Missy's Game Shelf

With all of Pokemons recent failures and the rumors of them attempting scam NFTs. I wanted to go back and play what in my opinion is the best Pokemon game. Released in Gen 4 as a spinoff to Diamond, Peral, and Platinum it managed to surpass the main games and stay to the ideas and themes of that generation. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Explorers of the Sky is highly considered not only an amazing game but also a good start on if you want to try dungeon crawlers.

Gameplay

The game is a dungeon crawler meaning you enter dungeons that are randomized. Everything from items to location of the exit is random. There is four members of a party allowed in each dungeon, but the first two will always be the player and their partner. Different moves have different range allowing you to attack things further away. Using too many moves will deplete PP like usual so you need to be careful. Some items can be used as weapons and can be thrown.

Plot

The story is you wake up and are transformed into a Pokemon with no memory. You learn time is getting distorted and even stopping completely in some places. This leads you to try and discover the cause and protect the world. As it is the game is best played blind as the story is its strongest element even having additional chapters to Explorers of Time and Darkness to explain even further.

Conclusion

This game is enjoyable as a dungeon crawler and rpg. It is one of my favorite games and I don’t regret playing it. Sadly it reminds me of how far Pokemon went from a fun game series with a lot to do and creative creatures to whatever you want to call it now. I loved playing this, but it remains as a game that pointed out Pokemons high points and then abandoned those.

Score: 5/10

First I’m going to explain an NFT so those who don’t know can keep up. NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token, currency that you can’t use. NFT’s have been mostly used for crypto scams and they are mostly just JPEGS of terrible art and try to create a limit on something where there doesn’t need to be. NFTs are scams because you can just take a screenshot. People try to buy or collect NFT’s to sell for real money when they really aren’t getting anything.

Alright, in an article from Ethan Gach of Kotaku reporting this, after a massive decline in profits Square replaced their CEO, Yosoke Masuda. I feel like his choice to announce an interest in NFT’s when most were proven scams and a desire to add them to games started the downhill in profit for them. Most of Squares recent games have been online so many were likely scared to play anything from them due to a fear of getting scammed. Online espicailly may have this issue considering real money involved. Furthermore, despite their large catalog of games, most of their online ventures either survive a month or go without updates. Forsaken died a month after launch as Square may be unaware online games need time not to mention people were likely saving for Hogwarts Legecy rather than a game that Squares history with online told everyone bare bones content and will likely die before gaining an audience or even after an audience no updates and server shutdown. They have an endless loop and no one really knows how long the Final Fantasy games will last.

While most are worried or skeptical of the new CEO, Takashi Kiryu, we really can only wait and see what he does. It does not seem to be going well as Forsaken was shown to be a loss for Square and the Symbiosis NFT centric game trailer by Square was mass downvoted and no one seems happy. My guess is Square really doesn’t know where it went wrong and believes NFT’s, Live Services, and inability to learn from mistakes makes progress.

Sources:

• Gach, Ethan. “Square Enix CEO Who Constantly Pushed NFT Games To Be Replaced”, Kotaku, 2023 https://kotaku.com/final-fantasy-square-enix-ceo-nft-crypto-blockchain-1850184312

I mostly am writing this to warn others that there seems to be a bug in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet associated with the DLC and Pokemon Go. If it was any other game I’m sure this would be a shock, but Scarlet and Violet are so poorly made that it shouldn’t really be surprising anymore. And before anyone blames quality control or testers remember this they probably ran into the many issues, but were ignored and developers decided fixing anything was too difficult and chose the lazy route instead. I find it hard to actually believe this game went through quality and no one caught anything.

Bugs aside no ones sure what is causing this the bigger problem is if pairing or the DLC is to blame or the games in general. I had high hopes that the DLC would, similar to sword and shield, be able to make the games better or more stable, however that doesn’t seem to be the case. It isn’t like Go has been an issue before, we could pair in the Let’s Go games and transfer pokemon. Most current Pokemon games have at least some integration with go seeing as almost all Pokemon are in Go and it can connect to home. While I also downloaded the newest patch I have yet to play it or send postcards so I don’t think the fault is the patch or it could be massive amounts of playtimes. I found that bugs in these games were more common the longer I played if I play an hour or two pretty stable maybe one or two animation bugs. Past three or so hours complete crashes, animation bugs literally everywhere, and who knows what else. Due to this I’m less effected because my playtime was interrupted so much I only have around 20-40 hours in game enough to beat the main plot but rarely grinded or shiny hunted and if my save gets wiped I’m not losing hundreds of hours and multiple shinies like others. In my honest opinion it is best to approach anything with the newest update with a level of caution.

