I understand this is what market research shows most player want.
I understand things change. I also understand that Magic, at its core, is just a game.
I am and will be completely open to play and explore the UB sets that are going to come to Magic.
That said, it is a little sad to me to hear that the new normal is more UB sets than UW sets, at least in the short term. I'm sorry for this relatively useless message: I know you get a ton of hate already, and I don't want to spread more of that. I'm just a bit malinconic, that's all.
It is *not* the new normal. 2026 is the outlier. Future years are going to be three and three.
A new normal of 6 sets a year with a 3-year rotation means 13-18* sets in standard at any one time. That's a huge card pool compared to the 5-8 we used to have.
This drastically increases the power level and makes it difficult for newer or more casual players to play what used to be a great introductory format.
This isn't sustainable and a change needs to be made to keep people actually playing standard.
My suggestions (in order of preference):
- Have two of those sets simply not go through standard which would bring standard down to 9-12* sets.
- Have Standard go back to a 2 year rotation instead of 3 which would bring standard down to 7-12* sets.
- Have much more aggressive bans and try to keep the power level of cards in general lower. This is the most difficult to maintain but easiest to implement
- Introduce a new official format that is less sets or a more frequent rotation (or just officially support Planar Standard which is a fan format that already does that).
Pathfinder WoTR Fancomic : How Azatas solve problems
Azatas are basically friendship fairies? The gameplay is quite whimsical and power of friendship but you can also release extremely destruction lol. its quite fun.
So a lot of people have been complaining about the graphics in ZA and they complained about the graphics in Scarlet and Violet too.
The question is, why are they so bad? Is it laziness? Poor design practices? Lack of time or money?
I don't think it's laziness and I doubt it's just bad practices, lack of funding and development time is definitely is a big factor but that isn't what this post isn't about that, it's about a different issue I think causes this issue and the how Sword Nd Shield show that.
The first core series Pokemon games we got on the Switch was Let's Go Pikachu and Let's Go Eevee and I think these two games look fantastic. They went for a cute anime art style and it works well.
I have some screenshots to show here and I want to note that when deciding what screenshots to take I deliberately looked for places that I thought would show off the game in the best light. Deliberate set pieces that the developers want you to be looking at, rather than finding some corner they may have rushed.
Here is a screenshot in the center of Cerulean City from Let's Go Eevee
I think if the other Pokemon games on the switch looked like this most people wouldn't really be complaining. Some might not like the style or still want some improvement (There are better looking games on the switch) but I personally would be fine with it.
But then we look at Scarlet and Violet which came out much later and it looks worse.
Here is a Screenshot of the ruins in North Province Area One in Pokemon Scarlet
When looking at this I feel like I'm looking at an unfinished game, it reminds me of when I used to play PC games that were in closed beta in the mid 2000s. This should look amazing, a lake showing off the Dratini line with some ancient ruins but it looks like a basic render that hasn't had the details properly applied yet. They have also tried to go for a bit more of a realistic art style than Let's Go and I think that makes it worse.
I said I was going to talk about Sword and Shield and that's because Sword and Shield both looks really good and really bad and as a result I think it helps show why the games have worse graphics now.
First where it looks good.
Here is a screenshot of Balloonlea in Pokemon Shield
Honestly I don't think this looks as good as Let's Go Eevee but I do think it looks much better than Scarlet and I think the main diffence between the two is the art style. Sword and Shield are more complex and less cartoony than Let's Go. There are a lot more details on this screen.
Now where it looks bad. Here is a screenshot from the start of the wild area.
Anyone who has seen people complain about the graphics in Sword and Shield will have seen people complain about the trees specifically and that is why I wanted to get one in shot. This looks worse than Balloonlea. One thing I find interesting is the berry tree because it looks completely different to the tree next to it. Its like they are completely different art styles, the berry tree looks much closer to the art style of Let's Go with its more simple design and bright shading compared to the more complex textures and darker colours of the tree next to it.
I will say though even in the wild area the water looks better in this game, you can actually see the building reflected in it where as nothing is reflected in the water in Scarlet and Violet.
So there is one big difference between the wild area in SV and the other areas. The wild area is much bigger of a load zone for a start but more importantly it has a lot of Pokemon wandering around. Each of these Pokemon takes up a bit of procession power, its not a lot but it adds up. I suspect originally the wild area looked more like the rest of the game but was lagging too much so the developers lowered the graphical quality to make the game run better in the wild area.
Other areas in Sword and Shield do have wild Pokemon wandering around but unlike the wild area there are fewer of them and they typically stay close to where they spawned, despawning when you move away from that area. Sword and Shield also did something that I imagine most people didn't even notice, I didn't even think about it while playing the first time but the wild area is the only place you can move the camera yourself so Pokemon need to spawn in a radius around you but in the rest of the game the camera angles are fixed, the game doesn't have to worry about spawning Pokemon that are not on the screen in that moment.
A smaller difference that I feel I have to mention is grass. If you've ever had to mod an Elder Scrolls game for perfomance reasons like I have you'll know very well that grass is surprisingly a big hit to perfomance. With Pokemon I'm not referring to the tall grass Pokemon hide in, thats actually not the issue. Its the little detail grass that you can see near my characters feet in both the Shield screenshot and the Scarlet screenshot. If you look at Let's Go there isn't any, its just a flat texture. Grass is just a small model that sways a bit, an individual bit of grass won't impact performance much, the reason grass is an issue is because there is so much of it. All those tiny insignificant hits to performance for each bit of grass quickly adds up and actually makes a noticeable difference to your performance while not really providing much in making the game look better. Which is why Elder Scrolls games often have mods that remove or reduce the grass.
