Aperson

Actually, I've come to like all the Team Yell related music in this game.

5th gym battle. As always, may contain Pokemon spoilers so don't watch unless you have already passed this point: I also need a bit of advice. I have two Pokemon with Gigantamax forms but I tried one of them out in a Max Raid battle and they were simply Dynamaxed. How do I obtain the Gigantamax forms for Corviknight and...

Hop does develop during the game. A later event does change his outlook, you'll see. Currently done with the 7th gym. Need to catch up on Youtube uploads but my entire team of 6 is now fully evolved and are all in a position now where they all feel useful. Needed the internet to help though because dang I chose two team members with obscure evolution requirements...

Ladies and gentelemen, I present to you... the most epic gym battle I've had in the entire game so far. All because I thought her second to last Pokemon was the last one... Just a minor warning, if anyone picked Sobble and has not yet seen what he evolves into (as in, full evolution line) I advise against watching the video just now. Hoping to do the 5th gym leader sometime soon. I expect to struggle because the Pokemon who I hoped would be able to take on this gym has not actually evolved to be able to learn the moves it needs to be able to win which should create a fascinating match because the only Pokemon that I have left that has a super effective move against this gym is weak to said type as it is on there as a counter move... I have also been doing a few Max Raid Battles to stock up on TRs seeing as the best moves are locked behind those. Obtained Ice Beam which my evolved Sobble then couldn't learn... however after the events of the video above it could finally learn it. I also managed to snag a TR for Dazzling Gleam which is useful as the Pokemon that was meant to cover that particular type of move hasn't learned a single one of those moves.

Made a considerable amount of progress today and reached the 5th gym leader. The 4th gym battle was pretty epic but I haven't uploaded it yet so you'll have to wait for the upload there. For now here's the third gym battle in the game. I finally had a full team of 6 for this third gym leader which is pretty quick... but I made a change to the team after the 3rd gym because I wanted something that could evolve and potentially look cool, plus if I'm getting a Corviknight then there would be a second Steel type on the team. So yeah, Deep Thought was dropped from the team after being around for only one gym battle. Unfortunately it looks like it's replacement has a rather obscure evolution requirement.:/ This Pokemon better be stronger in stats than Deep Thought.

I feel like what we have here is basically Pokemon X/Y 2. An instance where the developers made a technical jump but were time constrained when doing so and the technical jump was something that compromised every other aspect of the game. They also seemingly tried to correct the problems people had with Sun/Moon without replicating the parts that those things actually did well. They focused too much on the wrong things rather than something that actually makes a good game. And let's be honest, even if Sun/Moon had "too many cutscenes" its story was a lot better written than what we have in Sword/Shield so far. I feel like if they had included some of the stuff that they put in Sword/Shield and not spoiled too many Pokemon then people would have had a lot higher opinion about Pokemon Sun and Moon. As it happens, on the third gym I find that a lot of this stuff feels like a big step back in terms of characterisation from Sun/Moon. They are leaning heavily into the idea of Pokemon Battling being a competitive sport in this region along the lines of football and going ahead with that being the motivation of your character, your character is essentially a professional sports player and the Gym Challenge is essentially a season of competitive Pokemon battling. If you compare it to something like football, people follow football on a match by match basis looking to see what happens next. The thing about that though is that every so often something really big happens in those games, so major incident that gets everyone talking. Obviously I'm not far enough in the game yet but given the gym battles, such as this one that I played earlier in the game (includes Pokemon spoiler): Since they are being played out by you there's not really much room for artificial drama in said battles unless they were to specifically script said battles. Personally I feel like Pokemon and football do have similar parallels in that they both involve building a unique team so I feel like the comparison by the developers was inspired. I want to address the complains about the lack of voice acting. I completely agree, it feels a bit strange to be playing a game on the Switch that doesn't have voice acting when the likes of Zelda and Xenoblade have included fully voiced scripts. However, I have a different take on the whole thing because I know that if the games did have voice acting it would be incredibly cringey. How do I know this? Who would be in charge of doing the in-game voice acting for a Pokemon game? The Pokemon Company of course. So, what kind of endevours for voice acting have the Pokemon Company been involved in... oh... So you've got a choice between no voice acting or in my opinion bad voice acting. It may turn out alright on the Japanese side but TPCi are not great on the English voice acting side of things. I suppose having voice acting is better than having no voice acting though. I'll reserve my full thoughts for after I finish the game but I can't see these games being the best in the series by any means.

