On Pokemon's Future, Past, and Nostalgia

This piece includes minor spoilers for Pokemon Sun & Moon

To say nostalgia influences pop culture would be an understatement. There is, of course, the natural inspiration a creator may get from remembering or revisiting a beloved property, but we see it in much more overt ways as well; the recent years have introduced hugely successful films based on Transformers and G.I. Joe, children's cartoons from the 80s, and J.K. Rowling is still writing stories based on her Harry Potter series. Games, ultimately, are no different, with companies like Nintendo using their established properties and the strong feelings people have towards them to sell products. Just because a game uses nostalgia doesn’t mean it’s just empty reminders of the past, however. Good nostalgic games, like good nostalgic movies or books, will go “Okay. What here is essential? What needs to be the same to invoke what we’re trying to evoke? What needs to be different for this to work in the modern day? What should be changed, but can’t be altered for fear of backlash? What’s disliked, but essential for what this game was about?”

Take, for instance, the Pokemon series. For over twenty years, the games have delighted children the world over, and with a twenty year legacy comes a swath of fans now in their early to mid-adulthood. I myself, very young at the release of the first generation, grew up with the games, and consider them a very dear part of both my childhood and my adolescence. To this day I love the series and eagerly await this Friday, when the latest generation of Pokemon, the seventh generation, Sun & Moon, will be released and (with a convenient day off of work that I swear I didn’t ask for) I’ll be spending the whole day exploring the new Alola region, and discovering all the new Pokemon and people to challenge and befriend. As the day fast approaches, I look back and consider the best and worst of the series, at least in my opinion; the worst being the most recent installments, X & Y; the best, their predecessors, Black & White. Why? It all comes down to nostalgia, or to be exact, how those twenty long years of nostalgia are used.

X & Y tried to make you remember the past in the same way a parent might reprimand you; harshly and unsubtly. The third Pokemon you see in the games, after the local professors Gogoat and your mothers Fletchling, is a Rhyhorn; not only one of the original 151 Pokemon from Red & Blue, the first games in the series, but the pre-evolution (a prior form) of Rhydon, the very first Pokemon ever designed! A nice deep-cut for the real, old school fans. Later, when you enter the tall grass where wild creatures roam, what’s the first Pokemon you’d find, guaranteed, with 100% programmed certainty? Why, it’s a Pidgey! The bird you find in the grass in the original Red & Blue, right at the start! It’s like you’re playing those great old games from your childhood again! In the following area, a forest (and oh boy, a forest as the first dungeon! Just like Red & Blue!), you may encounter a Pikachu, the mascot of the series. What’s this? Replacing the electronic noise of a typical Pokemon call is a voice clip of “Pikachu!”, pulled straight from the cartoon you surely remember from when you were a kid.

It feels like the games are trying to distract you from the new, as if they’re afraid you won’t like what they bring to the series, so better to bury it amongst trite reminders of games and experiences long past. Indeed, the game seems reluctant to allow you to see any of it’s new Pokemon. On the first route you can find Pokemon on in the game, barely over half of the encounters (statistically speaking) will be with new Pokemon. In the following area, the aforementioned forest, there’s a measly 30% chance of encountering a Pokemon original to the sixth generation. X & Y lean on the old, and it works at first glance, but once you notice their crutch, you can tell how close they are (or feel they are) to falling over.

In sharp contrast, Black & White’s use of nostalgia was finessed. They didn’t hide their new Pokemon behind old; in fact, no old Pokemon appear in the games before you’d beaten the main story. Much like the experience of the original games, you had to traverse the land and meet new Pokemon to befriend and battle with. If you’re looking for references to the anime, then they certainly did work in the game to characterize the gym leaders and make them important characters in the story, doing the work in-game that would normally be kept for the television screen. Compared to the gym leaders in X & Y, who I felt were largely forgettable and only one of whom had lines outside of their gym battle to my recollection, the leaders in Black & White were downright nuanced.

Black & White were willing to step away from the norm in some pretty big ways as well; instead of only occasionally changing which Pokemon you encounter, the aesthetic of certain areas are entirely different depending on which game you get. Pokemon Black looked to be a Tron-esque future and Pokemon White appeared to eschew technology in favor of more natural beauty. There’s even an entire location that was different depending on which game you had, with players being able to battle a rotating cast of trainers in Black City, or capture rare pokemon in White Forest. A geographic difference between the two versions had never been in the games before, and certainly didn’t make a return in X & Y.

