#and the main mechanic itself is just. it was so meh after the previous boss fights. including the one right before it

[masqueradeoftheguilty]

i dont have the brain power to talk about it rn bcs headache but. im just after finishing the penacony big bad fight and its... kinda a let down? i wasnt really enjoying the story beforehand anyway but. hm. i didnt feel the "punch" you know?

[gale-gentlepenguin]

Gale Reviews: No More Heroes 3

Thanks to @knightsweeties for this art

Its been 10 years since the last mainstream no more heroes game and things really get shaken up.

Travis now is fighting for the fate of the earth.

Can this Passing Assassin become the hero earth needs? Or are there really no more heroes?

So for this review I will be covering the following:

1. The Story

2. The Gameplay

3. The side quests

4. Difficulty

5. Appeal

Spoilers below:

1. THE STORY

So its been 10 years since the events of Desperate Struggle. There is a rich CEO named Damon who reunites with his alien best friend FU. (in a ghibli-esque short of ET). And when FU returns he and his crew had basically escaped space prison and came back to earth to conquer it. FU then claims he and his crew are Superheros (as a subversion of the trope.) And Travis sees these a**holes destroying his city and decides to f*** them up.

After killing Mr.Blackhole. Travis finds out the UAA basically created a new list. The Galactic superhero rankings. And Travis now has to fight his way to the top to save the world. (though he initially agrees because His wife, Silvia, promised him something. Which we are believed to be dirty)

But s*** gets personal when FU shows up, Kicks the s*** out of Travis, Disarms Shinobu and murders Badman, AKA a friend of Travis from a previous game. Now basically making this whole game VERY personal.

So there is so much more to it, and there are so many twists and turns to the point where trying to explain it all would take away from it. But lets just say aliens arent the only opponents Travis fights.

Even when things get nuts the story knows when to take itself seriously and when to have fun with it. Anyone familiar with Suda51 will get a kick out of it.

But just know the plot itself is not the main appeal of it, its what happens during that makes it so interesting. The twists that had me saying "What the fuck?" are what really make it. And the genre changes that come in. Suda really went ham with his wild style and it shows. Dont do drugs kids, just play suda51 games and you will have the same effect.

It will leave you with more questions than answers.

2. The Gameplay

Lets get right to it. The game play is the best part. Fighting the different enemies, the puzzling yet fun bossfights. Thats where this game really shines. I recommend players start on Bitter. I started with Spicy and got my s*** handed to me early on. After beating it the first time then you can try the harder difficulties.

The death glove powers gives the player options when things look bleak and clever use can really turn the tides. The Chips the player can collect and craft also give Travis a lot of customization. Also some chips are WAY more useful than others. But the important thing is that you pick the best one for your play style.

I found most of the boss fights pretty balanced and have their own gimmick which has each one stand out.

And good news for the bitter players. Even if you die in bitter there is a chance you can come back with the chance wheel. And with sushi meals or to go items, you can boost your health and stats before a big fight, giving you all the advantages you need to win.

Another great feature is the time machine, which allows you to re fight old bosses. Letting you get coins that can up your stats and items for crafting. And you can battle them on different difficulties, from Berry sweet (I basically want to curbstomp the boss) to Death ( one hit will kill you). I reccommend saving the last difficulty for when you fully mastered the game.

Overall the boss fights, the mini boss fights, and the space battles are relatively fun and will keep you on your toes.

3. Side Quests

Honestly, meh.

The overworld is not as awful as people complain, but it is pretty bare bones. Some of the sidequests very from boring to midly entertaining. The search quests for the cats and stickers are a chore and the rewards are only some what worth it. The scorpions is the worst one since they can sting you and you lose your chance to find them.

On the plus side, its much easier to get money for the boss fight fee, and you can pretty much skip money grinding as the fights will often give you enough to pay for whatever. The money is mainly for the tee-shirts and Chips.

The game has a ton of collectables which are cool easter eggs and thankfully none of them are optional for the true ending, which means you dont need to do them if you dont want to. Which makes it a lot more tolerable. Only the diehard Suda fans really will care about them.

