Another Batch Of Unsolicited Game Opinions

Since my April 2021 video game review blog got such a warm reception, I figured I'd do it again with some of the games I've played in the year since that post went up. Not as many games this time due to the smaller timeframe, but I've got plenty to talk about...

Cosmic Star Heroine
Platform: Switch
Genre: JRPG

I picked up Cosmic Star Heroine as a result of Jumpropeman's Game Hoard review. He does a good job of running down the finer points of this game, though I ultimately did not rate CSH as highly as he did. While I thoroughly enjoyed the interesting battle system that requires you to use a variety of moves and found plenty to like amongst the characters and writing, I did have two criticisms that ended up stifling my enjoyment a bit.

First, CSH is a bit short for such a grand adventure. High stakes are established very quickly, and things are paced to keep you interested throughout, but it's all a bit breakneck - you don't get to spend much time in any one location, the big finish comes all too soon, and a few late-appearing party members barely get a chance to do anything before the credits roll (you get a LOT of party members considering the playtime). This is understandable, though, since CSH is an indie game being sold for a budget price, not a full-fledged AAA JRPG.

Less easy for me to forgive, though, was the ending. I don't wish to spoil it, and it was far from atrocious, but some elements of CSH's endgame left me sad and uncomfortable and made the finale my least favorite section of the adventure, and I had to force myself to finish the final fight, not wanting to abandon Cosmic Star Heroine when so close to the end. Your mileage may vary, of course. I don't regret playing CSH at all, but it simultaneously left me wanting more and also pushed me to not want to play the optional content I'd missed after the ending's narrative choices left me unsettled.

Also, big props for this being a sci-fi RPG. Always nice to see a JRPG-style game that isn't just fantasy-themed again.

Savage Halloween
Platform: Switch
Genre: Run-and-gun

Here's another game Jumpropeman has reviewed! This time I played it before he posted his take, having been drawn in by the very solid and smooth-looking gameplay combined with a low price during a Switch eShop sale. A lot of indie sidescrollers don't have the right 'feel' nailed down to make them play like the greats of the past, but Savage Halloween felt very natural and strongly reminded me of the Genesis games of my childhood (it has NES-esque visuals and music, but the gameplay is very much 16-bit, not 8-bit). In Savage Halloween, you take control of one of three Halloween monsters to try and put a stop to DJ Drac's mad plan to make Halloween last forever. They have great reasons for doing so, too - James the scarecrow is a grumpy farmer who wants to shut up the racket, Dominika the vampire is Drac's daughter and finds him embarrassing, and Lulu the werewolf appears to simply be James' small and cute pet dog, eager to help him by transforming into her monstrous werewolf form.

Gameplay is simple but fun, similar to Contra and the like. You have a gun and need to mow down everything standing between you and DJ Drac. Occasional special scenes liven up the action, like a skyride on the broom of a friendly witch and a race to the bottom of a huge room to outrun the fuse of a bomb. Aside from a single small scene where the aforementioned witch offers her help, the only moments of dialogue and story are at the beginning and the end of the adventure, but this isn't really the kind of game that needs a deep story anyway (even if it would be nice for DJ Drac to react if his daughter is the one who shows up to fight him at the end).

The different ammunition types you can collect are interesting to use and help you tackle various situations that your standard pew-pew gun struggles with. You can take multiple hits and the highest level you've reached is saved if you Game Over, so Savage Halloween is more forgiving than the likes of Contra, but it's still tricky. Expect to die a few times to bosses to learn their patterns. Overall, this is a fun game with a lot of love and thought put into it, and I had a great time kicking off my Halloween season last October by playing it.

Metroid Dread
Platform: Switch
Genre: Metroidvania

Metroid took over a decade and a half to finally get around to continuing its' story, but by gum when it finally came time to do so, they put their all into it! Metroid Dread is an excellently-crafted adventure that ties together the overall story of Metroid into a cohesive grand finale. It's been confirmed that this is not necessarily the last Metroid game and Samus will hopefully go on more adventures (and considering Dread's critical and sales success, it seems likely the franchise may finally be back on track), but it allows the next game to move on to new stories with a somewhat clean slate.