Sources:

• YongYea. “Pokemon Scarlet Violet Bug Is Wiping Saves With Hundreds Of Hours & Players Aren’t Happy” Youtube, March,7, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuWMb04pVjU&t=430s

I had yet to play Return to Dreamland, but I did play Planet Robobot, Triple Deluxe, and Star Allies. These were made based on the same engine as the original Return to Dreamland. I also played Superstar Ultra, The Crystal Shards, Squeak Squad, and Forgotten Lands.  So I know the series pretty well at this point.

While nothing is wrong with the game it seems more like a port with a few added features. There is now a Helper Magalor to assist in single player mode. I never used this unlike in Star Allies and Superstar Ultra it seemed entirely optional. The co op is similar to New Super Mario Bros. in which levels can be done and challenges completed no matter how many players there are. As for the abilities each player has a different set completely I like this in comparison to Super Mario the differences are more than this player can run slightly faster or do a small float. Kirby has the most diverse move set thanks to his copy ability but those don’t last forever if you get hit you lose the ability if you can’t eat the star it turns into, Meta Knight has the sword ability forever, King Dedede has the hammer power up, and Bandana Waddledee has the spear ability. Each power controls differently mirroring the copy power they are based on.

The only bad thing I have to say about this game are the Ultra Abilities while fun unlike having entire stages like Robobot would later in the series based around upgraded powers it seemed more like they were there to just be there sure the power was fun to use but the sections were normally at the end of a level to gain access to a portal rather than be its own real added benefit.

Plot

Kirby is running from King Dedede and Bandana Waddledee who wants a cake while Meta Knight is just there by coincidence. A portal opens and a ship crashes the group run into Magalor inside and agree to help him with repairs. Soon it is revealed that Magalor is evil and plotted to have Kirby and his friends defeat Landia to get a crown made of absolute power. Leading to the last fight in the game against Magalor.

As for the plot itself a villain tricking Kirby to end the world has happened multiple times before. So much like Mario the plot really doesn’t change. I just find it fun that rather than rivals or enimies King Dedede and Meta Knight are treated as allies and Kirby’s friends. As for Bandana Waddledee we know from Superstar he is loyal to King Dedede but has helped Kirby multiple times and is able to stay on good terms with him through the series.

Finally Magalors quest is I think new to this game it is a single player adventure unlocked after the main game where you play as the villain after the events. Magalor lost all his powers and now needs to recover them. For the most part I had fun with this but his Dark Needles move was difficult to pull off consistently it is supposed to cause damage and shield you when your combo meter is full but it never worked for me unless I was lucky. Making it unreliable compared to just getting the shield power up and normal attacks.

Score: 7/10

Pokemon Day Updates Thoughts

The World Championships is now taking place in Yokohama, Japan. Where competions across the TCG, Game, and apps among others. I’m not really one to care for the competitive so this announcement only would make me excited if we saw some strange or new strategies introduced. Kind of like how one of the previous world Champions brought a Pachirisu a relatively throw away Pokemon and still somehow won.

TCG Classic Announcement

I find this to be the most disappointing they already had a set of cards that were using the old Base one deck for the 25^th anniversary. If I could I’d say they should have a new deck or cards based on Base set 2 or Jungle. This doesn’t seem new it just advertises stuff already on the market.

Netflix and Pokemon Concirge

I suppose this is only somewhat of a shock after Netflix got the rights. I am a bit scared what they are going to do. Television based on games hasn’t been great so far. It uses stop motion and seems to be telling some story in the Pokemon universe. So this show will only focus on lore that is already established or branch out to do something different. Though the focus on a resort is strange to me Pokemon is at its core an adventure game so what adventures are at a resort for Pokemon especially when we already have Pokemon Café Remix.

Games

Zacian is joining unite still no real reason to play that so my thoughts are I don’t care so much. Café remix got a Paldea update Sprigato, Fecocco, and Quaxly can join your café. Once again do not care remix was fun for five minutes so admittedly I played it longer than unite. Galar Trainers and events coming to Masters. Definitely the one I played the most I like seeing all the Trainers in one place and find out what happened to them. Just why so late I am aware that Masters does have content geared towards Galar, but I kind of just want them to finish the main story. Pokemon Sleep I’ve seen some useless apps but really? Go got an accessory and has functionality with Scarlet and Violet.