These differences actually show us why Pokemon Let's Go and Pokemon SV are so different too. SV is open world and isn't split into load zones, everything is on one map. It does have lower quality versions of things in the distance that it swaps out as you get closer but that is still much more power required that having load zones like the previous games do.
EDIT: My partner pointed out to me a good example of a different game I should mention. Final Fantasy XII has an open world with a lot of monsters wandering around and it looks great while being on the PS2, this is in large part because it separated the areas into load zones.
SV also has a free camera for the entire game where as all the previous games have a fixed camera. Not only does this impact spawns like I said but it also impacts the scenes in general, if a building is only ever going to be seen from one angle then you don't have to make the back of it. I suspect if you were to unlock the camera in Sword and Shield and looked at the bits you couldn't normally see it would be much less detailed if there was anything there at all. Scarlet and Violet having a free camera means they have to render everything because you could be looking at any of it.
Another key difference between Pokemon SV and the games before it is that unlike the other games there is no battle transition. Battles happen in the overworld on the same screen that you traverse. This has a big impact on how good battles themselves can look because the game has to keep rendering everything in the overworld as well as running the battle itself. This is probably a pretty big factor in why the graphical quality is lower because while battles won't influence general exploration it would be very noticable if the game started lagging every time you had a battle so they had to make the environment with the idea in mind that a battle could be happening there which lowers the bar for how intensive the graphics could get.
These seem like very small differences but they do add up and it results in a much more intensive game, so in order to keep the game running at a decent frame rate they have to sacrifice the graphical quality.
There are a few games I've not mentioned yet and I'll mention them now.
Pokemon BDSP looks fine. Some people don't like the art style but the graphics themselves are on part with the Let's Go games. Everything I've said about Let's Go applies to BDSP too.
Pokemon Legends Arceus. This is the most interesting example I've not talked about yet because its a kind of inbetween state. It has the issues that SV has that I mentioned above but unlike SV its not a completely open world, it split itself up into various load zones which would offset the performance issues it could have had. It also does a fantastic job with the art style as it managed to find an art style that really covers up the lower graphical quality it has quite well. Some people still noticed that Arceus did not have as good graphics as other switch games but its less obvious than SV is.
Pokemon Legends ZA. There are so many articles and posts out there about this games graphics and I don't think I need to go over it here. The map is smaller than SV so it should look better than it but otherwise it still has the same issues SV has that I mentioned above.
There is going to be a trade off here. The question is, what is worth trading off?
Below I've put some ideas for changes that could be made going forward in order to have better graphics in Pokemon games.
The random detail grass isn't worth it, just get rid of it. Most people won't even notice its gone.
Bring back battle transitions. I've never really liked how battles looked in SV or Arceus and I doubt I'll be alone in that. Transitioning to another screen can be done quickly and allows for each battle to have a nice scene to fight in based on the area. The battle scenes are one of the few things I think looked really good from Gen 6 up to Let's Go and BDSP. This could even still work in Legends games. What you would do is instead of having Pokemon hitting you deal damage to your character you'd have it initiate the battle state with them. I'd still have catching work outside of battle in legends games, I don't think that would be too intensive.
You don't need a completely open world to have an open world game. Personally I don't even think Pokemon needs to be an open world game, it worked fine for decades being a traditional linear jrpg but a lot of people prefer it being open world and Gamefreak seems settled on that. But you don't need to be completely open, going back to Elder Scrolls that series has been open world much longer and one thing they did was each city had its own load zone and they had a lot of buildings which each had their own load zone too (something gamefreak seems to be afraid of since we got almost no interiors in SV) this takes a lof of the load off when it comes to performance issues and loading screens haven't been in issue in games for a long time, to the point where I laugh whenever there are loading screen tips because I never get to read them before the loading is finished. Ideally I'd break up the outside into loading zones too. You could have route gates like the old games do or make it look futuristic and have big holographic walls like ZA has around its wild zones to split the areas up. With the holographic walls they could also do a smart thing and not actually show the other side of the wall but have something that looks like it and takes a lot less processing power to render, put a little blur effect over the holographic wall and people will think they can see the other side but its just getting distorted rather than the reality that its a less detailed copy.
Prioritise a simple style over graphics. This is what Arceus did to an extent but it could go further with it. Cel shaded style games on older systems are the ones that still look the best today. It doesn't have to be specifically cel shading but I think a more simplistic look to the games would be a lot easier to make look good than the attempt at something a little more detailed and realistic that SV tried to do. There are plenty of other games that do this. Persona 5 is often pointed to as a game that has a great art style for example. I don't think this alone would be enough.
Less Pokemon wandering around. If everything above is done I don't think this would be needed but its still an option in order to retain more processing power for the graphics. SV had a lot of Pokemon wandering around and I don't think it needed quite so many, it could even be more interesting to have less Pokemon as it could be fun to hunt around and try find where the Pokemon are hiding. I also think if Pokemon wants some horde of Pokemon around like the groups of 5 tauros you might find in SV that it could be a good idea to actually make the tauros one big entity rather than a bunch of smaller ones and interacting with it puts you into a horde encounter like XY had.
Instead of doing any of the above just go back to the old style of games. Some people have been asking for this for a while but Pokemon doesn't need to be a big 3D open world game. It could work just as well and maybe even better if it went back to its routes and had games in the old DS style. The Switch is much more powerful than the DS so doing what was done on the DS but looking nicer would be a lot easier.
