Pokemon Sword & Shield GENERAL DISCUSSION Thread [Spoilers]

[Nutter t.KK]

After listening to that Music.. Why am I wondering about fighting a Duskull? While wearing a Blue Hoodie?

 

[LilligantLewis]

Guys I think merchandise has revealed a new pokemon! Well technically not new but an unrevealed one https://twitter.com/Pokeshopper/status/1190153654881456129?s=09

What Pokémon?

 

[Pokemon Power]

Guys I think merchandise has revealed a new pokemon! Well technically not new but an unrevealed one https://twitter.com/Pokeshopper/status/1190153654881456129?s=09

Where?!

 

[SurrealistSmeargle]

What Pokémon?

Where?!

It's on the file(?) that's designed like Leon's cape with all of the sponsors. One of the logos shows a grey squirrel/chipmunk like creature, which may well be one of our unconfirmed squirrels.

 

[sketchersmeargle]

Where?!

Think they mean the sponsorships banner. There is something giving a thumbs up on the top left.

Of course we also know that some mascots are just mascots/cartoons and not Pokemon. Like the Pokeball headed mascot for the Gyms.

 

[Kyuu-Tales]

I'm watching the overview video again. Did anyone else notice how Hop poses exactly the same way as Hau does? Then there's that train scene with Hop and the MC, which seems an awful lot like the ferry trip with Hau...

Hop is starting to feel like Galarian Form Hau. Don't get me wrong: I like Hau, but c'mon GF... I wanted something different this time.

 

[ObakeMouse]

I'm watching the overview video again. Did anyone else notice how Hop poses exactly the same way as Hau does? Then there's that train scene with Hop and the MC, which seems an awful lot like the ferry trip with Hau...

Hop is starting to feel like Galarian Form Hau. Don't get me wrong: I like Hau, but c'mon GF... I wanted something different this time.

That's been a pretty common complaint, actually, that they're reusing some of Hau's animations for Hop. I don't think it's really that bad because it's only a couple of poses that are used, like the "talking while moving his hands a lot" animation, but the pose that's feeling like his """main""" pose definitely looks unique enough. To be honest, I'm getting more Barry than Hau from what we've seen of him.

Also, that Toby Fox song is so choice. I'm glad they got him to do a little bit for Pokemon, I love how he uses the soundfont. Some of his music in Homestuck was incredibly hectic, and I'm glad they didn't tone that down, because it's so cool that he can make his music memorable and cohesive despite being complete insanity, lol

 

[Dragalge]

It’s fine to reuse models for future games. Iirc Astral Chain did the same thing with its character animations being reused from Bayonetta 2.

 

[Kyuu-Tales]

I'm really liking one thing I observed in the overview trailer: it seems you can differentiate between male and female Pokemon in the Wild Area, provided they have some distinguishing feature not related to size. Imagine just searching for a Combee with a red dot rather than engaging with every one you come across!

 

[Zachmac]

Remember everyone. Scaling can exist in Pokemon. Gamefreak are just too lazy to scale each pokemon to their respective heights. Gigantimax proves that the switch can handle the largest Pokemon against the smallest one on screen.

General word of advice - just because you don't know why a feature wasn't included, doesn't mean that reason was laziness. Most of us aren't game designers, and the few glimpses we get behind the scenes rarely paint the full picture of just how much work goes into game design.

This isn't just about pokemon, or even just video games. Just like it's easier to underestimate just how much nonsense that fastfood worker who messed up your order has to put up with on a regular basis, it's also really easy to underestimate the tedium a programmer has to deal with. Assuming it's always because of a moral failure such as "laziness" is just kind of cynical and mean.

 

[Ophie]

As for Frozen just go during the day but than again I have gone for kid movies here in LA and it is never busy. Saw Spiderman,Endgame and D.Pikachu and I either have the place to myself or it is only a few people. Now maybe it is due to being in LA and we have tons of places but at the same time I would think it would still be busy Day 1 here. Again maybe my luck for this stuff is just good I'm getting scared

That's odd. I live in L.A. too (presuming you mean Los Angeles), and the theaters tend to be packed on the opening weekend for any movie that isn't going to bomb. Something like Frozen 2and The Last Skywalker are out of the question; inversely, a movie like Missing Link had no problem whatsoever. I went to see Endgame one month after it had come out, on the first screening on a Saturday, and it was about 75% full. Even Ad Astra was packed on its opening weekend at my nearest theaters.