4.Difficulty

I touched on this earlier, with the different levels. But I will say that the game overall is not super difficult. Once you get your playstyle and max out your stats, you are basically able to have little issue beating most of the bosses. In Bitter its a lot easier.

In spicy, the early game is ABSOLUTELY brutal.

While most of the bosses are pretty balanced, some of them are really difficult. (Fu's boss fight can be ESPECIALLY painful EVEN WITH MAXED OUT STATS). But its not at the level where its not fun or broken. I would say the fights are the most balanced in the series.

Though some of the requirement battles before the big boss can be spiritually taxing with some of the minion combinations.

So just watch out and be sure to stock up on sushi.

5. Appeal

This game is fanservice to Suda51 fans. Its clear that first and foremost. If you arent into No more heroes, then you likely wont be as invested in it as someone who is. Now you dont need to play the other games, but I would recommend it, just so its not so confusing.

As a beat-em-up slash game, its one of the better ones. If you love that style of game you will be enjoying this one.

But really this game is an acquired taste.

Overall:

As a fan of Suda51, I give the game a solid 8/10.

If the overworld wasnt as barren and almost pointless, I would probably bump it to a 9.

The ranking is basically 4 points for the style, references, and overall experience the game gives, while the other 4 are for the nice fighting mechanics and gameplay.

If you arent a suda fan, then I would say its more a 6.5 out of 10.

[askkrenko]

SWORD AND SHIELD THOUGHTS

Alright, just finished the main game/post-game of Sword and Shield ,and I have... thoughts, general impressions, and feelings about the game. I’m going to try and be spoiler-free, but some things will have to be talked about, and though it might be indirect, no promises. Here’s my thoughts on the game overall...

First off, It’s Pokemon. I’m not going to discuss the parts of it where it’s Pokemon. At this point, you should know whether or not you like Pokemon, and if you DON’T know... start with FireRed and LeafGreen. Still the best gameplay experience.

Graphics are... meh. I understand and accept that they’re really not up to the standard of other Switch games, but you’ve got 400 pokemon, lots of people, locations, etcetera. Battle Animations continue to be pretty weak for the most part, with pokemon mostly wiggling around and a special effect showing up. Nasty Plot’s animation is offensively bad in this regard. Sure, some moves look cool, especially ones unique to individual Pokemon, but this game’s visual advances still result in mostly-static battles where your pokemon doesn’t even move across the screen to use melee attacks. You know how in old Final Fantasy games you rush to the enemy before doing your generic sword swing? Can’t we at least have that? 

The new Pokemon are bitching. Sure, there’s winners and losers, but overall I love Galar’s lineup. There’s new type combos, interesting abilities, a lot of cool designs.

Dynamax is... just not interesting. The idea of giant pokemon are cool, but when you actually use them they replace your cool, interesting moves with heavy-hitting moves that have minor secondaries that are hard to leverage. My best pokemon at the end was a Wishiwashi that knew Aqua Ring and Dive, so my battles involved doing the former, and then Diving, so with Aqua Ring + Leftovers I’d be healing a huge portion of my HP between every attack... In Dynamax, Dive turns into a heavy hitting water move, Aqua Ring turns into Protect, and it doesn’t even last long enough for a tank-build to work. In the gym battles the right answer is basically always “Dynamax when your opponent does so you don’t get one-shot”, and in Raids it’s just “Dynamax when you can.”  Gigantimax is a cool idea, too, but... you just don’t get to do it. You get a Charmander that can eventually do it for free in the post-game, but he’s a baby and your pokemon at that point are level 70+ and you probably already have a fire type who loves you so there’s no reason to train him up.  

On Difficulty: I played a Nuzlocke with no items in battle, so I can’t really speak to difficulty normally but... camping makes healing you party super cheap, and every dungeon and challenge seems shorter than in most games. I only remember one real cave system and it was relatively short, and gyms all seem to have exactly three trainers (or three pairs of double-battle trainers) before the leader. Further, enemies always ask if you’re ready instead of ambushing you, and many will give you a full heal before or after the battle. I had some challenges against gym leaders, sure, and I did wind up losing the Nuzlocke to the final fight against the ‘big bad’ (and then just continued in non-nuzlocke method) but I never hit one of those points like a Rock Tunnel or even one of Alola’s Trials where I felt like the encounters on the way to the boss were really whittling down my resources.

