Category: Switch

The Cruel King and the Great Hero

Ed Note: We requested and received a review copy of The Cruel King and the Great Hero from Nippon Ichi Software.

The Cruel King and the Great Hero is a a turn based RPG by Nippon Ichi Software. It has a beautiful story book art style and the story is solid. With that said, I’m on the fence about recommending it. The mechanical aspects of its combat system sit somewhere between “Unfun” and “Rudimentary.” This isn’t helped by the game’s random encounter system, and early to mid-game world traversal.

The game starts out with Yuu, the main character, living with her father, the Dragon King, where she trains every day to become a hero. We learn fairly early on that Yuu’s actual father was a hero who traveled around defeating monsters. The details on how she ended up in the Dragon King’s care are fairly hazy, though they do get fleshed out by the end of the game. While training, the stick that she uses as a sword breaks, and the Dragon King suggests she go to the nearby monster village to get a replacement. This means traveling through the forest, which is populated by dangerous monsters that will attack her. After defeating monsters and visiting the village, she gets a new sword.

After this the game opens up a bit. I won’t go into great detail to avoid some spoilers, but the general structure is “Someone has a problem, Yuu volunteers to help them, they join as a party member, and Yuu has to go to a place to do a thing.” A majority of the game follows this structure, prior to the climax and finale.

The localization is generally solid. There was only a single quest where it fell flat.

But it does bring us to the point I want to talk about the most: the game’s combat and RPG systems. Let’s talk about the RPG systems first, because there aren’t many. You have a maximum of up to two party members at any point in time, consisting of Yuu and one other character. Prior to reaching the climax, you have no ability to choose who is in your party. The game has a level system, but there are no choices related to leveling up, or character customization.

The closest thing to customization lies in the equipment. Each character has 4 equipment slots, a weapon, an armor, and two accessories. However, I never found two weapons the game that were equivalent but with different abilities. Every new weapon was just an upgrade. The accessories are the actual customization, but even then, I used the same 4 accessories for more or less the entire game (the accessories in question were two that auto-healed each turn, one that made guarding reduce damage even further, and a stat stick that increased speed and damage). This is really the extent of character customization.

Having covered the RPG elements, let’s talk about combat. Combat is basic. You have health and energy. There are a variety of status effects, but they follow fairly standard RPG tropes. Energy is used to perform special attacks. For abilities, (if I recall correctly) prior to the final boss, Yuu had 7 skills, of which only 5 were really relevant. More on that later. These 5 could be summarized as: Heavy Attack, Fast Attack, Conditional AOE, Protect Ally, and Heavy AOE. My other party member had 4, which could be summarized as: AOE and Team Buff, Self Buff, Single Target Damage plus Status, and Heavy AOE.

Each character also has a normal attack, and a guard. The guard is the only part of the combat system I have any actual praise for, because guarding restores extra energy, making guarding vs attacking an actual meaningful choice.

These two raccoons are about to be absolutely flattened.

The problems I have with combat are multi-layered, so let’s go through them. I mentioned above that there are conditional multi-attacks. These attacks will only hit enemies if they are lined up correctly. The problem with these attacks is that enemies never move around in combat. There is also no way to move them around. That means these attacks are only useful when enemies just happen to show up in ways that are convenient. Of the 3 potential party members, only one had access to non-conditional AOE, and so was the party member I brought with me when I could choose. Remember: you can only have one other party member.

The boss fights are the only source of real difficultly I encountered, and they don’t feel particularly fair. There were two instances of frustration I encountered. One was around the middle of the game. In that fight, the enemy used an attack that would do about 100 damage. Unfortunately, the max HP of my characters was respectively about 120 and 70. So if I ever let myself go below max, there was a non-zero chance I would get wiped by a random attack, with no telegraphing.

The other situation was the final boss fight. While I only failed it once, before returning to clear it, that first failure took around 45 minutes, and the second attempt took around 30-40. It is simply not a fun fight. Bosses are not affected by status effects, even temporarily, so the only real strategy devolved into “Make sure that they can never do an attack to kill both party members at once, and spam healing items.”