Most of Metroid Dread is the high-quality formula you've come to expect from the series - wandering around a large game world, traveling from region to region in search of boss fights and secret passages to advance the story, gather upgrades, and fill out a map. New to the series however are the EMMI, a squadron of robots that serve as almost-invincible pursuing threats. They lurk only in designated, clearly-marked "EMMI Zones", which Samus must pass through multiple times as she explores the surrounding labyrinths. If the EMMI hears Samus moving through its' domain, it will begin to search for the intruder, and if she is spotted, it will begin to give chase. If caught, Samus has only a very brief window to counter the EMMI's strike and briefly stun it, giving her a moment to run away. Otherwise, she's instantly killed and you're handed a Game Over. Eventually, however, you will be able to reach a secret room in each EMMI Zone where you can acquire a super-powerful (but unwieldy) cannon that will allow you to finally get revenge on the EMMI and clear its' designated zone.

Metroid Dread is no pushover. The EMMIs are nigh-guaranteed to kill any first-time player many, many times until you can learn the layout of their zones and determine the best course of action, and even then the EMMIs aren't totally predictable and may catch you off guard with variance in their patrols and pursuits. This is a far more serious threat than running from the SA-X in Metroid Fusion was. The conventional boss fights are quite difficult as well - again, you'll need to learn the boss' patterns and become skilled at knowing when to dodge, when to shoot, and when to use melee counters to make the boss vulnerable. Memorization and many retries will be required. Thankfully, Metroid Dread is forgiving in one vital way - death is not punished very harshly. Losing to an EMMI or a boss will simply place you outside the room you were in before the conflict began, and within seconds you're retrying. I found some parts of Dread extremely frustrating due to their high difficulty and if it hadn't been for these easy retries I would likely have abandoned my playthrough.

It's not recommended for anyone with a low patience for failure, but if you're willing to take a lot of Game Overs on the chin and keep pushing on to improve your Samus skills, Metroid Dread is an excellent title that's absolutely worth the time of anyone who's been waiting for more from the galaxy's finest bounty hunter.

Snowball!
Platform: PC
Genre: Pinball

Snowball! is a cute little game that's frequently on sale on Steam for a dollar or so, down from its' already-modest price of three. With such a paltry asking price for something that looked simple and appealing, I eventually went for it after the umpteenth email from Steam telling me that it had gone on sale yet again.

This game's premise is adorable and reminds me of something the kids' media of my childhood would do: An entire town's worth of people (probably all kids) have gotten together after a huge snowstorm to create a massive pinball table from scratch. Using analog technology to create human-powered flippers, trees are used as bumpers, and the ball is of course a snowball. You can try to shoot the ball into an igloo and a snow castle, play a game of Breakout in a side area, and smack the ball into a snowman to take it apart and start a multiball where you play with the snowman's pieces as well as your main ball. It's nice to see a winter-themed pinball game, as these are quite rare compared to the heavy abundance of pinball games that are appropriate for Halloween.

You only get one table, but that's to be expected at this price. You can play it in two different lighting modes, though: day and night. It's not a bad table, filled with gimmicks and secrets to discover, and while some of the goals are tricky to achieve (there's plenty here I was unable to do in numerous attempts), that's reasonable since it gives Snowball! some needed longevity. A harmless, bite-sized game good for a spin if you enjoy pinball.

Nina Aquila: Legal Eagle, Season 1
Platform: PC
Genre: Visual Novel/RPG hybrid

Nina Aquila is a love letter to the Ace Attorney series. With new Ace Attorney games being very sporadic (there hasn't been a proper entry in the main series since Obama was president), it's up to games like this to pick up the slack and fill the courtroom mystery void. Of course, NALE is a small production that can't hope to match Capcom's franchise in terms of presentation - this game was clearly built in RPG Maker, and most of the character portraits are made using an avatar maker (in early versions of the game, EVERYONE used this avatar maker!). The central characters all get "real" art, though, albeit from several different artists so the art style clashes a bit at times, particularly between the soft and adorable-looking portraits of Nina and the more Western-esque art style used by Nina's mentor and the courtroom judge. All the typical ingredients for an Ace Attorney type game are present - you go on investigations and gather evidence, then head to the courtroom to listen to witness testimony and either press for more information or present evidence to contradict their statements. It's all very familiar stuff, and anyone who's played an Ace Attorney game will instantly feel right at home in the first case.

