Pokémon Master Sword and Hylian Shield - Which box legendary is best? (LEAK-FREE ZONE FROM PAGE 7 ONWARDS)

Its good to have you back, Andy.

I enjoyed what post-game there was, chasing after whingus and pingus was good fun.

I don't care what the mechanical repercussions of dynamaxing are, seeing giant Pokemon is awesome.

Crumpy Andy wrote:

One of the steel users 1 hit ko’d my dynamaxed Frosmoth...

SUPER EFFECTIVE MOVE IN 'EFFECTIVE' SHOCKER

It's at its most effective when you use the stats. to boost yourself (e.g. Max Ooze, Airstream) and steamroll the opponent with hugely effective moves from there, but it's not unbeatable - it would be bad if it were.  The biggest singles battling community on the Internet has banned it though.

Not sure I agree on it being unbeatable, if you don’t have a dynamaxed Pokemon to challenge it you can neither beat it or stay alive. Sure you can slowly chip away if you have fast ‘mon, but in the situations above I ended up throwing a Pokemon out, reviving another and just waiting for the dynamax to go. Bad times.

Okay, it's not unbeatable if the opponent's monsters come out in an order such that you know you're going to get the Dynamaxer last. Or in doubles, which Pokémon campaigns basically forget about for some reason.

You obviously didn't get the item you need to pick up before the league challenge.

Spoilers for anyone who hasn't beaten the 8th gym :

Think Drunka is right with that, as can't say I had any issues.

Crumpy Andy wrote:

in the other Charizard pulled out a fucking grass move. Absolute shiter.

Man, I loved this moment in the Leon battle. The only Pokémon you know that he has before battling him his Charizard, so chances are that you'll be ready to drop a Water 'Mon into battle against his Charizard. The fact that he was ready for that and covered his weaknesses with a grass move was brilliant and really drove home the point that this guy was unbeatable before you came along.

As for Dynamaxing, I totally disagree with it being "unbeatable". For one, you've also got access to Dynamaxing, so you can either have a kaiju battle or you can make mincemeat of your foe's non-Dynamaxed critters so you can easily outlast their big bastard at the end of the fight. You can normally take them down fairly reliably too if you can outspeed them, or you can use stall tactics to outlast the three turns it's on the field. Moves like Protect exist for a reason, after all.

I seen the most genius tactic on Twitter which I really need to find again, it was basically a way to force your opponents Pokémon to switch out when it Dynamaxed. I wanna play online just to do that to people.

JayMoyles wrote:

Crumpy Andy wrote:

in the other Charizard pulled out a fucking grass move. Absolute shiter.

Man, I loved this moment in the Leon battle. The only Pokémon you know that he has before battling him his Charizard, so chances are that you'll be ready to drop a Water 'Mon into battle against his Charizard. The fact that he was ready for that and covered his weaknesses with a grass move was brilliant and really drove home the point that this guy was unbeatable before you came along.

Same, I loved this. I went in so cocky that my rock/ water Dreadnaw would wreck Charizard but then it one shot me! I think I won with like a Pokemon to spare, it was great.

Colossal is the way forward with his Charizard, wiped the floor with him.

Aye, I suppose he'd be able to stomach the grass move considering he'll only take regular damage with having fire resistance and all and then he could counteract with a quad effective rock type move. Definitely the play, I'd say!

I had a fire starter and I really liked Dreadnaw, so Coalossal wasnt long for my team, I'm afraid.

Aye, I was in the same boat. Well, not the Drednaw part - boxed him in lieu of Barraskewda instead.

I was lucky and got a dreepy in my wild zone before I'd finished the third gym so that was my answer if I remember rightly.

The battle tower isnt bad for tense situations too but it's not as good as the champion battle.

Even with a giant Dragapult firing Max Geysers at the bastard (how good is that evolutionary line by the way?), it still went down to the wire and my last two Pokémon. Charizard's final destroyer was the same monster who'd destroyed half the game up until then: Onions the Sirfetch'd.

Coalossal is better than all of those Pokémon you're mentioning.

I... had no trouble with Leon at all

There's a new mythical Pokémon announced! It's got naff-all to do with the British Isles (unless Luke's going to reveal some blindingly obvious connection I haven't made like the Applin one) and I don't care for it much.

I think we're past the point where any new additions are going to stick to the region thematically.

I tried the Mewtwo raid with three of my friends from work last night. We got wrecked over and over but wings and pizza and friends and Pokemon was a good night.

I'm not really bothered about Mewtwo being added. I'm happy to wait for something more substantial before I jump back in but it's nice to see Gamefreak continuing to add things here and there before the paid content.

It's a decent idea to keep people playing the game - it's drawing upon that GaaS spirit without any of the underlying money-grabbing tactics that sometimes come with those style of games.

Nintendo have generally been decent for that - stuff like Splatoon and ARMS are obvious examples, but even in other games like Mario Kart 8 and Breath of the Wild, they seem very willing to throw small things in for free and only charge for substantial expansions.

Yep, I'm on the whole very much on board with Nintendo's approach to non-mobile additional paid (and unpaid) content. That includes the DLC for these games, although I'm a little less easy about TPC's approach.

