Pokemon Sword and Shield Review

Pokemon Sword and Shield came out just over a month ago. It is one of the best Pokemon games ever. Game Freak did great, they were able to innovate on returning features and creating new ones. The story was pretty good and it has a post-game that doesn’t have pacing issues. Like everything there are issues but in my opinion, the pros definitely out way the cons.

Graphics and Sound

For the last couple of Generations, Graphics and Audio have been improving a lot. This generation is a huge leap for Pokemon graphics The new pokemon designs are nice and so are the character models. As always Nintendo is great at getting the most of the hardware. The music of the games is great it even includes a song by Toby Fox creator of Undertale.

Story

Pokemon Sword and Shield have a great story which is a little longer than most preceding Pokemon games. It’s one of the best Pokemon games ever but also has many issues like Team Yell being a terrible evil team (but there is a twist with that later on) and the story is super back-loaded. Now for the good. Another issueI have with the game is that there are way too many rival battles. The writers do a great job of incorporating British Folklore into the story and British-isms into the dialogue. They redid the format of the league, I’ll touch more on that later. Finally, it has a strong post-game which I’ll detail later in this article. 

Gameplay

The gameplay is great as ever, the length is just right but still a little repetitive. New features and updates to returning features make the game feel just a little more real and make it feel new again. This installment of the franchise is quite a bit more challenging than past installments. For Sword and Shield Game Freak completely overhauled the gyms and the league. In the new Gyms they’ve completely changed the mechanics, you first have to complete a Gym challenge (in on you heard Wooloos, in another, you are in a human pinball-like game etc.) but it gets better during the actual gym battle you’re battling in a stadium with fans. Leveling is scaled quite a bit more aggressively than in past games which adds a new dimension of challenge.

New Features

Pokemon Sword and Shield have lots of new features, the bigger ones being Dynamaxing, the Wild Area and, Raid Battles. Dynamax is the franchises new regional battle mechanic, it is sort of a combination between all the good parts of Z-Moves and Mega Evolution. The Wild Area is probably the most drastic new addition. It is basically an area in the center of the region where you can catch a verity of species from past regions it also acts as a connection between different section of the game and finally raids. Raids are similar to the concept in namesake in Pokemon GO.

Post-game

The post-game is great, it has a great story and character development. The story is a lot more balanced than the main story. The antagonists are really good and a little bit different and I think would make a good evil team.

Lasting value

The games a have a great lasting value. Like passed games there’s competitive battling and the ability to rechallange the gyms and the league. As I mentioned earlier in this article the post game is great. But the one thing I didn’t mention about it is you can don’t get locked into it, you can take a break from the post game and do whatever you want and pick the post-game back up where you left off. I feel it’s replayable and think that replaying would benefit you like rewatching certain movies.

I give Pokemon Sword and Shield a 8.5*

*on the Game Informer review Scale: http://bit.ly/2qM2OYJ

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My Disney+ review is going to be coming out in the coming days. I’ve been super busy the last month or so do do college. I may also be writing an article about today’s events regarding Boeing CST Starliner.