??? (Actually, I don't want to imagine what problems there would be with the 3d areas having to load 4 different zones depending on what season it is.)

It’s a game crucified by history because of the dexcut (I say this and chances are I’m also going to hit that exact moment where I want to throw my switch like I did with X).

https://sakurabomb.tumblr.com/post/741542516959150080 I found the Missingno birthday post! Jan 11th, 1999! Bit too late to have a uniform number change though. (Recall I put down May 1999 because that’s when the Nintendo power magazine was posted.)
A lot of games when they hit the switch has a lot of new changing ambitious things that basically defined a new standard of things. Like three houses basically reboosted fire emblem’s popularity, Mario odyssey, breath of the wild was pretty much the big “wow moment” for Nintendo and Zelda with open world stuff, smash ultimate brought back Everyone and then extra parties with the DLC , new horizons kinda took more away from new leaf until 2.0 (but that can be blamed on the pandemic) and it had more of the shift into giving players total freedom, and splatoon 2 and 3 both came out. If we’re counting non Nintendo, sonic frontiers! As for sword and shield? Idk, it kinda feels more like an upscaled 3DS game. It’s only new feat I’ve seen so far is having overworld Pokémon, and that was a mechanic introduced in let’s go. Heck, *knowing Pokémon development history, this game was probably just built on top of let’s go’s engine or they were developed simultaneously, which is why Pikachu and Eevee still have their voiced cries. *This is something I found out while goofing around in hexmaniacadvance, but Pokemon FRLG are built on top of Ruby and sapphire because all the data for the RS trainers and items are still in FRLG. I’ve seen the same thing with persona 4 being built on top of persona 3 and there’s still files of 3 left in the game. There’s a very likely chance that something went horribly wrong with the engine when testing and that’s why Pokémon had to be cut.
I mean I guess dynamax is their new big thing but it’s already gone by gen 9. Raids were there too, I guess. So is every gen going to have a new gameplay button mechanic now? I think ash had some kind of big bracelet with all the gimmick things for Journeys or it was fanart like that Sonic on deviantart I saw who had all the gimmick things, which makes me realize we haven’t gone a generation without them introducing some kind of new button mechanic that ends up defining the meta. Gen 6 started Megas. Alola did have Z moves and Megas, then they got cut for Dynamax, then that got cut for the big type hat, and that will be cut. We’re going to have more gens that have had a thing versus gens that have not had a thing. And I’m not sure I really… get dynamax? I mean, they get big, it’s powerful, but the gimmick is either to stall out or have a big vs big battle. Where does the energy from dynamax come from, what is a galar particle even? How do you even measure that? Pokémon shrinking is a thing now but they had that in Gen 1 with minimize, so they have been able to shrink. (There’s a difference between a move and just the fact they can do it inherently though…) They introduce new mechanics but I have not played competitive so fuck if I know what a terrain is or if it's lore important.
Energy sources in pokemon are pretty weird, because you get Z-power from Necrozma's body, Terastal from Terapagos I think, and Infinity energy itself is from the life force of pokemon, sync stones which are giving me "rocks that do whatever we want for gameplay and story purposes because bonds are a tangible thing in pokemon like a common anime trope". Why do all these random things exist exclusive to just one reigon minus megas? Regionlocking them would be pretty dumb. But when I play a game like radical red and trainers are whipping out all of these things in one go I say "that's bullshit, stop that." A person with choice paralysis like me is basically the worst person to play Pokémon or an open world game, huh. I normally do pseudo nuzlocke one route only runs because otherwise I’d run around trying to get Pokémon that I like instead of a Pokémon I’d never use and I don’t want to have to catch a Pokémon solely to beat one battle because of a gimmick and then box it forever.
As for the open world thing, I mentioned this before… but without an objective, I just end up going “Wow, an open world! What do you do?” “Catch Pokémon.” “That’s it?!”
I mean, there’s more like raids (to catch Pokémon), curry (to raise Pokémon), and… ??? On Arceus, these games NEED mini games or something because the core gameplay mechanic means nothing if you can just skip it and face 0 consequences Like let me do underground fossil hunting Give me a reason to want to backtrack outside of catching Pokémon or using HMs (There’s not even THAT anymore either)
You’ll never be gatekept by being like “you need 20 dex entries” and the only incentive outside of the shiny charm and diplomas were in gen 1 with aides That NEVER showed up again The only games to my knowledge that bar parts if you don’t have entries is PLA and LETS GO I have never felt a need to 100% a dex and closest I ever got was alpha sapphire and that’s only because I wonder traded like a fiend.
I feel like a good incentive for having such a open world would be to throw in some puzzles or something as a side thing to make it so I don’t feel the need to immediately beeline to my next destination because I feel like the place had zero relevance until I felt I was underleveled. And that would’ve been perfect to use like hidden machines (gone since gen 7)… Ugghhhh, why remove stuff if there’s not even gonna be a good substitute, the rotom bike is UGLY. I know PLA and SV add back ride Pokémon but in LGPE there were a lot more… that games got way too much of a significantly high quality increase for being a GO integration thing.

Battle of the Midoff!!
environment, X wins because the Wild Area bothers me mentally because I keep going "this isn't environmentally sustainable whatsoever" and Sword has no named Dungeons and like there's actual places in X that aren't just "city built around a gym!" It is nice to be able to see Pokémon in the overworld in Sword though actually have different reactions to a human but I could do without all the Briviary swooping down like flying eagles to attack me

Music department: I kinda don't remember many tracks from either of these games very well outside of X more because Lumiose is glued into my brain and snowbelle and sword with the yell themes because lemotif

Story: X because it doesn't infuriate me like Sword does but the stories are both mid

Characters: Maybe Sword but the bar is so low, idk, the only character I really liked in X was Shauna, but like the only ones I cared about in Sword were Bede and Marnie and Kabu and Piers and Sonia but like everyone else I was like "ehhh."

Manga Adaption: Considering at this point it's basically just Pokespe Vs Pokespe in terms of manga and the winner is pokespe either way and they're such radically different genres of story but Sword's rendition is just 1 to 1 but with better plot justifications but X’s actually has a Flare that isn’t incompetent so it’s XY I guess.

Clothes: X has a lot of clothes variety (for girls) and Sword has a lot of clothes variety (for girls) but if you're a boy then there is a continuous game of "SCREW YOU." Same with hair.

Postgame: X's postgame for the most part consisted of me grinding like an ass in battle mansion and doing the looker sidequest and then deciding hunting legendaries wasn't worth it. Sword's postgame is a $30 DLC once the lame brothers are handled. I hate both of these models.

Replayability: Sword wins team building wise because you can get through shit fast through playing through the wild area whereas X kinda just flops in terms of going into rush mode past gym 4 where you need to be in Lumiose which I guess was the X equivalent of the wild area. In terms of “playing for story”, ehhhghh… at the end of the day, Sword had more QOL but I liked X…

Difficulty: Lmao. Both these games are stupid easy X because they didnt balance the new exp share and Megas are busted and you get the kanto one for free and Lucario and there’s barely anyone in Kalos who has a team of six pokemon. If you play as is with no limits then Sword is basically made to be broken in half with the exp candies you get just for doing raids and like if you do nothing but raids you can basically never have to worry about battling again. Plus the amie equivalent bonus is a lot easier without minigames because all you have to do is feed curry

Rosters: X has a lot more pokemon at 457 but like a good chunk are trade evos or exclusives while Sword has 400 in the base roster DLC addition caps Sword off at 821 which is impressive but then you see the excluded starters in the roster and I go “why though.”