Combat just isn’t fun. Characters don’t have enough attack variety to keep things interesting, or exciting, and tactics for any encounter almost always boiled down to “Spam big AOE attacks, and hope you kill them first.” I used the word “rudimentary” in the opening paragraph, and I really mean it. The combat structure feels like it was copy-pasted from a default RPG Maker project.

All of this would be less annoying if combat wasn’t such a large portion of the game. Almost every quest and sub-quest involves traveling from point A to point B, with random encounters along the way. And while there is an item you can use to “prevent” encounters, I’m not convinced it actually works. At the very least, it doesn’t quite work as described.

Since we’re on the subject, let’s talk about traversal. Traversal is my other big gripe with the game. Yuu moves incredibly slowly. For an idea of how slowly, let me tell a story. Early on in the game, you get access to an item that lets you return to a hub zone. Later in the game while doing side quests in the ice zone, I found myself using this item often. This was because it was faster to complete an objective in the ice zone, warp back to the hub zone, walk to the teleport near the hub, and then teleport back to the ice zone, rather then just walking from one part of the ice zone to another.

But despite all this, I did finish The Cruel King and the Great Hero. I won’t lie, part of that is because I had a review copy, and I refuse to write a review of a game I can’t finish. Which is why we don’t yet have an Elden Ring review.

But the other reason is that the story is good. It’s a curious and compelling take on story book tropes. It’s not subversive, and it’s not going to win a Caldecott award or anything, but it’s generally comfy and interesting, and the story incredibly well accompanied by the art. The game’s side quests and writing all feed into this, making the end result feel like reading a set of children’s books.

Speaking of which, let’s talk about that art for bit. It’s great. I love the painterly feel, and the general soft tones. The animation is good. The UI elements are clear and crisp. The game absolutely nails a theme and feel, and that’s supported by the music. It’s just unfortunate that so much of this incredible art and comfy, if simple story, is left to carry the weight of a mediocre paint by the numbers RPG.

And those are pretty much my thoughts on The Cruel King and the Great Hero. A solid 9/10 for art, music, worldbuilding and tone. A 6/10 for passable mechanics that aren’t bad, but do nothing new, while not really offering interesting options. The game is $30 for Nintendo Switch, which honestly, seems about fair. If you want something small and comfy to play around with, and don’t mind dealing with a few aggravating moments, it might be worth picking up.

Pokemon Legends: Arceus

I like Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Does the game have so many technical problems that I’m going to devote at least a paragraph to them below? Yes. But is it also the first Pokémon game that we’ve gotten in 25 years that is actually mechanically different than the other games in the series? Yes. Yes it is.

The rest of this article is going to assume that you’ve played a Pokémon game at some point. If you haven’t, reading this post first will make the rest of this review make more sense.

As mentioned above, Arceus is significantly different than previous Pokémon games. In brief: the game now takes place in a semi-open world. Story progression is based around a combination of catching lots of Pokémon, and mission completion, and there are no gym battles or equivalents. While battling and catching Pokémon both remain, the battle system has been significantly trimmed down, with held items and abilities being removed, and most status effects/stat buffs have also been changed to be simpler. The game does offer the ability to use moves in different styles, but this mostly boils down to “Do more damage, but take longer to act again, or do less damage, but act again quicker.”

You can fight multiple enemy Pokemon at once.

As the game now takes place in an open world, there are no more random battles. Instead, Pokémon just sort of go about the world, doing as they please, with most having a set spawn location. As such, catching Pokémon has changed, with many not even requiring you to battle them. Instead, you just need to get close enough to throw a Pokeball at them and hit them. Pokémon also don’t share the same set of behaviors either. Some will happily watch as you walk closer and closer prior to beaning them in the head with a well placed shot, some will turn tail and run, and some will see you and just start swinging/blasting bubbles/trying to poison you—you get the idea. For Pokémon in this last group, once they notice you and engage in combat, you’ll have to fight them with your own Pokémon if you actually want to catch them. The alternate option is to truffle shuffle your way through the waist high grass and wait for them to look away so you can lob a ball at the back of their head. The game actually encourages this, because back hits have an increased catch rate.

You will never have enough Apricorns, and when you think you do, you’ll be wrong.