Quality of life: Infinite Escape Ropes and free Fly make Krenko a happy gobbo. Except I never used the escape rope because there’s nothing to escape. Other basic QOL stuff is updated, too- moves are marked with effectiveness once you’ve seen a Pokemon before and presumably know it’s types, the menu felt very comfortable overall (though with all the different types of items I’m starting to think the bag needs MORE pockets), and the hotbutton to pokeball in an encounter is great. Having an EXP ALL as a core mechanic makes leveling up pokemon so much easier. There’s now a name rater and move-rememberer in every pokemon center, and I use that guy so much. Any time I newly catch or evolve a pokemon, I take it right to him to see what else it can get.

Dynamax raids I... didn’t do much of. Because the difficulty of the ones that show up apparently increases with the story or something. The first few I encountered I could handle with my pokemon at the time, but now that I’ve beaten the champion, it feels like every raid location I see is five stars and I need pokemon higher than the level 70+s I have to handle it. It doesn’t help that the NPCs they summon to help you are incompetent. Sure, a few have useful abilities, but why is there a level 49 Magikarp, and why doesn’t this Solrock seem to know any attacks, and what even is this Wobuffet doing here?

Story:  Story is easily the weakest part of Sword and Shield. The story is both boring and too exciting for the game itself. The characters are both too cool and too bland. In the ‘main story’ where previous pokemon games have it, you are doing the gym challenge. This is fine. This is normal. There’s some cool stuff in there that makes it more of a proper sport than just a kid wandering around. You ocassionally have encounters with Team Yell who are trying to stop you, but... Team Yell is never threatening, they don’t accomplish anything, and the game seems to be very inconsistent on whether or not you have to accept that they’re in the way or if you can just kick their butt. When you finally get their super secret origin story, it’s... fine, and I like it, but I’d have liked it more if they had literally any impact on the game. The worst thing is, they compare unfavorably to Team Skull. Team Skull had strong leadership, and though you kicked their butts, they were regularly in the way and up to no good. Also, Guzma was awesome. Team Yell is just... running around being a general nuisance. Which would be fine if there was another real villain but...

Well, it turns out there IS another real, main villain... Who you don’t have reason to believe is a villain until after you’ve beaten all eight gyms, whose plot and motivation makes no sense, who has no convictions, and who you as a character have no real relation to. I literally don’t understand why this character was doing villainy.  And their evil team you only fight in the handful of battles immediately leading up to the big fight, and they make absolutely no impact other than standing in your way for reasons that you don’t really understand. That whole segment had nothing to do with anything, wasn’t properly built up, and didn’t feel like it went anywhere except the game handing me a Legendary pokemon.

Then there’s the post-game villains, who are... eh. They’re a lot more interesting, and I’m not even sure it’s fair to call them post-game. Unlike in most pokemon games, once you become champion the plot doesn’t just stop or say “now go to the challenge areas.” Instead, you have another, shorter storyline where you revisit all the old characters (who are all really cool on the surface and have NO DEPTH so you can’t get attached to them) and deal with stuff involving more dynamaxing and the box-art legendaries. This isn’t the worst plot, but it again suffers from no dungeons. You just fly from Gym to Gym having one fight at each gym. The game wants you to get to know and appreciate each Gym Leader, but because there’s so many of them, plus three rivals, plus the Champion, plus two professors, plus a handful of other NPCs, even the one that spends a fair deal of time with you in the post game never gets any real development. Here’s a key for story-writers: If your character’s not going to develop over the story, you don’t need to make a point of them showing up four different times. I don’t feel more connected to Nessa than I do to Flannery because she kept showing up and I got a card detailing her backstory. I just feel like you could’ve let me play faster instead of waiting for cutscenes.

