Recently I played through Pokemon Y and it was my first pokemon. I was born a few years too early for the Pokemon craze and by the time Pikachu was on every TV in the US and kids were huddled together trading pokemon, I was graduating high school and that was "kiddie stuff" and anyone in my age group would be embarrassed to be associated with it. Over the years I heard good things about the series and saw friends and acquaintances get overly excited each time a new pokemon came out. As a fan of jrpgs I was always curious about the series, but from brief glances at the games they just seemed like "my first rpg (for kids)" like the Mario & Luigi rpgs but without the humor and wit (and those weren't particularly great outside Paper Mario 2 and the first Mario & Luigi rpg).
Finally though, I decided to give it a shot with X/Y. I had some free time and the games featured shiny new 3d graphics, so why not.
The first few hours of the game were slightly confusing. It wasn't confusing in that the game was overly complex or non-linear in a sandbox world progression, no it was rather straight-forward, you walk forward from area to area and fight trainers while fighting and catching pokemon for your party. What was confusing was that even an hour or two into the game, I wasn't sure what the game was about. I mean there was no standard rpg story where the world was in chaos, or there's was a festival going on that I had to check out with my neighbor, and no needed exploring only to discover I was actually the crystal savior, no, it wasn't like most jrpgs I was used to, I wasn't just moving from event trigger points to event trigger points while battling dungeons in-between. Instead this guy, the professor, gave me a pokedex and said "go explore the world" and I went a walking. Sure later in the game a bit of plot came in with the antagonists, Team Flare, and the world in peril, but it entered the picture just as unimportantly as it left it far before the game's end, it's just another event that happened while walking around the world; it wasn't what the game is about.
The game is about...walking around a world. You walk around, see the towns and the sights, explore caves and factories all while fighting hundreds of fellow inhabitants that challenge you with unique pokemon team setups that require you to make teams to counter them and reach victory. Or that would be how the game played ideally if the difficulty level wasn't set so low that strategy hardly matters, and if the game didn't repeatedly put you into fights against the exact same group of enemy pokemon over and over again (I think team flare throughout it's 40+ fights probably owns a total of about 5 pokemon out of the 450 in the game). But ideally and at its best, that's what the game is and I get the feeling that's what it wants to be, an exploration adventure of a fun fantasy world filled with challenging creative battle matchups to keep the game exciting.
The battle system itself is quite good, as shown in the final hours of the game and post-game. The elemental grid that matches up the 20+ element types in strengths and weaknesses keeps the battles always exciting as you want to switch in pokemon that do 2-4x damage while taking 1/2 damage or less. It helps that the stakes are high and the battles are quick as fights are almost entirely "1-shot" based with your pokemon either killing the enemy in their first strike or the enemy doing the same to your pokemon. In the final 6 on 6 battles in the game it's all about playing smart and knocking out more pokemon than the opponent to give yourself some breathing room. Between all the various skills you can teach to your pokemon and insanely large number of pokemon types (since many pokemon have a mix of 2 element types), there's good strategy to be had and I'm sure that plays heavily into the multiplayer competitive game for which the series has strong roots & reputation. But as a single player rpg gamer, who has no interest to ever try the multiplayer, I wish the game challenged my group of pokemon more to force team building the right pokemon to beat each team I faced in the way that Shin Megami Tensei does on its best boss fights.
