Elden Ring

Available on Playstation 5, Playstation 4, Xbox Series X and S, Xbox One, and PC.
PC Version used for Calvin and Elliot’s review, Playstation 5 version used for Reece’s review.

Now this triple review is going to be very interesting, because it’s going to come from three different perspectives. If you want the perspective of the long-time huge fan of Dark Souls, you should read Elliot’s review. If you want the perspective of someone who is new to the Dark Souls franchise and gameplay style, read Reece’s review. If you want the moderate player, but not someone who would call themselves a massive fan or devotes an incredible amount of time to the franchise, read my review.

Now Elden Ring has had a huge development hype. It was revealed in 2019 as FromSoftware’s newest intellectual property which they had collabed with Game of Thrones creator George R R Martin. They also now said that they were going for a world inspired by Norse mythology. The biggest difference is the fact that this time we are having a FromSoftware game that is open world. My concern going into the game was ‘would open world design really affect the basic concept of the Dark Souls game type?’, and yes, this is very much in the same vein as FromSoftware’s previous titles (the Dark Souls trilogy, Bloodborne, and most recently Sekiro). Not much is really different this time, bar a few new elements added.

Personally, I was quite glad that this was going to be a more traditional game. As much as I think Sekiro is a very good achievement (and it did win Game of the Year back in 2019) I did find that the timing aspect to it often made fights a little more frustrating than need be, but that’s a personal matter on my part – I’m not normally a fan of timing mechanics. That being said, my favourite games prior to this were Bloodborne and I also have a special place in my heart for the Demon Souls remake that was done by Blue Point for the PlayStation 5. Though I will say, since doing that review I have kind of noted that while the game is great it does suffer from the fact that it’s just recreating the first one of these kinds of games and as a result it imports some things that haven’t exactly aged well and were taken out of the franchise for good reason.

So how does Elden Ring stack up from this lot?

PROS

• The open world

My fears that an open world would compromise a ‘souls’ experience which is known for having very excellent level design that rewards exploration as well as knowledge of the environments has been transferred very well into an open world. There are a few areas such as caves and castles that more resemble a Bloodborne or Dark Souls experience, so it’s not as if you’re going to be completely removed from that. And of course, there is a hub location with various vendors, side quests, and NPCs to interact with. This time it’s known as ‘the round table’, and in all honesty this might be my favourite save location in any of these games! There’s a ton of personality to it and it feels great the more it opens up as the game goes on. True, it’s not exactly unique to this game when compared to the developers’ previous track record, but personally I am a fan of this. There’s just something about this one that I really like. The great thing about the open world is not only do we get those great locations, but you’re also not limited to them. For example, I was following the beaten path until you get to the first boss in the game (or at least the first one that was mandatory) I was pretty much unable to defeat said boss, and usually this would mean that I would have to go through the beaten path again, grind for ages to increase some of my stats so that I would stand a better chance against the boss, but this one was particularly hard! The great thing was that I had a whole open world to explore – I could find a whole bunch of easier bosses to take down and explore lots of other areas, I actually got to have fun getting ready to fight a hard boss. This is something that is primary throughout the game, there’s very few times where you feel ‘boxed in’ which is not something I could say about the rest of the series.

What’s more, the world is fantastically designed. It feels like all of these areas flow into one another but they all have very distinctive area types so you can identify where you are. They’re usually emphasised by the colour palette of the area. I just loved exploring it! Granted, it’s quite hard when you don’t pick up a map, but map fragments are easy to find once you figure out what the particular space on the blank version of the map looks like, so I would recommend picking them up. This game has one of the best maps for an open world that I’ve ever seen, it really does an excellent job highlighting odd areas that are worth exploring, and I found a whole bunch of the best locations in the game just by putting a pin in a certain area and going off to explore it.

Bottom line: No, the experience is not compromised, if anything it’s actually truly enhanced this game and there are virtually no dull areas to explore. Although I had trouble with one particular area that has been meme’d, as much as I was having trouble there I still enjoyed exploring it. And wow, is this a beautiful world to explore, in a dark, gothic, mediaeval way.

• Character creation

This is a very small point, but I think the character creator this time around is better than ever. I’ve seen some excellent character creations online and I was really impressed with just how well you can work with it. It’s kind of pointless in the end because you’ll be picking up elaborate armour which covers up most of the design you’ve worked on, but it’s very much appreciated. Plus, if you pick a certain class at the start of the game, you’re going to be seeing your character’s face for quite a bit.

• Combat

Combat has always been good in these games, but I think it’s actually really good this time around and it might actually be the best they’ve ever made. It’s your usual style of slow but precise combat, you’re looking to figure out an enemy’s weakness and take advantage of it, you dodge, block, and choose between light attacks and heavy attacks with your chosen weapon- or if you’re a magic class you can choose certain spells. Plus, you have a dodge roll which is based on light, medium, or heavy based on your equipment mode and the type of things you’re carrying. Sidenote: you really don’t want to get the heavy roll, some of the bosses will kill you outright if you have it.

If you’ve played any Souls-like game before, it’s fairly evident what you’re getting in for. There are some new features added to this game, most notably, the game contains special abilities tied to weapons called Ashens of War as well as the new summonings where if you’re not currently in a multiplayer session, you can pay a bit of your FP (your magic cost) or in one case your health to summon a companion. This is usually based on certain enemies in the game. For example, a couple you get early on is the wolves one, as well as the jellyfish. Here’s a tip: that’s a good one to use early on. It’s a tank that can make mincemeat from some of those early bosses, but if you get any that you like do not forget to power them up at the round table. Look up a guide on how to get that shop opened up, you will need that for the later game.

I’ve heard people say that summonings only really exist to be aggro for bosses, but they can actually be really useful! At one point I had one that was so excellent that it was winning boss fights for me- until FromSoftware weakened it in a patch.. Thanks complainers, you just made that harder for me! But trust me, if you can power them up, they can be your greatest ally in some of these fights, though you will be limited, like increasing your weapon stats with the blacksmith, you will be also required resources as well as runes, which is the equivalent of what souls were in Dark Souls or blood echoes were in Bloodborne.