In addition, the story of Black & White were a step up from their predecessors as well, with the opposed Team Plasma being dedicated to freeing Pokemon from what they claimed was the tyrannical control of man. Admittedly, the game did little besides pay lip service to this idea; after a quick anti-Pokemon-capturing rally, you next saw Team Plasma grunts kicking a defenseless psychic tapir, presumably to assure children that no, the evil team doesn’t have a point and you don’t have to worry that you’re being cruel to Pokemon. But the fact that it even brought up something so often joked about in a semi-serious way was somewhat startling, and for all the harm his cronies may do, it’s made clear that your primary antagonist, the young idealist called N, sincerely believed that to be a trainer is to oppress Pokemon; capturing and controlling them against their wishes.

Compare and contrast this with the story in X & Y: a bad man wants to destroy the world. Stop him. Also, friendship.

I turn my eye towards the upcoming Pokemon titles and wonder which direction they’ll go in. I have ample reason to be skeptical; the main Interesting Thing™ of Sun & Moon are Alolan forms of existing Pokemon which grant different appearances and skills; dataminers digging through the released demo and copies of the games acquired early show these only exist for Pokemon from Red & Blue. In addition, there has been plenty of fussing and discussion about the inclusion of NPCs from previous Pokemon games, especially the titular protagonist and rival from Red & Blue. Once again, it seems as though the games will be trying to make up for deficiencies with blatant and poorly made appeals to players’ childhood.

And yet, at the same time, so much of what Sun & Moon are doing, or seem to be doing, are off the beaten path. For instance, the standard rhythm of the games, wherein the player goes to defeat eight different gyms, before facing off against the final challenge of the Elite Four and regional Champion, is gone. In fact, it’s an element of the story that the traditional Pokemon League is still in the process of being founded in Alola. Instead, players will go through the Trials of each of the four islands of the region, consisting of various tasks assigned by the island’s Trial Captain, followed by a battle against the island’s Kahuna. There’s also been a focus on the story of the games in trailers, involving mysterious Ultra Beasts and the Aether Foundation which works, in part, to study them (and who have, for their efforts, been treated with much suspicion by the Pokemon fandom at large). In addition, Team Skull is fulfilling the Team Rocket role of the game by stealing other trainers’ Pokemon. How this will all play out, and how all these pieces will play off each other, remains to be seen, but I’m looking forward to finding out for myself.

Pokemon is uniquely nostalgic for a new generation; I think it’s fair to say it may be to my generation what G.I. Joe or Transformers were to the generation before, the beloved childhood series that did no wrong as far as we can see looking back. This legacy gives Pokemon the ability to excite fans in two ways: It can merely show us what came before, content to retread old ground and confident it will suffice. Or, it can show us the best version of that, evolving and growing better with age without losing what made the games so loved in the first place. Game Freak, the developers of Pokemon, have both succeeded and faltered in taking those original games, the first generation, Red & Blue, and improving and modernizing them for the needs of the time. We’ll see soon enough if Sun & Moon can step forward, or if they’re too busy looking behind.

Titanfall 2 Impressions

So, Titanfall 2 came out about a week ago and I've played it a bit via rental! I was planning on reviewing it, but I can't force myself to play competitive team multiplayer stuff, and so I haven't played nearly enough of the multiplayer to feel good about calling my feelings a "review". In addition, the process of attempting to review this game made me realize that, since I spent so much time being an elitist dick who didn't like military shooters like Call of Duty and their ilk because they were popular, I don't have the experience or knowledge to tell how capital-g Good a modern multiplayer shooter is. Hopefully, I can try a few out this year and be better equipped for when the 2017 collection releases. Instead, I'm gonna write what is basically a kind-of bad review, and call it my impressions! Enjoy!

