A 24 hour live stream to reveal just 1 Pokémon? Oh dear…

The Glimwood Tangle, which fans got very intimate with over the 24 hour period! [Nintendo, Game Freak ©, Image Source: Dot Esports]

 

If only the title of this post was an exaggeration, but I’m afraid to say it isn’t.

It was announced at the start of this week (Monday 30^th September), that the official Pokémon YouTube channel would be holding a ’24 hour live stream from the Galar Region’ set to begin on Friday 4^th October. Not simply a Nintendo or Pokémon Direct, but 24 hours’ worth of footage from inside a location from the upcoming game; Glimwood Tangle.

Naturally fans around the world were excited to see what this lengthy stream would bring! In UK time, it began yesterday at 2pm and ended this afternoon at 2pm. While I never stayed awake for the full 24 hour stream, I did catch around half of its total run time. The image at the top of this post of the aforementioned Glimwood Tangle (minus the logos of course), was pretty much all we saw for 24 hours straight.

Now I’m only slightly exaggerating! Throughout the stream, various Pokémon would appear and run, float and fall across the screen, even random Pokémon cries would sound at random moments. For a complete breakdown of what happened and when then check out Serebii.net where they posted live updates as the stream went on. I know when I was watching, the Pokémon I saw were; Pikachu, Morelull, Shiinotic and Impidimp of the already established Pokémon. By way of anything new, we only got 1 (potentially 2 yet to be confirmed) brand ‘new’ Pokémon shown off.

At certain points throughout the stream, a bush will rustle and you’ll see something behind it. Not the whole image mind, just a head or a foot (hoof in this case). At even more stretched out moments, the Pokémon would gallop across the screen; clear enough to see it’s something new but not clear enough to see what exactly. Of course, eagle eyed viewers could tell a mile off what it was (also its cry sounded a bunch and, obviously, the galloping is a dead giveaway) and this mysterious new Pokémon was… Galarian Ponyta.

Seems to me that the new Ponyta might have a touch of Fairy type about it! [Nintendo, Game Freak © , Image Source: Amino]

While not totally new of course as it’s a new form of an existing Pokémon, it was great to see something new being shown off during this stream. However, it was the ONLY new thing to be shown off. Sure Impidimp, the new Fairy/Dark type Pokémon, hasn’t been officially revealed yet but fans have already known about him since a screenshot from the E3 demo this year. There was also one final Pokémon cry that went off as the camera went black during the streams close, that of a Rapidash (Ponyta’s evolution) but as many who have experienced the Pokémon gen 7 games (Sun and Moon) will know, a regional variant of a base evolution will evolve into a regional variant of that Pokémon too. E.G. Alolan Geodude evolves into Alolan Graveler, then into Alolan Golem. Having seen a Galarian Ponyta, it was only right to assume it will evolve into a Galarian Rapidash (although this wasn’t shown off).

Regardless of the new Pokémon however, numerous fans who tuned into the stream (myself included) were left very disappointed by the whole procedure. Only giving us 1 or 2 new Pokémon during a 24 hour period is pretty poor. While showing us 24 hours’ worth of gameplay would have arguably been too much, asking people to watch a 24 hour stream with the only payoff being right at the end is ridiculous.

While this hasn’t really dampened the excitement from many fans, this whole experience has left some with a bitter taste in their mouths. A new trailer or even a Pokémon direct would have served much better and would have been far better received than this. Keeping with their theme though, the official Pokémon site updated with a message from Sonia once the stream had ended.

Sonia is a new character in Pokémon Sword and Shield and the granddaughter of the regions professor, Professor Magnolia. The set up behind the stream was that Sonia intended to record footage from the Glimwood Tangle for 24 hours in order to help her grandmother in her research.

Going to the official website page for the stream here will show a message from Sonia that reads, “We saw some interesting Pokémon, didn’t we? I’ll collect everyone’s reports and create a summary for my gran soon. Thanks for the help!” This is likely to mean that we will be receiving a new REAL trailer for Sword and Shield soon. Which really begs the question; why bother with this whole stream in the first place??

Regardless of what everyone thinks of this stream, it’s clear that despite the game being just over a month away, Game Freak and Nintendo aren’t done with showing us new footage and information for the upcoming titles. We haven’t even seen the started evolutions yet! Here’s hoping whatever is shown next won’t involve us having to sit through 24 hours of what is essentially a desktop background.

Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King (3DS) Review - The definitive version to play?

A motley crew ready to slay some goo! [Square Enix ©, Image Source: Humble Bundle]

As any of my previous experience with writing has proved, it’s actually a lot harder to write about something in a review format when you absolutely love the product (Hence why I’m slowly putting off my Astro Bot: Rescue Mission review). I’ve probably just massively given away my opinions on Dragon Quest 8 already with that opener, but bear with me for a moment while I try to gather up everything I have to say on this game because not all of it is great. Full disclosure, I haven’t played the original PS2 version to completion so when I talk about the original version, these opinions are founded on the things I have read online by those who have played it far more than I have. Also to preface things before we go on, I started playing this game on a more casual basis earlier in the year and only sat down to commit to finishing it in the last month.

I suppose the first thing I should mention is how it was relatively easy to carry on after such a long hiatus! Many an RPG player can tell you how often times when you leave in the middle of a game such as this, you can’t quite catch back up to where you were when you return or at least not as easily. But it’s something of a testament to the game, its storytelling and the characters involved that I remembered almost exactly what I was doing the last time I played (the break was only to play other things that released).