NALE isn't content to just ape its' inspiration, though. To its' credit, it goes off in a unique direction in a few different ways. I enjoyed seeing how some common AA tropes were subverted or tweaked in NALE, particularly in regard to how it's emphasized that you don't need to find a guilty party to get your client off the hook (though, for the simple fact that it's not satisfying for the true culprit to get away, you'll still be able to corner them in court). Where things really start to diverge from AA, though, are the minigames. You'll encounter three different minigames in NALE, two in the second case and one more in the third. The first minigame is a simple slot machine game that's pretty rote. The second minigame, a monster-battling card game, was easily my favorite of the three. It combined simple strategy and fast gameplay into a decent little diversion, and I was actually disappointed when I ran out of opponents to play against. It lacked depth compared to a proper battle system, but it was plenty involved enough for a sideshow.

I hate to bash the third minigame, as it clearly had a lot of effort put into it and it's the most prominent of them all, but I didn't enjoy the racing game. Instead of actual racing, which would likely have been too difficult to do in RPG Maker, it is instead a turn-based affair similar to rock-paper-scissors, where you choose a driving style, your CPU opponent does the same, and the winning style earns points towards a meter. Every few rounds the meters are reset and whichever racer had more in their meter moves faster down the course than their opponent. Rinse and repeat about ten times and that's the minigame. While you are offered hints as to how your opponent may react, there's no getting away from the fact that Rock-Paper-Scissors is a luck-based game, and so whether you win or lose these races is up to chance, with there being a possibility you'd lose even if you played to the best of your ability. Add in the length of the race, the frequency with which you have to play it (the third investigation day of Case 3 consists almost entirely of race after race separated only by very quick factoids from the characters you defeat, with only a single really good conversation with a witness at the very end) and the repetitive squealing tire sound effects and the races ended up being the lowlight of my NALE experience.

On the positive side, the minigames are skippable... sort of. Both the card battles and the races have an option to turn on a god mode that makes it impossible for Nina to lose. This is a nice option to have, though you're still required to sit through them so it's not a perfect solution. As for the slot machine game, there's no option to make winning guaranteed, but it's mostly just a matter of picking a machine your assistant says he has a good feeling about. Said machine will inevitably pay out more than you lose. Weirdly, I was forcibly moved on to having enough money long before I'd actually earned enough in the form of a timeskip cutscene, which I think was because I kept examining different slot machines out of curiosity instead of sticking to a single one. (You can also skip the slot machine game entirely by interacting with an ATM at the convenience store.)

There are some other quibbles I could mention, like the music player you unlock after clearing the third case that doesn't have every song on it (and also has unrelated background ambience playing) or the little quirks of RPG Maker like characters appearing to hover over chairs instead of properly sitting in them, but probably the most major thing to point out is that "Season 1" bit in the title. NALE sets up a major case that lurks in the background of Case 2 and Case 3, similar to most Ace Attorney games, but you won't find any resolutions to it here. Presumably that's being saved for "Season 2", which is not out yet as of this writing. The cases we have here still stand on their own well enough, but Nina's story is clearly not finished yet.

But enough of the negatives - I still really enjoyed my time with NALE. The absolute saving grace here is the writing. There are a couple typos here and there, but even AA has flubbed in that department before. NALE's writing is seriously excellent, some of the best I've seen in a game. I laughed out loud numerous times, and a lot of the dialogue is very witty and snappy. Comedic moments are a riot, serious moments are very well done, and best of all - Ace Attorney's tendency to abuse the protagonist is almost nonexistent here. Nina gets teased occasionally, and of course her defense is usually on the backfoot compared to her smug and cocky prosecutor rival Chad Hawke until she turns it around right at the end, but she isn't a punching bag and there are numerous occasions of her actually managing to intimidate and shame people who are being rude or obstinate, or at least proving herself right and forcing them to apologize. It was a real breath of fresh air after seeing AA's protagonist abuse at its' worst in The Great Ace Attorney.

Bottom line, if you're hankering for more cases to solve after playing a few Ace Attorney installments and you don't mind either playing or pushing through a lot of minigames, Nina won't steer you wrong.

Also she's gorgeous.

Octopath Traveler
Platform: PC
Genre: JRPG

Octopath Traveler is the unofficial successor to Bravely Default, made by the same team that made the first two Bravely games. I really enjoyed my time with those two games (Bravely Default 2's inferiority compared to its' predecessors is easier to understand now - it was made by a different team), and another game from them sounded like a good time.