Titanfall 2 attempts to rectify the mistakes of its predecessor, both real and imagined. Despite critical and commercial success, along with interesting twists on standard modern shooter fare thanks to increased mobility and the ability to call in the titular Titans, gigantic rideable robot soldiers, the original Titanfall had difficulty retaining players. Between a lackluster progression system, a small variety of Titans and weapons to choose from, and being a console exclusive at launch to the much-maligned-at-the-time Xbox One, players unfortunately left the game quickly, leaving Titanfall's legacy as one of failure, despite its successes. With Titanfall 2, developers Respawn Entertainment aim to make something that is, without a doubt, a success. And while, again, I don't feel comfortable calling this a Definitive Verdict, I've certainly had a ton of fun with Titanfall thus far.

While the original Titanfall's "campaign" was only a series of audio logs over multiplayer matches, Titanfall 2 has opted to go a more traditional route, providing a proper and surprisingly compelling story. You play as Jack Cooper, rifleman in the Frontier Militia, fighting a war against the Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation, or IMC. When sent on a mission to a frontier planet, Cooper and his squad are shot down and ambushed, resulting in the death of his mentor, Captain Lastimosa. Before dying, Lastimosa transfers control of his Titan, BT-7274, over to Cooper, and together the two must finish Lastimosa's mission.

The big plot beats were fairly standard but some smaller, more focused aspects of the story go places I certainly did not expect. Character development is also good, with small dialog choices doing a good job establishing what kind of person Jack Cooper, and BT's "I'm a robot that takes stuff literally" schtick is clichéd but effective for making you care about the big guy. Even side characters who are only around for less than 15 minutes manage to be characterized well enough to do their job for the story, without feeling like nothing.

One thing I didn’t expect was how much variety there would be in the gameplay. Much of the campaign feels like a tutorial for, and an introduction to the multiplayer, touching on how to use your basic combat options effectively, as well as letting you try out all 6 Titan varieties that can be found online. There are also level-long mechanics in the game, such as swapping between two points in time (yes, really) which allows the game to both force you to deal with two different combat encounters, and include Mighty Switch Force!-esque jumping puzzles. Another section of the game gives you the Smart Pistol weapon, which is capable of locking onto enemies and killing them in one shot, to run through an area with, decimating your foes. The breadth of additions to the standard shooting honestly reminded me a bit of Half-Life 2, and I had a ton of fun playing around with them all.

Multiplayer is, obviously, the meat and potatoes of a game like Titanfall, and what I've played of it has been, mostly, very fun. I've been able to try the Attrition, Bounty Hunt, Last Titan Standing, and Hardpoint Domination modes. Attrition is the main mode from the original game, and honestly I can see why. In a team deathmatch-like format, both teams of six players are assisted by a bevy of AI grunts. Amass points by killing opponents both AI and human controlled; first to 500 wins. Bounty hunt is similar, but the AI will attack both sides, and you can "cash in" your points for killing the bounties to double your points. Last Titan Standing is what it sounds like; team deathmatch where everyone starts with a Titan; once a team loses all of their Titans, they lose, even if the pilots remain alive. Hardpoint Domination tasks you with gaining control of, and holding, points on the map which will amass points over time. There's a wide variety of options for players, and I wish I had been able to try more out before the time of writing; besides Hardpoint Domination, which went absolutely horribly for my team due to disconnects, and enemy players taunted us over voice chat like assholes, I had a good time.

One of the things I really appreciated about trying out multiplayer was seeing how the different Titans and player abilities could be used, and how well they worked in various multiplayer contexts. The Scorch Titan, for example, uses its main weapon to create streaks of flame that maintain on the ground and cause damage. I was never able to use it well in the campaign, but in Bounty Hunt I was stopped in my tracks from attacking the bounties more than once by good, careful placement of flames. In a game of Last Titan Standing, the Legion Titan dominated thanks to protection from its gun-mounted shield ability. Various pilot abilities can also turn the tide; I had fun using the grappling hook to “rodeo” enemy Titans, and weaken them so my teammates could deliver the final blow, and I was taken out more than once by an opponent using the invisibility-providing Cloak ability.

