Pokémon Shining Pearl

So when this game was originally announced I'll confess that I wasn't exactly all that enthused. I wasn't actually against the artstyle like some of my friends were, but... tbh the idea of Sinnoh remakes never appealed to me at all and nothing announced really made me think they were actually doing more than just remaking Pokémon Diamond and Pearl. Given that... basically nothing was revealed about the games in the months up to release, I was pretty content with skipping this game on initial release and kinda waiting out to see whether it was actually good or not. Reception was loosely positive, with a specific talking point being "this is really good if you've never played the originals and want to experience Sinnoh for the first time," so I decided I'd shell out and see just what this region had to offer.

Turns out: Sinnoh sucks ass! And, from what I understand, the remakes didn't do a lot to really fix its core issues.

I'll start with the positives because, for all I soured on it, the game left a pretty great first impression. First off: the game is absolutely gorgeous. I eventually grew to really adore the chibi models and the general artstyle/colouring was consistently really appealing — a good amount of locales/backgrounds looked stunning and the 3D models for the Pokémon felt somewhat stylized in a way that they've never really looked before. The modernization of old DS-era quirks also provided consistently nice touches: I felt surprisingly really nostalgic for the top town, grid-based movement of old and felt the way they did trainer interjections in important battles to be sufficiently cinematic (even if so many of them are "you haven't won yet! I've still got a trick up my sleeve *loses literally the next turn*). In terms of graphics and presentation this is honestly probably one of the prettiest games on the Switch.

In regards to how it plays... look, it's a Pokémon game, you kinda know how it goes by now, though initially I was having a lot of fun mostly because the ante got upped a little bit — changes were made to important battles mostly to make these boss fights a lot trickier. As someone who didn't white out in Sword right up until the final fight, suddenly getting wiped by Roark's last Pokemon really took me off guard and forced me to come up with a strategy I never thought I would need to use otherwise. The Elite Four and the Champion, as an extension to this, actively make use of stuff like held items and synergies which turn them into really tricky final fights — at more than one point their last Pokémon would just start sweeping my team and it took a surprising amount of effort just to take them down before they fully completed the comeback. The Pokémon gameplay loop, IMO, is at its strongest when it expects the player to earn their victories, and the very beginning and the very end of this game really did a lot to satisfy me in that vein.

Sure is a pity the rest of the game is piss-easy, though.

It all comes down to one "innovation" made in gen-8: the always-on EXP share. The fact that all Pokémon in your team will gain EXP from every single battle means that you will very rapidly exceed the difficulty curve, very quickly. Even when I never fought wild Pokémon across the entire game, even when I actively skipped whole routes and gyms worth of trainer battles, I was still way above the levels of nearly everything right up until the end. In addition to basically guaranteeing that battles generally never challenged me at all, it also made training new mons for the team a really insufferable experience: given the rate in which mons on the bench gain EXP compared to those who are active you have to put anything you want to get to the level of the rest of the team through basically hundreds of battles until they're with the rest of the party. I was basically never able to use half my team for nearly the whole game because the other half always ended up at a lower level so I had to train them up and it just made for a miserable experience.

Which is compounded by just... how weak regular trainers are. Nine times out of ten, I'd walk into a battle, and then I'd basically just press the same button over and over again to win it because trainers this game just throw three of the exact same, typically unevolved Pokémon that a trainer earlier on in the route already did. Trainers are complete pushovers because of this, and generally it's a self-imposed challenge to just get to the next bed or city before the mon you're trying to level up runs out of PP for all their moves. It got to the point wherein the late-game, when the game just outright starts spamming Team Galactic goons at you that I was legitimately not paying any attention to the game and just pressing the A button to win battles over and over again and, like, yeah I get Pokemon is a kids game, but give me something, y'know? Break the monotony. Make traversing Sinnoh less of an absolute pain.

Because believe me, trainers having absolutely no diversity is just a symptom of how boring Sinnoh is as a region. Every route you just encounter the same 2-3 wild Pokémon. There's the chance of maybe something new if you run around in the grass for ten minutes, but more often than not you'll just be seeing Bibarels and Roselias and Geodudes over and over again because as it turns out, Sinnoh has absolutely no unique biomes. You just walk through beaches and fields over and over again with the token ice area and a (completely optional) swamp. It's near impossible to find representation of certain types if you're picky — Sinnoh having no fire types is a meme for a reason (even if the underground fixes that) but even beyond that, hey, if you want a grass type that isn't Turtwig or Roselia? Either settle for Cherrim/Wormadam, wait several real-time days for the hope you hit that 10% Carnivine spawn, or wait for nearly the entire game to get to the ice area and catch Snover. Even the big catch of the region — a massive mountain that supposedly connects the entire island together — doesn't really do anything because there's no actual connectivity at all: it's just a series of generic cave levels under the same banner that look like they're one dungeon but aren't. Legitimately, I'd call Sinnoh pretty easily the worst region: even stuff like Hoenn or Johto have fun biomes/a unique aesthetic. This has nothing.

And I could bear that if the story/the journey was anything interesting, but... it isn't. This is a Pokemon game where you're fully just going through the motions of going through routes and collecting gym badges and they don't even try to make it more interesting than that. Gym Leaders (aside from some exceptions and inspired designs) are just obstacles with barely any personality who you forget about the moment you walk out of the gym. Your rival's much the same. Team Galactic is much the same. There's no real... story beyond "go to this place, fight gym leader, occasionally suffer through 500000000 Team Galactic fights," and... when the novelty of the journey in itself was already used up for the original games, you need something more to actually interest me and that's... not here.

So overall... god, this was not great. I love the aesthetic, I love the little bits of challenge that were actually there and supposedly now that I'm in the post-game things open up a lot more with rematches and The Underground (which I found to be actually kinda fun and gamey, though you kinda run out of things to do down there quick if you don't want to fight/catch wild pokemon) but when the journey was basically an exercise of going through the motions... I'm not really interested in seeing what bounties I find at the destination.