Anyway those are my thoughts on the graphics of Pokemon. Why it is the way it is and what could be done to improve it. I've never been someone who cares too much about graphics if the rest of the game is good I still played through Scarlet and enjoyed the game in spite of it but it can look better and I would rather it did than having all of the features I've mentioned could be reduced or removed. I didn't even get into the issues I have with the in-battle models and animations I have but that is an entirely different topic.
A Pokemon ZA Review (that doesn't talk about the graphics)
I've seen too many posts about Pokemon Legends ZA that will exclusively talk about the games graphics either complaining that they look bad or that they don't care how they look as graphics has never been the point of Pokemon games. So I wanted to talk about everything else in the game.
First lets talk about the battle system.
ZA is a big departure from previous games as for the first time in the core series the game has a battle system that isn't turn based.
Pokemon now move around, following the player in real time. The play can lock on to a target and select one of four moves, the Pokemon will then get into position and execute the move.
PP and move accuracy is gone and all moves now have a cool down which ranges from about 3 seconds to 20 seconds. Stronger moves have higher cool downs.
For the most part this battle system is pretty smooth and easy to use, though there is the issue that Pokemon will sometimes get stuck on terrain which can be very frustrating as your pokemon either fails to execute the move or uses it on the terrain its stuck on. I've also seen many clips online of Pokemon moving a long distance to line up an attack on a stationary target only to miss completely anyway which while funny at first would get frustrating after not that long.
The bigger problem with the battle system though is how much less strategic it is. I've been keeping an eye on how people talked about this, both during the game and in online play, and this is the prevailing sentiment.
Paralysis and Sleep have been heavily nerfed her as they no longer prevent a Pokemon from moving, instead just slowing them down. Oddly frostbite isn't in this game and instead they are using freeze which does keep a Pokemon unable to move and as such is the strongest status in the game now, if you can inflict it. There is no reliable way to inflict freeze leaving it an entirely RNG thing. Poison and Burn are now much stronger as they are now actually damage over time effects instead of per turn and seem to tick more often than once per move. Confusion doesn't seem to do much, it makes a Pokemon wander randomly between executing moves but as far as I've seen that is all it does. The result of these changes is that status effects largely don't matter except for dealing more damage.
Non-damaging moves in general seem largely useless. Protect and Detect are somewhat useful but require very precise timing. Buffs no longer seem to stack so setting up with multiple swords dance or something isn't really a thing in this game. All of them have really long cool downs as well.
The optimal strategy has already emerged, its to use a reasonably tanky Pokemon and just spam attacking moves, specifically fly and dig as they are unavoidable which is absolutely hilarious to me given that these two moves have been considered largely unplayable in other recent games.
The end result of all this is that Pokemon battles have little to not strategy to them, its just deal as much damage as you can as fast as you can.
Its not all bad though because the battles shine in the main draw of the game and what I think is its best feature; Rogue Mega Pokemon.
The Rogue Mega Pokemon are boss encounters you will fight regularly during the main story of the game and they remind me of the boss fights from Pokemon Legends Arceus but with your Pokemon actually being the source of damage this time. You run around a big arena, dodging attacks and finding good opportunities to have your Pokemon get in some chip damage while you collect orbs of mega energy. Once you have enough you mega evolve and start really dealing some damage. Once the boss gets to certain thresholds of health it will do a charge up into a big attack that is a real challenge to dodge. These are genuinely well designed encounters, I don't have anything negative to say about them.
How are the NPC trainer battles though? dull, they are dull. There isn't really much strategy to them, they will typically just spam attacks against you, they make no attempts to dodge or use any real strategy. Their last Pokemon will always Mega evolve as soon as it comes out. What makes things worse is that there are only a handful of trainers in the game during the main story and you fight those same trainers 2-3 times each. This could be interesting if their teams changed over time but apart from the rival the teams don't change at all aside from being a bit higher level than the last time.
The last Boss fight starts out really cool with a tonne of spectacle and then you fight a couple mooks at the start and its a good phase 1.
Unfortunately phase 2 and 3 of the fight is just doing the exact same thing as phase 1. I am not exaggerating it is literally the exact same thing, it only gets harder because you Pokemon are getting worn down. Its disappointing.
Level Design!
That was a lot of battle talk so lets change pace. The whole game takes place in Lumiose City as I'm sure everyone knows by now.
This itself isn't inherently bad and the game gives a glimpse of what could have been. Towards the end of the game you get to explore the ruins of the Team Flare base from XY which now has wild Pokemon in it including some Alpha Pokemon that act as mini boss fights. You have to power up areas and use teleporters and key cards to get around. Its a solid area. If there was more of this in the game it would be great, but there isn't. The only other area that comes even close is a sewer section but the sewers is mostly just the same few hallways and rooms and doesn't really have any puzzle aspects to it. Everything else is just Lumiose City.
So How is Lumiose itself? Not great. The ground exploration is very samey, not much environmental changes in the place and each area of the city doesn't really feel distinct from any other to the point that I wouldn't be surprised if people got lost a lot. Lumiose has rooftops too which does add something interesting to the game but it has a couple of major issues. Firstly like with the ground exploration there isn't really much variety but the worse thing is that moving around in the game is really janky. The game wants to be a platformer at times, it even has actual platforming sections made of scaffolding but the game has no jump button. Instead when you fall off of something you can press a in mid-air to have rotom lift you up a bit, its like having double jump without single jump, its really weird and unsatisfying to use.