At the same time, I have to say I'm glad the game didn't require me to run around catching all kinds of pokemon to get the right match ups on my team because I found the actual catching of pokemon to be the most uninteresting and tedious aspect of the game. If you want to catch a pokemon you throw a ball, each ball type with its own success rates, and then depending on the health of the enemy and if they are under status effects, it rolls the dice based on those percentages and you sit and watch the ball bounce for a few seconds and see if you catch a wild pokemon or if it pops out again. This was never fun. I mostly was able to catch pokemon the few dozen times I tried it out of curiosity to see what building a collection of pokemon would be like, but it just wasn't an enjoyable system and the further I got into the game, the stronger the pokemon were and the harder they were to catch, so it just didn't seem worth bothering. It also doesn't help that status effects are great for catching pokemon, but since your pokemon only have 4 slots for attacks and status effects never mattered the entire storyline because everyone is one-shotting back and forth, it's just a waste to assign a status effect only skill to a pokemon. You also have the problem of often your pokemon being so strong their attacks one-shot and kill the pokemon you want to catch, so you're stuck using a weaker pokemon and chipping an enemy down if you want to catch them (or wasting a slot to keep an attack that brings them down to 1hp). Thankfully there's only one high level pokemon the story forces you to catch (the legendary) and the game provides you with a 100% success rate ball during the story so you don't have to keep throwing balls until you draw the right number. You'd think for a game revolved around catching pokemon, they'd make catching them more fun. You also fight trainers far more often then you run into wild pokemon while just walking through the world so it'd be nice if you could win pokemon from other trainers by beating them in their battles or buy pokemon with the money earned from winning the trainer battles or something.
It was also nice that the story gives you a good balanced team as your progress of what seemed to me as a pokemon newcomer as "title character pokemon." I had my starter Fox for Fire & Psychic, Squirtle for Water, the Loch Ness Monster for Ice and Ground, Lucario for Fighting and an NPC in one of the first towns gives you a great Flying bird in a trade (which you can later replace with the Legendary in Y); between all those types you can pretty much take on anything. Plus I grabbed Pikachu at the start since, the game being my first pokemon game, I assumed he was the Mario of the series and the essential main pokemon for your team. Well it turned out that he kind of sucked, but his Electric filled a nice spot that was missing in terms of the elements so he was good enough.
There's also the ability to can raise pokemon. This means playing a bunch of simple and bad mini-games to slightly up their base stats. After messing around with these modes for an hour, I never bothered and just raised them by leveling them up in battle, which was fine. For people who like virtual pets I can see the appeal, but it wasn't for me.
The game also has a neat system where pokemon evolve to new ones. At first this was really exciting and I wanted to catch all the pokemon and level them just so I could see their bigger, more badass evolved forms. But quickly I learned that the evolve system is extremely uneven. Many of the pokemon you meet are in their 2nd evolution already and a good chunk don't even have 3rd evolutions so no matter how long you keep them around they never change, just increase stats and learn moves. Then the game introduces 4th Evolutions as part of the story, in-battle updates to the pokemon, initially really exciting because I wanted to find all the matching stones and see the 4th evolution forms of all the pokemon that I had collected, but then hardly any pokemon had 4th evolutions (less than 5%) and the feature seems more shoe-horned in as a teaser for the next mainline game than an actual major upgrade system for all.
Graphically it was nice despite the technical weakness of the team's first effort into 3d graphics (hence the framerate problems), the pokemon, which numbered in the hundreds were excellently rendered and their animations were smooth and great looking. The music did its job though nothing really stands out (and eventually I was just listening to spotify playlists on my headphones while playing).
So overall, how was the experience as a newcomer to the series with no nostalgia to pull on? Quite enjoyable despite not living up to what it could have been. While I never thought I could get into a non-dungeon-crawler jrpg that didn't have a story to give reason to transition from area to area, by the end I was more annoyed anytime there was a story event, as it was simply a distraction from what I was enjoying, which was progressing around my exploration of the world and battling trainers. There's something fun about just seeing the world the team's created and winning all these short battles of the one-shot fights (even if they are far too easy). It was definitely a fun game, and I'd love to play a game like this with real 3d fields like Xenoblade or Zelda where the scope the world is even more enjoyable to take in and explore, all while fighting pokemon running about the wild and trainers located around the fields as well. But if they just stick to their formula and make more like this, I'm down to play them as long as they provide some difficulty levels options so the trainer fights can be as challenging as a Persona game. The depth is there, it just needs the difficulty to provide the thrill that the final fights against the elite 4 provide, but for the entire journey.
