It's mind-boggling that 16 months after its release, you still can't go five minutes without something severely broken happening in this game. It feels like peple have become numb to the technical short-comings of Bethesda games, but it's more likely they gave up on Bethesda ever fixing their engine.
NPCs may be back, but still nothing you do in this game looks remotely engaging.
I'm playing a caster and I had a lot of trouble with that act 1 boss. I eventually beat him after 10+ deaths by buying a random bow in the shop and auto-attacking him to death...
Needless to say, this game is very unfinished. The final cutscene had me sliding over the floor in a t-pose, sound cuts out randomly, you can get stuck in level geometry and invisible boundries, enemies glitch and teleport around and much, much more. Honestly, I don't even think it looks that good besides some of the vistas in the background.
I do think their approach to skill combinations is very interesting, lending itself to unorthodox build discoveries. I do wish respeccing was free, since the system right now discourages experimentation and some skills just don't work like they're supposed to.
It's actually super impressive if they used to shit out a new one every six months and I imagine a lot of this new game's extended development time was spend on learning/building this new engine. By pretty much any metric though, these games compare most favorably to mid-90s adventure games and not much else.
Dan oversells the Rhava Velar a bit, acting like the game is a cakewalk once you get it. I still died quite a few times on bosses. Yes, you output a lot of damage, but you still take a lot if you get hit.
I'm not a Pokémon guy, so I won't argue about all the smaller details, changes and missing features people have been complaining about. What I will say is that this does not look like a "best effort" kind of product and it's a shame, because I was looking forward to a full Pokémon experience in console form.
Graphics would look average for a Wii U game, attack animations are lacking from what I've seen in streams, the basic structure of the game has not evolved (hah, get it) since the very first game over 20 years ago.
I had hoped this would be the Monster Hunter: World of Pokémon, but it seems like just another cheap iteration on the formula.
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