Octopath Traveler has some breathtakingly beautiful environments made with pixel art rendered in a 3D space. I was spellbound in the earlygame as I traveled from one location to the next. There's also a ton of flexibility in how you play Octopath. You may begin your adventure with any one of the eight playable characters you like, each one located in a different town, and once you have cleared their first chapter, you are invited to wander wherever you like. Inevitably you'll find your way to another town, where (unless you tried to skip ahead to the tougher areas) one of the other characters is waiting. You can then play their opening chapter, but your original chosen character is now along for the ride. The early chapters and enemy encounters are scaled so that they get harder based on how many party members you have, which allows for this flexibility without making the solo character chapter nigh-impossible or the following chapters too easy.

Another example of Octopath's versatility is the NPCs. A vast majority of NPCs can be interacted with in some way using the special field abilities of the player characters. Ophilia the cleric and Primrose the dancer can recruit them as temporary allies you can summon on command a set number of times. Olberic the knight and H'aanit the hunter can challenge them to a one-on-one battle if they're blocking the way to something you need or if they're being a pain in the neck. The scholar Cyrus and apothecary Alfyn can draw out special information from them, which rewards you with not just tons of fun flavor text but also bonus items and perks like discounts at the local stores. Lastly, many NPCs are carrying items or equipment. The merchant Tressa can buy these things off them, and the thief Therion can steal them. These field abilities are used liberally throughout the adventure, especially in the sidequests but also in the story missions too, and they make the NPCs of Octopath far more important and worth interacting with than the one-note nothings you usually see in an RPG like this. You're limited in your rampages amongst the townsfolk, though, as every playable character has some kind of caveat with their field ability. Ophilia, Olberic, and Alfyn must be a certain level to use their abilities, with different NPCs requiring different minimum levels before they will react to your abilities. Meanwhile, Primrose, H'aanit, Cyrus, and Therion's abilities are luck-based. You'll see a percentage of success before confirming an attempted use of the ability, and if you fail, you'll get a strike against you. Get too many strikes and you'll be locked out of using field abilities in the area until you pay a fee at the local tavern to restore your reputation. It's an interesting idea, though in reality it just ends up encouraging save-scumming. Oh, and as for Tressa, the only limit on her ability is the simple fact that buying stuff costs money, and in the early game you will be struggling hard to make enough money to keep your team equipped with the basic stuff being sold in equipment shops - let alone trying to buy powerful goodies from NPCs.

Octopath's customization and flexibility comes at a steep cost, however. While all eight main characters are extremely personable and likable, their interactions with each other are dearly lacking. In story cutscenes, every scene is presented as if you didn't bring any other party members with you. This is because of how you can do the chapters in any order - you can even ignore the other characters and attempt to do a solo run of a character's story (and this even nets you a Steam achievement if you go through with it!). It ends up causing a lot of gameplay/story segregation, such as your current focus character getting ambushed by a foe that the whole team could easily have warned each other about or overpowered, or one character likely having an important contribution to make to a situation but unable to speak because it's not one of their chapters. Starting with each character's second chapter, this is somewhat addressed by adding optional conversations between the characters that are triggered after certain cutscenes, but these are INCREDIBLY easy to miss as you must have the right character in your party at the right time, and there's no way to know when they need to be present. To see every optional chat in one playthrough would require constantly going back and forth to the tavern to swap your party, triggering a cutscene by going to the right location, and then leaving and swapping again. It's probably best to just watch the ones you miss on Youtube or something.

Octopath's battle system is unique and engaging. Seeming at first to just be normal turn-based fighting, the Break system adds a very interesting wrinkle. All enemies (including bosses!) have a number next to their name representing how many times they can endure being hit with one of their weaknesses. If you hit that weakness enough times to drop the number to 0, the enemy will lose a turn and their defenses will drop, giving you an opening to wallop them with your strongest moves. Timing your attacks and using the right moves at the right time makes the battles require some thought, and it's further bolstered by a similar system to Bravely Default that allows characters to store up energy over time to eventually unleash in either a barrage of regular attacks (good for striking an enemy multiple times to chip away at their weakness and trigger a Break) or a powered-up version of your special moves (great for dealing huge damage to a Broken opponent). It was one of the best battle systems I've had the pleasure of using, and I would enjoy another game with this same battle system.