Also, because this an open world game, there’s a crafting system. You can craft Pokeballs, revives, and various items with the rocks and berries you find lying around. It’s actually generally not as tedious as it might sound, primarily because the same few mats are used for a bunch of different things, and there also aren’t a ridiculous number of them you have to gather. cougheldenringcough

The open world itself is split up into 6 or so areas, and each area is self contained. For example, you can’t go from the ruin swamp zone to the ice zone without actually going back to town, and then going to the other area on the map. You likely won’t be able to explore every part of a map when you first unlock it, as portions will be locked behind ride Pokémon, the game’s version of HMs. These are various Pokémon that you’ll make friends with and will give you the ability to swim across water, fly across the sky, and scale rock cliffs. Yes, I know it seems like flying would make climbing redundant but it doesn’t really work like that in practice.

Realistically, these open world zones are fine. I’m gonna be honest, you could probably fill a grey box with lots of Pokémon and I would enjoy it. Pokémon Go put Pokémon on top of google maps, and I liked it. With that said, this isn’t Elden Ring or Breath of the Wild, there are no hidden secrets and crevices to find, and each zone itself is pretty small. They’re habitats for the Pokémon that live in them, and not much else unfortunately.

So what do I like? One thing is that Pokémon are actually rendered to scale in this game. This is a small thing, but it really does build the feeling of them being actual animals in the world instead of the “Wailord is the same size as Skitty” that we’ve had from previous games. It also gets used in two of the game’s mechanical systems, where catching Pokemon of different sizes can be a goal for various surveying missions and to distinguish Alpha Pokemon, which I’m just realizing we haven’t covered yet.

I just realized Dusknoir has red eyes by default, making this a terrible example of what this sorta thing looks like…

While you’re journeying around you might find a Pokémon that seems much bigger than you’d think it should be, with glowing red eyes. These are Alpha Pokémon, and they’re great. Outside of the immense bulk, there are few other critical differences. They tend to be much higher leveled then anything in the surrounding area, sometimes have special attacks, and have zero chill. They can’t be captured except by battling them, and until your Pokémon are in the 60-70 level range, they can and will thrash you into the ground.

I really like this because in most Pokémon games, catching Pokémon is pretty much a zero risk process, and you’ll never actually be able to go back to an area and be challenged. Alphas are a nice change of pace, and one of my most memorable moments in the game was wiping my team multiple times into an Alpha Tangrowth, then reviving them while it tried to put me six feet under. Alphas also tend to be Pokémon that could only have been obtained via evolution in previous games, so its just cool to actually fight and catch them in their already evolved forms.

Yes, that’s a wild Empoleon. It fainted from recoil damage. There was some salt.

Now that we’ve covered the actual game and mechanics, let’s talk about the game’s massive technical failings.

First, a brief statement. Creating games is a complex process with multiple disciplines and processes involved. That said , I consider most of the things in the paragraphs below to be effectively statements of fact. Maybe mimicking Super Mario 64’s performance and art style is a design choice, but I don’t give a shit. The game should not look and have performance issues this bad.

Most of the environments in the game look like garbage, and they feel incredibly static and stale outside of the Pokémon inhabiting them.
The Pokémon/NPC’s look good, but if you get more than 4 NPC’s on the screen even during a cutscene, the framerate dips. Because of this, there are very few situations where you can have large numbers of different wild Pokémon on screen, and the end result is that the game’s world can feel underpopulated.
The game has an amount of pop-in/fade in that’s comical on everything, and when you’re flying around looking for a specific plant, or a Pokémon that might be the size of that plant, this actively screws with your ability to find it. Of everything on this list, this one is biggest hindrance to actively playing the game, and pisses me off the most.

See that little hill in the distance, with nothing on it, and nothing anywhere around it?
It’s the one we’re hovering over right here.

In addition to all of this, the game has one of the most screwed up systems for animation level of detail that I’ve seen. It’s most visible on any of the flying Pokemon such as Gyrados, Togetic or Crobat, but you can actively see the point at which they get far enough away from you for the game to start dropping frames from their animation cycle.

Anyway, that’s Pokémon Legends: Arceus. If you’re someone like me who’s always wanted a Pokémon game where you run around massive open environments trying to catch Pokémon, and see them at actual scale, this game is pretty much exactly what you’ve been waiting for. You’ll be able to ignore the game’s flaws and have a lot of fun.

