A Conflicted Nostalgia Trip through Pokemon Let's Go | Fox Bites

you know that old saying you can never go home again I've been thinking a lot about that recently when I was seven years old I was given my first Gameboy and one of the games with it was pokemon blue from there I spent countless hours delving into the world of Pokemon even though I was a stupid kid that didn't quite understand the rules and end up with a disobedient Charizard for a majority of the game but that just made me relate to ash even more when I saw he had the same issue in the anime like most my age Pokemon is something I've always had a deep attachment to even when I'm not following everything that's currently going on in the series I was there for the cards the movies the various animes multiple generations and remakes the phone games and yes even a tattoo but it's undeniable that the series has changed a significant amount since I was a wee child things have become more streamlined HMS have been largely removed and remembering every Pokemon has become a much more daunting task to the point I don't even think the best pokerap would help much so I was curious how the Pokemon lots go games this strange nostalgia trip cross section between the original and modern series would recapture the feelings I had when I was a kid when I first began my Pokemon adventure so ignoring all the other titles on my switch I still have to finish I jumped in to revisit the world of Pokemon in order to see what I would find and if it's true that you can never really go home again so in case you weren't aware Pokemon let's go is largely define to be a modern remake of the original pokemon yellow as Gen 1 fans are always the easiest ones to Melk the list of 809 Pokemon has been dropped down to the first generations 151 with Melton included as part of the games integration with Pokemon Go which we'll get to later like the original titles gameplay elements like abilities health items and breeding are not included into the game which I'm certain is going to cause some of the fan base a burst blood vessel as they aren't able to breathe the perfect shiny Magikarp as much as it may annoy some of the hardcore fanbase that one of the competitive elements that the series has built up and I completely understand those complaints this is all designed to feel like a return to the first games on the Gameboy with a few modern tweaks to it and without some of the major flaws of the original like psychic only being week to bug which only had three attacks to it with that mind just like in pokemon yellow the game starts with you being sent on a journey by Professor Oak to catch them all and become the best like no one ever was travelling across the land searching far and wide starting from your small home of Pallet Town all the way to the prestigious elite for going from gym to gym proving your worth as a trainer like most Pokemon games before it the game revolves around understanding how to balance your team catching the right Pokemon and training and evolving them to make sure you're properly leveled for each new area especially since gyms won't even let you walk in if you don't have something that meets a certain level criteria which makes sure you don't get your ass handed to you because you're a bit under leveled though if you've been playing these games for as long as I have this will all come as second nature personally revisiting Pokemon games is always like slipping into a comfy groove on the couch even if it's easy to almost a fault at times like the fact most trainers don't carry more than one or two Pokemon at a time there is a lot of fun to be had reax plain Kanto and working your way up to the Elite Four especially because the entire world has been redone entirely into 3d models as opposed to 2d sprites I mean this look isn't exclusive to this game and we're probably gonna be seeing these models of Pokemon use for years but it's nice seeing the old home town of pallet or the cities like celadon being rendered in this quaint colorful 3d aesthetic along with a fully orchestrated version of the original 8-bit soundtrack to match with it though rather than be an exact one-to-one remake of the first generation this one seems to be going for an alternate take of yellow since certain details have been shifted around like how blue acts as more of a mentor figure and regularly appears in the game outside where you would usually find him and red can be found late into it so I guess naming my rival like I had with blue when I was a kid might have been a mistake aside from your rival another significant change is the way the game uses your starter Pokemon which is either a Pikachu or Eevee depending on the version aside from being your main at the start of your adventure you starter plays a more important role for the game both on a mechanical and emotional level from the start your partner refuses to stay inside of a pokeball again homage in the anime like the original yellow did and from there the game keeps them involved in the narrative throughout the entire story unlike other Pokemon games where your starter just becomes another tool for your end goal your Pikachu or Eevee are more than something that tags along with you but actually feel like a genuine partner in your journey such as with little mgs style crawling through the vent sections and giving you a little high-five after gym victories it's these little moments that show that the game is doing everything it can to make your partner as painfully adorable and endearing as possible from having them bring you gifts that they find like your dog happily bringing you a stick that if found to allowing you to dress a Pikachu like a Team Rocket member and I'm man enough to admit I had a little freakout moment when that came up your Pikachu or Eevee can even give the occasional support to Pokemon currently in battle if they've been given the proper love and affection as well as continue the trend of removing the need for HM slaves since they are the ones that learn and use all the secret techniques without having to take