The Ashens of War on the other hand are combat tricks that are tied to a certain weapon, and they often will come with special attacks that you use by hitting the left back trigger- aka L2 if you’re on a PlayStation 4 or 5. Some of these are excellent, for example I got one that caused a blood loss build-up which is great for certain bosses when tied with the katana (yes, you guessed it, I chose a Samurai for my starting class), but I also could have given it a poison ability, which meant sacrificing some of my weapons attack power but it caused a massive poison build-up which meant that I could have more time away from bosses whilst they still took damage. You really want to read through this, since it means that you don’t necessarily have to trade out weapons to deal with boss weaknesses.

Between these two additions, they really refined the combat excellently, but what also does the job brilliantly, is that the game adds jump buttons. Initially when I started this out this felt really wrong, you shouldn’t be able to jump in a Souls game! But man, this addition works and even adds a new jump attack to deal very serious damage.

The other major addition is the mountain combat, since this is an open world game they give you a horse to ride, and you’re going to do some boss fights as well as some traversal combats on horseback. This took a bit of getting used to for me, but I did end up getting the hang of it. When you get the hang of it, it’s incredibly fun to do.

• Multiplayer functionality with friends

The multiplayer functionality definitely has major issues within this game when you’re trying to play with random people (I’ll vent my frustrations on that later) but if I wanted to play with friends it was very well done. The major benefit is you can enter what is known as a ‘friend password’ which means when you go to a certain area you’ll only see summon signs from the people that have entered that specific password and vice versa. It works really well, I actually just tested it out with a few of my friends for some player vs player combat as well as cooperative play and it functioned really well!

As a whole, it functions really well – I wasn’t really noticing many performance issues during multiplayer. That being said, I of course have some complaints with the multiplayer, but I’ll save those for later. The fact that they added the password system really benefits as it makes sure that you can team up with your friends, even if they don’t want to help out because they don’t want to be spoiled in a boss fight.

• Graphics and art style

Okay, I’ll get it out there now: Elden Ring does not look as good as BluePoint’s Demon Souls remake, but that doesn’t stop it from being one of the best looking souls games to date. I think it’s the art style that helps in a big way, but it does feel like the team looked at the engine they have been using in Sekiro and thinking about how they can get the most out of it. As a result, this game looks stunning! I genuinely think that out of all the FromSoftware titles that this is their best looking game to date. There’s very little popping in the open world as well, and when it was occurring I only spotted it a couple of times which to me suggests that I probably missed it a couple of times.

• Bosses

Bosses are where the make or break happens in these types of games, and Elden Ring has some amazing ones- particularly the unique. I’ll be discussing my issues with the mini bosses later. As for the main bosses, they’ve got a lot of excellent designs, excellent introductions, and I’m certain that the more I look into it the more interesting backstories there will be as well. Now, because of Elden Ring’s open world making it one of the more accessible of these types of games, I do believe that the bosses are going to take some effort. You’re really going to have to learn their patterns and you may need to go and do some additional tasks in the meantime before you can really make another attempt on them. But I would say, don’t be discouraged. As I learnt with one exception you don’t really have to resort to too much shenanigans in order to beat the bosses. Do not be afraid to look up a guide if you’re having trouble, they will have some good tips. But be forewarned, make sure that their ideas match your playstyle- this is especially dependent on if you’ve made a more magic focused fighter or a more strength-focused fighter, or even if you’ve made a dexterity-focused fighter!

The unique bosses have excellent designs and move sets, only a couple of times will you be running around in the open world and just run into them, that’s more saved for the mini bosses. The fights are great and are some of the most memorable ones to date! I won’t spoil too many of them, but I think the highlight comes at the end of the last optional areas in North of the map- they’re probably the toughest boss in any of these games but man do they feel like an achievement once you’ve beaten them. But for the love of god- do NOT fight this boss alone! It is near impossible, bring a friend or two or even get some randoms to help you out.. There’s no shame in it!

MIXED

• Mini bosses

The problem that I have with the mini bosses is that there’s so many repeats.. This applies a bit to the unique bosses, but at least they were further apart and they often were a lot more difficult the second time around. That’s not really the case with the mini bosses, they tend to feel very samey. There’s about a hundred bosses in the game if you count the mini bosses, but a few designs and concepts repeat each other a bit too much. This will probably come up in Elliot’s review and I think he will talk about it a bit more there since he really highlighted this issue to me, but I did notice this a bit more especially in the latter half of the game.

• Soundtrack

I really like the soundtrack, especially considering that there is way less silence this time around, there are a lot more atmospheric songs put in the game, and I actually think that having more music does more good than harm to this game. What’s even better is some of the boss themes, which are excellent. The downside is a lot of the songs repeat themselves quite a bit, so as a result, a lot of the soundtrack doesn’t stand out as much as the one in Bloodborne, for example.

That being said, the soundtrack itself is great!

• Calculating fall damage

This game does have fall damage when you fall from too great of a height, but because of the open world design it is a lot more forgiving than usual. As a result, though, I did often find it difficult to figure out how high I could fall from. I definitely got better as the game went on, and I’m not willing to put it in the con section because you can buy items to alleviate your issues with this. Overall, it’s not too major of an issue, but I did feel as though I should point it out.

CONS

• Multiplayer functionality with random people

The multiplayer functionality hasn’t been optimal at this time with Elden Ring. I experienced this quite early on, there were a good number of times where it was impossible to get multiplayer sessions going where you were the host. There was only one area where I could consistently get cooperative multiplayer help from random people, which was the area before the boss which I told you that you should bring friends to if you’re going to fight it, which was probably the most thankful I was for support, because they practically beat the boss for me and made up for my weaknesses. I know that Reece also required help to beat this boss as well, so I’m glad it worked at this point consistently, but we both ran into issues almost constantly. I know the Xbox version has particular issues and what’s worse is the fact that more times than ever we had to see ‘Unable to summon co-operator’ and seeing that sign is just draining. I think this is mainly because there are a lot of people playing at once so they’re getting snapped up pretty quickly, but I stand by that I think the servers could be better to handle this and to make sure that people summon signs that are impossible to be summoned aren’t around too much.