One thing that is interesting is that the game has Rocks, Brambles and Sludge to break around the city. It can be removed with a variety of moves but the game only explains removing rocks and makes it seem like only Rock Smash will work on the rocks. Its an odd choice as the game is exhaustive in explaining every other mechanic but for some reason this one the player has to figure out on their own. These things will block up various paths and adds a little mechanical variety to the game. There are also spider webs around that you can hit to open up into bridges and ice rocks that if you use a water move on become ice bridges. This is used in a similar way blocking various paths. Its a decent take on HMs and I like that its a category of moves that can be used rather than just one specific move.
Wild Pokemon in this game are mostly contained to wild zones spread throughout the city and these are the most varied areas of the game, they kind of have to be in order to get Pokemon of various types available. Unfortunately these areas are also painfully small, the are some you can't enter without almost immediately being attacked by an alpha because it can see you from every entrance. Each area has a handful of Pokemon in it and it takes about 5 minutes to get almost all of them as they are all fairly close together. The only reason it takes longer to get all of them is because each area has at least one Pokemon that is a rare spawn and you just have to reset the spawns for an area repeatedly until it shows up. Which brings me on to..
Catching Pokemon
This section is going to be short. Catching Pokemon in ZA is a huge downgrade from Legends Arceus. Stealth mechanics are still a thing but they are less useful here for a few reasons. First the areas are often too small to actually hide from the Pokemon, they will just spot you from the entrance before you have a chance to even crouch. Second all of the cool mechanics Arceus added to catching are gone. The balls variety is purely in their catching chances, there are no heavy or wing balls here. You can't lure Pokemon with bait, stun them with mud or use smoke balls to hide your presence (you can use a smokescreen attack from your Pokemon but the radius is so small it doesn't work very well. Plus you have to be able to target a Pokemon to even use it), or anything like that. Its just been completely stripped back.
The research tasks have been simplified too. In Arceus each Pokemon had research tasks to carry out that were rather varied and fun to carry out. Here your research tasks are "Catch X water types", "win x battles", "collect x items". Its all stuff you do without really thinking about it and all of it converts to points that just unlock TMs. Its not bad its just no where near as interesting as in Arceus.
On the plus side unlike SV this game has the shiny noise again like Arceus did. Which brings me on to...
The Sound Design
The battle music in this game is great, I don't think I've played a single Pokemon game that has had bad battle music. So I'm happy about this. The environmental music is usually good too, I often get the cave theme from GSC stuck in my head and the Area Zero theme in SV is one of my favourite tracks in a Pokemon game. Here though I can't really compliment ZA. Its not bad as such but it gets a bit repetitive, I think this is a place where they could have really made Lumiose feel more varied if they'd had distinct tracks for each district as you enter new areas of the city but they didn't.
Speaking of moving around the city
Movement
Not something I would normally give its own section but I think its worth talking about here. In XY we had a unique way to move around in the form of roller skates, you could do tricks with them and they made it more fun to explore the game. XY also introduced the concept of Riding Pokemon, I don't think it executed it well but it became a big part of every game going forward and it was always a welcome addition. Arceus did Riding Pokemon best with being able to quickly switch between Riding on Basculegion to Braviary to Wydeer, it was smooth and made getting around the large open areas of Arceus really fun.
So it was really disappointing that this is the first core series game since XY to not have any way to ride Pokemon and the first core series game ever to not have any equivalent to a bike. I was especially disappointed because of how this game has platforming sections in it that you move around rather jankily. Imagine if instead of jumping with a rotom phone awkwardly between buildings they had little ramps that let you use skates to ramp off of them and land on the next.
Another option would be to have any sort of ride Pokemon. Riding a Gogoat through the streets of Lumiose (which you could do in XY btw), using a Scolipede to climb up the sides of buildings (instead of those elevators) and using a Talonflame in the late game to fly between buildings could have been really fun, even better would be if you could use multiple different Pokemon to do this like Let's Go had.
I've seen some suggest that the reason this wasn't done is because if you could get around the city at a fast speed you'd notice how small it really is and unfortunately they might be right on that.
Let's talk about something that the game did well though.
The Characters
This game has a varied cast of characters with unique personalities and I genuinely really like some of them. Lebanne is my favourite, a woman that acts like a stereotypical dignified maid in public but goes complete goblin mode in private but the other characters are all good too with a few exceptions. I wasn't a fan of Grisham, I don't think L was particularly utilised well and the main rival Urbain/Taunie is very annoying and not in an endearing way. Outside of those few I think all the characters were interesting and brought some life to the game.
Which gets me on to another thing I dislike, big spoilers ahead because I'm going to talk about..
The Story
The story in this game is a complete mess. The protagonist arrives in Lumiose, seemingly on holiday and is grabbed by Urbain/Taunie to stay in their hotel. The protagonist is then quickly roped into helping out with Team MZ. This is a really strange premise to begin with. I can't imagine going on holiday to Paris and then joining a gang as soon as I got there and just doing whatever activities they wanted instead of like sight seeing. The premise isn't my issue though, as weird as it is.
You join the ZA Royale tournament and start ranking up in it. This is clearly going to be a big part of the game and I'm sure most looked forward to the 26 boss fight opponents it would offer (spoilers: it doesn't).
You meant a group of people called "The Fist of Justice" who are against the idea of containing Pokemon in Wild Zones and want them to go free. Reminds me of Team Plasma. I assumed this would be the major faction in the game and that the main conflict would revolve around the Wild Zones since Quasartico is building more and this team wants to abolish them. That is not the case. Apparently the team is all talk. The Fist of Justice have no significance in the plot outside of their leader and his sister being boss fights later.