If you’re someone who played the games primarily for the battle system, or for engaging with the secondary mechanics like breeding for perfect IV’s and competitive move sets, those systems have been either stripped out or massively simplified, and I suspect you won’t have as much fun. I don’t personally think that the removal of things like abilities and held items is made up for by the games strong/agile move styles.

And perhaps you’re neither. Perhaps you’re not a Pokémon fan. If that’s the case, I would say that your enjoyment is going to depend heavily on what you want out of the game. You want a game with a mediocre open world, but a bunch of really cool monsters to catch? This could be for you!

If you want a game with an open world that tells a subtle story via its environment and mechanics, with a focus on difficult combat and challenging gameplay? Well, you probably want Elden Ring instead.

You want a large underwater eel? That’s a moray.

Pokémon Legends: Arceus is $60 for Nintendo Switch, and only Switch, because the day we get a mainline Pokémon game on a non-Nintendo console is the day we look out the window and see a flock of pigs sailing unimpeded across the clouds.

Deltarune – Chapter 1 & 2

So, Deltarune. I think it’s very good.

Deltarune is a turn-based RPG. It’s made by Toby Fox, the creator of the darlingest of indie darlings, Undertale. There are a large number of similarities between the two games, including rad as hell music, incredibly weird yet cohesive stories, and bullet hell gameplay mechanics for dodging enemy attacks.

They’re also both games that at least to my mind are much richer if you go into them with no spoilers. As such, if you enjoyed Undertale or games like Earthbound, I would encourage you to grab your gaming machine of choice, and download Chapter 1 & 2 right now. They’re free, and they’re available for PC, Switch, and PS4.

Now, it’s possible that this isn’t enough information for you. You want to know more about what you’re actually getting into. So this next section of the article is for those of you who are either on the fence, or not as interested. Perhaps you played Undertale and it never grabbed you. Perhaps you’ve had your fill of weird internet humor. Perhaps you’re tired of listening to Megalovania. Whatever the reason, I’d still suggest you check out Deltarune.

Deltarune is still just as weird as its famed predecessor, and the music is in my opinion just as good. However, Deltarune’s combat and ACTION system are vastly improved over those of Undertale.

One of Undertale’s primary selling points was that you didn’t have to kill anyone. You could play the game as traditional turn-based RPG with grinding, attacks, and murder. But you could also play through the game by choosing to talk and interact with enemies, and then SPARING them, ending combat without defeating them.

How the story unfolds if you choose to spare enemies is one of the most unique parts of the game. Unfortunately, choosing to spare “trash mobs” quickly becomes tedious after the first time you fight that type of enemy. Combat encounters in Undertale are fairly simple. Combat starts, and on your turn as a pacifist, you select various options in the interaction bar to try to butter up or calm down your opponent. Whenever they attack you, you play a bullet hell dodging mini-game to avoid being hit. While this is fine for bosses, it quickly becomes a boring for the other fights. Every type of normal enemy has the same sequence each time to “beat” the encounter.

But this writeup is about Deltarune, not Undertale. Deltarune still allows you to be a pacifist, but without making the encounters boring. There are a few new mechanics that solve this problem, as well as some general ways that combat encounters have been made more meaningful than they were in Undertale.

The first new mechanic is a system called TP. When enemies attack you in both Undertale and Deltarune, you play a short bullet hell sequence. This sequence varies wildly based on the enemy, but the general rule is: don’t get hit. Deltarune adds the TP gauge to these sequences. It’s used for various special actions and magic attacks including healing, and it fills by being just barely close enough to not take damage from attacks.

The second new mechanic is that pacifist actions also occasionally have their own mini-games associated with them. They’re nowhere near as elaborate as the bullet hell sequences mentioned above, but they’re more fun than simply choosing options on a menu like in Undertale.

And finally, you now have multiple party members to use. Some of the more interesting encounters in the game play with how pacifist options work differently for each party member. And this makes sense because some of your party members are… shall we say… “Less Inclined to Non-Violence” than others.

(Looking at you Susie.)