Octopath Traveler gets divisive as it reaches its' conclusion. At first there doesn't seem to be a true final boss, as once you've cleared all of the story missions, things just seem to stop happening and you're left alone in the world with no direction. However, if you keep looking for sidequests, you will eventually find a chain of them that leads you to a secret boss, and this boss is very clearly the true final challenge. Orders of magnitude more difficult than anything else in the game and located behind a boss rush of moderately-strong foes that are trivially easy to a party that's good enough to even stand a chance against the actual boss, this final battle is one of the hardest boss encounters I have ever beaten in my entire gaming career. I overprepared like mad for it, having been warned in advance that there were no save points after the boss rush (so, a lot of wasted time if the final boss took me down). Even after hours and hours of grinding, the final boss was still an absolute marathon that took literal hours to defeat. It was an incredibly thrilling rush, and I was so excited after claiming victory that I was shaking, but if I had lost that fight it would have been a different story (and there were multiple points where I came VERY close to losing, but I just barely pulled through each time before finally building up an unstoppable momentum at the very end to finish it off). And through it all, despite everything happening in that finale, not a single one of your characters gets even ONE line of dialogue, even though you need all eight characters to complete their stories to access this fight (so the problem other chapters have of Octopath not knowing who you have available is no longer an issue). Things like this and the varying levels of effort put into different major bosses, as well as weird things like optional dungeons with nothing of significance in them, indicate that Octopath Traveler may have had a rushed development and that it could have been improved significantly if it had been given more time in the oven. What we've ended up with, however, is still a hell of a game and probably my favorite RPG of all the ones I've reviewed for this article.

Pokemon Brilliant Diamond
Platform: Switch
Genre: JRPG

I'll be honest, I wasn't asking for much from the Gen 4 "remakes" - I just wanted to play through Sinnoh again, for the first time in over a dozen years, without erasing my beloved old save file. I put "remakes" in quotation marks because this isn't so much a remake as it is a straight port with improved graphics. Sure, a few things are improved or changed here and there - the Underground has been expanded, for instance, and although 98% of the main game is super easy due to an always-on Experience Share showering your team with experience points, to compensate somewhat they actually made the infamously hard Champion battle even harder, if you can believe that. But for all intents and purposes this is Diamond and Pearl again, warts and all. None of Platinum's additions or upgrades are present, aside from Platinum Dex Pokemon getting put in the Underground. If you're feeling nostalgic it's a good play, but people expecting something that actually upgrades Gen 4 into a modern experience will just find it dull.

Pokemon Legends Arceus
Platform: Switch
Genre: JRPG/Action RPG hybrid

I was nervous about this game before it released. I didn't want to look too deep into it before playing it, which allowed me to be surprised by some of the content inside (like the new evolutions and forms), so all I knew mechanics-wise going in was that this Pokemon game had finally added the fabled "open world" along with action RPG mechanics. I didn't know to what extent that entailed or how it would all fit together, and so it was with some nervousness that I booted it up and got to playing.

I had nothing to worry about. This is the best Pokemon game since Sun and Moon, easily.

It's one thing to randomly take out bits and pieces of a legacy game design because you couldn't be bothered to include it all (Sword and Shield refusing to allow in all Pokemon and all moves). It's quite another, however, to turn that legacy design on its' head and essentially throw everything out and start over. This is not a case of failure to carry over every last thing from the 3DS Pokemon games - this is a grand reorganization, a streamlining of Pokemon's fundamentals, something that has not happened once in the entire run of the series. Instead of being strictly turn-based, battles are speed-based - a fast Pokemon can take multiple turns in a row if they're fortunate, and when the battle menu comes up, you know for certain that your action is next and will not be interrupted. (Priority moves like Quick Attack have had their effect changed to make your next turn more likely to come sooner, possibly lapping your opponent.) Stat boosting moves have been simplified to provide a temporary boost to either both offensive stats, both defensive stats, or both. Freeze and Sleep have been changed to a Burn-esque condition called Frostbite and a Paralysis-esque condition called Drowsy, respectively, and all status can be shaken off now. The relationship between move power has been shifted, with moves like Flamethrower and Thunderbolt dialed back to match the strength of Shadow Ball and the like. Hold items are gone. Abilities are gone. Double battles and all old gimmicks like Dynamax are gone, with the only new gimmick being the ability to make moves stronger (your next turn will take longer though) or weaker (but your next turn might come sooner). EVs have been overhauled into a much easier to understand system. Battles are fast and brutal, with underleveled Pokemon often able to trade blows with higher-leveled ones, especially early on. This is a lighter, more agile, easier to understand battle system that has trimmed the fat and come out better for it.