Then Zygarde shows up and you chase it, it leads you to an Absol that has gone rogue and AZ lends you a mega lucario to handle it. This starts the only plotline that is consistent throughout. For the rest of the game you will periodically get given three Rogue Mega fights to do in any order you like. I won't be mentioning it again, just know it happens between the rank up matches.
Then you go back to ranking up. By this point you are Rank V and your next Rank is... Rank F. The game just skips more than half the ranks. This is a huge issue but I understand why they did it. Talking to others who have played the game many have stated fatigue from playing the Royale and that by the end of the game they just found it tedious. The Royale was supposed to be the core gameplay of this game and it was such a miss that the devs decided skipping half of it was a good idea. That is pretty rough.
There is then a segement where you learn about Canari and Team Dyn4mo, don't let the name fool you this isn't an evil team like in previous games, its more like Team Yell but with less organisation. Canari is a streamer and she is a fun character, similar to Iono but more interesting I think. You do a quiz (its not interesting), then you fight Canari and rank up. Dyn4mo is no longer relevant to the plot.
Your next fight is against Ivor, the leader of The Fist of Justice but instead of this segment exploring his desire to remove Wild Zones his sister has gone missing and you have to help find her, you go on a little adventure with Detective Emma and Ivor then you fight Ivor's sister and then Ivor.
Then Urbain/Taunie goes missing, turns out they *borrowed money from the Kalosian Mafia to fund their tiktoks and didn't pay it back*, this was a very weird segment. You mafia is called the Rust Syndicate, yet another faction, and they force you to work for them to pay off the debt but for such a shady group the work they make you do is just, community service stuff. The game tries to portray the group as actually benevolent and I would agree with them if they hadn't tricked a child into debt and forced said childs friends into doing free labour to pay it off. Once again this faction loses all plot relevance once their segment is over.
Next is Jacinthe, a socialite who invites you to participate in her tournament. She then gets very pissy when you leave the party early to go deal with Rogue Megas and then forces you to come back and do the tournament. A lot of people don't like Jacinthe and I get it. She is the one who has the maid Lebanne, that I mentioned earlier. The fandom (at least the queer part of it) seems to agree with the idea that they are a couple. The tournament could be interesting if it wasn't for the fact that you just fight the last four boss fights again and then Jacinthe and their teams are unchanged aside from levels.
Then there is a scene where it looks like Quasartico might be secretly evil and causing the rogue mega evolution. I'm sure everyone is tired of this plot twist since it was done in SM, then done again but worse in SwSh. For those people I have good news and bad news, the good news is they don't do that, the bad news is that this who thing amounts to the player and the leader of the Rust Syndicate just asking the CEO of Quasartico if she is secretly evil and she says no so they take her word on it but its okay because it turns out she wasn't lying.
Next, Team Flare is back! except not really, its just two grunts who have decided they want to bring Team Flare back and succeed where Lysandre failed. Thats what they tell you, what they actually do is infodump about the events of XY (which have been changed from what actually happened in XY). When you beat them in a battle once they just don't do anything else. Oh also this was the fight to become Rank A so you are now the top trainer of the Royale. A guy called L has shown up a few times before now and its now revealed he is actually Lysandre and he not only survived XY but is now immortal like AZ.
Then the game finally gets into the reason why all these wild Pokemon have been mega evolving, its because somebody forgot to turn off the doomsday device that was in XY and its just been spewing out energy this entire time (I'm only partially joking).
If nothing is done the Eiffel Tower Prism Tower will go rogue and start attacking everyone (I wish I was joking but I'm completely serious).
You fight Urbain/Taunie for who gets to use Eternal Floette to try stop the tower. Regardless of whether or not you win (yes you can actually lose the fight and the game continues) the rival gets to use Eternal Floette anyway because they really really want to play hero.
So they go do that then something goes wrong, the tower spews out a bunch of mega energy, turning a tonne of wild Pokemon Mega which you have to fight through with the help of everyone you've fought along the way to get to the tower which has fused with Eternal Floette to become a giant tower plant monster thing.
I mentioned the last boss fight already and how disappointing it is. I can now mention that also Zygarde is here. It was too weak to help before being stuck in 10% form but L (who has been revealed to be Lysandre) has been collecting Zygarde bits to let it reach 100% form. Its weird how the player doesn't get to be the one collecting Zygarde Cells, after doing it in Sun and Moon I was sure it'd be a thing in ZA but no Lyzandre is doing it... for some reason. The things you fight are two flowers at the base of the tower, after you kill them Zygarde will do a big attack on the tower, then shield you from the retaliation attack, then the flowers regrow and you have to fight them again. Do it two more times and the tower dies but then it fires the doomsday device from XY, at which point Zygarde will turn into a fucking gun (again, not joking) and shoot the beam to turn it into harmless fireworks.
Credits Roll. After the credits you are at AZ's grave as he died during the credits. He apparently died from the coughing too much disease. Its assumed he died of old age but its kind of weird because before now he was said to be immortal but I guess that immorality in Pokemon just means 3000 years.
Then in the post game is Quasartico asking what you want for your wish, you get three options but two of them are "wrong answers" and the game will only progress when you wish for the ZA Royale to go on indefinitely which apparently they were going to do anyway but you've still used up your wish so fuck you I guess.
Once I had seen what the story was in its entirety I sat down and thought about that first trailer and remembered something. What the fuck happened to the Lumiose Redevelopment project? The early trailers made it seem like the game was *about that* but Quasartico just does that in the background and the player has nothing to do with it.
