Random Review: Pokemon X & Y

After waiting about a year from the release of Black and White 2, we get another game that has a weirder title. According to the developer of this game, he imagined it as a coordinate plane that signified a path or destiny and how both the X- and Y-axis intersect at one point. It's a nice explanation but I'd rather imagine it as sex chromosomes but I just prefer that to make fun of girls who get Y. Anyways, these games added a lot of features that excited Pokemon fans and they are generally favored by everybody.

Let's begin by looking at the new stuff. The biggest changes were the fairy type and the mega-evolutions. The fairy type was created to counter dragons and are generally the new over-powered type that everyone seems to use. Mega-evolutions are evolutions within a battle to a pokemon. Mega-evolutions always mystified me since I felt that they should've just went balls to the walls and created the elusive fourth evolution but Nintendo evidently loves its rule of three. What we get is this funky mechanic that requires a lengthy animation that powers up your pokemon. This is probably the most poorly defined mechanic I've seen since random pokemon get this mega-evolution and the designs themselves aren't outstanding. I ended up not using mega-evolutions most of the time because of how long the animation took. Other new tidbits are the deletion of the grid-system, sitting on benches, riding on pokemon's back which was rarely used and dull, and customization. For now I'm just gonna focus on the main story because multiplayer isn't that special anyways in Pokemon games.

Well, I've gotta say, this is the easiest Pokemon game I've ever played. The experience share is so useful and catching pokemon gives you experience as well. My pokemon were at least ten levels higher than any gym leader or trainer and I rarely faced a challenge. I ended up just being bored with the combat since there wasn't any strategy I applied except for using brute force. I usually do this in any other Pokemon game but for some reason they don't work as well. I know they want to make it more kid-friendly and stuff but the difficulty was almost non-existent. Sure people can turn off experience share but catching pokemon still over-levels you quite a bit.

The story is duller than the usual Pokemon drab. I was disappointed after seeing Black and White's story which was a bit more compelling at the start at least while this game just flat out had a bad guy and a big guy who screwed up. Your "friends" that you get are surprisingly one-dimensional. You've got that dance guy, that rival who complains about getting her butt whooped, that pokedex nut, and that one girl who is weird. I kept skipping through the dialogue since I know that they just talk about the same stuff over and over. Professor Sycamore is kinda cool but he barely shows up anyways. The side-stories in this game lets the game drag a lot. There was a period between the first and second and second and third gym that had pointless digressing to remote areas. Something's wrong if I have to spend fifteen hours to get to the third gym because after a point, I stopped caring about the little things you could do and tried to blaze through the game just to be done with it.

The graphics are nice though. I enjoyed the customization since it gave the character a better persona. But one thing I have to note is that the entire game could've probably been kept on the gameboy or gameboy advance. The reason I say this is because the core mechanics of Pokemon are the same and having it degraded down to gameboy form would just make it the same game with less pretty graphics. I think that's the point I'm getting at here because Pokemon has barely changed. The developers are too scared to drastically change any core concepts of Pokemon that would make it different. At least with Zelda you get Skyward Sword which implemented the WiiMotion Plus and Mario has a million genres. Sure Pokemon has a lot of spinoffs too but the core games are the ones that matter and they either don't change enough or they change too much to be able to recall nostalgic memories. I'm one of those people getting sick of Pokemon which isn't fair, I guess. This game was still very fun but I guess this kind of rpg is a bit too simplistic for my taste and the lack of challenge deterred me from actually liking the game. Gen. 3 is my favorite generation based on how quickly you can get things done. Here, you're forced to the game's slow pace.

Overall, this game is a mixed bag for me. Part of me wants to like it for what it is, a new Pokemon game, but another part of me just wants something different. I don't want to be able to plow through this game yet I don't want the game to be too difficult that I actually have to grind. It's a great new addition to the Pokemon series but I don't enjoy it quite as much as its predecessors. Keep in mind, I'm not a Pokemon fanboy so this is speaking from a guy who just picks up the new Pokemon game and finishes it before never touching it again.

Final Rating: 5.5/10