#I also liked Carmine from the DLC still not as good as Arven writing and character-wise

[mile08]

Selfie with buddy 🐶

Wanted to draw my favorite character from Pokemon Scarlet & Violet: Arven ^w^✨

Some WIPs! 🐶

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Commissions Info | DeviantArt | Twitter | Instagram | Ko-fi

[hamofjustice]

whoever wrote this is my friend at game freak. about 2500 new lines of dialogue celebrating these characters in the way you'd expect the plot drivers and supporting roles of the story to be celebrated (albeit i wish more the former and less the latter), if the game that the writer(s) were stuck writing for actually got to be about those characters and hanging out with them the whole way through. it's a - pardon me for saying so - real treasure.

that being said...

i don't think pokemon, my former chief interest, is a series for me anymore, unless we get a permanent traveling party in the next one. i'm looking for games that are less... lonely all the time? that don't set up expectations they'll never meet because they don't have time? whose fans and leadership don't both openly hate story and companionship (and also women) unless those companions can't talk? i've changed, pokemon's not changing with me. and this console generation in particular has been egregious about not caring about making customers happy as long as they buy shit because of the brand on it.

but stuff like this league club or the epilogue is at least good enough closure for me on my unusual investment into this also unusually heartfelt generation. i'm no longer so pissed off that i'd just stop posting about these characters altogether. in the end, they weren't completely forgotten about... but why were they forgotten about at all? they were the main characters of the story, not us. forcing our character into making bad decisions isn't going to change that.

man, what could've been.

between this and the aforementioned epilogue (that has no reason to not be available day one tbh) i can see a ton of evidence that stuff got changed or cut against their wishes, or at least compared to the original plan. and that's gonna keep happening as long as pokemon keeps up this sloppy, rushed, "who cares if it's good, they'll buy it because it's pokemon" business model with far too many places, characters, and monsters and far too little time spent lovingly with each one, that keeps them feeling stuck generations behind other $60-95 games... and hollower and lonelier than the rich warm hearts of $5 indie games.

what i linked above, however, is the kind of thing i wanted from the DLC - just getting to sit back and enjoy being nemona penny and arven's friend like we did in area zero and watch them grow together - and it's an afterthought in a game that otherwise threw its characters and messages about friendship into the garbage and aggressively pretended they never existed (including the love story they just released a music video and book about!), that refused the most obvious slam dunk story climaxes (no 4v1 tera raid boss fight ever happens with other characters? given two different opportunities? that were both remixes of the raid music? really? really?) and cool returning features we saw coming a year ago and never actually got (seriously, you're getting outdone by sword and shield here), in favor of... a massive amount of grinding over four versions of the same song that makes doing things without paying for both your online subscription and pokemon home subscription unbearable. how playable is the endgame going to be when those things are gone?

they really don't think people are going to be upset that the main characters still have basically no new lines or mentions until the epilogue (that they don't even know exists) releases? that they're not going to be upset that kieran and carmine just despawned again with no clear way to bring them back after kieran asked if you could be friends again? (same thing, epilogue)

kinda seems like this DLC was made to piss off people who were emotionally invested and reward people who hated nemona as anything but a hentai model. it didn't even execute its own story properly! the beautiful mess of a base game just turned into the usual pokemon dumpster fire with the absolute bare minimum done for the trailer to not technically be lying about anything, and nobody's gonna notice because it has starters and legendaries and the synchro machine. even the new credits theme sounds like a cry for help.

i'm taking the love i had for these kids and channeling it into something that no corporation has control over.

my biggest wish for the next game is to let our friend NPCs use the union circle as one of its headline features. with this much effort put into its dialogue for just those few characters. like the area zero trip but all the time (players who hate dialogue would probably also appreciate it not interrupting their actions like that segment didn't! win-win!). i want the characters from the 50 hour story to still be in our lives for the 500 hours of postgame, not say we'll live happily ever after and then turn into statues for a year. if next gen hurts as much as this one did, i'm not getting invested.

also, where the hell are the multi battles. i'm not that surprised they didn't bother with a battle tower again, but 2 on 2 with friends just like sword and shield seems so, so obvious and fun, but apparently not to this company

not even saying the game is bad, just not what i wanted.

i (somewhat) formatted the text dump of the blueberry league clubhouse dialogue in the indigo disk if anybody just wants to read it now without the lil animations and skip the big grind

(and the irl wait for the epilogue quest with all of our friends to become available. spoilers for that, but i will not hold off on telling people it exists because they deserve to know before they get too upset that the DLC story completely shafted the basegame's characters yet again, for even less good reason than last time, to the point that it feels almost spiteful)

[hamofjustice]

click if you've seen the end screen or don't care

I expected our friends nemona arven and penny getting basically nothing and somehow TPC still managed to let me down by giving them literally nothing. just. not acknowledging them in any way. aaany way. except the new hand clasp emote. which of course nemona doesn't notice you doing at her because this isn't animal crossing

I guess they didn't notice you left the country for a week? they still only have one line of dialogue too. yes, seriously. still.

what we got instead was... fine, and draws some parallels to main story, but... fuck, dude.

I was so desperate that I kept checking those tablets in the community center because it was mentioned you could chat on them. nope.

(also the framerstes in kitakami are worse lmao)

back to waiting for my friends to come back, except now with two more of them. this was basically just a character establishing demo for the real DLC / final update, and... I'm not sure if I'm really feeling this kieran start of darkness angle, it feels more... idk, this is a very fandomy thing to say but it feels mean to write him being this way rather than something he'd actually do? and of course it's the "crush this kid's dreams by winning battles you cannot lose" story again, even if his dreams are pretty selfish. carmine is cool and hilarious, I was saying at first "see fans, this is what a rival who hits on you looks like, leave nemona alone" but then she stopped doing that once she actually started to like you. looking forward to seeing what hidden depths this prickly softie has

the selfie game is pretty good now and I took a ton with other characters in case I'd regret not doing so later (I was right) but I sighed when I couldn't get mela and presumably the rest of team star to react to the music the way some other NPCs did. also not sure why their new map icons aren't fly spots but idk whatever

well there's plenty more to do now because of the dex expansion and new minigame but. man. I didn't think they'd care THAT little about the friend trio. not enough to even spend ten minutes giving them new dialogue. why am I even posting.

idk why people are still saying billy and o'nare are nemona's parents when they look nothing like her and explicitly say multiple times they're in charge of a different company specifically to dismiss that assumption, but lemme tell you I stayed up too late making sure they weren't. while it would be SOME form of nemona story development to hold us over for the next few months I would not be able to deal with nemona having white parents and being another "don't be scared! it's just a sun tan!" brown character, I would just assume she was adopted from somewhere rich people love destroying

teal mask is here, see you in street fighter 5 everybody