up a move slot they don't even have to be in your main roster to do things like cut and serve since they remain attached to you regardless though there isn't much for reason to remove them from your team for a majority of the game because by the midway point they become almost God beings without ever having to have been evolved due to things like stat bonuses unique candies special moves special for them which if you're playing the Pikachu version like myself is another fun parallel to the anime your partner isn't the only one of your companions allowed to join you on your journey though as you can let others from your team out of their pokéballs as well to walk along with you which is a feature that's been sorely missing from the series since the days of soul silver and heart gold however it does evolved the concept a bit by both having them act as scent hounds for hidden items that can be found throughout the world and with larger Pokemon being rideable replacing the need for bikes or running shoes which I've been asking for since I played the first games and needs to carry over into the next generation if I can't be carried by a Snorlax while holding on to its stomach like a baby opossum in the next new Pokemon game it's a failure in my opinion these changes while seeming a bit superficial at face value really make it feel like your Pokemon are more than just tools to be used and that they're actually along with you on this journey it's more like they're your best friend in a world you must defend but those friends do need to be found first and that is where another significant change comes up random battles no longer occur at random but Pokemon now walk around their habitats out in the open and you have to walk into them to start an encounter and considering how long the series has been going for I'm kind of surprised it took this long to incorporate something that's become quite standard for RPGs not only does it make it easier to scope out whatever specific Pokemon you're looking for and makes the world feel a bit more lived-in but this also means you don't get harassed by zubats non-stop once you enter a cave though I imagine this game would require Nuzlocke runs to have an entirely different set of rules than before and that brings me to one of the most controversial parts of let's go and that is how the game handles catching pokémon as opposed the classic beat the Pokemon into submission before catching them using the same mechanics as the trainer battles let's go instead adopt something closer to Pokemon go focusing entirely on the caching aspect using motion controls with a go style caching system requiring properly gauging your toss and timing so that it hits the Pokemon at the right moment and placement oh and if you were hoping to play the game on your TV and simply use the grip controller well too bad Nintendo I know that we was good for you but do you still need to push motion controls when we just want to sit and play a game normally though despite my grapes once I got used to the single joi con and motion controls I will admit I did start to enjoy the novelty of throwing a pokeball when it worked properly and didn't go in weird directions it is incredibly satisfying getting that expertly time throw after a Pokemon reacts or catching one mid movement plus the XP you get from catching Pokemon now increases with better executed catches which requires stronger catching skills and the ability to recognize the patterns each Pokemon use which makes the occasional wonkiness with the motion controls that much more frustrating when you miss your first throw or it doesn't go in the right direction that XP you get also effectively replaces what you would get from frequent random battles and even spreads it across your entire team so as to alleviate some of the grinding you would have to do to make sure everyone is evenly levelled on top of this let's go also heavily incentivizes catching the same Pokemon repeatedly giving combo bonuses for catching the same thing multiple times in a row and increase in the likelihood of shinies for that specific type the extras you have don't go to waste though as you can grind up the excess cluttering your PC into candy to power up your main team stats similarly to the way the mobile game functions though it still retains the original evolution requirements rather than having to feed them a certain amount of species based candies something that made me draw a Pokemon go when it first came out as it felt a bit to grind you for my taste so I'm glad the devs didn't go that far while on the topic of change another interesting one is removing the locked PC box and giving the player remote access to it at all time on the one hand it means you can put pokémon you catch immediately inter-party and don't have to race over to the Pokemon Center when you need to change up your team it very much is a time saver however having constant access to all your Pokemon means you're no longer using a team of six that you need to perfectly balanced with types and move sets that complement each other now it's a team of all the Pokemon you've caught which remove some of the inherent challenge of these games flights still use a maximum of six but after a difficult fight you can just swap out and your teammates for fresh ones which removes a good amount of the strategy that the original formula has I don't think this breaks the game since the latter half still requires you to be using better trained Pokemon so you can't just swap out anything from the box and have it work but it is an interesting changeup and I'd be curious to see something like this go into later games as well if it was reworked a bit and with that we come to probably the biggest question of the game and that is how does Pokemon go itself fit into this whole thing considering so much of Luntz COEs design was built off the mobile game and that is where a lot of the hardcore fan bases misgivings of its stem from so I read unloaded go to see what is going on with it and considering it still has stupid authentication issues that