I think the reason the game talked about that though for the trailer is because there is no real story here. Now Pokemon games don't need a good story to be good, the first 2 gens were pretty thin on their stories but since gen 3 the series started trying to have an actual narrative through the game and has been putting more focus on it with more cutscenes and less player freedom and this is the latest in that. This story isn't good, its just a bunch of largely unconnected things that happen thinly wrapped in the rather simplistic mega evolution plotline. What makes it more disappointing though is the potential it had, if they had just picked one of the major factions to focus on and build them up and tie them to the mega evolution plot it could have been really good but they didn't.
Its also really weird that this game doesn't have an antagonist. It sets up a bunch of *potential* antagonists but none of them ever actually become antagonists, they just become allies to the player instead, even Team Flare does. An RPGs story doesn't need an actual antagonist, its completely possible to have a story without one but its very difficult to do well and Game Freak did not succeed in doing it here.
Conclusion
This game had a lot of potential and doesn't live up to it and is ultimately a disappointing mess. The gameplay is stripped down compared to other entries while the story is unfocused and uninteresting. It has good characters and the Rogue Mega fights are enjoyable but they are not enough to carry the game.
I'm a long term Pokemon fan, I started with Red and Blue and have played every core series game since then and with one exception I bought every one on release. That exception was XY. I did eventually get it later and I found myself justified in having waited so long to play it as it was easily the worst core series Pokemon game to me. That was until ZA came out and now XY is the second worst core series Pokemon game.
If I had a nickel for every time I disliked a Pokemon game based on france I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot but its weird its happened twice.
I love Pokemon and I really want it to do better but my optimism is gone.
Hi Mark! I have been a huge fan of the UB sets we've gotten so far (both in flavor and gameplay), I had a blast with Edge of Eternities and have no beef with the new aestetic territory Magic has been pushing into (I loved the feel of Thunder Junction.) As a player since Revised, I feel like Magic is only getting better as time passes. I am also a huge Star Trek fan (the Star Trek game from Decipher was also one of my first CCGs).
Even with that high praise, I'm really struggling with the idea of Star Trek in Magic for a pretty simple reason. There's plenty of people who Gather in Trek, but there is no Magic. Star Trek might be the closest thing to true "hard" science fiction in pop culture. For any given technology or event in Star Trek there is an attempt to ground it in actual current day theoretical science. I can't explain how a replicator works or how those time travel gates in City on the Edge of Forever function, but I know there's someone out there who can, and it'll be grounded in some kind of real-world hypothetical principle.
All of our standard legal UB sets so far are in universes that have magic. There are lots of science fiction properties that cross into science fantasy (maybe a big one owned by the people who also own Marvel, for instance) and use magic. Edge of Eternities showed us that space fantasy is a great fit. Star Trek just isn't space fantasy.
I'm excited to see Magic explore other properties, I just would really prefer Magic to have magic, not to put magic in properties to fit them into Magic. I really love both magic and Magic and would prefer them to overlap.
I'm sure I'll enjoy the gameplay, the work you guys are doing is phenomenal, and I appreciate you taking the time to give me this venue to be an old man yelling at clouds.
P.S. Jaws III: The Revenge pretty clearly establishes that the shark/sharks have some sort of supernatural gene-memory and tracking powers or something, so that one sits just fine with me. I assume that's why the property was chosen, I appreciate that careful consideration.
Avishkar is a world of invention, where magical spells are represented by the use of technology rather than magic. Did that upset you?
Why is Mark trying to do a "got ya" on a fan for expressing dislike of having non-magical UB settings in MTG?
Even if Mark was correct and Avishkar was an example of an in-universe plane that lacks any magic (it's not) this is how I'd expect a random idiot on Reddit or twitter to respond to the criticism, I expect better of the head designer of the game and I am disappointed to see this.
reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics
Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.
And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!
Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.
May I recommend my new favorite tool: Mapgen4. You start with a random seed and then add mountains, valleys, shallow water, or oceans as you like. You can adjust the wind direction to make wind shadows off the mountains fall where you want. You can adjust overall raininess to make the rivers larger or smaller, or have more or fewer tributaries. It works best for small, isolated landmasses (think islands more than continents) but as there’s no scale bar and it’s all slightly abstracted anyway you can do whatever you want with it. I’ve only just started playing with it but it’s SO FUN.
I do think this could be useful for writers! ...Caveat, if you're going to use this for making a map for anything published (digital or paper, even if it's only in a fanfic archive or whatever), please, please credit the creator and their program as how you made that map! The more ways information like this gets out there, the more useful it'll be to other writers, roleplaying game DMs/GMs, creators, etc.
One of my favourites for mapping plates, biomes, etc is Tectonics.js. If you're familiar with how tectonics shape a planet, you can guess where the features go by toggling plates, crust thickness, etc. Between Mapgen4 and Tectonics.js, we've got some pretty sweet tools at our disposal.
European Geosciences Union Blog — Beyond Tectonics: Building fictional worlds to better understand our own
Reshaping Reality's Worldbuilding Tips
Worldbuilding pasta's series, An Apple Pie from Scratch also check their resources page!
R/worldbuilding's Reading List. Also check out their collected resources link. This basic geology guide from 11 years ago is still nice.
Creating an Earth-Like Planet, and The Climate Cookbook (aka Geoff's Climate Cookbook) technically the climate cookbook is a part of Creating an Earth like Planet I think.
Related: Worldbuilding Workshop's "Working Out Climates Using Geoff’s Climate Cookbook." Which goes through using the resource in order to map make. Also just the Worldbuilding Workshop in General.
Madeline James Writes's Worldbuilding Guide
Worldbuilding 101 (this links to the Biomes section but there's like...everything.)