• The Godskin Duo

This is the only boss name I’m going to point out because, wow, this is the worst boss fight in this series’ history. It’s not bad in a hard way, it’s bad in just being completely bad design and it’s just so frustrating to do. There is nothing about the design of this boss that feels fair. I think that a new patch needs to curve this a little bit. When you see that name on the health bar, you are not ready. You either need to bring help or have an excellent summon to back you up, especially if you are a strength class. They were, without a doubt, the worst boss that I had to deal with in the entire game and possibly the worst boss in the series – I hated fighting them that much! I wouldn’t mind so much, except that they are a mandatory boss fight, you cannot get to the end of the game without beating them. I don’t know if Reece will bring it up in his review, but he had to change his entire fighting style and class mid-game just to beat these bosses.

It stands to another point that I want to make about this game, which is I feel like the game favours you being a magic based fighter rather or a strength or even a dexterity based fighter, because you really noticed by the end game that they have a massive advantage, and this fight is no exception. I think a pure strength build cannot beat this boss, especially with some of the best Ashens of War and summons for that class receiving a downgrade in the most recent patch while some of the best magic in the game which is already doing well got a buff?! It almost felt like the developers were saying we want you to play this game this way, and we’re going to punish you for playing it another.

It didn’t ruin the experience entirely for me, I was able to find the correct combination to really make the fight doable and I eventually did it, and probably should apologise to my neighbours considering how exuberant I was after I defeated it, but man, it was just a chore.

• PC Version Issues

I will say that this is more because if I don’t mention it it’s going to be very hypocritical because it’s not as if I don’t know they exist and I haven’t seen them. I will state that I think my PC must be better than I thought, because I was not running into a lot of the issues that other people were having. The game had a pretty good framerate for me, even when I had it at the highest resolution possible for the game. I did try turning down the resolution from 4K to 1440p to see if I would get a better framerate, but it was about the same so I decided to go with the better resolution. Though, I will say, I have heard from other PC users that turning down the resolution has aided the framerate which, believe me, you want this game to run at mostly 60 frames per second for most of it. The correct timed attack or dodge is going to make all of the difference.

That being said, the PC version appears to be the most inconsistent in terms of performance; certain PCs are running into issues with performance and the game straight up freezing or crashing. Fortunately for me, I only had two crashes and one freeze did eventually heal itself. What’s more, I only ran into the falling mounted combat glitch once, it cost me a lot of runes but it only happened one time.

Bottom line, if you only have a PC and you think that you have a very good one, it’s fine to experience it now, but you might want to wait for that version to get a few more patches.

So how does Elden Ring stand up? Well, despite some of the issues with it seeming to have more of a preference towards magic fighters or strength fighters (which I have been informed seems to be prevalent in other games of the series, but it feels slightly more prevalent and unusual this time around) I think I can safely say that Elden Ring is my favourite in the series. I loved the exploration, I loved the combat, I loved the world design, I love the fast travel that makes it really easy to explore the world and means that we get more rest locations than ever, I loved the characters, the world settings, the boss fights, it’s all excellent.

If the multiplayer functionality was better and there was less performance issues across the board, I would have no problem scoring this game even higher if I didn’t feel like the second half did more damage than good, I think that the second part really felt more unfair than the first half in many parts towards my style of gameplay.

But as a whole, I did really like this game, and considering I could have possibly beaten this game before the new patch came in, I thought it wasn’t entirely fair to mark it down on that basis.

If you love these kinds of games, I think this is one that you should really pick up. And as for newcomers, while I do think if you don’t like Souls games already this might not be the one for you, this is definitely the one that has the most accessibility options and the one that has the most balanced challenge.

This game is fantastic, and I have no trouble highly recommending it.

Score 9.5/10

Reece’s Review

My experience with Elden Ring is that I have beaten the game and have begun “Journey 2” aka New Game + I also have every trophy on the PS5 version except 3 (Get 2 specific endings and the 3rd is the Platinum Trophy itself)

I played the entire game on the PlayStation 5 so I have no other experience with the other game versions aside from that, so all pro’s and con’s in this review are just from the PS5 version and do not reflect other consoles or PC versions.

Elden Ring is the latest game in the “Soulsborne” genre spun out of the “Souls” series created by FromSoftware and game director Hidetaka Miyazaki.

Elden Ring is an 3rd Person Action Roleplaying game as sees players traversing a vast open world on a quest to restore the Shattered Elden Ring and overcome any obstacle in your way to get to that goal and become the new Elden Lord of the Lands Between.

Elden Ring is currently released on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X and Windows for PC.

Pro:Weapon variety

Being an action game first and foremost I’m glad to say that Elden Ring has fantastic weapon variety and combat options as they player is free to create their character in any way the want from melee, archery, sorcery and incantations.

For melee fighters plays can use a wide variety of swords, spears, axes, claws, hammers, scythes and whips. This also doesn’t take into account all the subdivisions meaning that melee fighters have multiple options at all time so they will never get board as the different categories of melee weapons all have a varied move set to use.

Then ranged fighters have the different range of bow types and Staves for Sorceries (Intelligence Magic) and Incantations (Faith Magic). Bows use a wide variety of arrow types from haemorrhage, poison and Scarlet Rot so you can pick off your enemy from great distances before they have a chance to get close to you.

The real fun for range fighters in my opinion is with Sorceries and Incantations. As with Sorceries you use more traditional magic that you would see in fantasy films with brightly coloured bolts of energy flying through the air all the way up to throwing a small moon at your opponents.