That aside, I work normal office hours, so I can't go on a weekday morning or afternoon. I can only go on weekday evenings and on weekends, when there are the most people. (Gave me a few problems when One Piece: Stampede had a lot of 12:30 PM screenings.)

Weird we have a decent amount of that you can make videos for while some poketubers are doing videos about obviously fake starter evolutions. Been critical of aDrive but he's been mostly moving away from covering most of the fake rumors

It's because those people have a built-in audience who are getting their Pokémon news mainly from them. Theoretically, as long as they can make a video for it, they can make up anything they want to, and the audience will believe it. (That, and fake leaks make for good clickbait.)

I don't buy it. Maybe 20 years ago that was true, but if they still don't realise it nowadays after selling pokémon games for over two decades that would just be wilful ignorance on their side. They obviously wouldn't label it as scummy, but let's be real here. The only reason version exclusivity is a thing is to get people to buy what is essentially the same game twice. No other franchise does this because no other franchise would get away with it, pokémon only gets away with it because that's how pokémon has always been. GTA doesn't sell two versions of the same game with 90% the same missions and 10% version-exclusive missions, 90% same cars and 10% version-exclusive cars. Fans would consider that scummy. But that is essentially what pokémon does, and has always done. Other franchises might hold back a titbit of content and release it as "premium" or "deluxe" content, or as DLC, but it's rare that relatively small amounts of additional content cost the same as the base game.

I have my response to this one in the form of the next two responses:

Yeah even taking "Creator-Provincialism" into account there's no way that they are that naive. I mean if they weren't aware of that there wouldn't be bundles of the two versions with pre-order bonuses...
Plus if Gamefreak supposedly listened to their western fans about not revealing so much prior to release this time around, then they are aware of how their global fanbase plays.

The only thing we can confirm out of the presence of the double-pack is that they got sales data showing people often buy both versions at a time. Doesn't mean they figure the same person is playing them both, especially the physical release. Complaints about revealing too much also existed among Japanese fans (though more likely, Nintendo of America and of Europe told them via feedback,not that Game Freak's people heard them directly).

And a company can operate for a long time in some foreign land and be pretty clueless as to how people there behave. Disneyland Paris is an example: the folks at Disney assumed that, since Paris is such a popular tourist city, to put a European Disneyland there. The European Disney fans suggested Madrid, since the culture there was much more receptive to a big American thing popping up than in Paris. But the Disney folks in the U.S., thinking about how tourism to Paris is so high compared to Madrid, insisted on Paris anyway. Sure enough, the park was soundly rejected by the locals when it was new (as well as its employees, who really did not like the dress code there), and the tourists mostly ignored it. It's different now, but it still shows how Disney, which had been marketing there for decades, could still make a blunder by only seeing from the outside.

And then there's the Cool Japan project, a government undertaking to promote sales of Japanese products that has, for its entire history, been basing its decisions solely on what Japanese products sell well. Related is the incident with Evangelion: You Are (Not) Alone, which required FUNimation to screen it in theaters in the United States before they'd allow a home video release. The movie was a box office hit in Japan, and Gainax's people assumed it would be one anywhere else too. They were completely clueless that NGE was a cult hit at most outside of Japan and that people don't flock to anime movies in North America like they'd flock to Pixar films. FUNimation knew the movie was best sold direct-to-video in the US based on past sales of NGE-related content, but Gainax wasn't having any of that. They forced FUNimation to do a theatrical release, apparently also clueless that FUNimation was and has never been a major Hollywood studio and doesn't have the clout to do a wide theatrical release. They settled on a single screening in one theater. Gainax brought people over to observe. To their horror, hardly anyone came to watch. They let FUNimation release the sequels direct-to-video from then on.

The big thing though, which was my main point, is that the people at Game Freak are likely unaware of certain things obvious to us westerners because the thought has never occurred to them. They observe which Pokémon are more popular, whether western fans like the human characters as much as the Pokémon (or more, which is how it often is for Japan), and of the metagame. The idea that western fans often buy both versions for themselves might not have crossed their minds because there is no reason for them to think of that. They may not realize the penetration rate for Pokémon is lower, by a longshot, in all other countries. They may not realize that the higher crime rates for most of these countries mean that people don't openly play video games in public. They may not realize that many such areas don't even have reliable public transportation and thus people have little reason to play video games in public that need their attention for longer than a few minutes, and they may not realize many schools do not allow students to play video games on campus. That is, they can gather sales data, but it's a lot harder to gather usage data or consumer behavior data.