I thoroughly loved the story of this game, even if I thought as numerous times the game was going to end a good 10-20 hours before it did. For instance defeating Dhoulmagus seemed very END worthy I thought until things carried on. Then after kicking Marcello’s ass I thought we were winding down pretty soon. Nope. Again though, not really a complaint more of a commentary on how and when we usually expect a decent story to end, but Dragon Quest 8 decided it wanted to tell a much more grandiose and in depth story and I was fully along for the ride. When the story eventually did wrap up, I was very satisfied with how it all came together. Upon further research I found out about the other endings the game held including two that could only be accessed after completing a section of the post-game. After doing so and experiencing one of these ending, I have to say that I easily prefer the original ending the game came with for the sheer excitement and sense of adventure that it gave that resonated with the rest of the game. Not to say that the other endings (let’s call them the “Ring” endings to avoid spoilers) where bad, but compared to the original endings, the “Ring” endings changed a major element of the story’s end but didn’t give them enough of a payoff afterwards. In fact, one of the “Ring” endings that I looked up on YouTube had a better payoff than the other which annoyed me most as I never would have thought the story to end that way; apart from one instance in the game that is entirely miss able nothing else leads you to think the story could go that way.

But I digress, let’s move onto the gameplay itself. Apparently the gameplay mechanics are similar among other Dragon Quest games so if you’ve played another game in the main series then you shouldn’t have any issues. I however was a newcomer to the mainline titles, having only completed the spin-offs Dragon Quest Builders (Fantastic game) and Dragon Quest Heroes (Shit game), it was very jarring for me when I went into battle for the first time after stocking up on healing items to find that those items were in my ‘Bag’ and not on my character. So I quickly learned that Dragon Quest ascribes to the old school style of RPG where you need to organise a characters items individually whether that’s equipment or usable items. This way of playing is likely to be difficult to understand if you’re new to RPGs, but anyone who has played a few RPGs before will get used to it pretty easily. Once you get a good few levels under your belt and invest the skill points in the right areas, healing items will become less and less useful as you’ll get healing spells that don’t cost that much MP (Magic Points) to use.

The main party consists of four characters; the Hero, Yangus, Jessica and Angelo. Each filling in a sort of classic RPG roles like Warrior, Tank, Black Mage and White Mage respectively. Your player character will get a good mix of both physical and magical skills so you can play them however you wish. Yangus has next to no magic abilities, his strengths lie with his attack skills but he can learn one ability that can be a real life saver (no pun intended) whereby he’ll “sacrifice” himself in order to revive the rest of the party if they’re downed. I say “sacrifice” because the moment you do that and he dies, you can simply order Angelo to revive him next turn, the only caveat as he’ll have no MP left to use magic or skills. Moving on to Jessica, she is the dedicated magic user, she can use physical attacks too but they do practically no damage. Her speciality is her magic which she uses mostly as an offensive attack but has some useful buffing magic. If you level up her… “Sex Appeal”, she’ll gain a passive ability that has the chance to stop monsters from using a turn as they become… *cough*enthralled by her “fine form” (This game is Japanese don’t forget). And lastly is Angelo, who for my run at least was my primary healer/buffer character. He has several useful physical skills but as I focused my Hero and Yangus on their strength, he became the guy who’d heal, revive and buff stats throughout the battle.

All in all, a good balance of playable characters I thought and how the game originally released back on the PS2. However the 3DS remaster boasts two additional party members; one that is gained through the story and another that you have to earn through a Pokémon style monster arena. The former is Red; those who’ve played before will know Red as the female bandit character you encounter near Pickham. You’ll encounter her again in Pirate’s Cove later in the game and in this version she will decide to join your party on your journey. The other character is Morrie, the red and green curator and champion of the Monster Arena also found near Pickham. He isn’t so easily gained however as you have to complete his monster arena challenges all the way to S rank where you’ll face Morrie in the final fight. Defeat him and he’ll also accompany you on your adventure. Now, you may notice that except for the finale, they won’t have much of an impact on the story and even then they only make brief appearances during the stories close. Other players online have expressed that they use the two new characters in place of Jessica and Angelo for their playthroughs however, I didn’t use them apart from visiting a grinding spot; not to say that the characters were bad or unusable, just that I had grown so accustomed to the original team and devised a strategy that worked well for me even through to the final encounter. My point here is that the new additions are well received in a general sense but I personally didn’t experience it.

I’ll mention briefly the post-game stuff. After beating the story you’ll unlock a new area and an additional bit of story in order to unlock the “Ring” endings mentioned earlier. The Dragovian trials, as the sequence is called, can range from being very short or very long depending on how much you wish to invest into it. Myself, I only up until the story part ended and the trial part began. From what I can gather, the only reason to carry on after this is to simply keep beating harder and harder bosses, which is fine if you’re into that kind of grind but I took what I had and ran with it.

So I need to wrap things up. Honestly, if the old RPG mood takes you and you want something with a good level of challenge and a good story, you could do worse than to check out Dragon Quest 8. It’s an older title now but with the 3DS port, it’s never been easier to play it whenever you want to. The new additions from the PS2 version are only really noticeable when they’re pointed out otherwise you might miss them. Regardless of that, it’s a good way to spend 60 hours and speaking as someone who used this as their introduction to the main series, I will definitely be visiting more titles in the Dragon Quest series. You might feel the same after finishing this game.