Lastly, Scarlet and Violet got two new Pokemon based on Suicune and Virizion. Wild Mane and Iron Thorns respectfully one clearly an ancient form of Suicune and the other a future form of Virizion are available in raids. A DLC pack The Treasures of Area Zero while not what I expected I will play both packs when they release later this year. I was only half wrong.

Sources:

The Official Pokémon YouTube channel. “Pokemon Presents|2.27.2023”, https://www.youtube.com/, Pokemon, February, 27, 2023, video length 25:46, https://www.youtube.com/@pokemon.

Pokemon Day Hopes and Predictions

For those who don’t know the 28^th of February is when Pokemon sends out updates, news on games both coming out and current, and new patches to bugs. I thought it would be nice to list what I am hoping to see.

DLC PACK FOR SCARLET AND VIOLET

Scarlet and Violet are relatively boring and lore wise not very interesting. The same can be said for Sword and Shield, but I have to admit the packs for those two made the game better. I think the packs should be focusing on time travel or different points in Pokemon’s lore. Maybe seeing the ancient past or distant future, or characters from past games, and mostly focus on either a new place or the origins of Pokemon. Possibly a launch of Pokemon Home update for these games.

A New Legends Game or Other Spinoff

While Legends is a main series game due to lore or having a Pokedex I won’t say I’m not hoping for a new Legends game. I think a focus on the Johto of Kanto regions might be fun.

A new mystery dungeon the only mystery dungeon game on switch is a remake. I think we should get a new game in the series. Or even if there is a remake of explorers then that would at least fit with the themes of multiple universes and time Scarlet and Violet were going for.

Other

News on events and raids for mobile titles. I think there will be more to do in Go, Masters, and Unite so far all we’ve seen in any of those games is up till Gen 8. I think they are going to announce Pokemon and characters from Scarlet and Violet.

I’m going to say this I have yet to play any Sonic game since mania and when it comes to 3D sonic I have only played Heroes and Unleashed. So I am probably the last to go to about Sonic. I saw the gameplay trailor for this and immediately felt something was wrong with Sonics movement, but regardless I tried to keep an open mind. Sonic games at their core are momentum based platformers. The gameplay at best I could run around, but with little control it constantly felt like I was steering sonic over having full control over him he kind of just slides all over the place while I try to avoid spikes. At worst I was just sitting holding the Boost button. I can at least praise the writing here someone tried to make this game marginally more interesting. The biggest thing is the open world. Calling it open would be disappointing at best. It is open with challenges and platforming everywhere, but more or less it is just one big stage connecting to other stages the only reward for doing these are rings and the returning red rings. I didn’t bother to collect all of them as that seemed pointless even with any kind of secret ending. I was already collecting Memory hearts before the game told me what they were. I also only played for a few hours as at that point I felt I had enough to at least do a first impressions review. If you can’t hook a player within 5 hours with gameplay and plot then there isn’t a point to keep playing. It’s odd Sonic Forces was bad because it lasts 4 hours at most here it took me just as long to make an opinion. Was what I played good? No. Was anything about this game good? Maybe the plot but I didn’t play enough to actually get that far into it so it wasn’t considered much for this review. I tried to like this game after the many Sonic related disasters and probably should have given up before 5 hours, but the more I played the worse it got. Dying in this game doesn’t just mean lost progress I had to figure out where I was now for most open world games this is as simple as opening a map or checking a mini map, but they somehow messed this up as you travel the map is created while a unique idea it is really easy to get lost when your map can literally show near nothing. Another thing is it is really easy to get lost after death as you respawn on some random place on the map. Half my deaths took me to areas I never saw or noticed so how is an autosave there?

Score 2/10

Guardian Tales (Switch Port)

Guardian Tales is an incredibly fun game, but with flaws. Widely accepted as a mobile game with more effort than usual as well as free, but with microtransactions it can be easily written off as Pay to Win, but alternatively you can reset your account any time so long as you aren’t too far things should be fine. With just learning the basics and what you need to know then starting a new game should help.