Deltarune keeps the parts of Undertale that were already loved by pretty much everyone (including the strange story, bizarre art and animation, and music that goes so much harder than it needs to), but just makes them more fun to experience.

I highly recommend you play Deltarune, or at least what’s out so far. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Author Note: Images are from the IGDB because I was too lazy to take screenshots while I was playing.

Disgaea 6 – Spoiler Full Edition

It’s been over a month since D6 came out in North America. We had a spoiler-free writeup on the series earlier, and I’m gonna write this post assuming that you already read that one. Is that entirely fair? No, it’s not, but otherwise I’d be retreading a lot of already-visited ground.

Just in case you still choose not to read it, here’s the five second version. D6 has a new art style, performance problems, and gives you meaningful access to the unique mechanics essential to the game faster than its predecessors. Good?

Few more things to get out of the way before we get into this:

  1. I cleared all content except Raksha Ba’al, the last endgame secret boss.
  2. I played without any DLC except the free Hololive DLC.
  3. My save file has about 300 or so hours on it. I’d say that translates to about 80-100 hours of gameplay, maybe a bit more. The reason those numbers don’t add up is because I spent a lot of time auto-grinding.

ART

Disgaea 6 has a very different look than its predecessors. Instead of using 2D sprites like the previous games, D6 uses 3D models. I don’t like them as much as the old sprites. In addition, the super over-the-top skills feel a bit more toned down than usual in terms of visual flashiness. I didn’t see anything that was super memorable, and many of the skill animations feel shorter, as compared to things like D5’s Super Olympia which crushes an entire solar system as part of the attack.

STORY

If I’m rushing through these elements, it’s mostly because I want to just address them and get them out of the way. Compared to the other games, I’d say D6 has a stronger finish and conclusion than 5, albeit with somewhat weaker middle. The characters are solid. There are some fairly funny moments, and a few more brutal ones. All in all, it’s fine. It does follow the same pattern as D5: many characters get a power up at various points in the story arc that correspond to their growth as a character, making that growth feel a bit forced, but it’s an overall improvement.

GAMEPLAY

And here we are: the big one. The chonky boy. The factor that the rest of this post is going to be devoted to: D6’s gameplay loop. So how is it?

Well… it’s a bit different than other entries in the series, actually. Let me explain what I mean.

Disgaea has a reputation for being a grindy game, but despite that fact, grinding usually isn’t necessary to beat the “Main Game” and see the credits roll. It’s more or less required to beat endgame content, but even then, grinding in Disgaea tends to be a bit different than traditional grinding. Instead of the classic “Walk around, find encounter, spam attacks, rinse repeat,” Disgaea tends to take more of a puzzle route. End game grinding in Disgaea is less about how much you grind and more about making your grind as efficiently as possible.

Let’s take D4 as an example. D4 has a set of end game maps that culminate in a map that is incredibly simple. It’s just a large square of enemies, arranged in a specific pattern. And it’s possible, with the right set of skills, abilities, and setup, to hit and clear this entire map in one hit, and hit the level cap after a single fight in this map. This isn’t an oversight. The map is designed in such a way to be beaten like this, and cleared incredibly quickly.

D6 is different. Unlike other games in the series, you will have to grind to beat the main story, because the level cap has been extended twice, all the way up to something like 9,999,999,999, along with the stat cap. The leveling process itself is much faster, and but there are still a few points where if you’re playing each map once, you won’t be high enough level to clear the next one.

And this is where some of the game’s new systems, Demonic Intelligence (D.I. for short), auto-play, and auto-repeat come into play. DI is effectively a visual programming language. Each unit can store up to five of these, and have a single one active. When you toggle on the auto-play feature, the game will have your units execute commands based off their active DI. If you toggle on auto-repeat, when you clear the map, you’ll just start it over again. Which means this is the point where D6 switches from being a tactics game, to being an incremental game.

DI is a really cool idea. I really would like to say I love it. Unfortunately, I can’t because in its current incarnation, it has some massive flaws. Disgaea 6 doesn’t have any form of documentation/information about exactly how DI works. When I say documentation, I mean explaining how the various functions work. For example, it would be great if the game explained that “The Target an Enemy Function will target the closest enemy starting by checking clockwise…” but it doesn’t. And while normally this wouldn’t be too bad, it brings me to the second point. There’s no real way to debug or step by step execute DI Instead, you can either have it turned on or off. There are also several commands that are effectively useless such as option that lets you target a specific square on a grid, without any way to figure out how gridding for maps works.