While Incantations use more Holy themed magic and fire magic, and focuses more on buffing the player character and their stats then using more creative spells with lighting and fire that feel very distinct from Sorcery builds, so if you have a friend who focuses on Sorcery then you will play very differently to them if you use Incantations.

So no matter how you build your character you will always have multiple combat options and even if you don’t have the correct stats to wield a new weapon or spell then you can level up or respect your character which is easily done from the midgame onwards.

Weapon skills

A great new system for Elden Ring is the new weapon skill mechanic using the Ashes of War to apply new skills to basic weapons while special weapons have fixed weapon skills.

These new skills allows players great freedom in how to use their favourite basic weapons as some basic weapons already have built in status builds up like some weapons generate haemorrhage on hit but you could put another weapon skill on it to also inflict Scarlet Rot or poison on your skill to create a funny hybrid weapon to inflict enemies with multiple status effects at once.

The only downside is that special weapons have fixed weapon skills that cannot be changed with Ashes of War, but to make up for this the special weapons all have great unique weapon skills that are always fun. The one i used since the beginning of the game till the start of the late game was the Grafted Blade Greatsword as its weapon skill is “Oath of Vengeance” which gave a boost to stats for a limited time which helped me clear out enemies.

Spirit Ashes

Spirit Ashes are a new feature in Elden Ring where for the cost of your FP you can temporarily summon an NPC to help you out in combat.

These range from great early game summons with the Jellyfish who can tank with high HP and occasionally poison the enemy (Which you get outside of the first castle) to later game summons where you can summon powerful knights and assassins to help you out in combat.

These are great for new players who can’t get another player to summon in with the current state of multiplayer summoning is with randoms online, as they give the player enough breathing room to drink a health or FP flask while your summon draws aggro for you from the boss.

I would definitely recommend players to find as many as they can as they are very useful and most early game summons can still be useful in the midgame when levelled up with the special plants that you can find in the catacombs with the Grave Gloveworts being used to upgrade basic summons and Ghost Gloveworts being used to upgrade the special summons.

Open World

Elden Ring has an extremely vast open world that harkens back to the days of Skyrim where instead of modern day open world creations that are mostly barren and empty, instead Elden Ring is filled with dungeons, jails and environments.

So that the player is never board as there is always something optional to do in the early and mid-game until you are funnelled into the late game and more focused in your objective.

The player is also always rewarded for exploring the world with new weapons, armours and Ashes so if they feel stuck in the current area then they can explore other parts of the map to get better equipment or grind more runes to level up and increase their base stats.

Bosses Elden Ring has over 100 bosses in the game with at least 70 being unique, so players will almost always face a new unique threat every time they go into a boss fight and never really be sure of what to expect.

There is also a great variety in the different shapes and sizes of the bosses from regular sized humans all the way up to giant monsters that have more in common with Bloodborne.

All bosses also have varying weaknesses and strengths to keep players on their toes, as bosses can be immune or resistant to player builds like a boss could be immune to Haemorrhage aka Bleed/Blood loss which is the main build for Dex melee builds, so players cannot always use the same strategies against every boss or they will quickly be defeated.

Mount freedom

Early in the game the player gets access to Torrent who is the mount for the game and by using Torrent it allows players to quickly traverse the map and gives players greater freedom through the use of a double jump.

The double jump is a great way to bypass some platforming challenges as instead of going round and slowly climbing an area you can use Torrent to jump up through terrain that shouldn’t normally be climbed on, so players can speed up traversal using Torrent and I wish more open world games had a mount as fast as Torrent.

Music Elden Ring has a fantastic OST with amazing songs in every situation from exploring deep dark catacombs to facing off against gigantic bosses.

I found myself going to the options just increase the music slider just to hear the boss themes louder as every main shard bearer boss has a great theme song that I never tired of hearing.

Con:Graphics Texture pop-in was a real issue with the PS5 port as riding around on Torrent with grass and foliage constantly popping in right in front of my character was very jarring and difficult to play with.

Individual assets in game also have low quality textures and are blurry on the PS5 in Graphics mode and are really noticeable in Performance Mode, as even the map would glitch out when scrolling in and out as the map unloads so it goes back to its brown fog setting of before you find any map pieces.

It also is a major downgrade from the recent remake of Demon’s Souls, as not only are the textures more blurry, but it also lacks the brighter colour palette of the previous games and feels quite dull and dreary.

Frame rate

In both Performance and Graphics mode Elden Ring could not hold steady in its frame rate, as even in Graphics mode which is supposed to aim for 30fps (Frames per Second) I frequently found it dipping below even under 20fps at time which made the game practically unplayable so most of the time I had to play in Performance mode but even then that dropped from 60fps a lot to around 40fps.

The game just seems very unoptimised for PS5 and both of its modes, and apparently this was an issue in the old games as they also had poor framerates so hopefully this can be patched in the future to make the game more enjoyable.

Multiplayer summoning

For the final secret boss I spent over 2 hours continuously trying to summon in other players for assistance only for the message “Unable to summon co-operators” to keep appearing even after closing the game down and reopening it.

Collectively I clicked on over 400 gold summoning signs in that time and after all of that I only had 2 players able to connect (Although they still instantly died to the boss so that was redundant).

Multiplayer invasions

When I did a series of invasions as part of a side quest all of them were riddled with lag, so much so they the enemy players I were invaded were glitching around the screen and all instantly backstabbed me.

One time I was even stood behind an enemy while they stood still and when I was in the start of the backstab animation they teleported behind me and backstabbed me instead cancelling out my animation and taking out most of my health in the process.

Endgame common enemies balancing

Towards to the end of the game when you get to the area after the snow area (No spoilers) where common enemies are now very bloated health bars so they take a lot longer to kill but the Runes they pay out are still miniscule so I found it better to just keep running past them and go from boss to boss at the end of the game.

Platforming FromSoftware games have already had bad platforming due to its physics engine and control scheme, making player characters have similar controls to older more rigid action games from the PS2.

