#heinousasks

[heinousactszx]

In your opinion how did the open world format work for pokemon legends of arceus? Is there anything you would have changed about it?

TLDR, i think it worked fantastically. but in order to get into why, i think i need to get into why the open world of SV (and to a lesser extent swsh) did NOT work.

It's practically one of my mantras at this point, but an open world game can have an explorable space as big as the real world itself; it's not going to be fun to play if it's not worth exploring. that means having interesting locales, secrets and new abilities to find, and exciting challenges to seek out.

Scarlet and violet... Don't really have that. the only thing you can really find in the game are, well, pokemon. Yeah yeah I know there's trainers and the treasures of ruin and maybe a raid battle, but overwhelmingly what you're finding in that big open world is pokemon. And the fun of discovering them sort of pales when really all you can do with that discovery is add them to your team or your dex. Plus, unlike classic pokemon games, the removal of random encounters means there's no real reason to even engage with the pokemon you see once you're at a high enough level and have them in the dex. seriously, once you realize how much of SV is just walking around pokemon in the open world, you'll never unsee it

you could argue that having the choice to complete the 3 stories in any order you like is one of the things you can find. But when all of those events are tied to a structured level scale that doesn't change, your "choice" comes down to either running into fights that are way too hard and then abruptly way too easy, or playing in the exact order they want you to. not exactly enticing either way. Scarlet and violet probably would have just been better off as a more linear pokemon with typical hallway routes instead of spending all this time on an open world that rarely enhances any part of the experience (though i will admit running around with a friend in union circle is really fun)

ANYWAY to get back to what you actually asked, Legends arceus sidestepped this issue by making interacting with pokemon the entire gameplay loop. it was a stroke of genius to make completing the pokedex the main goal of the game, because unlike in the regular series, catching a pokemon does not tie the bow on it. No, in order to advance in the game and truly fill out the dex, you have to complete research tasks related to that pokemon. Hitting it with certain attacks, using items, number caught, number stunned, using certain moves, and so many more. some of them even have side-quests associated with them!

all of this encourages you to do more with the entirety of the world you're exploring than SV offered. switching up your team and trying new things to fill out dex entries is encouraged and gives so much variety to the actual experience of playing the game like you usually would. While there's actually less pokemon to find than in SV or swsh, improving the way you actually engage with all of them makes legends much more exciting to run around in.

not to mention, the game feel in legends is just better, flat out. walking around feels better, the ride pokemon are more fun, pokemon running from you or attacking you feels more immersive than the way they mostly just exist waddling around in the other switch games. It helps that legends, while having some performance issues, is nowhere near as bad as SV has it.

of course, the truth of the matter is that legends arceus is not truly an open world game. It's a series of large and open but disconnected areas accessible from a main hub, rather than one large contiguous gamespace. remoraid to my head, i think i'd pick the former every time. it gives the game more focused central game design and cuts out a lot of extra transient elements that don't really add that much. Running around a true open world is fun and all, but legends arceus would not have been a better game just because you could walk directly from one area to another, much in the same way that Scarlet and violet really aren't better games for it either

as for what i'd change? honestly? nothing. the gameplay loop of legends was so addicting that i did almost nothing but play it for weeks when it first came out. it was and is the best pokemon game in over a decade. in some ways i can't believe it's actually as good as it is. i remember being so anxious with a friend that it was going to be a disaster when it ended up being a masterpiece.

no, wait, what i'd change is game freak's awful habit of adding cool new features, like this entire game, and then never touching them again. make a sequel. pokemon legends kyurem. call me mr iwao i can make this work

#heinousasks #driftingballoons #pokemon #pokemon legends arceus #pokemon scarlet and violet #heinous plays pokemon

[heinousactszx]

holds mic out. any random agent 4 headcanons?

-like all the agents, not a talker. They can communicate other ways but are so expressive that most of the time you can understand them just by their face

-naturally skilled at turf and ranked. if they had the time or the inclination to train, they'd be a better fighter than both 3 and 8

-loves dodge rolling so much. they're known to grab some dualies, go to the lobby, and just dodge roll again and again until they get kicked out.

-goofy and silly but not very distractable. they have really good focus and pick up on the little things a lot

-will be the protagonist of splatoon 4. it's right there in the title!