The end result is a system that is very hard to get it to dowhat you want. Instead, I found myself just sort of brute-forcing it. I would run DI setups that I thought would fail, and they would end up working. More often than not, though, the DI setups I thought would work instead failed. Instead of using DI as a solution to automate grinding to high levels, I tended to make simple patterns, and just have units leveled up high enough that I could face roll through content.

And generally speaking, this would be mostly fine if it wasn’t for another new system: Karma.

Karma functions as a replacement for the Chara World systems from previous games. These are areas that you would use to permanently boost your characters’ growth and stats.

In D6, instead of having an item world equivalent like D4, or a Mario Party board game like D5, each time you reincarnate a character, you get a certain amount of Karma. You’re then given a menu where you can spend this Karma on a variety of things, including extra evilities, stat boosts, and…. max level and stat caps.

And here’s the problem: because of the ridiculous scaling in D6, scaling your stats with Karma feels like the most effective way to boost scaling. But because the level cap is so high, it takes several hours of grinding with DI to have your party hit the level cap. Or you can do this bullshit and have a single member of your party hit max level in about 5 minutes, but there’s no way to use DI to farm it.

Regardless of how you choose to do it, once you do, you hit one final wall: The amount of Karma you get per reincarnation is “relatively” small. And because this is Disgaea, let me give some exact numbers. Each reincarnation from max level gives about 120,000,000 Karma. Each stat point past 2,000 costs 5,000,000 Karma to buy. Stats cap at 4,000. There are like 6 stats. I was gonna say “I’ll let you do the math”, but that’s a cop out, so instead, here it is.

Getting a single character to max stats would require you to run this 3-5 minute setup about 500 times. So, assuming maximum generosity, just about 25 hours, if each loop took 3 minutes. There is no way to speed it up or make it faster.

I wouldn’t say this is the defining factor of D6 for me, but it does highlight what feels like the weirdness of the game. It’s a game based around massive numbers, but makes getting to them a chore. It adds autogrinding and looping, but it does so in a way that makes the system hard to utilize, and debug, and means that you end up skipping more content than you play. And even when you use those systems, in the hyper late game, they’re less efficient than actually playing the game by such a massive amount that you may as well just ignore them.

While it might seem like I don’t like D6 given how much time I just spent tearing parts of the game apart, those things only came to annoy me because I spent so much time playing the game. I do want to call out D6 for what it does well: making an attempt at innovating with some of its mechanics and systems, and trying to make them more core to the main game.

The attempt at switching to 3D, and the new combat animations aren’t great, but hopefully that’s the result of unfamiliarity with new tools and systems. DI is a very interesting system, but it’s heavily busted because of the lack of ability to debug and step through behavior. The frame rate is garbage for no reason, so hopefully that gets fixed.

As an entry in the Disgaea franchise, D6 simply wasn’t as fun from a purely tactical gameplay standpoint as D5. The lack of exciting combat mechanics like Overloads, somewhat reduced skills, and lower character class pool didn’t feel as interesting.

So here’s my verdict:

If you already like the Disgaea series for the story and humor, D6 is worth playing through for those.

If you already liked the series for munchkining tactics and extensive vidya bullshit, and don’t give a shit about the story, D6 is probably not going to be your cup of tea.

And if you’ve never played a Disgaea game before, well, it depends. D6 is in many ways a good introduction to the series, with some of the simplified systems, and auto-grinding. But those same elements also make the meta-flow of progression less interesting, so if you want to see what the franchise’s mechanics are all about, I’d suggest D5 instead.

Pokémon: Unite

You can skip Pokémon: Unite, unless you’re a massive sucker for anything Pokémon related. Like I am.

For me, the ultimate test of any licensed game consists of two very simple questions:

  1. Would I play this game if it didn’t have the licensed branding?

    And
  2. Am I going to play it anyway, because I am a consumer whore?

