Having played the prequel title Ar nosurge on the Vita, I ran through this one on a whim without really taking much in the way of notes or screen captures, so I’m preserving this as a mini ramblings. Definitely a solid choice to go back to as a PS2 play through.
Super solid battle system, really deep crafting system, solid JRPG story that isn't overly ham fisted with its use of typical archetypes.
Customization on equipment through elemental damage/resists and other passive boosts was also a really nice way to tailor the entire party to the chosen play style.
There was a lot of noise about this release in the general gaming sphere – a bunch of Pokemon were removed, people got up in arms, they then started picking apart every little thing as reasons why the game was lazy or low quality or whatever the complaint of the day was. Frankly, it felt like a bunch of whining prior to release. Having played the game now, it’s definitely a bunch of whining. While Pokemon Sword is a pretty straightforward Pokemon game in general, it’s still extremely high quality and also takes some important steps forward for the series in a general sense, giving us what is another solid entry worth playing through.
The obvious change here is that despite the Switch’s ability to be played on the go, this is the first mainline release that’s actually playable on the TV, unless you count the Super Game Boy on SNES or Game Boy Player on the Gamecube as console option entries. This definitely made playing the game in long sessions at least a lot more comfortable. The main focus though is definitely on gameplay features, which kind of falls into two main things – the Wild Area and Dynamax Pokemon.
Dynamax is the replacement for Mega Evolution and Z Moves from previous generations. In this case, it feels like it’s been integrated in a much better fashion. For one thing, it’s available to damn near all Pokemon, apart from a handful of legendaries. There’s an additional tier available called Gigantamaxing that also adds some unique moves and fun visual forms, but it’s there as an additional layer. This leaves your entire party as being useful in these situations, which is a much better situation than the limits in place in X/Y + Sun/Moon. The ability to use it is also limited to specific battles – generally speaking, Gym battles and specific wild battles against other Dynamax Pokemon. Overall it means that the system isn’t available to be spammed all the time, but is always equally useful when it is available.
The other big one, and probably the biggest feature, is the Wild Area. What this ends up being from a feature perspective is just another route to catch Pokemon. However, from a visual perspective it’s a huge leap forward for the series. It turns a large portion of the game into a pseudo open world area where you can catch stuff, but also run into Pokemon that are way too strong for your current team, go into multiplayer Dynamax fights, and just generally run around. It’s as close to reaching for a modern RPG experience as the series has ever gotten, and it’s a much larger modernization step than has been typical for the series.
There’s a bunch of little user experience things that have also improved the game in small ways. The player is automatically healed to full after gym fights, including the Elite Four replacement because the player was going to heal up anyway. Pokemon are visible in the world in the grass areas like in Pokemon Let’s Go!, because random fights are fairly silly. HMs continue to go away, with flying open almost immediately at the start of the game via a taxi service and Surf being replaced entirely by a bike upgrade. The player can now setup camp while in the field replacing the need to run back to Pokemon Centers to heal. There’s a portable Pokemon Box device to grab Pokemon in and out of your storage on the go. EXP share for your party makes a return and EXP gain is also around when catching Pokemon, leaving it practical to go for either as a leveling setup.
It’s also worth mentioning just how fucking cool it is to do the gym battles. It’s a little thing, but having a huge crowd chanting and yelling, and having good fight music on is such a huge experience change from the past that I’m honestly surprised they haven’t gone in this direction before. It actually feels like a sport now, which animal rights problems aside, is a fantastic change.
At the same time, there’s still some things they’re stubbornly holding on to for seemingly no reason. The box storage system still exists, and it still can’t be sorted despite the fact that there’s no technical reason to not allow for better storage solutions. Despite the fact that you can see move advantages when switching Pokemon, you can only see that if the opponent’s Pokemon is already out, even though you explicitly know which Pokemon will come out next. Evolution methods are still not shown anywhere in-game, despite the fact that all the information is available on the internet all the time. It’s little things like that that are really going to go a long way to making the series feel like it’s finally really moving forward, and also currently go a long way towards ammo about the series feeling lazy.
However, the core of the series is still as strong as ever. It’s still just straight enjoyable to play the stat game, play the type advantages, and build out the party that suits you the most. I’m also not sure if it’s a placebo, but the game felt much better balanced in general, and certainly balanced more difficult than in the past. I found myself using a significantly larger amount of Pokemon to use my type advantages, even in just fighting wild Pokemon and Route trainers. By the end of the game, my party’s level range was only around 60-65 for all members, which is an extremely narrow range for my typical use. In general I had to use those as well. I was almost always around level parity with the opponents, so going in with type disadvantage was a good way to get killed. In good news, I didn’t feel a need to grind either, so the curve felt pretty appropriate to a first-run through.