Gameplay

It is an RPG so leveling up and exp are the main mechanic. Each companion has a type and different teams can have advantages in different areas and while you can get more companions these can cost gems or tickets. After Awakening specific skills you can evolve your heroes and use Chain Skills to do combination attacks. The game has a consistent difficulty curve until you hit world 7. Even if you do end up using gems to continue. At that point you have Nightmare mode for new resources rather than difficulty. What I also like about the nightmare levels is that these levels take place after the events of the quests and the main story. The layout is the same, but both the monsters and main goal of the level changed. For example the tutorial level Kanterbury Forest has the goal of locating the princess, meeting the first members of your party, the Guardian Wolf, Innkeeper Loraine, Red hood Elvira and Vampire Karina, and finally unlocking the town simulator. The nightmare level has the goal of figuring out the monsters hiding in the forest, but while you do so several characters from the quests in the normal mode mention things that happened in that world. One character states the disappearance of a brutal Guardian Wolf that lives in the forest, another is looking for the Red Hood, but fails and instead mistakes someone else for her. It’s small, but I like the change of instead of normal levels just harder we actually see people reacting to the changes that happened during the normal playthrough. Much like other RPGs there are different classes for different characters. Tanks do damage and can take a lot of hits the tradeoff is there is not a lot of tanks available to the player unless you use summons, Warrior does a large amount of physical damage guickly, Ranged are good at bows/ riffles and magic with limited ammo but great distance and elemental damage, and Support heals the player.

I liked this game unfortunately at world 7 the game quickly devolves into how many gems do you have and are you willing to spend any throwing away the good gameplay, fleshing out characters, and puzzles for money. For boss rushes and repitious dungeons fortunately World 8 feels better with a bigger focus on puzzles I enjoyed what I played to that point so it really is your choice. The game is free so it doesn’t hurt to at least try.

Score: 7/10

Can a person who has never used this service write a review on it? I’ve never used Stadia simply because of the requirement to always be online at the time of its release my connection was not ideal for the system. This led me to think that during extended play if my internet cut out then I would lose hours of playtime. While this could or could not be true multiple people said that Stadia actually came with gameplay lag and delay input. Then I forgot the service existed entirely after awhile. Google also didn’t advertise it as much in coming years. This was only one reason I had no faith in the platform word of mouth told me I’d never want it. Google has a tendency to release things and want instant profits from it. With a lack of new titles and any games on it having released months, some years, prior to the Stadia actually coming out meaning most already owned a version of it meant nothing interesting on their store and library. With this in mind, it was easy to tell that Google had no interest in gaming or releasing anything of substance. Games can take years to create so the fact Google would attempt it when they shut down items and services after only a short time also told me this wouldn’t last long. What even more baffles me is an internet service like Stadia as it is more advertised as a Netflix for gaming, they failed to capitalize on a pandemic when everyone was reliant on the internet for entertainment. Among Us, Fall Guys, and even services like Playstation Now and XBOX Game Pass are all things that really took off in 2020. Yet Stadia still wasn’t able to get a foothold on the market. As of January 18 2023 Stadia shut down and several games supported by the platform along with it. I was originally planning on writing about high points of this console, but I realized that I was basically reporting on a consoles brief life, death, then the final nail in the coffin.

Score: Is it even possible to score something I never used or had a bias about from the start? 0/10

Harvestella

Harvestella is a game that I have mixed feelings toward. It is a real-time RPG and farm simulator. Similar to Rune Factory though I do enjoy this game more than the disappointing Rune Factory 5. It has a few things different and some things the same.

Gameplay

The farming is how you can get healing items as cooking and making juice is the only way to get stamina and health. You also need to take care of animals so they can not only give you eggs and milk but the more you do the higher quality and higher bonus. Crafting materials are found in dungeons and used for improving weapons and tools for making cheese, juice, animal feed, flour, among other things most of which you can buy, but you save money by doing it yourself.

Combat is confusing until you get used to it. You level up when you sleep and all your stats get a small boost. As time goes on easier enemies won’t give any experience. There are also your companion bonuses depending on who is in your party and how much you helped them you get stat boosts. As for weapons you can change any weapon at the checkpoints in each town and dungeon and some are faster than others, but do less damage. Weapons are under a job system as all weapons have a skill tree.

Plot

The plot starts with the player waking up in a town with amnesia. After a short time they are given a home and farm. They are then told that the Seaslight, an important resource to each area is acting strange. So you investigate and eventually learn that in order to save everyone you need to stop Quietus, a strange dust that comes between seasons and causes illness and eventual death with no known cure otherwise it worsens and kills everyone

Conclusion

I enjoyed this game as frustrating as some mechanics are such as the hunger mechanic leaving me with no way to heal multiple times. It feels like a game with a good balance between plot and gameplay. Harvestella does have a problem with lengthy dungeons being a bit to long, but otherwise it was fun. There are flaws but, this is to be expected as this is a new IP not something established so if a sequel ever comes out I hope they learn from mistakes not create more.

Score: 9/10