#splatoon #thehandwixard #heinousasks #agent 4

[heinousactszx]

What's your stance on the national dex issue for future games? My main fear is that it'll bump out less popular pokemon, even if I don't have an issue with not including all pokemon ever in a game

Swsh ended up being a solid game, and SV was pretty good (bdsp was, uh), but the whole time in the back of my mind i was chafing at the constraints of dexit. like, i'm the type who prefers to use in-game pokemon to make new teams every time and it STILL bothers me. the pokemon are THE appeal to pokemon, it will never be okay that they're not all accessible now. I feel like half the reason they're doing dlc now is to manipulate you into paying more just to have access to old friends again

and you're right, less popular pokemon are gonna get left in the dust. if your favorite is pikachu or eevee or lucario you're fine, but some pokemon are out of luck. By my calcs, 74% of all pokemon at the time are available in Swsh, and 58% of all pokemon are available in SV (the second dlc will bump this up but if patterns hold it'll be a lower percentage than swsh). That gap is going to continue to widen the further we go. it could conceivably be years and years before your favorite shows up in a game again if they keep this up.

it's related to the issue of the games being rushed again. i'd gladly wait for the games to take longer if it means we have access to everyone. I'm not asking for dex entries or revamped movesets or every pokemon to have a dedicate area for catching, I just want them all to be available. and I know game dev is tough but pokemon's internal engine is robust enough to be sharing compatibility to this day from what was established in 2002. I refuse to believe it's that much more difficult to have all these pokemon in the data especially for the most lucrative franchise in the world. a modder working on a natdex in bdsp even noted how easily pokemon can be slotted into the game (bdsp was made in unity, but the point stands)

if they absolutely have to continue cutting the dex, they need to do two things to make up for it

more stuff to do in pokemon home. link battles, a battle tower, pokemon refresh, stadium-style mini-games, anything. there's so many pokemon stuck in home right now, that you can't use for anything other than trading with other people. what's the point? it's a glorified box that costs 20 bucks a year

PORT THE OLD GAMES OH MY GOD. of all game freak's questionable decisions over the years, this one is the most incomprehensible to me by a mile. every single mainline pokemon is on the "best-selling games of all time" list, there is zero reason in the world for these games not to be readily available on every nintendo system forever. imagine if they said "hey ruby and sapphire available on eshop for ten bucks go wild". it'd print money. and yet here we are. and yeah, I know. piracy. that's how I still have them too. but the multiplayer that's such a big part of pokemon can't be done with piracy, it's a huge loss. By my count, there are 38 core pokemon games, and 29 of them are legally unavailable. it's unfathomable

#pokemon #thehandwixard #heinousasks #i got a little off topic from your question but i'm still mad about this so it's a chance to steam

[heinousactszx]

It really is the self-evident object of worship. Even from simple observations in the real world, without science, everyone knows the dominant importance of the sun. You just can't get any more impressive than that!

and science has only made it more impressive, frankly. it's a ball of gas so large it's beyond out ability to understand. it's millions and millions of miles away yet holds us in an iron grip of orbit. it's painful to look at even when blocked. it visibly burns and leaves permanent marks on you just by being in it. those burns kill you from the inside out if you get too many. one day it'll grow so massive it'll consume the earth entirely. yet if it suddenly disappeared, literally all life would die very quickly.

meanwhile, the moon has gotten way less god-like as we've learned more about it. what, it moves some water around? it slows our days? boooo. get some new material, moon! you're not even your own thing, you're just some of earth's debris that made an orb!

#heinousasks #mightyhydrator

[heinousactszx]

thanks for the mystery dungeon ask! What kind of feelings do you have about the games? Which is your fave?

Okay so I don't know if this is a story I've told before, but one time my family took a trip to boston, and while we were there I went to a gamestop in a mall. when you're a kid all you can really do is look at the games and maybe play the demos. anyway i had spent enough time in there and my dad called for me but as i was walking out i saw the little kiosk for blue and red rescue team. All i saw was "play as a pokemon!" and i desperately wanted to go back and look more but i didn't want to get in trouble so i just had to imagine the potential game awaiting me for the rest of the trip.

when i finally got it, after waiting months reading nintendo power previews (and the little manga that came with them), of course i fell completely in love with the game. playing as a pokemon, seeing the world through a different perspective, managing your inventory, bonding with your partner, lying on the test so I could get the pokemon i wanted... oh it was so good. i even bought the guidebook (remember those?) so i could get every last bit of the game completed. I lost DS privileges multiple times because I kept getting caught playing the game late at night on school nights. I loved blue rescue team

then explorers came out... and it was better in every possible way. more items. more pokemon. less frustrating dungeons. a story that was somehow even more powerful than the first game. the guild oh my god i love the guild and everyone in it so much. I bought sky because i wanted to play it even more. i bought TWO guidebooks for those games. still have them.