Also I would recommend looking into Landscape Archaeology as well! That's because Landscape archeology is basically adding the social/cultural layer on top of all that geology and geography. Environments change when communities live in them, and communities likewise adapt to various environments.
This is a short free introduction to the concept: "Notes on Landscape Archaeology." To summarize, Landscape archaeology sort of like...studies the relation of people to places/spaces (that is, landscapes) in time.
Also this paper [An Archeology of Landscapes] breaks down/introduces the key concepts that I learned which is first that you can form the "construct paradigm" of a landscape from settlement ecology,
ritual landscapes, and ethnic landscapes.
And then the highlights of their summary of what constitutes defining a landscape:
Landscapes are not synonymous with natural environments. Landscapes
are synthetic (Jackson, 1984, p. 156), with cultural systems structuring and
organizing peoples’ interactions with their natural environments ...
Landscapes are worlds of cultural product ... Through their daily activities, beliefs, and values, communities transform
physical spaces into meaningful places. ...
Landscapes are the arena for all of a community’s activities. Thus landscapes not only are constructs of human populations but they also are the
milieu in which those populations survive and sustain themselves. A landscape’s domain involves patterning in both within-place and between-place
contexts ...
Landscapes are dynamic constructions, with each community and each
generation imposing its own cognitive map on an anthropogenic world of interconnected morphology, arrangement, and coherent meaning ...
Basically a "landscape" is made by a community living in an environment. Once you have a geological environment that makes sense, landscape archaeology is like... Basically how I feel confident knowing where trade routes would be on a map, where there are areas of continual high conflict, what kinds of agriculture exists where, etc. once the geological stuff is hammered out, it's like...I know how that would influence the local cultures and vice versa. At that point, it's easy to start marking the natural borders, settlements, trade/port cities, and even strategic fortresses. If you have properly put rivers on a map, then marking your port cities is effortless, basically.
Also:
This course syllabus for a Landscape Archaeology class is freely accessible. It includes an online resources page.
Place, Landscape, and Environment: Anthropological Archaeology in 2009
(Landscape Biographies is open access, as is Landscape Archaeology between Art and Science: From a Multi- to an Interdisciplinary Approach. But I wouldn't try to read every essay.)
If you are like me and find it helpful to have video reference for a process/activity in addition to a written guide, Artifexian is a YouTube channel that does a LOT of world building stuff and specifically he's in the process of creating a world following a lot of Worldbuilding Pasta's methodology!
This is me like every time I break something. I can never be normal about it it always breaks in a way that makes people question what the fuck I did.
One of my favourite examples was that one time when playing Digimon World I somehow accidentally entered a debug mode, I have no idea how I did it, I couldn't find anything online about it at the time. In my defence that game was held together with chewing gum and hope.
This is my final post of the card of the FFIX commander deck. Cards I missed from other posts.
First one of my favourite characters of the game, Beatrix.
Beatrix is a recurring boss fight but you never actually beat her. To represent that you can't lose while she is in play. First Strike is to represent that she is always the one attacking you and lifelink is to represent her white magic abilities.
Zorn and Thorn unfortunately did not get their own custom cards, instead I chose to represent them with a single reprint. Trouble in Pairs is a strong card and works quite well for them.
Induce Despair is another card I didn't really know about until making this deck, it's not a strong removal spell but it does work in the deck and I think it goes well with the scene of Lindblums destruction.
Disenchant is a simple removal spell that I used to showcase the moment when the enchantment guarding Cleyra was destroyed.
Two more removal spells both from the same cutscene depicting Bahamut and Alexander's destruction.
These also are moments from the same cutscene. Abstruse interference depicts the moment when the invincible shows up to take control of Bahamut from Brahne and kill her with it. The spell allows you to exile a creature and then cast it yourself. Worth noting that I did devoid a bit different to normal aesthetically because I didn't think the eldrazi frame worked well here but I still wanted to get across the devoid.
Bitter Triumph depicts Brahne's death itself, it's a victory for the party because a villain is dead but Garnet still mourns for her mother anyway. The quote is taken directly from that scene and really exemplifies why it's perfect for the card. The card itself is great for the deck since it lets you fill your graveyard.
Finally I have two more cards that I actually decided on early on. Eye of Doom is an interesting card for commander and depicts the eye of the invincible.
Mass Calcify is a strong boardwipe and here depicts the petrification of evil forest and blank.
That's it, I've shown pretty much every card in the deck now and gone over my thoughts on them. I hope some people here enjoyed the deck and if you didn't well I'm shutting up about it now haha.
There are some Sorceries in this deck though not many.
Of course being a reanimator deck we have to have some reanimation.
Graceful Restoration here depicts the rebuilding of Alexandria and there are a decent number of creatures in the deck with power 2 or less making this more valuable.
Vat Emergence is another card that I feel is perfect here, it returns a creature and proliferates which normally wouldn't be all that strong but with saga creatures it allows you to get two chapters immediately as well as triggering the chapters of any other creatures you might have. At first glance it doesn't seem like something that would make flavour sense for FFIX until you remember how genomes are created on Terra.
Kidnap the princess was created because I wanted a card to depict Tantalus, the scene where they are planning the kidnapping particularly. There were a few different ways to do this but I went with milling a player and getting a creature or artifact from among them. It's only really theft if you target the opponent but it wouldn't really synergise well with the deck if it couldn't be used on your own deck. Honestly I'm not too happy with this card and I'm open to better ideas.
Jailbreak was another card that I didn't even know existed before making this but felt very good for the deck. It depicts the moment Steiner and Marcus break out of jail. It's also a 2 mana reanimation spell, you have to give an opponent something but it's probably worth doing.