The Mega Man Battle Network and Star Force Series have done it though.

Mega Man Battle Network 3, in particular, had it to where you needed one battle chip from the other game in order to fight the completion boss.

Now the Virtual Console does alleviate that by allowing you to input a code, but its not like you can enjoy all the content by having one of the games.

Also the Yo-kai Watch games, all of which have come out in multiple versions simultaneously (at least in the main series). This worked well enough for Level-5 that they started releasing Inazuma Eleven games as multiple versions. Also Fire Emblem Fates, though that one was more pronounced in that the two versions tell different stories with different characters.

Looking it up, the Japanese game company Smilesoft released every one of its video games in this way. (They are now known as Rocketcom.) Dragon Quest Monsters 2 also functioned like this; the versions had different epilogues, and the game could not be completed without receiving data from the other.

There were games that didn't come out in multiple versions but require contact with someone else with that game for 100% completion. The World Ends with You has pins (which provides powers to Neku, the player character) you get from connecting with others, and it requires a pretty large number to get all of them. The Switch remake, to my knowledge, does not do this; they're given to you in-game on its own. The DS version of Final Fantasy III will unlock you a character to put on your team if you contact enough other people playing that game at the moment. Boktai has a set of seven strong weapons. You are given one randomly, and once you connect with someone else with Boktai who has reached that point in the game, you'll receive one of the ones they have (also at random). Certain songs in jubeat copious require you play multiplayer with every player's requirements being quite high (one of which is a four-player match in which all four players must play the song perfectly). And then there's StreetPass Mii Plaza...

The prevalence of games like this in Japan suggests there is a culture there of socialization based on video games, a culture that doesn't really exist in the mainstream anywhere else. (You could argue it exists in Korea for PC games though.)

I mean people are expecting info from Game Freak, they already basically confirmed that they gave us all the info they want to reveal. That being said this is really awesome hype commercials and the ending with Zacian and Zamazenta is amazing. Made them both look really cool without giving us much.

Plus it's only a couple of weeks and plus every Nintendo game is leaking I guess so we'll know about stuff soon.

Something I noticed: Zacian's sword looks different than his usual one.

This is how Zacian and his sword usually looks like:

Here was Zacian with a different sword (or the same sword in a different form, which I guess would make it like Sora's Keyblade in Kingdom Hearts) in that video:

This one looks kind of like a fish. I still stand by my guess that Zacian can wield different swords, and Zamazenta different shields, which have different affects. At minimum it'll change how their signature moves work. At most, it will change their types.

I hope so. Its one of the type combinations I hoped for, and discussed for a long time.

Steel/Fire already exists with Heatran though. That being said, we could really use a non-Legendary Steel/Fire Pokémon. (Obviously, it wouldn't be Zacian or Zamazenta.)

Remember everyone. Scaling can exist in Pokemon. Gamefreak are just too lazy to scale each pokemon to their respective heights. Gigantimax proves that the switch can handle the largest Pokemon against the smallest one on screen.

In addition to people saying that "lazy" should not be applied so casually and that scaling a Dynamaxed Wailord would cause problems, bear in mind that Dynamax and Gigantamax can only be done at select locations. These locations were designed to accomodate scaled-up Pokémon. Other locations probably weren't. Unlike Let's Go!, battling here seems to use the same backdrops as the overworld where the battles are fought rather than a separate location (programming-wise). Not every place can fit Wailord, especially in urban areas and non-stadium indoor areas.

I’m expecting the answer to this to be a resounding No, but it’s worth an ask anyways: what are the chances that the Tetris 99 event will have unrevealed Pokémon sprites in its data?

It wouldn't really make sense to put those sprites into Tetris 99. It's a game in which the majority of its contents is post-release DLC, and ideally, that should be as small as possible (no matter how much memory space you have).

That music sounds like it belongs on Sonic, it’s nice

Sounds more like Mario Kart to me, but I can see why it'd remind people of Sonic.

General word of advice - just because you don't know why a feature wasn't included, doesn't mean that reason was laziness. Most of us aren't game designers, and the few glimpses we get behind the scenes rarely paint the full picture of just how much work goes into game design.

This isn't just about pokemon, or even just video games. Just like it's easier to underestimate just how much nonsense that fastfood worker who messed up your order has to put up with on a regular basis, it's also really easy to underestimate the tedium a programmer has to deal with. Assuming it's always because of a moral failure such as "laziness" is just kind of cynical and mean.

