#to be fair i always end up posting on here ocassionally when i have like

[sunny-daysss]

Also thank you to Hatchetfield and Mouthwashing for bringing this sideblog back to life

[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. 

[shaineybainey]

Lab Rats Spin-Off, Reimagined

Okay, so picture it: Davenport never formed the Elite Force. Mighty Med was attacked, but Horace and Alan survived. Threats of various levels are popping up, not just in Centium City, but all over the world.

Help is needed, and a team is formed to investigate mysterious cases and hunt down superpowered lawbreakers - both from this planet and beyond.

This is an alternate version (and honestly, what I thought would have been more interesting to see) of a Lab Rats spin-off series. It’s geared more towards older teenagers and maybe early 20’s viewers? Think Agents of SHIELD x [insert your favorite crime procedural], but lighter and milder. The cast is diverse. Instead of one city and similar, repeating sets, the show goes to various countries all over the world.

Below is the cast of characters making up the team.

Agent Herman Delgado

Supervisor

played by Adam Rodriguez

Nicknamed “HD” by Leo, Delgado has been assigned by the covert international group to supervise the young team. He’s a seasoned agent with years of experience under his belt. He's tasked with relaying new assignments to the members, and during missions, he‘s there to guide them.

Though considered a ‘no-nonsense’ supervisor, Delgado truly cares about the young people entrusted in his care. His job prevents him from being with his family and having one of his own, so he’s spent years being by himself. Now, having the five in his care, having a semblance of a family, he’s thrilled. He’ll never admit it, but he’s glad that he’s not so alone anymore.

Skylar Storm

Team Leader

played by Paris Berelc

Skylar is appointed to be the leader despite not having her powers back (yet). Her team benefits from her quick thinking, level-headedness, and fair sense of judgment as it often diffuses high-tension situations and keeps them safe during dangerous missions.

If she’s to be honest, this new assignment is challenging. She’s so used to working alone that suddenly having to care for three then four others around her age is an adjustment. Still, in each week that passes she learns she can count on both Oliver and their new friends to have her back no matter what comes their way.

Bree Davenport

Recon Expert, Ocassional Co-Leader

played by Kelli Berglund

Bree didn’t want to accept the job in the beginning. Although she did sign the contract accepting it, she was that close to walking away. They’re deceptive, she thought, this unnamed organization, and she didn’t know if she could work with people like them.

Still, she stayed, because at the end of the day she knew that here she could do more good.

Being one of the only two superpowered members when they first started, Bree feels the weight of the job at times. Nonetheless, as things continue to shift and change for them, she realizes that things won’t be too bad as long as she’s with her team. She can lean on her little brother and her friends, just like how she could on Adam and Chase when she was still with them. 

Leo Dooley

Hacker & Tech Expert, Linguist

played by Tyrel Jackson Williams

Out of the Founding Four, Leo is the most eager to start this new job clouded in mystery. He takes everything with a wide-eyed wonder, and he’s always ready to jump into action - which annoys his teammates at times. Though the most vulnerable out of the five due to lack of experience and abilities, he continues to be the most spirited and most motivated.

He also contributes much by providing the team with the gadgets and intel they need in their many assignments. Because of his diplomatic personality, the international group has opted to train him in speaking many languages - in both Earth ones and ones from other planets.

Oliver (Connelly)

Medical Resident

played by Jake Short

Guilt has been plaguing Oliver since reports of Mr. Terror attacking innocent people began sprouting like dandelions. He can’t shake the feeling that it was all his fault, and so out of that he agrees to work with the nameless organization.

He brings his medical expertise to the table, a knowledge that surprisingly extends in usefulness outside the superhero world. Because he also works with regular humans, he’s trained by the organization’s professionals on how to care for his teammates when they’re injured (and in this job, they do get hurt - a lot).

This doesn’t restrict him to his clinic and medical supplies, though. His list of abilities also makes him a valuable asset to the team during missions.

Ranavalova Girard

Ex-Assassin, Probationary Member

played by Tati Gabrielle

Ran never intended to become part of the team - or any team for that matter. The half-French, half-Malagasy is a trained assassin, bent initially on destroying the men and women that caused the death of her mother and destroyed her family. Her quest for revenge eventually put her in the path of the team. She proved to be the first real challenge to them due to her intelligence and skills. Eventually, though, they caught her.

The committee ended up offering her a deal: go to a max security prison for her crimes and lose her freedom forever, or join the team in relative freedom, helping them catch enemies who has hurt many individuals and families like the people she was going after.

Thinking that she’s got a better chance at escaping if she’s outside, she chooses the latter.

She doesn’t warm up much to the team even after a long while, especially as she senses the girls’ lingering distrust of her. Still, after a while, she learns to enjoy the challenging job. Though she doesn’t think the rewarding feeling stems from knowing she did a good deed, as Leo suggests (her gauge of good and bad had long been broken by life), she can admit that she likes how a good day’s work help her sleep a bit better at night.

The Atlas

The Team’s HQ

located somewhere in Alaska, USA

Named by Oliver and Leo, The Atlas is the team’s base of operation. The building itself is built with a cloaking device, among many other defensive features, to prevent the team from being discovered by their enemies. Underneath it is a spacious underground port that houses a jet and a few other modes of transportation such as a car and two motorbikes.

The main headquarters contains:

the Cortex, where the team convenes and is briefed on new cases;

a fully-equipped training area;

the Vault, which houses all the gear and equipment the members will need in their assignments;

the Observatory, Leo’s laboratory and ‘classroom’;

the Triage, Oliver’s domain, ‘classroom,’ and the team’s clinic/infirmary;

the Principal’s Office, aptly named by Bree, which holds items potentially hazardous items confiscated by the team, all awaiting recovery and transport;

a state-of-the-art entertainment room; and

various rooms for each of the members, all designed and equipped to have whatever the members will need.

When not on an assignment, Delgado stays here with the five.

What Else is Different?

Since Disney XD is primarily geared towards boys, I find that they often depict female characters in one of two ways: (1) tough and kick-butt objects of desire or (2) boy-crazy, generally crazy, high-maintenance ornaments. Sadly, it seems that Bree and Skylar fell into this limiting characterization. In this version, I want to expand on who they are as people, their capabilities untied to the stereotype subtly being introduced to children through the shows. This version will feature their strengths and their weaknesses, fully fleshing all of them out, and will show how circumstances and challenges realistically mold these young men and women still adjusting into adulthood.

Uh, the girls’ hairstyles ain’t finna be the long and super styled type they oddly always were in their respective shows. Like, they’re superheroes?? While they can have long and styled hair, it’s not really practical. Or at least, I’m convinced not all of them would choose long hair. Skylar would definitely cut hers short, just a bit above her shoulders. Bree would hold on to the long hair a bit, but then she’ll cut it shorter eventually. Ran has always been practical; she knows that hair can be used against her by enemies and can be an inconvenience. So, she’s never grown it out longer than a pixie cut.

THEIR AGES, Y’ALL. Disney is so obsessed with being young that they never let these kids age ㅠㅠ When it begins, Skylar is 17, Bree is 22, Leo is 19, and Oliver is 19. Ran will be 23 when she joins the team. These children will continue to add years to their age. Getting older is just reality and none at all a shameful thing.

Relationships. We’ll talk about that on another post.

All right, that’s it for now. We’ll add more to this universe later.