- Hey, guys, and welcome to This Is Now.
Pokemon Sword and Shield
come out on the switch today
and while it should be one of the most
exciting days of the year for Pokemon fans
it's more than a little bit
bittersweet thanks to some,
shall we say controversial
decisions on Game Freak's end.
Look, for me my love of Pokemon goes deep.
I've been playing Pokemon
literally since I was like six years old
and while the games have been incredible
and the games have been great
there's no doubt that things
have gotten a little stale.
Right, I mean there's a very
rigid formula in the games
and I understand that
over the years Game Freak
has tried to shake it up and
introduce new forms and new,
ideas, I don't know, I mean,
Mega Evolutions were cool.
What was the other thing, what
was it after Mega Evolutions?
- Z-Moves
- Z-Moves, those are dumb.
- Yeah, I don like Z-Moves.
- Z-Moves are dumb.
But now we've got mega-giganto max.
You know, I would talk a
lot about this right now
however I think Pokemon's
had lots of really weird,
like, some Pokemon, like
the way like they evolved
and all kinds of stuff or like trying,
do you remember try to catch a Feebas?
- [Jimmy] Yeah.
- That was like the most infuriating thing
of any Pokemon game where
there's like one tile
that changes once a day in one, ugh.
But to understand it all we
have to go back to the beginning
where Sword and Shield were announced
back in February of this year.
Fans were excited because to
combat a negative reaction
to the very simplified
remake of Pokemon Yellow,
Let's Go Eevee and Pikachu,
Game Freak wanted to make
sure to let everyone know
that hey, they're also working on
a brand new main line follow-up
to Pokemon Ultra Sun and Moon
which will be coming out this year.
Now that turned out to
be a pretty smart move
since while the Let's Go games were fun,
they end up cutting out a lot.
Things like random battles
in the wild were removed
to make way for a Pokemon
Go esque catching encounter,
the Pokedex was slash
down to the original 151
and there Alolan forms
and the entire game was
made just generally easier
so younger people could find
a new entry point into the series.
Personally, while it was nice to play
realistically we've been
to Kanto many, many times
and I kind of enjoyed it
but I also made it about
halfway through the game
and haven't touched it
in the year since so,
it's cool but I don't know,
I guess I'm a hardcore Pokemon fan,
I'm an old-school Pokemon fan.
I wanna actually battle wild Pokemon.
I wanna go get my eight gym badges
in what's the new region, Galagar?
- Galar.
- Galar.
- Yeah, england.
- England!
But of course as we all now know
things pretty much went
downhill for Pokemon Let's Go.
So the first controversy
to come out of the Pokemon
Sword and Shield reveal
in February came down to graphics.
Now with the jump to new hardware
almost three years into its lifecycle
fans were rightfully
expecting Sword and Shield
to be a big leap forward
for the franchise.
Similar to the jump between
Black and White and X and Y.
I know while obviously the DS games
hung around for quite a while,
when you jumped up to
3DS it was like, whoa,
look at those graphics, this
is revolutionary, it was good.
So when the reveal trailer dropped
and it made Sword and Shield
look like a slightly uprezzed Sun and Moon
fans were not happy.
So the main meme being used
to represent the graphical updates,
or rather the lack thereof,
was a screenshot of a tree
taken from the early area.
Now at first people
putting it side by side
with a picture of a tree
from Breath of the Wild
and then they put it next to
a tree from Ocarina of Time.
Yes, putting a tree from
Pokemon game released in 2019
next to a tree from a
game released in 1998
was an actual comparison
people could make.
Now to be fair, of course
graphics aren't everything
and at the end of the day
it's gainfully that really matters.
But one of the key criticisms
against the Pokemon
franchise for a long time now
is that the games are slowing
on adding new features
and genre trends.
On top of that, most new features
like having a Pokemon follow you
or Mega Evolutions don't
really impact gameplay
in a meaningful way
and they only tend to be
included for one or two games
before being replaced with something else.
For example instead of
Mega Evolutions or Z-Moves,
Sword and Shield features Dynamaxing
which allows you to battle
with a giant hologram
of pretty much any Pokemon you want.
Now, Nintendo probably made the smart move
and didn't really offer much of a response
to any of the criticism
so it generally died down
until around E3.
Turning the Treehouse Live
presentation of the game
Nintendo revealed that like Let's Go,
Sword and Shield wouldn't
support all 800 plus Pokemon
that have been created since Red and Blue.
Now this really was the
final straw for fans
who expected to take advantage
of the upcoming Pokemon Home app
which is supposed to allow you
to freely transfer your
Pokemon between games
all the way from the digital
versions of Red and Blue
all the way up to the
most recent generation.
I mean, that's always been
one of the major strengths
of the mainline Pokemon games.
You've had literally all
the Pokemon available.
And even though, yes, certain generations
such as third gen didn't allow you
right out of the box to
import older Pokemon,
there was at least all the
Pokemon data in the game,
you could trade them eventually
with things like Pokemon Colosseum
and Leaf Green and everything
but this time around
short of some like firmware update
the games straight up do not have the data
for many of the older Pokemon.
between Pokemon Go, Pokemon Let's Go,
as well as Sword and Shield all having
different sets of usable Pokemon
the app really is a holding cell for
whenever the games start to support
all the old Pokemon again.