End of the day, this one is a pretty simple thing to recommend. If you’ve liked Pokemon in the past, you’ll still like Pokemon now. At the same time, while I sort of get where people are coming from, I think it’s worth ignoring the pre-release noise. The loss of Pokedex did not effect the quality of the game and only helped the game’s overall balance, and the game that is there is still as good as ever. Frankly, if removing more Pokemon results in steps as big as the Wild Area for Gen 9, remove even more. If there’s anything to take out of this generation it’s that there’s been a big jump in the quality of what’s there, but they’ve definitely still got a lot of room to grow now that they’re fully embracing their console future.
I’ve played a bunch of the Neptunia games, and they’re always a nice breather from my typical run of titles. They tend to take a known genre, craft a story around it that makes fun of the genre, and still manage to make a game that more often than not is shallow, but fun. Unsurprisingly, Super Neptunia RPG is more of that style. In this case, they take the 2D overworld movement of something like Muramasa, give it a battle system like any normal 2D JRPG, and manage to spit out a game that works, even with some grinding flaws. In this case, the Neptunia gang get transported to a place in which 3D games are banned, and the entire world is now 2D – and that’s about as serious as this series is ever going to be.
This screen will become your friend throughout the entire game. It gives you everything you need to quickly clear enemies.
Combat is the real focus here, and the entire flow of the game is built around the combat system. The closest description I can come up with is basically this: take the ATB system from SNES Final Fantasies, apply that to your entire party so they share the pool, and have the weakness exploiting of Shin Megami Tensei recharge your ATB pool if you land a weak hit. That combination of mechanics basically has the game working in vastly different ways depending on whether you’re in a trash or boss fight.
For trash fights, the name of the game is completing the battle as quickly as possible by exploiting as many weaknesses as possible. Hit the weakness, keep your ATB, and immediately spam the next attack. By doing this, you can generally complete any weakness-focused battle in seconds. However, this does have a significant problem in the late game.
Ratasteam? Ratasnow? Rataspell? Definitely not Rattata.
Near the end of the game, a lot of the enemies simply stopped having weak points. Any trash fight without weak points plain and simply sucked. Your attack numbers were never really high enough to do large chunking damage on their own, and the ATB meter charging isn’t super fast. Because the meter is shared amongst the entire party, you’re never in a situation in these kinds of fights where you can attack with multiple people. The enemies themselves were generally never dangerous enough to make a risk/reward interesting in whether or not to save ATB charges, so the fights simply dragged out. My tendency ended up being to run from fights without weaknesses, avoid entire regions of battle, and then go to areas with known weaknesses to grind if needed. It just dragged the pace of the last 3-4 hours so much that I wish they’d have balanced the weakness system better to have it be used always at a cost of not being as powerful.
On the other hand, bosses generally had no weaknesses, but were often dangerous, so the risk/reward of saving ATB charges really came into play here. More often than not, I was saving nearly a full meter within a boss fight, then activating either a full attack combo, or some mix of buffs, heals, and spot attacks. This slowed the pace of the fights way down, but also brought them into a place where the strategy more typical of a JRPG was really combing into focus. I wouldn’t say the bosses were ever all that hard, but they were definitely the more interesting of the fights even without exploiting the weakness setup.
Mix Dragon Quest Slimes with Goombas and avoid getting sued? Sure why not.
Luckily, non-battle gameplay was also fairly entertaining. The traversal mechanics and level setup are basically a straight rip of the Vanillaware-style 2D game. Visually, the game has the same sort of hand-drawn-ish, but still very smooth Flash animated characters. The backgrounds are all super colorful with a bunch of parallax layers to fill out the scene. Movement is fast, and with the right amount of exploration you’ll find hidden items or entire hidden areas. As you play through the game, you end up earning more traversal abilities, so going back and revisiting areas has added benefits. If the combat had been in real-time, this would easily have fit in against Odin Sphere or Muramasa, even if it wouldn’t be anywhere on the level of seriousness of those games.
There’s also a bunch of added depth simply in gearing your squad. This game takes the modern Tales of approach of adding acquireable skills to gear, and once earned the skills can be permanently equipped. Their weapons are unique equips, but accessory gear is often shared between party members. In this way I was always playing a balance between finding skills that fit the character’s strengths, while also trying to rush skills that I knew would be beneficial to the entire party. As an example, by end game I’d earned a permanent HP refresh (1% heal per ATB bar generated) across my entire party, so rather than having to have a dedicated full time healer, I was able to craft my party into a mixed physical/magical damage rush party with only weak heals to fill out during burst damage times.
All that being said, there’s really not a whole lot of depth to the rest of the experience. The gameplay is all solid, but the game is less than 20 hours long. There’s definitely a lot of side quests, but they’re all of the gather x thing / kill y enemy variety. You could probably entirely ignore them and get by just fine. Even in combat, you could squeak by without paying any attention at all to the weakness system, although it would probably take a significantly longer amount of time to finish. However, as a breather between serious games this one really hit a good mark. It’s enough of a game to still be fun to play, strong enough mechanically to be interesting enough, and have a stupid enough story to let me just enjoy the comedy for what it is. Is this going to win any game of the years? Unlikely. However, it does exactly what it needed to do – be fun.