What makes this worse is that the finicky platforming is needed to get the Platinum Trophy of the game as you need to do a lot of platforming to get to secret areas as well as for the secret endings.

This also ties into the problem I had with depth perception in the game as fall damage is extremely severe as I either dropped a large distance and took no damage or instantly died and while there are Rainbow Stones in the game you can pick up or you can instead craft them, but that only adds to the tediousness of having to keep a stock of them every time you want to drop a small distance or craft more.

Even using the double jump from Torrent does not seem to alleviate fall damage from the same distance or even when I had landed on a ledge halfway down a drop and then went to the floor I still instantly died even though it was a short drop.

Ambiguous item descriptions

For a game that focuses on stats and how to increase them with various items and talismans, the game is weirdly ambiguous on how they affect stats.

For instance, the Graven-Mass Talisman has in its item description “Greatly raises potency of sorceries.” This is extremely unhelpful as instead of saying it increases your damage by 8% it instead is just a riddle with no clear answer unless you spend a large quantity of time working out the effect of each talisman and start number crunching.

In-game weapon upgrade economy.

There are 2 kinds of upgrade materials needed for weapons, these being the standard Smithing Stones for basic weapons for +25 and Somber Smithing Stones for special weapons for +10.

Basic weapons go up to +24 with enough Smithing Stones that can be bought from shops and special weapons only go to +9 with Somber Smithing Stones bought from shops when the proper ball bearing has been given to the shopkeeper.

The economy has been worked out for between them and to upgrade a basic weapon to +24 you will need 482,400 Runes to buy the 96 Smithing Stones and you will only need 9 Somber Smithing Stones for 97,000 Runes.

This means that the game is very unbalanced as you can easily power level the boss weapons to +9 for roughly 1/5 the cost of upgrading a standard weapon to +24. Whereas the boss weapons should be more difficult to level up and cost more.

Conclusion:I am glad to of picked this as my first Soulsborne game as it is still very enjoyable for a Soulsborne open world game with a lot to do and I spent 70 hours on my first playthrough, so it’s definitely worth the price of admission in my opinion.

The best part of the game is definitely the early and midgame before the game balancing goes downhill, but if you have experience with previous entries from FromSoftware in the past then I’m sure you will love this new entry in the series.

Score: 8.0

Elliot’s Review

(WARNING: may contain minor spoilers)
(At this point in time I have not beaten Elden Ring, mostly due to changes in my real life that have affected my chances to play it, so apologies if I get anything wrong or miss anything out.)

If you know me at all, you’d know by now just how much I adore the Dark Souls series and other Souls-Likes. It’s my favourite series of all time, Bloodborne was what got me into platinum trophy hunting, and despite the brutal difficulty I always have a ton of fun playing each of them (yes, even Dark Souls 2). So as you’d expect, I was really excited for Elden Ring since I heard the first rumour about it, hell when we got the first release date I was jumping and screaming like a child who got a PlayStation 5 for Christmas for about fifteen minutes. Elden Ring was developed by FromSoftware and was released on the 25th February 2022 for PlayStation 4 & 5, Xbox One & Series X and PC. 

Within The Lands Between, the Elden Ring has been shattered. The offspring of Queen Marika the Eternal have now claimed a shard of the Elden Ring, which have been named the Great Runes. This led to a war known as the Shattering, leading to the events of the game. You play as a Tarnished, a being that was originally banished by the grace of the Erd Tree, now returned to The Lands Between to restore the Elden Ring and become the Elden Lord. Elden Ring follows in the same footsteps as most Souls-Likes when it comes to story. Rather than having a straightforward story out in the open, it instead relies on the world itself, item descriptions and character dialog to hint at the story that the players will then figure out for themselves (or they will learn it by watching Vaatividya). I have always said that I liked this in the Dark Souls series and it’s no different here, the environments and characters really make me interested in learning how the world works and what was like before the game’s events. It especially helps that this game’s lore was written by A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin.

Presentation wise, this is without a doubt the best looking FromSoftware game to date with the exception of Bluepoint’s jaw droppingly stunning Demon’s Souls. The environments and character models are incredibly detailed and look distinct from one another. Each major area you explore looks very distinct from one another, from the expansive meadows and forests of Limgrave, to the twisted and haunting swamps of Caelid, to the star-filled sky of Siofra River, you won’t find yourself mistaking one area from another.

 Now you’ve likely heard horror stories of the performance issues of Elden Ring’s PC version, and while I personally haven’t found it as bad as other people have, I can confirm that it has left much to be desired. The framerate is very inconsistent and ended up lagging for a few seconds on multiple occasions. Luckily it plays a lot better on PlayStation 5, and after restarting my playthrough on that a few days ago, I can confirm that I am not turning back. Definitely not unplayable, but there are much better options out there.

You’ll notice that in recent years a number of Souls-Likes have been adding more sombre music to their world rather than just the boss fights, FromSoftware decided to add on to this with Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and have continued to do so with it in this game. The music focuses on ambience and setting the mood for the environment and does a really good job at it, Limgrave’s music, for example, sounds very grand but at the same time somewhat sombre and depressing, meanwhile Caelid’s would fit right in a horror game, it’s incredibly haunting and dread inducing, really adding to the absurdity of the area. Of course, the main spectacle with the music is in boss fights, and holy hell are they amazing. The music makes the fights go from a challenging skirmish to an epic clash between enemies. The grandness and extravagance of the music leads to what is, in my opinion, one of the best soundtracks of any souls-like.

The game is what you’d expect from any other souls-like. You traverse sections of the world, encountering troublesome foes and dying a lot. Once again, FromSoftware has designed the game to be a strenuous but fair challenge to all players to pick it up, and once again it has a great balance between the two. While encounters in this game are difficult for their own reasons, I never felt like it was a flaw in the game and it normally felt like my own fault for not fully knowing how to take on the challenge or just me getting greedy at the worst times. I always felt that I had a chance to defeat everything that came my way, all it would take was time, patience, practice and stubbornness (more often than not stubbornness). 

