04/02/2022
So I've basically finished Pokemon Legends: Arceus. To do the last post-game quest you need to have completed the pokedex, and I'm about 30 away, but the only legendary I haven't caught yet only appears if you have a save file from a game I don't own, so I think I'm about as close to done as I can get. It's...fine? It's incredibly ugly, which wouldn't be as big a problem if The Pokemon Company wasn't a multi-billion dollar company that can absolutely afford to fix the amateurish issues with the graphics. I think it's wrong to give them a pass for that. This game was published by two huge corporations, broke sales records across the board, and they didn't bother making it look better than a decent fangame. Any time and money they didn't put into the game translates into extra profit down the line, and I don't like rewarding that kind of behavior by brushing over it. Still, I'm gonna set that aside and write on its game design philosophy, what I think works, what I think doesn't, and the ways I worry about the directions they're taking the series. Obviously, mileage varies on this, and since this is a spinoff, it's possible none of its changes will make their way into the main games, but considering much of its design philosophy were improvements on concepts from the Let's Go games, these are still clearly things that are going to be in the ether going forward, especially given how big the game's launch has been.
So firstly, the battle system is heavily simplified. Obviously, held items and abilities have been removed, but a lot of changes have been made to speed up battles and make them easier to win. Many weaker moves have had their power increased and stronger moves have had their power decreased, tightening the window of possible damage output. Similar tweaks have been made to max PP of moves such as Ancient Power/ Ominous Wind etc. Moves that used to not do damage but had unique strategic effects have been removed or made into damaging moves, like stealth rocks and spikes. Any move that raises a stat instead raises both the special and physical versions of that stat at once, making moves like calm mind and bulk up both identical and considerably better. Stat raises also don't seem to stack, though I'm not 100% on that one. The accuracy and evasion stats have been removed and replaced with a two-turn evasion buff effect. Confuse, Sleep, Freeze, and Toxic Poison have been removed, and status effects that do damage over time now do 1/8 instead of 1/16 of max HP each turn. There are no longer EV caps, and it is possible to max out EVs on every stat on every pokemon, which means strategic builds aren't a thing in this game - which I predict means that any training you do for a pokemon in this game won't carry over to other games once transferring is implemented in the Fall. They've also modified how damage is calculated more generally, so that lower-level pokemon can more easily defeat higher-level ones, and it seems to me to have increased the strength of moves at 60-100 power across the board. I haven't looked into whether stats have been tweaked yet, but considering how much damage my Chansey does I wouldn't be surprised if those have been altered too, to make less damage-oriented pokemon do and take more damage. Moves that take two turns, like Dig and Fly, have been removed. The only one remaining that I could find is Shadow Force, which now adds the evasion effect instead.
When I first picked up the game and saw the new, FFX-style turn order system and Bravely Default-style Speed and Power system, I was pretty thrilled that they'd been willing to add so much more complexity to an already pretty complex battle system. The more I played, however, the clearer it was that they added this because the other changes they'd made left the system so oversimplified that it needed some strategic element added back in. It seems that all these changes were made because in the open world stealth game they had made, battles function as a punishment for failure, rather than serving as the core purpose of the game. In my 50ish hours of play, I've had easily less than 15 trainer battles total (against unique trainers; there are three repeated trainers who have a chance of showing up randomly every 3-5 outings or so). I've been caught unaware by a trainer battle with level 60 pokemon and still decimated it with a team of level 23s I was leveling. In this game, battles are primarily a tool to slow down players who do poorly at the stealth and action components, and as a result they have been made as quick and easy to complete as possible, so the punishment doesn't last overlong and frustrate stealth and action players. My first time blacking out in this game was 40 hours in, and it was from accidentally fat-fingering and switching to riding a bear while flying. I haven't lost a battle yet. The battle system is almost vestigial, at this point, and I can't help but wonder if some of the overwhelming jank and ugliness of this game is because resources went into the battle system when they simply shouldn't have. I think this game should have been a reimagining of the old Pokemon Rangers spinoff series, where the pokemon in your party afford you advantages without acting as battling partners. The Zelda-style boss encounters in this game are already absolutely updated versions of the Rangers encounters.
My main disagreement with this game, philosophically, is on the way it handles catching. Legends approaches catching the way especially Go and to a lesser extent the Let's Go games did, by encouraging players to catch as many pokemon as possible and chunk the duplicates for training items. This was unavoidable in Go, as it was a mobile game and was designed around a mobile gameplay loop. This was counter to the point of Let's Go, to the point that I refused to buy either of those games on principle. Here...it makes more sense than Let's Go, but it still feels kinda gross? I never deleted my first file in Pokemon Blue. Ditto for Sapphire and Platinum. I only started reaching a point where I could say goodbye to the pokemon I'd run through a game with in Gen 5. This always felt like...the point? You're supposed to get attached to the pokemon you play with, not as a collection of lists of numbers with a cute design, but as individual beings who went on an adventure with you. It's why each individual pokemon has slightly unique stat spreads, why they gain EVs from the battles they're in, why you can transfer pokemon from game-to-game, and gen-to-gen, why they added shinies and forms and eviolite. It's the main theme of the television show, and (I'd assumed) why so many people have wanted the return of pokemon following you outside of battles (which Legends doesn't do and I find a little unacceptable). You watch so many characters in this game befriend a pokemon and become attached to it. There are nearly a hundred sidequests, about half of which involve catching a pokemon for someone so they can use it as a tool, and over the course of the game those pokemon evolve and grow while their trainers become attached to them. This is supposed to be a game about befriending pets and surviving hardships with them, and the fact that I go to the storage system after each outing, peruse the stat spreads of 15 sneasels, and grind all but the best one into EVs feels like we took a wrong turn somewhere.
I only took my starter all the way to the end, out of a sense of obligation. I have two boxes of the about fifty pokemon who I had in my party at some point, because I feel obligated to remember them. But I switched each of them out without any remorse, or twinge of attachment. I'd already caught tens of each of them, and if you catch a pokemon with a better nature, it's laughably easy to use EV items on it and overtake the one you'd used before, since you don't earn EVs from battles anymore.
In the end, Pokemon Legends: Arceus is a fun - if ugly - game with a decently rewarding loop. I don't regret the time I put into it. But I look at the patterns it continues from previous games and those it leaves behind, and I worry that the wrong lessons are being reinforced. That worry powerfully sours an otherwise solidly enjoyable experience.
