YOU’VE recovered from wrapping Christmas gifts, spent your weekly budget on Valentine’s Day, and already bought your hot cross buns for Easter, but did you remember Pokémon Day on Monday, February 27?
Yes, just like Halloween, Black Friday and every other special day imported from overseas, it’s all to encourage consumerism.
Nearly 27 years ago in Japan, the Pokémon Red and Green video games were released on February 27, 1996 for the Game Boy system. This is not a relatively long time ago, yet Pokémon, according to some reports, is the highest grossing media franchise of all time, up there with the likes of Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse & Friends, and Star Wars. Not even the Marvel movies are comparable.
If you’re unfamiliar, the franchise takes place in a world where cartoon creatures called Pokémon (Pocket Monsters) exist and can be captured in a ‘Pokeball’ by ‘Pokémon Trainers’, who have them fight in grudge matches. The games usually have the players create a team of Pokémon as they explore the world to take down ‘gym leaders’ and then the ‘Pokémon champion’, so the player can become a ‘Pokémon Master’.
If you’re a 90s kid you may remember the absolute mayhem for the games and associated films, trading cards, cartoon and toys – many of those are going strong to this day. You may also remember the craziness returned in 2016 when the smartphone app Pokémon Go was released, a time when people got together to go on walks and capture digital creatures together. Is there any better place to hunt Pokémon than among the incredible scenery in the Shire of Wellington?
The Pokémon Company will celebrate their special day with an online presentation taking place in a few hours, and presumably will announce new toys and games for fans to spend their hard-earned cash on. 2022 was the first time where two mainline Pokémon games were released in the same year (aside from the countless spin-off titles), so it’s worth a look at those two titles and figure out which is a better purchase for your Nintendo Switch system.
The first was Pokémon Legends: Arceus and the second was the recently released Pokémon Scarlet and Violet (released as two games with very minimal differences).
Pokémon Legends: Arceus was released in January 2022. It shifted the series’ traditional role-playing game (RPG) gameplay to a more action-oriented RPG style. The focus was no longer about building a Pokémon team to fight the strongest Pokémon trainer in the land. Instead, the game takes an unexpected narrative turn to the past before much of Pokémon technology exist, and you’re tasked with creating the first database of these creatures ever. This involves seeking and capturing Pokémon in a number of different areas while also uncovering the game’s central mystery, as the player has found themselves in an unknown world with no memories.
Is that mythical creature Arceus behind all this? It’s quite a compelling plot that unravels nicely while the player has fun wandering its varied worlds catching Pokémon.
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, released in November, returns to the old school gameplay structure that fans have been familiar with since the original games.
One of two main things going for this game is its truly large open world, which is very fun to explore. And secondly, there are more than 100 new Pokémon designs and they are very creative, which is impressive since the games mark the 1000th Pokémon. (Yes, there’s more than 1000 Pokémon creatures now.) However, the games are a step backwards from Pokémon Legends: Arceus, as many of the great ideas introduced in that game were dropped, in favour of tired old Pokémon tropes you may remember from more than 20 years ago.
The game’s core quests of finding the ‘Titan’ Pokémon, defeating the Team Star crime syndicate and becoming a Pokémon champion are very simple and undercooked, compared to the creative and challenging puzzles you complete in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It’s as if both the player and the game developers are going through the motions with these new entries. The story takes so long to get going, and insufferable dialogue makes it worse.
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet also run very poorly on the Switch, with frequent slow downs, game crashes and framerate drops. Legends: Arceus doesn’t fare particular well in performance either, but it’s nowhere near as shocking.
With many of the interesting ideas not fully realised, it’s almost certain these games were rushed for their release – most likely to release with the merchandise and episodes of the TV show they had planned. With this franchise being literally the highest-grossing ever, it is inexcusable the games run as poorly as they do.
If you’re looking for a traditional Pokémon experience, do go with Scarlet/Violet, because despite its many issues, it is the first time the series has gone truly open-world in its gameplay, and it’s a great environment for players to explore and find a large number of new Pokémon.
But in the end, Pokémon Legends: Arceus comes recommended for nearly everyone else. It revitalised the franchise and beat Scarlet and Violet in many areas, including sound, design, graphics, performance and story. Its worlds are linear, but are richer in player discovery, and the Pokémon creatures you encounter in the wild actually feel threatening – much more so than the other games. Legends: Arceus succeeds in almost every idea it has served up for the player.
On the Pokémon Day online event taking place in a few hours time, you may learn about a new game to subject your wallet to in 2023. But don’t forget about 2022’s Pokémon Legends: Arceus for Nintendo Switch, an incredibly engaging and addictive action RPG that moved its franchise forward, and appealed to new fans.
