Time Drawn: October 2013

I finished the newest Pokemon game last week, and I’ve spent a noticeable time since then trying to figure out why it’s solidly my least favorite in the series. (In case you’re wondering, I picked up the Pokemon X version. There’s also Pokemon Y, and together they count as the sixth generation of Pokemon games, called X and Y. The twin game thing has been going on since the first Pokemon games, Red and Blue. There’s always pokemon that are exclusive to one or the other, so you either have to buy both or trade with other people to get all the pokemon.)

At first I thought it was because the story was barely there. But my favorite game in the series, HeartGold, also has a minimal story. And it follows the standard formula of “Evil team shows up, inconveniences people, you encounter them a few times while working your way through the eight gyms, and beat them before fighting the Pokemon league champion.” And this one tossed in a touch of historic storytelling to introduce the villain’s Dire Plan. Which was, um… Ummmm…. Hmmm….

Really, that’s the main problem I had with the story. I never felt like Team Flare was really bothering either me or the people of the world that much, and despite having just finished the game, I don’t recall what the motivation of their boss was. Some generic “I feel wronged so I’m going to ruin everyone’s day with this GIANT DEATH LASER!!!” plotline or the like. Really, it felt phoned in. I bumped into them a few times where they just ran off when I defeated them without bothering to tell me why they were there, then we skipped right to the “stop the big bad from doing his evil thing” step, with very little build-up in between. And don’t get me started on how inane the in-game “friends” they assigned me were…

Now, the story of the Pokemon has never been the focus of the series, though last generation’s Black and White games actually had a good story with some actual parts that made you sympathize with the villain’s goals, if not their actions. So this really felt like a step down. But still, the fun of the games is in fighting and collecting the Pokemon.

So how does this game compare on those aspects? Well, I do have to give major points for the introduction of Fairy type. If you don’t know, Pokemon uses an elaborate rock-paper-scissors-esque series of types. There’s now sixteen types, which are strong against certain types and weak against others. There’s a whole lot of strategy in using the right type against the enemy without having to use a pokemon that’s weak to their attacks, especially since you only have six pokemon with four attacks each in your team. And attacks can be different types from the pokemon who’s using them, and a lot of pokemon have two types that shift their weaknesses and so on.  Adding an additional type upset the balance and made some types stronger and others weaker, so I’m having to run a different mix than usual. With sixteen types available and only twelve type slots for your pokemon to be (six with two types, not that you can easily manage that without overlap), you will have some weak spots where you only have one pokemon who can handle certain enemies and if that one goes down, well, it can be a real struggle as you try to get it back up before the rest go down.

Well, at least it should be. But Pokemon X and Y made it a wee bit too easy to level your pokemon in this game. Between making the Experience Share item affect your entire team, making it super-easy to keep your entire team up in levels, and in adding the Pokemon-Amie minigame that lets you become friends with them by feeding them sweets and rubbing their bellies (seriously), which gives them a major boost in how much experience they get, well, I never had a difficult fight. Usually I reach the Champion with pokemon around the same level as the ones she brings to the fight, in the mid-to-high 60’s (out of 100 max). And I usually have to use a lot of items keeping my team in fighting shape going through the five tough back-to-back fights that include the champion.

This game, well, I had a pokemon at level 90 when facing the champion. That’s a full 22 levels higher than the toughest enemy I faced. And while that was the one I had used and pampered the most, the rest of my team was still around level 80. I normally only get to those levels well into the post-game, and with great difficulty. Each extra level grants you a lovely dose of additional stat points that make you hit harder and faster and all that fun stuff. I’m sure you can figure out what that much extra power on my side meant for the fight.

It’s not like I’d gone out of my way to level my pokemon, either. That was gained just following the storyline plus checking out the various corners for what loot I could find. And my team did have some serious weaknesses. But when you can arrange things so that the enemy is dead before they get a chance to attack, your weaknesses don’t matter any more.

Actually, the overleveling was part of why the story seemed so boring. I just kinda waltzed through the enemies and never even came close to being in danger. Heck, I think in the course of the game, I only had pokemon faint on me about three or four times, period! I usually have a period where I’m desperately scrounging for the Revive item to keep from losing battles due to having no available pokemon (followed soon after by my stocking up on 40 of the things), but here I barely used them.

Alright, so the story was lame and the fighting was too easy. How about the collecting?

Oddly enough, there were simultaneously too many pokemon and too few. To be specific, too many old pokemon and too few new ones. First off, there’s now 718 pokemon (yes, really). They decided to include so many of the old ones that there’s only about 125 that you can’t catch in either the Pokemon X or Y version, 80 of which are either starter pokemon or legendaries that are supposed to be rare (you can usually only get one of each per playthrough of the game, though starters can be bred to get more copies). There’s also two sets of 20 pokemon that are version exclusives. Which means that there’s a full 573 pokemon you can catch in each game without doing any sort of trading with other people. I’m sure you agree that’s a wee bit absurd.

So, how many are new?

They decided to make this a smaller set of pokemon, only adding 69 new pokemon. Let’s see, 69 divided by 573… That means, on average, about 12% of the pokemon you can encounter are new. And 12 of those are starter/legendaries, which you can only find in certain spots, so drop that a bit more. They did add in some old legendaries and even starters, so if you chop those off the list too, let’s see… Ah, there’s 13 old starters and legendaries added in, so 57/548, which means about 10% of the easily available pokemon are new. Huh, even lower.

