Sword/Shield Thoughts on SwSh (~a year later) I'm curious as a outsider looking in!

Teres my honest opinion its really kinda Meh there some cool mons like Hattrem Dracovish and Galarian-Corsola but tbh after I beat the game kinda just stopped caring

 

Personally, I love Sword and Shield. Something about them just felt so new and fresh to me. The problems it had didn't really bother me. Overly, they still feel like the best games in a while. Granted, it's become apparent to me that my standards are just naturally lower than others, do keep that in mind when considering my opinion here.

In terms of the additional stuffystuff can't get, the Max Raids are really the only big thing you'll be missing out on. You can still tackle them alone, but they are much better with other players than the CPUs. I'm assuming you've heard of the Solrock?

I think they're worth a shot at the very least. You'll never know whether or not you like them unless you play them yourself. Worst case scenario, you end up not liking the game and return/sell it.

This part isn't really important, but I also want to add that Sword was the first time I actually felt compelled to complete the Pokédex. It was the first time I've ever done that. I don't really know why this was the first time I wanted to, but it was.

 

They're okay games. I'm not going to give a review or anything like that, I just think they are good. I had fun playing them and they were one of the few games that actually got me excited playing them. I really got into the idea that I was a challenger fighting with huge audience. The game is really good looking to the point where it made me have a hard time breaking my immersion except in the wild areas. They are just okay games. If you expect innovation or the next big thing in Pokémon, don't buy them. If you want a game that you'll have fun playing, then I'd say its worth a buy, but go in with those expectations.

 

game good

Spoiler: My actual review

my friend wanted me to do that

- The new Pokémon are mostly pretty good. There are some really bad ones, like Eiscue and Stonjourner especially, but the good more than makes up for what little bad there is. My personal favorites include Clobbopus and Hatterene.

- I expected Alolan forms to not make a return, but I'm very happy to be wrong. This is a newer gen gimmick done right: it makes sense lore-wise while also providing a nice new spin on some old and often forgotten Pokémon. Their selections for Pokémon to get new forms were great too, at least for me, with a lot of unpopular Pokémon I liked (think Corsola, Stunfisk, Yamask) getting new forms. Very happy on this.

- As for Dynamaxing, it's definitely better than Z-Moves and Mega Evolutions. Let me first say that Gigantamax forms are mostly kind of lame design-wise, but I did find their initial rarity to make them pretty fun to collect. It's a super unbalanced mechanic, but literally everything else they do is done well. They're only used sparingly ingame, which makes them feel a lot more special when they do get to be used and avoids going through the long animations repeatedly for all regular battles like Megas and Z-Moves had. They also allowed for Raid Battles to exist, which leads me to my next point...

- The Wild Area is great. When a Pokémon game drops, I mostly play until I get bored of the Battle Tower, which mostly lasts me a week or so, story included. But Raid Battles are insanely fun despite being so simple and they were something that kept me into the game for a similarly long amount of time. They are by far the best part of the Wild Area and they kinda just make me forget about everything else they have to offer.

- The story is kind of all over the place. Imagine an hourglass: very big on the very top and bottom, but nothing in the middle. That just about perfectly describes the substance of this game's story. You fight a Level 20 Pokémon in the first gym because of how much stuff happens at the beginning, and then the characters actively try to push you away from the story until the very end. Their reasoning for this is kind of garbage, "we're trying to keep you out of danger," but with a supposedly unbeatable Champion at your side, that shouldn't be a worry at all. That's another thing I don't like: they keep telling us things and not showing them, with the biggest example being "Leon is unbeatable." They show us zero incidents of this ingame. Show, don't tell. I do like some things though, like I like Hop's dynamic with Leon for example. I just felt like the bigger focus of the game felt very underexplored compared to what it could have been.

- However, I like most of the characters. Hop and Bede are the friendly and rude rivals that could have ended up being very generic, but they ended up developing in pretty realistic and pretty interesting ways. As I mentioned before with Hop, I like both of their dynamics with other characters as well. Sonia had a fun little arc too even if it wasn't the most interesting or gripping thing out there. Marnie, though, completely lacked character, and I think that the only reason people like her is for her design, which kind of sucks. I REALLY think people should put more importance in interesting characters as opposed to ones that are designed well, but oh well.

- I really like Team Yell. At first I expected them to be kind of empty, standard nuicanses that lacked the charm Team Skull had, and while they don't have quite the same level of charm as Team Skull, they still ended up being pretty good. They're not evil, they're just rough around the edges, and all they want to do is support their hometown hero. That's a really great motive for a not-so-evil team. Piers is great too for similar reasons: you'd expect him to be evil by his looks, and while he's definitely snarky, he quite clearly still loves his people and Marnie especially.

- Macro Cosmos...Why? Not every game after XY needs a poorly-done twist villain. I think Rose is somewhat interesting as well even if executed terribly. I like that he's driven to do what he does because he wants to help the people of Galar. I'm gonna try to say this next part without spoiling, but in the main part of the game, why is he so impatient and why doesn't he wait for Leon? Seems completely out of character for what they set him up to be. I think it was in character for him to turn himself in, but I highly doubt that was intentional for reasons I'll get to later. Oleanna's really interesting as well for reasons I won't state so I can keep this paragraph short and doesn't have any execution issues. I don't like Macro Cosmos as a team, but I do like the notable characters.

- Controversial opinion, this game's graphics are MOSTLY fine. Not perfect in any area, but fine. I think that a lot of the animations are great even if some of the early-game moves are lacking in some areas, and while the models themselves are also good, the textures are absolutely terrible and I think it's the sole thing that makes the game look worse. Are the textures alone reasons to hate a game's graphics? That's subjective. I mostly didn't care, but sometimes it did get to me.

- Some areas really lack polish. The aforementioned textures, the fact that Pokémon don't have animations for turning around in the overworld, the new shiny hunting method not really buffing the odds by any significant amount...these issues were not present in earlier games, even LGPE, and they started to grate bigtime.

- The worldbuilding this game is fantastic. This isn't something I normally compliment with the Pokémon games, but literally all of the cities felt fresh and interesting, and small details like the fact that NPCs slowly start to recognize you as you progress really help sell it. The fact that there are stadiums for gym battles was amazing, and the fact that they chant for you when there's a Dynamax Pokémon involved is great as well. Lots of smaller details can really help sell the experience.

- Some one-off things. The music is among the absolute best. There's not much for me to elaborate on, but I will say that Rose's theme is great even if not entirely fitting. There are some nice quality-of-life changes that helped push. The postgame was nothing spectacular, Sordward and Shielbert suck.

Overall, I love Sword and Shield. They're very flawed games for sure, and there are Pokémon games that have less obvious flaws than them that I like more. These games are great fun and I'm happy to see them selling so well. If I were to compare them to other games in the series, I'd say they're worse than BW, BW2, HGSS, and DPPt, but they're better than the rest of the games in the series. It makes me sad to see them removing the National Dex only because of how they mess with the reputation of these games, and I feel like if they had it, these games would be recognized as some of the best in the series. At least it's still selling well, and at least many of the people I've spoken to have enjoyed it.