One of the more powerful reanimation spells in the deck is storm of souls. It won't work too well with the few creatures in the deck that rely on being big like the Yan but there are plenty of creatures in the deck that are powerful because of their abilities instead. The scene depicted here is the souls swirling around the outside of the Iifa Tree.
There isn't just cards to get back creatures.
Past in Flames lets you recast the other Indians and Sorceries in the deck but really it's in here more for flavour as I wanted to depict the scene in which Madain Sari was destroyed.
Every deck needs some card draw. Secret Rendezvous is a fun reference to the love letter section of the game while cathartic reunion depicts the last moment of the game in which Garnet and Zidane are finally reunited, it also plays nicely with the reanimation theme.
Lastly there is the boardwipe Blasphemous Act. Depicting the scene where Kuja destroys Terra, a scene I absolutely had to depict on a card.
What does the manabase look like in the FFIX commander deck? I mentioned on my last post that I included shattered landscape, Nightmarket and Promising Vein but it's not all common lands.
There are other great lands for graveyard decks.
Silent Clearing is a pain land that you can sacrifice for card draw, which is great with Crucible of Worlds and Sun Titan. The art here is the clearing in Evil Forest which I think looks quite serene.
I also included surveil lands like Shadowy Backstreet to help put your creatures in the graveyard for later reanimation. Here I depicted the alleyway in Alexandria which I think fits great.
Of course every commander precon comes with a Command Tower so what did I do for that?
I chose Memoria for this. I did consider Lindblum but that art is already in the main set so I had to find something else and I think Memoria looks fantastic here.
I also put Fabled Passage in the deck and used the portal to Memoria for that.
A couple more lands of lower rarity here
Tainted Field is an underrated land I think, it's like a slightly worse verge, I think it'd be nice if we got more uncommon cycles like this one but really I just wanted a land where I could depict Qu's Marsh since I and other people who love Quina spent so much time there, it also has one of my favourite music tracks.
Tramway Station is not a good land but sometimes you just see something that is normally a bad fit for reflavouring have a good fit and you just have to include it. Lindblum actually has stations for an inner city public transport system! So yes I depicted that for that tramway. It might not be good but I love it.
A couple of other things I wanted to depict in the deck were the play from the start of the game and the mognet. I don't think either card here is amazing in the deck but they aren't bad either. Thespians Stage of course depicting the sword fight between Zidane and Blank during the play and Nomad Outpost depicting Mognet Central. I think the latter fits pretty well since the moogles working for mognet are pretty nomadic.
Finally we have a couple of utility lands
Blast Zone is another solid fit for the decks themes and goes well with Sun Titan, it depicts the destruction of Alexandria. Rogues Passage is just a solid card in general and here it depicts the secret passage that leads from the castle to the Gargan Roo.
There are some more fixing lands I didn't show but I think this give a good idea of what is in the deck.
More cards from the FFIX commander deck I made. This time I'm going over the ramp the deck has. This is all reprints here nothing new so the focus of this post is on the flavour.
Every precon has a Sol Ring and an Arcane Signet and this one is no exception.
For the ring I chose to do the rings around the crystal, with the way sol rings are usually depicted in the art this image just screamed sol ring to me.
For the Arcane Signet I went with Garnet's Pendant and used a great shot from the last cutscene in which she drops it on the floor. The flavour text is the in game description for it.
I was originally going to include the talismans for each of the other 3 jewels but unfortunately I couldn't get a clear image of the desert jewel in the game and the falcon claw never shows up at all but I can use Eiko's E earring and since it's not part of a group of talismans I decided to pick a more flavour appropriate mana rock with honored heirloom.
Solemn Simulacrum is of course in this deck and for that I picked one of my favourite moments in the game.
This is the scene where Vivi talks to Black Mage #288 about mortality and the unfortunately short lifespan of Black Mages. It's only shortly before this that you learn the Black Mages are self aware and before you've had a chance to fully think through the ramifications of that it hits you with the fact that some of them not only know they are going to die but that it's going to be soon and there is nothing they can do about it. The quote in the card is one that has always stuck in my mind since the first time I played the game.
This flavour fits the card well in my opinion and allowed me to show off one of my favourite scenes.
Maps
I was looking through ramp options I could include in the deck. Archeomancer's map seemed like a good option, initially I used the map Blank gives you but that didn't quite feel right and then I remembered the scene in Treno where Doctor Tot shows his map and thought that fit much better. Planar Atlas was actually the other way around, I wanted to delict oelivert and when I saw the atlas I thought "wait there is a card in magic I can use for this" and that's how I got planar Atlas for the holographic globe in oelivert.
One of the first cards I made for this deck was Crucible of Worlds
I'd decided very early I wanted a graveyard theme for the deck before I even knew I'd do mardu (I considered Abzan and Jund) which Crucible goes well with and knew exactly what art I'd used for Crucible. This moment in the game looks quite similar to the art for the original crucible with two planets close together.
The flavour text is a quote from Garland that he says when you first enter this area.
I of course made sure to include lands that work well with Crucible.
Night Market has cycling and depicts the auction house in Treno, a sight that is very recognisable for those who have played the game. Promising Vein sacrifices itself to get a basic land but can also just be used for colourless mana if you'd prefer, I depicted the Fossil Roo in this one which I'm quite happy about because I really wanted to depict either the Gargan Roo or Fossil Roo.
I also included a land that both cycles and sacrifices to find a basic
Here Shattered Landscape depicts Alexandra shortly after it was destroyed by Bahamut.
I'll do another post soon showing off some of the other lands in the deck.