There are a number of differences with this game compared to other Souls-Likes, both major and minor. Minor ones mostly consist of names getting changed, souls are now runes, bonfires are now sites of grace, estus flasks are now flasks of crimson tears and so on.

Though the major changes really add to the game, and for the better in my opinion. 

One of the main changes is the world itself. I tend to call games in the Dark Souls series semi-open world, as while you are able to explore to your heart’s content and take on certain areas in any order, the game is still pretty linear and you’re mostly limited to what areas you can explore depending on how far you are in the game. With Elden Ring you have no restrictions, immediately from leaving the tutorial area you have complete freedom to go wherever you want. The game does hint you in where to go by a stream of light from the sites of grace pointing you in the general direction of the nearest Great Rune, but if you wish you can ignore them and go to wherever you want. In fact the game encourages that you do so, not only by having the fights in the “main” areas be a bit too difficult for you to fight straight away, but by also rewarding your expeditions with mini-bosses to fight or fortes and catacombs to explore. The best comparison I can make to this is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, as that game also requires and encourages you to travel to different places and explore to your heart’s content before taking on the games primary objections. Exploring is probably my favourite part of this game. I have a ton of fun looking on the map, finding something that looks cool on there and heading towards it, most often I’ll find something fun to do or, more likely, something that’ll repeatedly kill me about a dozen times.

The game provides you with a few things to help make travelling the world a bit easier. For starters, it seems to have taken a few mechanics from Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, most notably that you actually have a jump button now (a fact which I’m still not fully used to saying), meaning that, yes, there are some minor platforming sections. To go with that, you may have noticed that when you drop from certain heights you don’t take any fall damage, which does make the ordeal a lot easier. That being said though, while I personally didn’t have any major problems with the platforming or dropping from heights – most of my deaths from that were either mistiming my jumps or not noticing a ledge in time whilst in a battle – I will admit that it’s not the best. The platforming is quite clunky and it’s not always easy to control. As for the fall damage, it’s not always the easiest to tell if you’ll die from a fall or not, especially seeing as you will take more fall damage if an enemy is nearby, so it’s just a lot of inconsistency there. And while you could argue that the platforming is Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice worked well so it makes no sense not to here, that game does also have a grappling hook mechanic which made it a lot easier, a luxury that this game unfortunately doesn’t have. The game has also brought back the stealth mechanic, which actually works a little too well. If you’re crouching and walking behind an enemy, even if you’re practically touching them, they won’t notice you. 

 In other Souls-Likes you have to be at least resting at a bonfire in order to fast travel from one area to another. That’s no longer a requirement now as you can travel to any site of grace straight from the map, provided that there are no enemies in the vicinity. Another thing that you’ll notice is that while there are no enemies around, you don’t lose any stamina when sprinting, this small addition to the game really makes wandering the world and running through dungeons much less of a headache. 

One of the best new additions to the game is your noble steed Torrent. You get him very early on in the game and he makes exploring the world an absolute joy with how fast he runs, and he’s practically required for a number of mini-bosses – especially the dragon fights. That being said though, fighting while riding on top of him isn’t exactly the best. The side your sword swings on depends entirely on  which of the shoulder buttons you use, and it’s pretty difficult to get an accurate hit when you and your opponent are constantly moving. Torrent also has his own health bar, if/when it’s depleted he’ll disappear and you will have to use up a flask of crimson tears to revive him, though you can restore his health by using a rowa raisin or using your flask of crimson tears while riding him. Though there have been numerous times when he will just disappear when he still has health, and I’ll be honest, I have no idea why, sometimes it’s because he took a lot of damage at one, sometimes it’s because he took too many hits in too little time, I’m honestly not sure. 

Magic once again makes its return in Elden Ring, giving you a variety of spells and incantations to give you an advantage in battle… too much of an advantage. Yeah this game seems to have taken some hints from Demon’s Souls and made magic builds somewhat broken, not to the point where the game isn’t a challenge, but more to the point where the gap between magic and strength builds are quite monumental. Also to aid you in battle, new to this game, is summoning spirits. Sometimes when you defeat a more tricky encounter or boss or by exploring the world you’ll obtain an item called spirit ashes, these will allow you to summon warriors or creatures who have fallen in battle, and are very much a benefit to collect as they can deal damage to your opponent – at times even causing status ailments – and can draw enemy attacks away from you, allowing you to heal up and get in a couple extra hits. In some fights these are a slight advantage, while in others they will be your saving grace. 

Dark Souls 3 introduced weapon skills, which were powerful attacks that you could use depending on what weapon you were wielding. Elden Ring once more brings that back with not only the weapon skills, but also with the ashes of war. Ashes of war are special attacks that you obtain throughout the game. By equipping these to a weapon of choice, you can replace whatever weapon skill the weapon currently has with a new ability to give you an edge in battle. These will include powerful attacks that will help to decimate your opponents, or a buff to your weapon, letting it deal more damage of add a status ailment to your attacks, what will build up with each strike. 

That game also has a crafting system (*sighs* not another one), and I can’t help but feel mixed on it. On one hand it lets you get some very useful items without the need to explore, but on the other hand I can’t help but think that it’s somewhat unnecessary. It just feels like you can have these items be spread throughout the world or be sold by merchants rather than have to find the materials to craft them yourself. Especially seeing as because of this certain items that are commonplace in other Souls-Likes are a lot more difficult to find, for example fire pots. 

Finally, the bosses. The bosses in any Souls-Likes are the game’s highlights, always being the biggest and most satisfying challenge that the player will have to overcome. And for the bosses of this game, I can’t help but be a little mixed. While, as I’ve admitted at the beginning of this review, at this point in time I still haven’t finished the game, and therefore likely have not fought its best bosses yet, I still find myself conflicted. On one hand, I found a decent number of these bosses to be an excellent challenge that I had an insane amount of fun fighting and dying against, I would even argue that some of them are highlights of the genre for me. But on the other hand, I found a number of them to be of little challenge, only taking me a couple of tries to slay, and those deaths were from me getting careless against a certain attack – don’t get me wrong I did have fun fighting them, I’m just a little disappointed is all. That goes for the mini-bosses as well, a decent number of them, I had a lot of fun fighting against, but there were a lot of repeats with one small gimmick to make the fight a bit more interesting. Even more disappointingly, a decent amount of mini-bosses were just regular enemies that had been given a slight health and damage increase, which I just find annoying and somewhat lazy. 