For the best sort of licensed game, such as something like Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, the answer to question 1 is a solid “Yes.” This is something I can say with confidence because I’ve been playing a bunch of Shiren the Wanderer, and it kicks ass. Then we have stuff like Pokken, which is more of a “Sorta,”(but it’s not because the game is bad, just because I don’t really play fighting games).

On the flip side, we have games like Magic: Legends, which gets a solid double “No.”

And then in the middle, we have things like Disgaea: RPG, and, the actual topic of this article, Pokémon: Unite.

I am a sucker for pretty much anything Pokémon. This doesn’t mean I’m 100% “Consume Product,” but if there is something Pokémon related, and it doesn’t cost me money to try it, I probably will.

I’m not sure how long I’ll play Pokémon: Unite for. It honestly might be less than a week. The primary reason to play it over something else is that it’s on the Switch, it’s Pokémon themed… and that’s about it.

The main reason is that while the theming, sound, graphics, etc are charming, the gameplay itself is lacking any incredible moments, and the meta-progression/economy is absolute garbage. Also, I have some problems with its informational display, but at least my UI complaints are correctable.

Let’s start with the gameplay: Pokémon: Unite brings exactly one new interesting idea to the MOBA genre, and that is the victory condition/scoring. Instead of towers or ancients to destroy, there are a series of hoops. You gain score by collecting points, and then convert those points into score by channeling at these hoops. So the basic loop is: build up points by KOing wild Pokémon, go to a hoop, channel and score. It’s an interesting mechanic that leads to some neat tension. And that last sentence right there is a the nicest thing I’m gonna say about the game for the rest of this article.

Okay, this isn’t a great combat screenshot. The UI usually isn’t this busy, but it’s the one I have.

The rest of the game feels fairly standard, like a dumbed down version of Heroes of the Storm. There are a few different maps, with different layouts, but similar objectives. Your hero champion Pokémon have an auto-attack, two specials, an ultimate that takes 8 years to charge, and a summoner spell battle item. In either case, the end result is that in any fight, you have effectively two activatable moves, but I’ve yet to see a situation where it doesn’t feel like I’d want to just spam them. There’s no mana cost to discourage you from doing so, and the cooldowns for the moves are fairly short.

I can’t believe it’s not flash!

The end result is a game that feels bland, to the point that I’m bored with writing about how boring it can be. So let’s move on to the next part of the game that sucks: meta-progression.

Everything about the game’s meta-progression is garbage, and I can summarize why I hate the system in two sentences.

Unless you want to spend real money, unlocking a new character costs between 6000 and 10000 gold. The maximum amount of gold you can earn in a week from winning random battles is 2140.

Yes, you can get more gold from doing quests, and limited time events. Yes, you can get gold by leveling up your trainer level. Yes, you can get gold by finishing the tutorials, or doing some weird slot machine thing. It doesn’t matter. The core point is that the game is designed to be an absolute slog for grinding out the ability to play more characters, leveling up equipment, etc.

The game feels like a cheap mobile game, in the sense that it’s designed to make you log on to do your dailies, to build the habit of playing a few matches, and then leaving. Instead of having you come back for the gameplay, or exciting updates, you’ll come back because if you do for just a few more weeks, you can unlock a new character! Or you could just spend like $10, and get them right now!

Oh, and it has a premium currency, bonus boosters, a battle pass, and just about every other feasible way short of straight up gacha. The game even has a kinda gacha in its energy roulette system, but at least you can’t directly pay money for it.

Oh, and while we’re at it, I have one last big gripe. Keywords, description, functionality and stats. Every attack in the game is something like this:

Secondary gripe: why do I have to confirm moves being upgraded when I get them? Just upgrade them! Don’t make me press buttons twice.

And then we have items in the game that look like this:

40 SPEED UNITS OF SPEED

Do you see it? Or perhaps more specifically, do you not see it? “It” in this case, being any sort of useful information/way to measure the actual numbers/damage/etc that your character can do in a game? Because I sure don’t. At least this one they can probably fix, but why isn’t it there already?

Pokémon: Unite isn’t awful, but it isn’t very good. There are better games to play on the Switch, better MOBAs to play in general, and better Pokémon spinoffs. If for some reason after all this, you still want to play it, it’s Switch exclusive right now, so just go find it on the eShop.