Today is the launch day for Pokemon Legends: Arceus!

I have been pretty excited about this game since the initial reveal. The idea of a more open world type of pokemon game seems really fun.

I recently played the two dlcs for pokemon sword and shield and they proved to me that Gamefreak could handle more open environments with exciting places to explore and collect items.

The review scores seem to be pretty good:

Gamespot - 8

Shacknews - 80

Vg247 - 80

Thesixthaxis - 90

IGN - 7

Mostly reviewers are liking the updates to the battle system, quality of life upgrades and new catching mechanics.

The negatives tend to focus on the graphics/framerate(at times).

What do you guys think about what you've seen so far? Are you picking this on launch day, like me?

Picked it up. Old school gen1/gen2 fan here. Besides Let’s Go Eevee, I haven’t really touched a full on Pokémon game since the good ol’ days. I have to know with this one.

The big downsides I’ve heard are performance, which is the Switch game mantra by now, and awkward growing pains of trying something new with Pokémon finally.

Both of which I’m willing to put up with to see how it all pans out.

I played a decent chunk of SMT V but eventually gave up because of bad performance. I understand the Switch isn't very powerful, but that doesn't change the fact that playing a game at sub 30fps is a deeply unpleasant experience for me. Normally I would be interested in this, but not with reports of poor performance.

I plan to pick it up eventually but there's just too many video games to play. I'm mostly interested to see if the changes they made to the battle system are at all taken advantage of by the encounter design. There's a lot of potential here and I'm ready to be underwhelmed but it's good to see some changes being made at least.

Now make the next game all double battles like you should've done 10 years ago.

I'm going to wait and see what the average consumers and ACG think. I do not trust most reviewers when it comes to pokemon games, due to the abysmally low bar they seem to have for the series.

IGN had a good discussion about it on the latest NVC podcast. Seems like it has a great core gameplay loop but that the world is an empty shell. Maybe I'll wait until the sequel?

No, but you guys will and will let me know if it's good or not.

I'm interested - I eagerly bought Sword when it came out hoping for something new and was pretty disappointed it was just the same as every other pokemon game but featuring pokemon I was largely unfamiliar with and thus not invested in.

Is this a mainline pokemon game? Is it the open world pokemon game I was hoping Sword would be?

@junkerman: It's not open world exactly, it's like an expanded form of the Wild areas from Sword/Shield.

Playing it now. Slow start but neat so far. However, this game is making me beg for some kind of fake speech sounds. Even a simple sound when someone starts speaking would be appreciated. It feels super strange with all the characters being completely silent. I haven't played any of the switch Pokemon so maybe it's normal.

I started playing today. I'm a pretty fair-weather Pokefan, but I really think Arceus has legit "no for real this time you guys trust me" changes to the fundamentals. It's not just the open world aspect-though obviously that's part of it-but how the way the actual Pokemon RPG stuff works as well.

There is a far greater focus on your character specifically and how they engage with the world. Everything you do in the open world is tied to Pokemon in some way, and at times the Pokemon themselves feel more like a means for you to interface with said world than as collectible battle critters.

Evolution is simplified, and is now literally an option you select from the menu. Combat has been overhauled and moves and abilities are either reworked or non-existent. Trainer battles are far more scarce. Even the act of catching Pokemon emphasizes item management and choosing how you approach a wild Pokemon so that if you do get caught in a battle it's either because you went out of your way to do so or because you messed up somehow.

Your main focus is on leveling up your Pokedex meter, which is essentially your character level. This time you're not working towards beating the Rock type gym, you're working towards filling out Bidoof's Pokedex entry. You can do this either by doing stuff like catching 3 during the day, 3 at night, and 2 that are bigger than average, or by defeating a dozen of them and watching them use the move "Rollout" a certain number of times. There are "boss fights" and other obstacles in the way, but the main loop seems to be centered around gathering materials to craft items to catch the right Pokemon in the right situation in order to level up.

I think it's a really weird and interesting Pokemon game. In some ways it comes off as the bizarre lovechild of Lets Go Pikachu/Eevee and Sword/Shield, and in other ways it feels entirely alien. I guess the real question is whether the novelty endures or not. For what it's worth, I'm enjoying it a lot so far, but I can't say how long that lasts.

I'm really not running into a lot of performance problems so far to be honest. The village is fine and the areas I've seen so far are fine. It has however made some pretty notable sacrifices to maintain that performance.

But I would say if you were worried about something on the order of how SMTV went it's not that.

As a general idea for all game development everywhere, I think this is an idea that way too many devs are sleeping on but should be in nearly every unvoiced game.

Like OK, either your game has a small budget so voice over is out of the question, or it has a medium budget but still way too much dialogue scope for VO to be affordable. Fine! But don't just leave text dialogue completely silent. I really think it gives your game way more character if you give some kind of unique sound that plays while different characters (or even broad types of unnamed NPCs) are talking. It managed to make pretty iconic characters in stuff like Star Fox, Undertale, Inscryption, etc. where each character has its own identifiable sound, even if at the end of the day it's all just some version of Simlish.

This still takes dev resources, but I have to imagine that sticking a sound engineer or whatever on this for weeks is probably still a huge cost savings compared to fully voicing a large cast.