Now, there are differences in how common certain pokemon are, but still, I was seeing a lot of the same old faces. And I didn’t particularly want to catch those ones again, either. I grabbed the new ones as I found them, but I still caught a mere 35 pokemon total in my playthrough. I was also having absurdly good luck with the Quick Ball item, which gives you a bonus to catch the enemy if used on the first time. Usually you have to whittle down the pokemon’s hit points to as low as you dare (all the while praying you don’t get a poorly timed critical hit that kills it), possibly put them asleep or something, and then throw your pokeballs at it turn after turn hoping one will take before the enemy knocks out too many of your pokemon. But the quick ball is a nice “let’s just skip all that” move, if you get lucky.

And my goodness was I getting lucky. Let’s see… Seven of my 35 pokemon were given to me, so they don’t count. Twelve are in the most basic pokeball, which I stopped using around the same time as I started getting quick balls. Of the remaining 16, a full seven of them are in quick balls. That’s a 43% success rate on a first-turn capture. I’d tell you what the normal probability is, but it’s both highly dependent on which pokemon you’re trying to catch and also full of complex math (seriously, read through that page and tell me that pokemon is simplistic). For instance, a cute little level 3 Pidgey is at least a hundred times easier to catch than a level 50 legendary like Xerneas. Legendaries are one-per-game and extra tough to catch, usually taking upwards of forty high quality Ultra Balls to snag, which can take half an hour or more of real time to manage.

My Xerneas is in a quick ball.

There’s nothing quite like starting a major epic fight, with special music and battle arena and all, with the game carefully saved beforehand just in case you get that ill-timed critical and kill the thing – and then you just toss a single ball and click, it’s caught.  It’s simultaneously awesome and anti-climatic.

This game’s going to be easy for legendaries. They only added three new ones, and one of those is exclusive to the other version of the game, so I’m going to have to trade for it anyway. So I’ve only got one more to grab, and I still have my guaranteed-catch, one-per-game Master Ball. The Zygarde fight will be as easy as the Xerneas one…

Now, a large part of why having all these old pokemon available is irritating is personal. You see, I’m very close to catching them all already in my older games, and don’t want to clutter up my boxes with duplicates. I’ve been working on that big goal of the series since I started playing this series with Pokemon Red back in 1999. I’ve accumulated all the legendaries and all but one of the other pokemon family trees in the 649 pokemon that existed before this game. I just need to restart my HeartGold game to get a Totodile as my starter and then do some leveling to get the upper evolution levels for some others. And, most importantly, get all of these critters in the same game. Which does make the fact that the Pokemon Bank system for bringing the pokemon you caught in older games into X and Y isn’t coming out until December 27th rather irritating. I want to start shifting things over already, geeze! With how easy it is to level in X, it’ll be a snap to finish up those last few upper evolutions and everything!

…Not that I’m 100% looking forward to bringing forward my pokemon. They swapped from 2D sprites to 3D models in this game and well, the new models look kinda, well, uninspired and boring. They’re fully accurate and do have some nice animations at times (though the sprites were animated too), but the advantage of sprites is that you can easily pick a dynamic pose that adds a lot of character to each pokemon.  Show their best side and all. But the new models all just kinda stand around most of the time. Just look at this comparison of the different portrayals pokemon Snorlax through the various games. You go through a serious of interesting poses as it rolls around and then, well, just stands there like a lump. And Snorlax isn’t exactly the most dynamic pokemon out there, to put it mildly. It’s best known for laying around sleeping!

I guess moving to 3D models was something that needed to happen at some point. But please, could you have at least put more character into how they stand?!

Perhaps having to make models for a whopping 718 pokemon ate up all the time they could have spent making them look better, but still, my art geek tendencies keep twitching at the blobs shaped like pokemon half-heartedly bouncing up and down…

So yeah, now that I’ve written a massive wall of text about a video game that’s marketed towards kids (if also played by a lot of adults who grew up with the series and never stopped enjoying it), I suppose I should stumble towards some sort of conclusion. Pokemon X and Y is my least favorite generation because it’s a bit too easy compared to previous games, and the story, collecting, and battling all have some noticeable flaws. If you’re into the series, well, you already own your own copy by now. If you’re not, this is not the game to start on.

However, this game does make one of my favorite pokemon, the adorable Deceiver Pokemon, Mawile, actually usable, so much is forgiven. It used to be pure Steel type with an absolutely horrible list of attacks it could learn (with not a single Steel type damaging move in the lot!), so while I found it an adorable and awesome design, it was worthless in battle. But now it’s Steel/Fairy and has access to two really powerful attacks at higher levels, the Steel type Iron Head and Fairy type Play Rough! And since the new Fairy type is weak to only Steel and Poison, having a Steel type in the party is extra awesome for taking out those pokemon, plus Steel is immune to Poison and resistant to Steel attacks so adding the Fairy type into Mawile’s mix doesn’t add any extra weaknesses! It actually takes one away, since Steel’s weakness to Fight is canceled out by Fairy’s resistance to it! It’s awesome! And Fairy type’s so useful too, being strong against the very common Fight, Dark, and Dragon types! It’s a perfect combination! Or something like that. And yes, my Mawile was the one I got up to level 90, since I used it so much. I definitely pamper my favorites…

…I’m also definitely a Pokemon geek…