UK charts: Pokemon Legends Arceus spends third week at No.1

My last Pokemon before Pokemon Legend Arceus was .. Pokemon platinum on the Gameboy DS. All these reviews claim how the tutorial is drawn out and has 2 hours of non stop dialogue. They claim how the game doesn’t pick up until roughly 2 hours in.

Sure most already know the basics of Pokemon, but some haven’t played in ages.
It’s not like some games that more less force new comers and experienced players to play on the same skill level or same difficulty … Like King’s Bounty 2 and Disciples Liberation. Neither have a difficulty setting until it was added with an update

Started it two days ago. Already have around 17 hours on it, with most of the main game complete.

Super short review:

Questing, adventuring, overworld, process of catching pokemon: Great. Best set up the franchise has ever had.

Combat, adjustments to mechanics of pokemon in battle: Ehhh, a little sub par at best. The core changes to the pokemon, like the removal of passive abilities, and the overall weakening of defense in all forms, would DRAMATICALLY reduce the number of viable Pokemon overall. They just can’t apply this to all the games. Too many pokemon would be utterly ruined by it. A lot of Pokemon are entirely balanced by things that simply don’t exist in this game.

As for how the combat engine works mechanically, the changes made would more or less destroy the competitive pokemon scene. Agile and Strong style moves are just way too abusable at no cost. You can Agile style a Hyper Beam, a move who’s power is supposed to be balanced by skipping your next turn, and actually get two turns in a row instead. With that second turn, you can Strong Style Hyper Beam. This would make Hyper Beam function how its actually supposed to, but chaining these together means you get 325 attack power worth of hyper beam, rather than 150, at no extra cost.

Weather effects removed, sleep is not sleep at all, in any way, completely changing all strats that use sleep which ruins a lot of pokemon, stat adjustments work completely differently, ruining a lot of pokemon, but more importantly are dumbed down. No longer can you raise attack and lower special attack. Now its just ” offensive stats were raised”.

I can understand why some people would call this the worst Pokemon game. If the only thing you cared about in Pokemon were the combat system and building competitive teams, this game has nothing for you. That said, that’s not what this game was designed to be. They didn’t include online vs. battling for a reason.