I could rant about the story for a long time, but the point is: It’s bad. And the worst part is, there’s a bunch of cool stuff that seems to happen... that I don’t get to see.

So, my BIGGEST, absolutely most major complaint about the story is that two of the characters closest to you, Hop and Leon, do all sorts of really cool and interesting stuff... just offscreen. Hop is your main ‘rival’ and best friend, and he’s sharing in your adventures but also has some of his own. He has battles, he has a character arc, he starts really annoying but grew on me over time and I genuinely like him... But it’s hard to feel attached because all his formative stuff happens just off-screen. This isn’t a ‘Blue’ situation where he’s doing the stuff you are but faster and getting in your way, and you want to smush his stupid face in. This certainly isn’t like Hau who was just one step behind you the whole time. Hop has a couple battles that he talks about that alter who he is as a person that you don’t get to see because the game decides you don’t watch them. You’re not racing this guy- you hang out all the time- but for some reason you don’t get to watch his fights. I understand it’d be boring if they forced it and it played out like a normal fight, but give me a cutscene! Hell, I wanna know who he faced at the end! Hop has a mystery battle against someone else who completed all eight gyms that he beats and we never find out anything else about this person... 

But it’s even worse with Leon.

See, a big part of the game’s storyline is giant, Dynamax pokemon running amok and the Champion having to stop them. This means for the FIRST portion of the game, Leon is going out doing heroic things, battling giant pokemon that you never see. Sure, you can dynamax battle, but he’s involved in all these cool, great, crazy adventures... just offscreen. And then when you become the champion, YOU get to fight these rampaging dynamax pokemon... ... by walking to the area you’re told they are and immediately showing up in a dynamax fight. The game has models for pokemon walking around the overworld. Pokemon all have various attack animations. If Dynamax pokemon are running wild, can’t you SHOW me them running wild? There’s so many ‘cool things’ that happen in the game that I just don’t get to see, even when my character should be able to watch them, and it’s annoying as hell. If you can’t SHOW ME rampaging giant pokemon, don’t make the story ABOUT rampaging giant pokemon!

....Okay, done talking about story.

THE WILD AREA is a cool idea with poor implementation. I absolutely love this big area with all sorts of pokemon that change with the weather and different sections having different levels, except the wild area only really connects two locations (you get there via train the first time,) so there’s not much in-game reason to go back except for grinding, it’s small enough that it’s mostly the same terrain, and the level progression of the area doesn’t really match where you are in the game in the way just having routes used to. Also, for some stupid reason once you’re champion everything there suddenly becomes level 60 instead of scaling to different areas.  Which, sure, I get it, for post-game stuff people just want higher level Pokemon, but it’s so weird that suddenly there’s level 60 zigzagoon running around.  The Wild Area would have been much cooler if they’d just done away with traditional routes entirely and had free wilderness between EVERY town- blocked off in part by tunnels and forests which still counted as wild area, sure, but not gated by ‘you must have this many badges to progress.’  Just gated by ‘the pokemon here are level 30, are you sure you want to proceed?’ The only reason the game forces you to face the gyms in a certain order is to lock you into a narrative that’s mostly a waste of time. Not being allowed to catch ‘very strong’ pokemon is dumb, too. You could’ve made us able to catch them and just not train them because they’d do things like go to sleep and use the wrong moves and loaf around like a traded pokemon.

Camping with your Pokemon is cute, but needs more variety. There’s like seven toys, but only one of them isn’t a ball you throw and they fetch. You can make curries, and you will because it’s the cheapest way to heal your pokemon on the go, but the curry minigame is identical every team and gets very boring very quickly. You can talk to your Pokemon, but none of their responses have any meaning or impact or anything at all. It’s not like they’ll give you hints in the game or randomly give you items or ask for specific items for huge happiness boosts or whatever. It’s cute, and they get experience from it, but camping feels like it should’ve been expanded a whole lot.

....In summation: Pokemon Sword and Shield is not one of the better Pokemon Games. It’s still Pokemon, and if you’re into that, there’s still plenty of fun to be had in it, but it’s heavily flawed.