I hopped online with my friend Amelia in the UK the other night to finish off my Pokédex. To get a couple of the evolution items, I had to dabble with the battle tower as well, which seems like it might be fun.

Next up will be cracking on with that living dex in Pokémon Home.

Balladeer wrote:

if you are interested in the things I found unfinished I put them here.

I'm bored at work. Let's do this.

Balladeer wrote:

I finally finished a retail game!  It's a shame Game Freak didn't.

Cheap. Bad. Weak. Disingenuous. Does not predispose me to treat with you as a reasonable adult . . .

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The first and most obvious one is the cut-scenes.  There are several unskippable moments of dialogue that look for all the world like they should have had voice acting, but didn't.  I don't particularly care about VA in Pokémon, because there is so much potential to cock it up, especially with 'comedy' British accents.  I care that it looks like it was meant to be included but wasn't

I mean, I guess I can see your point but I really don't mind about this one. I guess making it skippable would be better, but I never would.

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The Wild Area is a tremendous idea that was pretty bland and dull in execution.  Without the magnificent scale of BotW, say, the open-world area felt like merely (and this is a recurring point) a blueprint for a later idea.

Whereas here, I just straight-up disagree. The wild area was great, and it made going back post-game to fill my dex the most fun it has ever been. Add in cool, modern multiplayer stuff like Raids and it's a total win for me.

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The routes felt short and lacklustre.  I've never really cared about the routes before, seeing them as obligatory joining points between locations.  Now it's clear how much they added to the pacing of previous games.  You never know what you've got...
All this applies double to the caves and dungeons.  There's nothing with more than one floor here.

I don't disagree with you here . . . I just think these are positives, not negatives!

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[*]The pacing in general could have this levelled at it, especially in the endgame.  You'll jerk from sedate progress to taking on three gyms in a row with nothing between them.

Again, I just disagree. "Good pacing" doesn't mean "the same pacing throughout". You have slower parts, faster parts, quiet moments to breathe and rushes of action. I genuinely think this game had great pacing!

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Team Yell making a ruckus is responsible for pretty much every roadblock in the game.  It gets dull fast, and feels handholdy to be restricted in such an artificial-feeling way.  Say what you will about HMs: they made the opening up of the world feel much more natural.

Finally: I agree. I also think it was a very minor issue and didn't bother me.

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There's a very plot-critical group of characters that gets shoehorned in worse than anything else in the game to my mind, included as an afterthought at the end.  Cripes.

I'm not sure if you mean Rose & Co or The Royalty, but either way I think it was actually done well. I've said this elsewhere, but deliberate or not I like the angle that as a young teen Pokemon Trainer, I wasn't really involved in the main plot until the adults already fucked it up. Also, Rose as an Elon Musk Tory was a great villain. I wanted to kick his dick off from the moment he appeared on screen.

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The plot follows those characters to an extent.  There's minimal plot throughout maybe 4/5ths of the game, including a reference to a scene with Dynamax Pokémon running wild that you should have partaken in, instead reduced to a moment so forgettable I don't even consider it a spoiler to mention here.

Yeah, I wish we could have seen/ participated in a kaiju rampage. This is the most obvious "this game was ruched to release" discrepancy, and I can't excuse it. Oh well.

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You barely use the water 'cycle outside of the Wild Area.

 
And? Better than Hoenn amounts of water . . .

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No legendary trio!?

Let the past die, kill it if you have to. Although, they've alluded to new versions/ additions to two previous trios being in the DLC, so whatcha gonna do?

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Finally, Piers.  I don't feel like he, or his surroundings, got the development they deserved.  It's a shame: he could've been the next Nanu.

I feel like Piers got a pretty decent showing? I'd have liked more Oleanna if anyone, she seems like she's way deeper than we got to see. At least we got a decent amount of Best Girl Marnie and perfect idiot Bede.

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 The characters bar the Hop brothers are an appealing lot - Bede and Marnie both grew on me after lacklustre beginnings.

Wait, WHAT?
Leon was a cracking rival, he really felt like this larger-than-life, unbeatable presence and I was SO hyped for that battle.
Hop was also a fantastic little character, with a genuine journey full of emotion. That look when he finally gets to the championship but you beat him? Kind of heart-breaking. It really leaned into something that was only implied in previous rivalries.

And there we go. Please don't take this as me attacking you, or attempting to take you down. I'm not angling for Super Genius DESTROYS Stupid Liberal With Facts and Logic or anything here. I just wanted to show you how my mind works on this stuff. I'm not an apologist for Nintendo, and I don't just feel so strongly the positive aspects that I ignore the negative; it's simply that I genuinely don't have the issues you have with the game.

There are plenty of things, even including games made by Nintendo, with which I do have issues. I think I've done a pretty good job of dishing out kickings when I want to?

Balladeer wrote:

I genuinely do appreciate Drunka thinking about this rather than soyboy beta cuck-ing me

I mean honestly, you're just asking me to do it when you say something like this. But I guess that's to be expected from a low-testosterone simp who would rather be cucked by feminazis than play real games, for real men, about a real league, with real monsters.