Booted up the game this morning with the intention of renaming my new team member having finally decided on the perfect nickname for it... then I unexpectedly encountered the last Pokemon I was looking for a lot earlier than I anticipated and was able to complete my team of 6. Having deposited everyone in the box to help the new team member catch up I found something pretty unexpected... a Shiny Minccino! Now about to take on the Firey Gym but due to how today is going to go and the fact that I have yet to upload the second gym to Youtube, that will have to wait. I can however post my team going into the third gym. I tried not to level up too much this time around so hopefully won't be too overpowered but I think his ace is 4x weak to both Water and Ground which is bad news for him since those are the two Pokemon I'm planning on using.

OK. Hopefully there's another brand new Ground type in this game that I can run on the team. For now it's on the team because I have two Pokemon that are weak to Electric and need to cover my weaknesses. Currently my team are all Level 27 and I'm just out of the second Galar Mine. Yamper evolved and thankfully I like it's evolution. I have two badges and I must admit even playing under a no healing rule these gym fights haven't been too challenging so far. Hopefully the next one is a bit more challenging but given it's Fire and I chose Sobble as my starter then I suspect not.

Yes. You don't need to level it up, just achieve a certain criteria in one battle. On another note, I need to know for team planning:

Quoth? It's meant to be the name of a Raven from Discworld. My team is British fiction names, which is why I also have James Bond, K9 and now Lancelot on the team. Oh yeah, speaking of which, I have a Sirfetch'd on my team now. Unfortuantely I had the evolution method spoilt by reading the comments of a tweet from @Serebii but in more surprising news K9 the Yamper has evolved. Interestingly it's the exact same level Rockruff evolves.

That is correct, I remember you getting confused three years on Sun and Moon.

OK, I'll set up the Link Code. 6729 if you want to trade. EDIT: We don't seem to be picking each other up. Am I doing something wrong here?

I don't know what I can give you yet Glen, might catch some spare Pokemon which I can trade for the Eggs, I'm currently on Route 5 training up my new Sirfetch'd. I don't have the Ditto I need to breed Sobbles yet.

Following video contains a Pokemon spoiler for anyone who hasn't played the game yet. But yeah, I'm posting all the gym fights as videos on Youtube.

I still need a Grookey and a Scorbunny but I don't have anything I want to trade right now as I only have one of each Pokemon out of not wanting to gain too much experience during the game.

Started Pokemon Sword today. I'll go into more detail in the actual thread about my gameplay experience but so far the niggling issues that people have been moaning about haven't affected me as much. It does feel like a step backwards storywise after Sun/Moon, a bit more like X/Y 2. However, I'm loving how they have streamlined all the tutorials so you are not forced to sit through them if you've played the game before. Which is annoying because that's precisely what they should have been doing all along. Already discovered at least 4, maybe 5 Pokemon that were never officially revealed, though I suspect two of them, including one on my team, evolve into Pokemon that have already been revealed.

Man, Team Yell's battle theme is amazing:

Bought the game today and played a considerable amount. I've just finished the Gym opening ceremony and about to head towards the first gym challenge. Already obtained half of my final team that I intend to use for the rest of the game, assuming one of the Pokemon I obtained is the pre-evo of Corviknight. If it isn't, I will have to change track. That Pokemon was never officially revealed so my team will be boxed in a Spoiler but if anyone wants to know what I've got so far, feel free to expand the box below.

Game is out in Australia now so more people will be posting playthroughs of the game on Youtube and Twitch. So more spoilers may show up on the internet from people who've been able to play the game. If you downloaded the game off the Australian eShop though, enjoy.

I accidentally saw one of the evolutions for Scorbunny in one of the videos and learned of evolution names of Scorbunny and Sobble (might have been the final evos) but I have no idea what the likes of Yamper and Impidimp evolve into or what any unrevealed Pokemon are, or the names of the Pokemon shown in the final trailer.