Now according to Game Freak,
the reason for the reduced Pokedex
is that the higher graphical
fidelity of the Switch
allowed them to create a new
battle and idle animations
which of course takes time to do,
especially when you have
eight hundred plus Pokemon
so they made the sacrifice
so that the game will be ready for launch.
Or at least so they claim.
Of course, fans were
immediately dubious of this
and in early July a user posted
a thread contradicting it.
First they showed a clip
of the main character
speaking with their rival
matched up with an animation of the rival
from Sun and Moon which is identical.
Isn't that slightly suspicious.
And then they showed a video
of a new Pokemon using Tail Whip
which was again the same
animation from Sun and Moon.
They also compared the Tail Whip animation
from Sword and Shield to the original
Pokemon Stadium game on N64 and,
yeah, it doesn't look great.
Now the Dynamax Pokemon also
have these same animations
as the smaller counterparts
but that just slowed down.
Now, at this point the
internet, not too pleased.
And if you can believe in things
continue to get even worse
as outrage tends to do.
On November 4th the Reset
Air user Joeski posted a grid
featuring every single Pokemon
in the National Pokedex
with the returning Pokemon
highlighted in green.
As it turned out Game Freak
was absolutely ruthless
when deciding which Pokemon
they were going to cut.
Pretty much every starter
aside from Charmander,
because of course, didn't make the cut
on top of fan favorite
legendaries like Mewtwo,
Ho-oh, Lugia, all of the legendary birds,
even Dragonite didn't make the cut.
Man.
Now, if we get a little
bit deeper into speculation
there were a lot of rumors
in the early part of
the Switch's lifecycle
that Game Freak we're going to be remaking
the Ultra Sun and Moon
games for the Switch,
mostly because they're afraid
that the Switch wasn't
actually going to sell.
Now when it became very obvious
that the Switch was a big seller
it seemed like their sort of strategy
got moved around a little bit
so Pokemon Let's Go showed up
which were admittedly pretty fun games
but they're very, very simple.
And instead of doing a
Ultra Sun and Moon remake
they start working on Sword and Shield.
Now it makes sense if they
had already started prepping
sort of moving the 3DS
game over to the Switch
that they would wanna renovate or reuse
a lot of the same models,
a lot of the same moves,
a lot of the same animations
from the Ultra Sun and Moon games.
I mean, yes the Switch is obviously
much more powerful than 3DS
but these games are fairly complicated,
remaking 800-plus Pokemon is a lot of work
but the downside here is that, yes,
it's great to have a new
Pokemon game every year
but is it really worth
it to have something
which by all accounts
seems to be a little empty?
There's lots of cases of like
buildings that feel like they
totally should be fleshed out,
dungeons which are like five minutes long.
Like there's so much for this game
that seems to be a little bit cut short,
it seems like Game Freak just
had to rush it out the door.
And well it's great because
some parts of the game
do seem to legitimately be solid,
but a lot of the game just
seems to be not quite there.
That brings us to today,
the reviews of Sword
and Shield have dropped
with some of them calling
it the best Pokemon game yet
and others calling it a hollow shell
of what the franchise once was.
But overall to be fair, the
scores have been pretty solid
with the current Metacritic score of 84%.
Game Freak didn't get much time
to rest on their laurels though
as the game is officially
out in the wild now
and because of that it has found its way
into the hands of data miners.
So the statement from Game Freak
about the models and
animations in Sword and Shield
being built from scratch
is starting to come back
to bite them once again
as the data miners were able to pull out
the exact models of some
of the Pokemon in the game
and after comparing them to
models pulled from the 3DS games
it looks like they are
functionally identical.
To really drive the point home,
here's a video of
Scorbunny's third evolution
using Double Kick.
Not only is it a kind
of terrible animation
but it's the same one we've been seeing
for the past few games in the series.
Now all of these videos of course
are making their way through
Twitter as #GameFreakLied
has been the top trend
on the platform lately
and it's like, man, it's a mess
because obviously the internet gets salty,
they get upset sometimes.
Although to be honest, I
actually kind of feel like
all this criticism has been pretty similar
to a lot of other releases
of other Pokemon games.
So what exactly makes this so different?
Well probably this is because
this is the first time
we're supposed to get
a flagship Pokemon game
on a full console, not
just a limited handheld.
Now, it is good that Game
Freak has made some strides
like being able to skip
the awful tutorials
or having an open world
when you compare the scale
of Pokemon Sword and Shield
to something like Breath of the Wild
Matt can't help but feel
like he was cheated out of his money.
I'm curious, do you think the internet
is overreacting with this
stuff and also let me know
exactly how old I am in the comments below
by letting me know
what your first generation of Pokemon was.
Anyway, thank you so much for watching,
make sure to hit the like button
and subscribe and you can check out
some of our other episodes here and here.
If you don't actually
check out those episodes
I'm not sure what will happen
because Matt's not here today
so he didn't write an outro for me.
Although you coulda
just given me an ending,
everything else is here.
I don't have to do
without Matt, it's weird.
Matt, I miss you, come back, please.