As I close my thoughts, I think I would be remiss to not mention my favorite moment playing the game. Maybe this happens all the time, but I still feel it's noteworthy. It was towards the end of a match of Attrition, and my team was winning, but just barely. As the match wound down, I found myself in my Titan but very close to death, the game informing me that I could self-destruct with three quick presses of the square button, rather than going down with my ship. Normally, I'm more than willing to die in my robot, but an enemy player, perhaps wanting to take down an easy foe or just acting on opportunity, had hopped onto my robot and started the process of sabotaging me. "Well, that's no good," I thought, and quickly tapped in the self destruct sequence. My character launched high into the air, as expected, but the enemy who had lassoed me shot up, too. I'm still not sure if you get launched up if you're on an enemy Titan when it explodes, or if they had simply timed it just so to come up as well. In any case, my opponent (who in my mind had just destroyed my Titan, even if I was technically the one who pulled the trigger) and I found ourselves floating through the air on the force of the explosion. Thinking quickly, I pulled the left trigger to aim down the sights, lined up the reticle with my opponent, shot him out of the sky, landed safely on the ground, and continued on. Even with my lack of experience, my lack of skill, my lack of dedication to the genre, I know this: any game that can make me feel as cool as I did in that moment can't be all bad.

My time with Titanfall 2 was a ton of fun. I’m honestly thinking about purchasing the game; multiplayer shooters may not be my bag, but I still had a lot of fun playing Titanfall 2. Many are worried that, since the game was released between Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Titanfall 2 will be passed over. Indeed, I’ve heard anecdotal evidence that Titanfall 2’s player count has been disappointing for a AAA title released so recently. If you’re reading this, I urge you: if you have any interest in the genre at all, consider checking out Titanfall 2. I had a lot of fun, and it deserves to get some attention.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition review

Bethesda made a bit of a stir last november in the lead-up to the release of Fallout 4 by casually mentioning that, to learn the ropes of developing on the Xbox One, the studio ported The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim to the console. The much-beloved 2011 RPG was going to be coming back, it seemed, and a rabid fanbase swelled with excitement! And, despite claims by Bethesda that it had no plans to actually *release* this port, it was announced at E3 2016 that, yes, Skyrim was totally coming back on Playstation 4 and Xbox One, along with an updated version for PC.

For those of you who haven't played the original, Skyrim is an open-world action RPG similar to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3, or The Witcher III: Wild Hunt. Gameplay consists of running around the titular country of Skyrim, diving into dungeons and abandoned forts to slay the denizens within and find cool stuff. You swing swords, you cast spells, you sneak, you steal, the works! Leveling in the game is based on what you do; as you use skills, they will increase in efficacy. Increase them enough, and you'll level up, granting a skill point which you can use to unlock special abilities and perks for the skills you've leveled. Compared to how leveling worked in Oblivion, where you set which skills needed to be increased to level allowing players to only pick abilities they wouldn't use and steamroll the game, it's smart and a good way to make your character play to the skills you use.

The combat was never particularly complex; You can sneak up on enemies to get bonus damage, or cast spells on the ground that activate like traps, or use the occasional conveniently placed environmental object to give you an edge, but for the most part you just swing your weapon or throw your fireball and run away when the enemy gets close and starts swinging. But it's engaging enough to get you through hours and hours of dungeons, which look fairly samey after a while but never to the degree that they feel copy-pasted.

In Skyrim, you play as the Dragonborn, an adventurer of legend who can absorb the souls of dragons. It's good that you show up when you do, too, since Dragons have suddenly reappeared in the world after centuries of absence to destroy mankind (and elfkind, and catkind, and lizardkind; there's a wide variety in Skyrim) and take over the world! To combat the dragons, you use your aforementioned skills along with your "Thu'ums", or "Shouts", turning the language of the dragons against them and your other enemies in battle. These "Shouts" are effectively powerful spells on a cooldown that you earn by both learning the words, typically on a mural at the end of dungeons, and spending souls you collect after fighting Dragons to unlock them, with a variety of abilities such as a powerful knockback, fire breath, or pacifying your foe. While hardly ever necessary, the abilities are still cool to play with, and provide yet another incentive to journey through every location you stumble across.