take up an hour to solve I wasn't exactly happy from the get-go to start you aren't able to do anything with gos connectivity capabilities until about halfway through let's go when you get to fuchsia city where the new go complex replaces the Safari Zone which I assume was done so you can transfer over legendaries and high powered pokemon during the early game the complex acts largely as a hub for you to send over your go poke one in two and then you go in to catch the ones you want to bring over into the full game however the transfer is a one-way street and they can't go back so the decision of which ones to send over is based on where you need them most and considering I'm not likely to continue playing go after this I pretty much sent everything I could the major benefit of this mobile game companion setup is that you're able to transfer over version specific Pokemon or ones that require trades which can be super helpful since I played let's go like I did with my first Pokemon games sad and alone and I didn't do any of the online play either because I didn't want to pay an extra $20 for switch online to get wrecked by hacks though this also meant I had zero ability to get my boy Gengar why do you do this to me Nintendo why do you continually taunt me but while I do appreciate what little go adds to the game there is another side to it and that brings me to the major underlying fault of let's go in my opinion and that is that it largely seems to be made as an advertisement for Pokemon go now it could be that Nintendo knows a lot of people got back into the series due to Pokemon go and are using the mechanics of it as a fun one-off gimmick to appeal to those players I mean mixing up the formula isn't an inherently bad thing but the cynical part of me suspects it's the opposite where the game is intended to push the mainline fanbase towards the mobile game which has an insidious nature to it considering gos business infrastructure is built off microtransactions it's not a requirement especially if you know the game extremely well but it definitely is a key element to it being free-to-play and considering the game has supposedly made more than 2 billion dollars in the last two years of its lifespan there clearly are people putting money into it and Nintendo would like to keep it that way this push towards go is highlighted most with the new Pokemon Melton which is not only exclusive to go players but can only be evolved in the mobile game which requires a crazy amount of melt and candies to do it more than quadruple most other Pokemon so if you want to catch them all you're gonna have to a lot of time grinding to do it if you're a new or previous lapse player or you could spend a little bit of extra money I feel I'm in the minority that thinks it was interesting to pair let's go with pokmon go since it felt like an evolutionary twist of the polka Walker and SoulSilver plus I always like when mobile games have benefits to playing them in the main one it's a companion to however chinjung key elements of the game's design in order to make them work with goes and making new unique pokemon exclusive to it makes it seem like the devs a game freak or more likely the Nintendo executives are attempting to put Pokemon go before the actual full price game itself putting the cart before the horse so to speak and when you also account for the fact that Mew is exclusive to the $50 proprietary pokeball controller is another harsh reminder that Nintendo is a business first and foremost and giving their old fans that full nostalgic experience largely comes second which ultimately leads me back to where I started at it's true you can ever truly go home again that local pizza shop you used to go to has been replaced by a big corporate fast-food chain dear kid you spent endless hours at has closed down even your old room is now just a guest room stripped of all the things that made it yours but for all my cynicism z' it would be dishonest of me to say I didn't thoroughly enjoy my time back in Kanto so much of this game is what I wanted as a kid being able to ride atop an ark and I along with my trusty Pikachu dressing up as a Team Rocket grunt while I go on my adventure to catch them all going back to Pokemon Red and Blue 20 years later you can't ignore how rough the sprites look and how busted some of the systems are but when we were kids this is what we had regardless of the flaws and the features it didn't have we loved it and seeing so much of that be brought back with Pokemon let's go while adding a lot of extra flair to it is great and I hope some of these features do carry over into future mainline titles similar to fire red and Lee Green Pokemon let's go highlights how the series has evolved and changed over the years even if some of those changes aren't for the best reasons but if you'll allow me to be a bit introspective here haven't we all changed we've all had to grow up and face the realities of being adults those of us who started on those original games when we were kids are no longer the young pokemon trainers with their whole lives ahead of them we are now the bills professor oak's or officer Jenny's sprinkled throughout the land that have to work in order to maintain their livelihood I was seven when I started playing Pokemon when the biggest issues I had were math homework and dealing with bullies in school and now I'm a 20-something university graduate that is struggling with where they want to go from here a problem I feel many others are currently facing so it's nice being able to visit that bit of our childhood when things were so much simpler if only for a moment [Music]

Channel: Foxcade

Views: 545,470

Rating: 4.691772 out of 5

Keywords: Pokemon, Nintendo, Game Freak, Foxcade, Video Game Review, Video Games, Nintendo Switch, Pokemon Let's Go, Pokemon Lets Go, Pikachu, Eevee, Blue, Red, Pokemon Go, Gengar, Meltan, Switch Online, Gen 1, Remake, Reimagining, Motion Controls, Kanto, Gameboy, Elite Four

Id: FbBagrI5mV0

Length: 18min 51sec (1131 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 24 2018