Legends Arceus takes place in the distant past (it is unclear exactly how distant. Almost none of Sinnoh  - here called Hisui - is colonized and technology is fairly simple... aside from handheld cameras being commonplace, which is what throws the time period into confusion). As a result, people and Pokemon are only just beginning to bond. Many people are afraid of Pokemon, and Pokemon trainers are few and far between, making any trainer encounter into a miniboss fight. Needless to say, Gym Leaders and the Elite Four are nowhere to be found, and the closest you'll get to the usual "evil team" is a tiny little trio of three small-time bandits who occasionally get in the way and be annoying for a minute until you slap them aside in a Pokemon battle. With Pokemon training in its' infancy and all of these classic Pokemon cliches off the table, what's left for Legends Arceus? Why, the Pokedex, naturally. And with nothing else to get in the way, the Pokedex has been elevated to incredible heights to become far more important than ever before - and it's more fun to fill out this time.

First of all, since Legends Arceus is a standalone game with no alternative versions, there are no version-exclusive Pokemon to worry about. Trading is possible, but it's optional - you can complete the Pokedex all by yourself (Even the starters you didn't pick will eventually turn up!). Trade evolutions are no longer an issue either. For example, to get a Steelix in the older games, you would normally need to get a Metal Coat, give it to Onix, and trade it, then have your trading partner trade it back. But in Legends Arceus? Just use the Metal Coat on Onix the way you would an evolution stone, and bam, it evolves. Or, if you're particularly fortunate, you may even find a wild Steelix and can just catch it outright! (And if you're wondering how to evolve the trade-evolving Pokemon that don't use an item, like Haunter and Graveler, they added a new item called the Linking Cord that will make it happen for you. Easy!)

It gets better. One of the downsides of Pokemon catching in older games is that, once you've caught a Pokemon once, you cease to care about that Pokemon. You'll see a Paras, and you'll desperately want that Paras, but then once you've actually caught the little guy, every subsequent Paras earns an eyeroll and a click of the Run option. Not any more! The Pokedex offers various tasks to be completed for every Pokemon. Catching one is just the start - you'll be rewarded research levels for catching multiples, or catching them in different ways, or for knocking them out, or for seeing them use certain moves in combat. Every Pokemon has a list of tasks to do, and you only have to do a handful of them to hit Research Level 10 for the Pokemon and mark their entry as officially complete. But the leftover tasks can still be performed - all research you do will earn you overall points to increase your rank as a Pokemon researcher, even if the Pokemon's entry is finished. Higher research levels allow you to use higher level Pokemon, get bigger rewards for turning in your work (since there are almost no trainers to battle, the main method of making money is that you're paid for catching Pokemon - because it's your job!), and unlock better items like Great Balls and Super Potions. What does all this mean? It means that encountering the same species more than once suddenly isn't a bore - it's a necessity, and a fun one. Most tasks are completed in seconds, and there's a constant feeling of progress as you fill out charts and meters and make numbers go up.

To make things easier, catching Pokemon has never been so quick and simple. You can throw balls at Pokemon without even engaging them in battle, and while normally you'd want to weaken a Pokemon first to increase your odds, here you can do things like hit Pokemon from behind or ambush them with a thrown ball while they're sleeping, to make capture more likely without having to fight. Seamlessly sneaking through a stretch of wilderness, chucking balls at one Pokemon after another, makes the old games' random encounters look positively lumbering and archaic in comparison. You're actively encouraged to catch multiples of the same species, after all, so making catching easier was a no-brainer.

While I ultimately still did not complete the Pokedex in my playthrough due to one species being locked behind a huge and tedious fetch quest, and the story drops the ball at the very end by forgetting to address an extremely crucial loose end that desperately needed resolution, I still really enjoyed my time with Legends Arceus. After Sword and Shield were ravaged for their faults and limitations and for their failure to be better than their 3DS predecessors despite launching on vastly more powerful hardware with a much higher price tag, it was nice to play a Pokemon game that took risks and got rewarded for it. I'm interested to see how Scarlet and Violet turn out, as they have shown to have some similarities to Legends.

I don't have a snappy conclusion for this post, so here is a picture of Nina Aquila.