Pokemon Legends ZA Trailer and More Thoughts On Wilds
Hello. I’m a little sick. I can’t quite focus on Wilds right at the moment so I thought I’d write something. The meat of this post will be about Wilds but I wanted to start with my thoughts on the Pokemon Legends ZA trailer.
The Legends ZA trailer didn’t make me excited. I usually buy and play Pokemon games regardless but I’ve been losing interest. I like to have as many of the legendary and mythic Pokemon as I can get but I didn’t even get the Scarlet and Violet DLC I’ve been so uninterested. The games just have been lacking something recently. I remember seeing art for X and Y, no, it was Sun and Moon wasn’t it? Yes, art for Sun and Moon, there is a picture of a Blastoise in a bucket like truck to be used as fire truck and that really excited me. I was hoping to see Pokemon be more of a part of society but they weren’t, and they STILL haven’t. Even in the original games you had spaces where Machops and/or Machokes were in construction sites. With the games limited visuals you could imagine them helping with construction but to this day Pokemon still just stand around in town, just being there. Overall ZA just looks boring. Recently watched a video talking about how more recent Yakuza games take place in a small city but it’s packed full of stuff to do and I just don’t see Game Freak doing that. They are just comfortable doing the bare minimum. I’ll wait and see but I’m really thinking this is gonna be a game I skip.
On
to Monster Hunter. I’ve mostly finished the story I’m guessing, we’ve moved on
to High Rank now and I think I’m understanding more of my issue with the story.
As I said in my last post, in Monster Hunter, the story is just in the way of me playing with my friends and I think it’s
because overall I see my character as a background character or something. Like
in any generic fantasy animes, you have the main character who goes in the
dungeon and hunts the monster like everyone else but something special happens
to them. I don’t need to be the main character. I don’t WANT to be the main
character, I want to be one of those background fucks whose sole purpose is to
go to the quest counter, see who needs help with something and sets out to do
it. The chef needs this monster out of the way so he can get his supplies? You
got it! I want to eat his new recipes! Main character has a huge, village
ending level threat that they need help with? More than happy to help out, but I don’t need to be the hero. In like
World and Rise there was an overarching plot and um… dammit what’s the word?
Damn illness… Mystery to solve? Where is the Zorah Magdaros going? Why is the
rampage happening? And it was a huge effort. In World there were four other
fleets of hunters and researchers before your group and even your group was, I
was lead to believe, had at least a handful of hunters other than yourself. In
Rise the whole village helped against the rampage from the village leader right
down to the quest givers and the dango girl. In Wilds it’s just you. You, Alma
and Gemma. You three. Olivia is there to provide some sort of a leader presence
but overall it’s just you three doing what you want. I find it weird also that
I don’t love the way the story goes. In previous games we’d see remnants of a past civilization but it’s never really touched on. In these games you might find some worn or rusted weapons in mining nodes, upgrade them and the descriptions would talk about them being from unknown origins. Wilds basically gives us all the answers. Once you explain a mystery it’s no longer interesting. The fun thing about a mystery is not to solve it but to speculate about it. It’s like watching Penn & Teller’s Fool Us, I see tricks on there and think “Wow, how on Earth did they do that?” but then sometimes I’ll find a video explaining the trick and it’s always something so simple and mundane and it’s just not cool anymore.
I kind of like the idea of customizing your camp site but I don’t love that it’s only for your pop-up camps. I am not the kind of person who is willing to sit here and customize every single pop-up camp. If it was like previous games where you had a main camp in every zone that was customizable, that I could get behind. I like the idea of your hunting party sitting around the camp fire before a hunt, prepping, eating a meal together.
The gameplay at the moment honestly makes me sleepy. To be fair, I am ill, as I’ve said, and I’ve just been going through the low rank optional quest one after another but still, I’m falling asleep. Post the quest, jump on my raptor, it autopilots me to the monster, I fight the monster, I win, repeat. In Rise you could ride your Palamute around the map but you still had to actively control it. I’ve noticed that mounting a monster doesn’t seem to pose any risk now. I have not once got thrown off a monster while attacking it with my weapon and not once pushing the “hold on” button. Just earlier I was fighting the big Shadow of the Colossus thing and it shot be with its frost breath three times while I was hacking at its back and nothing. Didn’t bother me one bit. I saw this lengthy Reddit post recently and the OP makes a lot of good points that I agree with, I think it’s worth a look. One thing they mention is how there’s no fear of running out of items because you can just go back to your camp and restock. There were many times when I’d get on a hunt and be like “Uggghhh! I forgot my hot drinks again!” and my friends would be kind enough to give me one or two each so we could continue. I don’t mind prep work, I kind of like it honestly, so I don’t quite understand why Chillshrooms and Hot Peppers grow in hot and cold regions respectively, in the game. I won’t lie, I was quite happy I wouldn’t need to remember hot and cold drinks in Rise but if you’re just going to put the exact ingredient that you need for the region you are in then what’s even the point? In Wilds we have little bugs on the wall that also serves the same purpose. The bugs I can almost get behind, they’re a creature living in a harsh climate so they’ve adapted, okay, but the plants I don’t think make sense. The bugs could also only provide a temporary fix, not the full length of the drinks but if you’re mid fight, realize your buff is gone but there’s a bug near by that you can grab to hold you over until the monster leaves you alone so you can use your drink.
I came across a post on BlueSky of someone saying they’re running out of things to do in Wilds and that “master rank can’t get here soon enough.” A typical thing a gamer to say. I mean, I’m probably worse because they just want the expansion but I’m looking for the NEXT Monster Hunter because I think that will be more to my liking, but I’m gonna play this one, I might bounce back into Rise here and there but I’ll continue with Wilds. It is still fun it’s just losing some of its predecessors’ charm. I remember back in Generations my friends and I were really plowing through that game, trying to get to G-rank because that’s where “the real game” was and as we were doing High Rank I was quickly realizing that there was no G-rank. This was it and it was kind of a bummer for us. We didn’t know different at the time. We started with 3 Ultimate, which was Tri with G-rank, and then 4 Ultimate which was the same. We didn’t have a base game and an expansion after.
So, that’s that. I’m gonna go take some more meds. Maybe nap. What do you think of the Pokemon Legends ZA trailer? What are your thoughts on Wilds? Let me know below and I’ll get back to you sometime, bye-bye!
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