While I have been giving a number of complaints about the game, don’t for a second think that means that I didn’t enjoy it. I thoroughly loved every moment that I spent wandering through The Lands Between, exploring ruins and castles and dying an ungodly amount of times. I can happily confirm that this has become one of my favourite FromSoftware games to date with the exception of Bloodborne, and I’m certain that my love for it will increase as I continue to play it over the next few months. I absolutely recommend you pick up this game and if you’re not a fan of Souls-Likes I encourage you to at least give it a try. I promise you won’t regret it. 

9.7/10

Chocobo GP

(Available for Nintendo Switch only)

Chocobo GP is the latest entry in a Final Fantasy themed cart racer that traces back to two entries on the PlayStation 1. It also is part of the Chocobo Mystery Dungeon series that Square Enix only seems to remember exists every five years, but that’s another conversation for another time.

Chocobo GP has entered a crowded market, especially considering it’s on the same platform as games like Team Sonic Racing, Crash Team Racing, and of course it shares being a Switch exclusive with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (which is still the best selling game on the system having sold over 43 million copies as of last year – and will likely gain even more sales thanks in no small part to the fact that a week after Chocobo GP’s release it will be getting it’s first in 6 DLCs that will add a total of 48 tracks by the end of 2023). In fact, this DLC will probably be out by the time you read this review.

Now, that being said, Chocobo GP had me excited when it was announced because this was coming at a time where I was kind of falling off Mario Kart. I like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, but I’ve been playing those same tracks since it came out on the Wii U in 2014. It’s kind of losing its lustre, but now it has to compete even more for attention in a crowded field. While it’s going to do this by mainly focusing on its Final Fantasy pedigree, the original games mainly focuses on the Chocobo Mystery Dungeon cast with a few FF characters thrown in the mix. There’s a lot more characters, including some Final Fantasy characters including Terra from FF6, Vivi and Steiner from FF9. The game is also adding more characters through several season passes – more on that later.

PROS

• Gameplay and Controls

Now if there’s one thing you can say about Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Crash Team Racing (which I stand by as the two best kart racers you can buy today) it’s that they have buttery smooth controls; you cannot blame the game if you are doing badly! Luckily, Chocobo GP also has very good controls.. They will take a bit of getting used to if you’re used to playing Mario Kart. Drifting is a slightly different beast to how it works in Mario Kart, as well as boosting, but as a whole, it works very well. I did find myself really enjoying just going in between various races and perfectly timing certain corners. You’re going to have to learn certain tracks very well in order to pull off certain combos, but I think it works very well!

As for the gameplay itself, it’s a typical kart racer and you know what you’re in for; race to the finish on wacky themed courses, use items to boost your speed or deal damage to your opponents. The big difference this time is a couple of features, first being that you can actually increase the power of your weapons, part of this is by collecting Magicite, a crystal that you’ll see on the track. From there, you’ll be going through more item boxes to make your weapon more powerful by up to three levels. If you think that sounds like a rip off of Diddy Kong Racing, I want to point out that this feature was in the original PS1 games.

It does add a bit of strategy into the game, mainly being ‘would you save an item for a certain time period or use it immediately?’. You might end up using it immediately for it not to be successful. The other factor as well that is really interesting is that each of the characters have character specific powers that they build up through a meter throughout the game, and each of them are actually decent references to the source game. For example, ViVi uses his Double Black Magic, Steiner uses Sword Arts, etc. They’re relatively cool features and they do add a bit extra, although I will say I had a bit of trouble figuring out when would be the best time to use them and sometimes they weren’t as effective as I would have liked.

• GP Mode

GP mode is the main feature of the game, and it’s one of the things that make this game stand out from other kart racers. Essentially, it’s a kart racing Battle Royale. You and 63 other players will take part in a tournament style race, each time entering with 8 players, going into the top 4, and so on and so on until there is a final eight players and one wins the final race. It’s actually one of the best ideas for the game, it’s a genius move since it’s incredibly addictive. I was hopping on to play this constantly! It was amazing how much fun it was. It certainly is also a good mode for training players who aren’t as good, since you don’t need to come in the top spot to advance, you just need to come in the top 4. It also helps you learn the tracks since each race has a random one selected – although I did notice they repeat a few times, particularly the Dimensional Bridge track, which is repeated almost constantly. If for no other reason, get this game for the Chocobo GP mode! It does feel weird however that the best mode in the game does need an online connection, but really most kart games are better as a multiplayer experience rather than single.

• Track Designs

The only negative I can say about the track designs is some of them often feel a bit narrow so you often go into the wall, and I think a couple of them could have done with spacing things out. That being said, holy moly, these tracks are all awesome.

There’s tons of Final Fantasy references in lots of subtle ways. You’ve mainly got things like the Golden Saucer from FF7 and Alexandria from FF9. It’s amazing how much cool attention to detail has been made, for example, one of the things I noticed in the longer version of Alexandria is that they take you through a dungeon in Alexandria castle with a swinging cage which is reference to a mini game you get during a portion of FF9, and there’s a lot of other subtle events like that which I won’t spoil.

They also had the great idea of extending the tracks out by having two versions of each track, one for quicker races and one for longer races. If you like Final Fantasy, these tracks are great. It also helps that graphically this game is really good and gives a nice colourful feel to the game.