I don't have exact numbers for how many times i've replayed each pokemon game, but explorers has to be up there. it's in my top 5 pokemon games and the only spinoff on the list. it's so fundamentally a story representing everything i love about pokemon. and it has spinda's juice bar.

as for the others, eh. i didn't play gates because i'd heard they drastically reduced the available pokemon and i wasn't into that (dexit foreshadowing), and while I did play super, i didn't get very far into it because the pacing and difficulty jumps in that game are horrible, and the fact that the playable pokemon were just starters and riolu was kinda lame. the whole mechanical rework for super also irked me. it was fine before why change a good thing. i played the demo for the rescue remake and it was more of the same.

but you know what? I don't need any more. Rescue and explorers are good enough I can enjoy them for the rest of my life no problems. I'm sure I'll replay sky again soon, it'll never go out of style.

#long post #driftingballoons #heinousasks #thank you for waiting on this ask i wanted to give it the full explanation it deserved

[heinousactszx]

Have you had a maractus on your team before? I always wanted to use them, but never got very far 😭

^best quality: their wiggles •w•

i used one in b2w2! it's got solid mixed stats and juuuust enough of a movepool to pull its weight. plus it's adorable just look at its sprites

shake shake shake

maractus feels like the perfect underpowered, one-off oddball candidate for a cross-gen evolution, but it hasn't happened yet. maybe in legends z-a? just pretend france has cacti it's fine

#heinousasks #driftingballoons

[heinousactszx]

What would your ideal 6 pokemon team be?

Misdreavus, magnemite, and maractus are the big 3; they're on and non-negotiable.

The next 3 are nebulous because i genuinely just love so many pokemon it's hard to narrow down any more i love on the level of those first 3. Ask me again in a year and the answer might be different.

But if i had to pick, I'd add tentacruel/toedscruel (basically count as the same), dewott, and drifloon (hi!). Those 3 are all pokemon I've used a lot and always enjoy having on a team

#heinousasks #driftingballoons

[heinousactszx]

favorite boss in metroid so far?

proteus ridley in samus returns, no contest. i know it's controversial and totally changes the tone of the ending but i'm all for it. i love how it perfectly links together the prime games to the 2d games. and it's such a great fight too, not just as a game but for spectacle with those quick, snappy cinematics. she beats the crap out of him, he beats the crap out of her, and even the baby metroid gets in on the action. it's great stuff, and if it's the last ridley fight we get, it goes out with a bang.

honorable mentions are the dark samus fights because i love evil counterparts, and the rundas fight because i love sad battle music

#heinous plays metroid #metroid #thehandwixard #heinousasks

[heinousactszx]

What’s your favorite book or book series?

I love the wayfarers series by becky chambers. it's 4 self-contained sci-fi stories set in a well-developed future universe. the details of these stories and the alien cultures within them are so fascinating, it's full of great world-building. you want to learn more about what goes on in the world and how everything connects together.

I don't want to call them "cozy" reads because there's a connotation to that, and it's not like nothing eventful happens in them (the second book is particularly harrowing and kept me up at night), but they are very grounded in a way most sci-fi is not. and i don't mean that it's "hard" sci-fi, just that the characters in these stories are unremarkable people doing their jobs and living their lives. no luke skywalker heroics here, these are the lower decks.

I highly recommend them for anyone who enjoys some lower-stakes sci-fi

#heinousasks #driftingballoons #wayfarers

[heinousactszx]

why gallons of milk specifically

Because i drink 3 gallons of milk in a week pretty much every week and i live alone. Milk is my favorite foodstuff in the entire world

#anonymous #heinousasks

[heinousactszx]

Which factors are most important to you when choosing pokemon for your team? 

New pokemon are the priority at this point. I've played so much pokemon over the past 24 years that what i'm looking for most is pokemon i haven't tried before. This isn't just about new pokemon for a new game, it's also about trying team members i've never used when playing an old game. it's not that i'll never use an older poke, especially if it's a fave, i just like to mix it up. i'm never one to use the same team every time.

i also try to keep at least some type balance. just enough so that i don't get totally steamrolled by one coverage move. (legends was annoying about this, half the new pokemon were dark or ghost type which was redundant together)

i don't use legendaries, the games are easy enough without using stuff that's deliberately overpowered. pokemon also generally have to have a certain floor of offensive presence for me to use them. like chansey's cool and all but 35 special attack ain't cuttin it. i'll break that rule sometimes (i dragged ledian all the way through ultra moon) but i want my pokemon to actually make progress against npc trainers and defensive pokemon rarely do

other than that though i'm game to use pretty much anything. there's something to love about every pokemon so why not try to use them all?

#heinousasks #driftingballoons

[heinousactszx]

Athena actually does interact with a child…! In a way. She tried to handle and calm down Owen, the 5 year old alter of Uendo Toneido…!