Really wishing I hadn't read this...

Saw the IGN review. Them and Gamespot were always going to be the most likely ones to give shill reviews, so I was never going to trust what they say very much. Nintendo Life's review was far fairer, although Alex had to put a part at the end of the video where he acknowledged that no matter what he said people were going to get angry. Game hasn't been review bombed in the user score section on Metacritic like I was expecting it to unless that section doesn't open until Friday, at which point I am fully expecting a lot of review bombs to take place...

People were harassing the developers over the lack of national dex since E3 this year. Yes, it has esculated since then but the whole harassment has been going on for a while now.

Has anyone ever considered the possibility that Twitter harassment may have affected the game's development? I'm not saying Game Freak is entirely innocent in this situation. However, if you are receiving death threats over Twitter and going overboard, that surely has to be demorilising and will affect your ability to be able to do your job properly. There's an interesting tweet from Lockstin about this actually: He does make a fair point about all of this. We are only hearing about the bad things at this point, I think we need reviews to help us understand the good stuff. Having said that, people are no doubt refreshing Metacritic getting ready to review bomb the game at the first available opportunity. I have generally relied on reviews when buying games but there are times when I've bought a new game in a franchise that I have particularly enjoyed and it just doesn't live up to what I was expecting. A good example is Metroid, a franchise which I indulged in for a good two years or so while buying almost all the games. I bought Metroid Other M off the back of the reviews it had been getting in some places but I have had no desire to replay that game ever since as the game contained a few major issues in the story department that marred the overall experience. A bigger take is perhaps Metroid Prime Federation Force which admittedly was never hyped up by anyone in the first place and was lambasted upon announcement, yet I picked it up anyway. On this occasion... it was basically OK with a very very awful final boss. I can't say I didn't have any fun playing it but then again I think sometimes there are franchises you love so much you don't want to admit that what you're playing isn't that great until it really starts to set in and you have to force yourself to realise that the quality of the game you are playing is not up to the same standard as the games that made you love the series in the first place. I must admit there was a time when I was buying most major Sonic games that were coming out on home consoles even though they never reviewed very well, I still enjoyed them in spite of this. What broke the camel's back on that franchise for me? Sonic Unleashed which genuinely looked like it was going to be a significant upgrade on previous games in terms of quality and I was getting involved in the hype cycle as the first Sonic game I'd actively been involved in following the pre-release stuff for the internet... then some things happened which made me consider whether the hype was unjust and after finishing Unleashed and it having a few problems I was driven to a point where I felt I could no longer continue supporting that franchise. By the time Sonic Colors came out and actually reviewed well I'd decided I was over Sonic games but after Generations came out I had decided that the only time I would ever buy Sonic games again is if they reviewed well. The net result of this being that Sonic Mania is the only Sonic game I actually bought in the last 10 years! I think Star Wars Battlefront II has people a bit more weary of game development practises now. It has become well publicised by many Youtubers over all the anti-consumer practises that the likes of ACtivision, EA and Take-Two have been involved in and that only increased over the following year as Bethesda's Fallout 76 launched and ruined many people's hopes. So now people are looking at the Pokemon series, seeing it's annualised nature and questioning why this series should be treated any differently. Overall I feel like this one is hitting home for me a bit more because Pokemon Red was the first video game I ever played and this series was one I decided to commit to years ago so the fact that a mainline series Pokemon game has been rushed to meet a deadline has me feeling a bit disappointed. But I'm also conflicted, as despite the dex and graphical complaints I was still going to commit to buying the game and actually getting to play a Pokemon game fresh and blind without knowledge of the new Pokemon and exactly what team I was going to build. Problem is I have agreed to accept money from a sibling for half of the game's cost before I saw the drama kick into overtime so I kind of feel like I have to commit to buying the game as it would be difficult to turn around and say no. It's not like I buy every new Pokemon game that comes out every year mind, but I already had plans to record all the gym leader fights on Youtube.

That's possible? That's good, I was worried that there would be no interaction between accounts given that it was unlikely they were going to make it possible to battle others on the same system and I don't think that's going to happen but at least you can trade between accounts on the same system so getting all the starters is something that might be very possible.