The main story of the game is dealing with the Dragon menace, assisted by what's left of the organization known as The Blades (a much smaller organization after the events of the previous games). In addition, the game has a B-plot of sorts surrounding the civil war between the Imperial Legion, the rulers of the entire continent of Tamriel, and the Stormcloaks, 'true sons of Skyrim' who want it to be ruled independently rather than as part of the Empire. Players can choose to take a side in the conflict, helping the Imperials stomp out the Stormcloak resistance or assist the Stormcloaks in driving out the Imperials.

These stories, where you take on the dragon menace or decide which side of the civil war to fight on, are there if you want to do them, but I've dumped hundreds of hours into Skyrim and never gotten close to finishing either. This is mainly because of the massive amount of dungeons and sidequests to be found in the game, which can be ludicrously distracting from any set goal for yourself. You'll be running back to town to get to the business of dragon hunting when, oh dang, I don't think I've seen that dungeon before. Oh, there's a dude here with a cool mask! I gotta fight him and get it! Okay, now that's taken care of I can go and- whoa, dragon! Gotta fight it! Alright, finally time to- oh, a courier just gave me a letter telling me there's some daedric shit going on in a town on the other side of the map! Gotta check it out! So on and so forth for hours. There's a lot to do in the game, and it never feels boring even after all this time.

Speaking of the dragons, I feel the need to note that, for all the pomp and circumstance surrounding their inclusion and the amazing rush the first few fights are, eventually fighting them becomes boring. You see them in the horizon, you head in that direction, and once the dragon notices you it kind flies in a circle for a bit and breathes fire or ice at you. After a while it'll land, allowing you to get some swings in if you're not using a ranged weapon. Rinse, repeat, and there you go: dead dragon. For the huge variety of abilities you get as Dragonborn, and for as much as the game emphasizes that your "Shouts" are just what happens when Dragon gets spoken, you never see the interesting abilities being used by the dragons against you. In a game with so much stuff, it feels like a missed opportunity.

You'll notice that, so far, I'm speaking on the original 2011 Skyrim and not the newly-released 2016 Skyrim Special Edition. That is because besides the graphical improvements, it is the exact same game. There is very nice lighting! The draw distance is much improved! I've heard that the game has some behind-the-scenes changes that make it able to handle more stuff without crashing! But it is, in almost every sense of the word, a repainted version of the original Skyrim. There's no new content, unless you count the original game’s DLC, which I don't.

It's so much the exact same thing that one of the first things I did upon booting the game up was try one of my favorite speedrunning glitches: in the first indoor area of the game, you can pick up a bowl and use it to pass through a wall. The game doesn't handle collision with curved objects particularly well, so if you hold the bowl in front of your character the bowl will clip into the wall and your character will clip into the bowl, which sort of chains off itself and causes you to clip through the wall. I picked up a bowl off a table, pointed at the wall, and ran forward. And I instantly passed through. Mining will also only notify you of the first and last piece of ore being put into your inventory, with no notification of the third piece you get in between. I also put a bucket on an storekeepers head, which the game counted as obscuring the NPCs vision, and stole every loose item in their store by exploiting this glitch that I could have sworn they fixed already in the base game?

I cannot emphasize enough how much I've heard the game runs a bit smoother under the hood, but as far as I can tell none of the glitches or other weird issues in the game have been addressed.

Bethesda has decided that their graphical upgrade (many aspects of which still don't compare to downloading mods if you're a PC player by the way) and Skyrim’s existence on a new console is worth full price. Skyrim Special Edition, which does little to nothing besides add a fresh coat of paint, will cost you a whopping $60 to pick up and play at home. For almost the exact same game that was released 5 years ago.

I can't bring myself to recommend it. I was able to get the game for free; if you own the original Skyrim and all of its DLC on PC you get the Special Edition for free and I'm certainly not complaining about having another excuse to dive in, especially considering that the improved draw distance leads to some stunning vistas that I never noticed in the original game. But if I was expected to pay full price for the game again, I would balk, and rightfully so. Nicer textures and less fog do little to disguise the fact that it's just the same game again; even if you somehow don't already own the game, you can get a version that looks only marginally worse for significantly less money. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a fantastic and fun game that can provide hundreds of hours of dungeon delving fun, and I cannot recommend it enough. But in 2016, the value proposition that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition makes simply does not add up. Play Skyrim, if you haven't. But for now, until a price drop, you can safely skip its Special Edition.