I'd say it counts! my comment was that she'd be good with kids, and so she pretty demonstrably has those skills! if the lawyer thing doesn't work out she'd make a great museum tour guide

#transpanda-1 #heinousasks

[heinousactszx]

have you ever seen the mega man unraveled video where he rates each robot based on whether it was worth risking a sapient robot uprising to build? one of my favorites, was wondering if you had your own take on the concept or rankings

I hadn't, but i just watched it now, and i liked it. cute premise, and i appreciate that he did his research and made exceptions for the robot masters that were expressly built for combat (although he missed a few).

it's a fun concept for a video, and was done well (i don't think i have any major disagreements on his rankings), but i do think that in order to fully engage with mega man as a premise you need to engage with the idea that this is simply a world where such robots exist

my beloved archie mega man had numerous discussions on the ethics of making robots that think and then having them do dangerous jobs (Quake Woman's whole character arc is basically exactly for that discussion), but this bit here is more emblematic of what I mean. on the surface of it, it's ridiculous to build an exploration robot wearing a nemes, arm him with a fireball, and name him Pharaoh Man. there are any number of reasons that would be inconvenient or impractical. but robots built in this manner are simply the way of the world that the story takes place in, and for my money it's more enjoyable to accept it as a suspension of disbelief thing.

I do think there's a darker take on the concept of having so many robots doing human jobs though. the lighter tone of the classic series eventually does give way to the darker X, zero and ZX series, where catastrophe after catastrophe devastate the world, all because of an over-reliance on robots that led to endless war. capcom is clearly never going to specifically bridge that gap (which i respect), but if they were, that'd be one way to do it

#heinousasks #thehandwixard #mega man

[heinousactszx]

Top 5 pokemon types?

Ghost. I know it, you know it, everybody knows it. ghost types are consistently the best and most creatively designed pokemon in the series. Every single one of them is good to amazing

Psychic. Similar to ghost, there's a lot of lovely weirdos. definitely more of a conceptual typing than one with a hard basis you have to go off

Electric. electric types tend to be predictable in shape and i wish there were more blue ones but they have some serious hits

Bug. sooooo many good bugs in pokemon. the series inspired by bugs has good bug designs, crazy

Ground. This might be a a sleeper pick but there's a ton of great ground types and it's such a strong type it has to be up there. it's thematically distinct from rock btw don't let anyone tell you different

#heinousasks #noodles24601

[heinousactszx]

Feeling curious, which is your #1 favorite pokemon game, and why? :3

it's close. it's really close. and it took me a long time to truly settle on a favorite

but it's platinum. it could never be anything but platinum

there's just something... magical about sinnoh. the way it looks, the way it sounds, it's got something about it that no other pokemon game is quite able to match. all of the myths really drew me in, especially as a kid, and made the whole thing feel so much bigger than just what we were seeing. plus the day night cycle hit harder here than in johto, especially with that beautiful nighttime music

And the pokemon are great too. I know the increased number of legendaries wasn't everyone's cup of tea, but in a region so focused on myths, i think it worked. plus the fact that so many old pokemon got extended families was great, and added so much to the world. i don't think misdreavus would have become my favorite if it hadn't gotten extra focus by getting an evolution. i wish they had added more, honestly. they all feel so integral to the pokemon now, when i go back to an older gen i get sad when i remember "oh yeah magnezone's not here yet"

and while diamond and pearl had their (significant!) issues, platinum fixed up almost all of them. better pokemon selection, better load times, better opponent teams, a more refined story, plus a lot more endgame content. i spent hours at the battle frontier as a kid, it's WAY better than emerald's. the fact that BDSP didn't bring forward ANY of the updates from platinum is mind-boggling

platinum is a game i'll always come back to and be able to enjoy just on its own merits. sometimes when i play an older pokemon, i'll mix it up one way or another, but platinum i don't need a thing to be different. just typing all this up is making me want to replay it again!

(close seconds on favorite pokemon game are black and white, which proved you could reinvent the wheel if you just executed everything perfectly, legends arceus, a breath of fresh air which managed to change so much for the better and defied all my expectations, and explorers of sky, which you certainly don't need me to tell you why it's up there)

#heinousasks #driftingballoons

[heinousactszx]

Which paradox pokemon is YOUR favorite? And if you could pick another to get a form, what would it be? :3

My favorite is definitely Iron Valiant. combining two pokemon into one makes it looks distinct and cool, and i wish more of the paradox mons had done it. Plus making the empathic gardevoir and gallade into a killer robot is a good twist

as for a new one, maybe lopunny? a past form could lean fully into the feral shape that the mega hinted at, and a future form could turn the giant ears into weapons or thrusters. i would also love if maractus got one, although i don't have any real ideas for it

#driftingballoons #heinousasks