NEW POLL:

Thoughts on Pokemon Presents?

Also, for anyone who missed it, see below for the Pokemon Presents show from today:

It was pretty good, lacked bit of news for games that I believe exist like Detective Pikachu Switch.

I'm not a Pokemon guy, but Legends Arceus looks like an impressive step up from Sword/Shield in both graphics and gameplay, it's good to see them apparently taking criticism on board and stepping their game up.

Yeah, I totally agree, they been taking some steps forward.

New Pokemon Snap still looks cool.

I don't have strong feelings about Brilliant Diamond in the sense that I don't think Gen 4 is a particularly great generation, but I am looking forward to playing the game at a decent speed, so maybe I'll appreciate some of it more by revisiting it, I like the look of the overworld areas, the battle scenery and models could use some more polish tho.

Legends Arceus I'm curious about, I don't think making Pokemon open world just because that is seen as the way for an RPG to progress is inherently going to do it any favors, but if they can pull something cool out of it, props to that, the designs of the wild areas in the Sword and Shield DLC showed that Game Freak can do interesting designs out of an relatively small open area, but it will remain to be seen if that translates well over this game, at least the core gameplay looks to be the same, just more seamless in catching and battle transitions.

It was a pretty good Direct. Cable Cable Cable Cable.

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My thoughts on the Pokemon Direct is that the Diamond and Pearl remakes look pretty bland and I went from being somewhat excited to almost assuredly skipping them. However, I don't mind much because at least Legends looks both 1 ) interesting and 2 ) like something a developer who actually cares about their franchise would do (experiment with it).

Also Pokemon Snap looks fucking great as always.

So like a good 7 or 8/10. It was definitely better than the main direct, as a non Pokemon fan.

Right? I mean, I am not a graphics whore by any means and I think there's definitely a place in this world for simple, top-down RPGs like this...but it doesn't even look as good as the Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire remakes and those came out 7 years ago! 2014! I also didn't care much about the shoddy animations in Sword/Shield, but it pissed a lot of people off and here they are doing the absolute bare minimum again. 

I'm the kind of person that usually tells other off for caring too much about graphics and stuff, but something about this in particular - when mixed with their recent history - that really angers me. It's like GameFreak or whoever it is remaking the game doesn't even care. I wouldn't even be upset if it was 'only' as good as the last generation's remakes, but this is actively worse and even more simplistic. IT's hard not to feel neglected in this case. 

I'll still buy them, though. If they at least have modern pokemon (as in, can still play with gen 5 and forward pokemon), even though that doesn't seem to be the case.

I'm pretty much neutral on BD/SP. They seem like a "faithful remake/remaster" of the original Diamond and Pearl more along the lines of FireRed/LeafGreen than OR/AS. Considering that OR/AS was my least favorite remake, I'm willing to give it a shot since I enjoy the top-down style of the older games. I would have preferred a more stylized aesthetic however, but Pokemon games have never been strong in that department so I'm not shocked that that this is no exception.

Yeah the Diamond/Pearl remakes look pretty poor visually. I get that they were going for simplicity and keeping a similar style but it looks like a 3DS game in HD, and this on the same platform that runs games like Luigi's Mansion 3, Mario Odyssey, etc.

By contrast, New Pokemon Snap looks really good; not my personal cup of tea but it's clear the developers put effort into it.