Pokémon Legends: Arceus Review 

It's one of my favourites too! They tried and they succeeded.

Seriously! I wish that they would move away from dual version releases and trade/event-only Pokémon, but that's asking them to slash their profits by a wide margin. Gameplay changes like that will never happen unless people speak with their wallets. This is my favourite Pokémon game on the Switch too. I'd recommend it to every Switch owner. I didn't know that you enjoyed it so much! I remember when you mentioned getting Arceus and then immediately dropping the game 😂

@@TheLegendofLeo must be a different game. I got Arceus for Christmas and played through it immediately and consistently through January to completion. I’m not itching to replay it anytime soon but I had a blast :)

@@Majora_T Haha, no, I mean the Pokémon Arceus! You mentioned it during the first section of our interview/your podcast with me.

@@TheLegendofLeooh lol miscommunication I thought you meant the game itself. Yup that’s true! There was little other functionality after that imo.

Thank you! Haha, well now I'm extremely curious to hear your thoughts on it. I'll be talking about Pokémon Scarlet soon, and I remember what you said about Violet in your review! It'll be interesting to compare our tastes in Pokémon 😁

Something else that I didn't mention was how different Pokémon's stats were. Didn't you find that attacks were generally much stronger in this game, but not very effective attacks were incredibly weak? I remember some instances where I had a Pokémon 20 levels higher than a wild one, and if I used a not very effective move and especially if I made it agile, I wouldn't even come close to knocking out the Poke. I never bothered looking into damage calculations, but I don't think that they were the same.

@@TheLegendofLeo yes I definitely did notice that, to the point where having a much more balanced team (that counters) was really important. The cool part of course is being careful sending the wrong Pokémon (who are weak to certain attack types) so in other words, the enemies can really take advantage of your weak Pokémon as well. I really enjoyed this title and would love to see another entry.

@@GamesWithTea You and me both. I didn't think that it would happen before, but now that I've seen the sales figures, I see no reason why they shouldn't.

Ah, you're right. I don't even have a complete Pokédex right now because of that quest and a couple of other tricky ones. All they needed to do was have an NPC who you could talk to about the rough location of the next nearest wisp. There was a similar slip-up with the Landorus/Thunderus/Tornadus quest, where after you're told their locations the first time, there's no one to remind you of them again.

Yeah, it felt like an experiment from the N64 or GameCube era! I'm so glad that they tried something new.

Thankfully I and none of my friends encountered those bugs. I saw some funny graphical bugs though, like Pokémon sometimes turning invisible 🤣

DQ Monsters sounds good. I'd like to play a couple of the mainline games first to appreciate the universe first, but I love the look of so many spinoffs: Monsters, Builders, and even Treasures. I'll tell you something that I kept out of the video because I think you'll find this ridiculous. Remember how I showed the main character falling off a cliff with that stupid T-pose? That stall time in the air is so that later on, you can press A to summon a flying Pokemon to make you airborne. The character struggling to climb uphill is the same thing. Once the "quicksand"/slow animation activates against a slope, you can press A to summon a climbing Pokemon. So those things are a bit rough and need to be polished for a sequel, but the mechanics themselves are great. You can fluidly alternate between modes of transportation in the overworld if you become familiar with with to time your button presses, or you can anticipate them and pre-summon those Pokemon from your UI.

@@TheLegendofLeo ok i see exactly what your saying. yeah they should at least updated it with a patch

This game felt like Colosseum + Snap + a mainline adventure all rolled into one. It reminded me of why I enjoyed Let's Go so much as well. You're encouraged to catch a lot of Pokemon, and you're also rewarded when you release all of your extra Pokemon. Released Pokemon drop different power-up items that you can use to level up your Pokemon's stats.

@@TheLegendofLeo I've been done with modern Nintendo for 9 years, that isn't going to change any time soon. Pokemon was my childhood, I cherish it but I have to move on. I recognize that the era of edge is over now and that Colosseum will never happen again. There is no way in 2023 that we will ever get a pokemon protagonist as sigma as Wes, it just isn't happening, let alone the ability to steal Pokemon. Knowing people nowadays, people woule get offended that Pokemon is encouraging kids to start engaging in criminal activity. The edge was a big part of the appeal and it was the thing that ultimately extended my interest in a series at the perfect time... only for that interest to suddenly deflate when Diamond & Pearl came out. Colosseum represented the 2000's in every single possible way, edgy, experimental, controvertial etc. Sure Arceus breaks the mold but unlike Coloseeum, you can tell that Arceus is trying to be different, deliberately. Colosseum wasn't trying to be different, it just was... because the 2000's was all about that stuff, for better or worse but Colosseum turned out on the better side of things if you ask me.

The game looks good more often than not, like when you've got a wide view with a sunset on the water or with something like the thumbnail capture. But there are too many low quality textures and graphical glitches, and crazy amounts of pop-in that can pull you out of the experience. Nothing ever made the game less fun for me though.

You really think so? Sure SV and SwSh blow it away, but it's 1-2-3 with Let's Go first, then BDSP, and then itself. Those three titles are all within 240,000 units sold of each other.

This aged like milk