There is a Native American fable about this. In it, Coyote is hungry in the cold winter, so he asks his friend Kingfisher if Kingfisher has any fish for him to eat. Kingfisher climbs to the top of a tree, dives into a hole in the ice, and a few moments later, comes up with a fish in his mouth and gives it to Coyote. As Coyote is eating, Kingfisher climbs the tree again, dives down again, and catches another fish for himself. Coyote, watching Kingfisher, decides to try it himself. He climbs to the top of the tree, dives down, and hits his head on the ice, which hurts him but is otherwise okay. As Coyote is sitting down to regain his bearings, Kingfisher returns laughing and with two more fish. The lesson: "Other people's work is harder than it looks."

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich is recommended reading for those who have never been in the retail or service sectors, because it demonstrates how tough and demanding these jobs actually are. Not Always Right, meanwhile, is a website where people recount anecdotes from working these jobs and the incidents that happen when people don't understand it.

 

[shoz999]

Saw a lot of the leaked stuff. Especially the possible Gigantamax forms. Sobs in a dark corner... they look... awesome. Ten times better-looking than Mega Evolutions.

Random Fan - Why are you crying if you think they look great?

If this really is real, they could've been cross-evolutions... why GameFreak... why would you tie them as GIGANTAMAX FORMS!?.

 

[dss_live]

-snip-

This is the general discussion thread, both the rumor thread and the leak thread are where to discuss the new leaks.

 

[B. Thunder Tiger]

This is the general discussion thread, both the rumor thread and the leak thread are where to discuss the new leaks.

Thanks for the heads up. Already deleted my message.

 

[BlackButterfree]

Anyone know if we'll be able to move up our LGPE starters? I know we can unlock Gigantimax Pikachu/Eevee if we have LGPE records, but it sounds eerily like a consolation prize for being unable to move your starter up.

 

[Phillies]

Saw a lot of the leaked stuff. Especially the possible Gigantamax forms. Sobs in a dark corner... they look... awesome. Ten times better-looking than Mega Evolutions.

Random Fan - Why are you crying if you think they look great?

If this really is real, they could've been cross-evolutions... why GameFreak... why would you tie them as GIGANTAMAX FORMS!?.

If they truly are having problems with to many Pokemon this gives them a way to use new designs while not have to worry about using them that often. Same thing with Mega Evolutions. Doing it this way means that neither Gigantamax forms or Mega Evolutions will have to be used again until each games remakes.

I do agree that the Gigantamax forms should have been used as regular evolutions. As for the Mega Evolutions most of them should have been Kalos forms.

 

[RileyXY1]

If they truly are having problems with to many Pokemon this gives them a way to use new designs while not have to worry about using them that often. Same thing with Mega Evolutions. Doing it this way means that neither Gigantamax forms or Mega Evolutions will have to be used again until each games remakes.

I do agree that the Gigantamax forms should have been used as regular evolutions. As for the Mega Evolutions most of them should have been Kalos forms.

The Megas look more like new evolutions than regional variants, and that was the point of them in the first place.

 

[Marzbar]

I think we can safely say that Gen 8 is looking LIT and that these games are going to be great. There were a lot of concerns about a small amount of new Pokemon. Well I won't spoil anything, but NOT including Galarian forms or Gigantamax forms (which there is a lot of btw), I have already counted 61 brand new Pokemon. And I have no doubt there's plenty more than that, because I haven't seen any legendaries/mythicals/fossils yet, and a lot of typings haven't had much representation yet. So we are legitimately looking at around 100 new Pokemon this Gen. Gotta be happy with that! Much better than Gen 6 & 7.

Yeah, so I was wrong to doubt these new games.

Having said that, I will be sad if Crobat, Honchkrow and Lopunny don't make it into the Galar Dex.

 

[Phillies]

The Megas look more like new evolutions than regional variants, and that was the point of them in the first place.

That's true. I just think that some of the designs are to good to only be used every once in a while. I doubt they will be used anytime soon which is a disappointing.

 

[Tsukuyomi56]

Anyone know if we'll be able to move up our LGPE starters? I know we can unlock Gigantimax Pikachu/Eevee if we have LGPE records, but it sounds eerily like a consolation prize for being unable to move your starter up.

Given you cannot trade away the Partner Pikachu/Eevee, it seems likely you cannot transfer the LGPE starters to Home once it launches.