• Soundtrack

If you’re a fan of Nobuo Uematsu music, who composed the soundtrack almost entirely for the first 9 games and has contributed to some of the others, you are going to love this one, since it mostly consists of new versions of his songs and remixes. Newer versions are mostly used for cutscenes, and remixes are used for the tracks, and I love them all. Uematsu is probably one of my favourite video game composers, and it shows how good his songs are that they work so well even remixed in this context. Some of my favourites include the new version of Battle on the Bridge and particularly the remix of Melodies of Life, which I adore and I will probably buy the soundtrack just for those songs alone.

• Character Selection

I actually think that the character selection is pretty good, a good balance between classic Final Fantasy and Chocobo Mystery Dungeon, and what’s better is that most of them are unlocked through the story mode. The downside is that not all of them are, but the character selection as a whole is excellent. Most of the focus goes to the Chocobo characters, so if you’re a fan of that series you will get the most out of them. Final Fantasy fans on the other hand might be waiting a while to see some of their fan favourites, although the game is chock full of so many awesome references that you won’t really care.

The game is also slowly adding more characters, the season pass that launched day one with the game did give you Cloud from FF7 and Squall from FF8. I have heard that Square Enix are planning to add more characters to the game though I suspect that depends on how well the season pass sells.

MIXED

• Content at Launch

That brings me quite well to this point. While the game had decent content at launch, it feels like it’s lacking in the number of tracks, there’s not a lot here and they kind of make up for it by making two versions of the tracks. That being said, there’s less tracks than you’d expect for a racing game like this. I’d say bare minimum you need to have 20 tracks at launch; if you count each of the different versions of the tracks that we have here at launch it still falls under that. Hopefully the plan is to introduce more tracks but at this point the game feels like there’s too few of them and I felt like I was on loop constantly with them during Chocobo GP mode.

• Single Player Experience

The game offers you custom races for your multiplayer as well as a few grands prix, but the main focus is the story mode. It’s basically a tongue in cheek story with not much to it, think of it as being a Final Fantasy version of a kid’s cartoon. Most of the references will be appealing to you if you’re familiar with the Chocobo Mystery Dungeon games or are very familiar with Final Fantasy. It’s not as if it’s going to be familiar to you if you only play FF14, early FF gets most of the attention here, particularly the PS1 era. As a whole it works quite well and most of the challenges don’t even require you to come first, you just have to place ahead of a certain character. You’re going to have to do this mode, most characters are locked behind the story mode. You’ll even have to go through story mode to unlock the characters that you can buy with in game money (more on that later).

As a single player experience, it’s fine – I certainly preferred this to Mario Kart, which still to this day has very bare bones single player, something I hope is improved in future games.

• Online Multiplayer with Friends

It’s fine, it works pretty well, it’s certainly easier to play it online with random people, but that being said it doesn’t have as much freedom on how many friends you can play with as Mario Kart does. You can still play with quite a few friends, but I was joining an executive producer session with the Good Vibes gaming team and they had planned for Chocobo GP to be one of the games that we played but we couldn’t do it because the battle royale mode is not one of the custom modes you can do for online multiplayer, which is a real drag because Mario Kart lets you set up online tournaments that everyone can complete in. I don’t think making that not doable was a very good choice, hopefully this is changed in an update..

CONS

• Micro Transactions

Yep, this game is full of micro transactions that are so unhealthy. It doesn’t really justify the fact that this game is near full price. In order to get the season pass I had to spend quite a lot of money on day one to get the ability to buy Squall and Cloud. It also got me up several levels so that I would have a better chance of gaining tickets so that I could unlock more characters. While most characters do unlock through just beating certain characters in story mode, some require additional purchases, which you admittedly do get through levelling up in the game but you might have to go quite a while if you don’t have a season pass to get those characters. It also doesn’t help the fact the amount I spent was nearly half the price of the full game. That being said, this doesn’t feel as much of a gut punch as when they were added to Crash Team Racing after the release. It feels really predatory to lock certain characters behind a paywall, and it also really drags the game down overall. Honestly, it’s kind of depressing.

Chocobo GP is a really good kart racer. As a Final Fantasy fan, you should pick it up. In terms of gameplay, it really stands up there with Mario Kart and Crash Team racing, but the micro transactions are really a drag. I don’t think there was really enough content at launch, I think that this is a game that will really benefit from some free updates down the line. Because of that, I normally would say you may want to wait on purchasing this one, but if you have any curiosity you should get it now, because if they add any more characters you might end up spending a lot more to get all of them. I can certainly talk from experience from when I was playing Crash Team Racing.

That being said, I think Final Fantasy fans are the ones who will get the most fun out of this, I think CTR and Mario Kart have more universal appeal. But as a kart racer goes, it’s really good when you boil it down to the gameplay, and the Battle Royale feature that they’ve come up with is really great.

Score: 8.2/10

Pokémon Legends Arceus

(Available for Nintendo Switch only)

Much like before I’ll state for the record that the three reviewers that played this game all picked a different starter. Reece chose Cyndaquil, Elliot picked Rowlett and I took Oshawott.

Now, I’ve stated on many occasions that I’m a huge pokémon fan, and I have been for years. And one of the games I’ve been excited to play since it’s reveal is Pokémon Legends Arceus. The game was revealed to have a sort of open world design in which you would be reading pokémon behaviour patterns in order to catch them and traverse the expansive open world environment based on a version of Sinnoh hundreds of years before the events of Diamond and Pearl, with your character helping the Galaxy Squad to create the world’s first Pokédex.

Now despite the fact that i’ve gone on record on several occasions stating that I don’t think the pokémon formula needs much of a mix up, it did seem like the game was going to be a breath of fresh air for the series which has had its issues in the past but I would be interested to see how Game Freak would be approaching this game after developing the wild area in Pokémon Sword and Shield. Now despite the fact that this review is coming out weeks after the game’s release I will be doing my best not to spoil much of the game as I do believe you are best going into this game almost blind.

PROS:

• Open world gameplay

The gameplay is very addictive, and it gives you a real reason to explore the environments. The game consists of five open world areas (more detail on that later) and while some people are disappointed it’s not one expansive open world area, these environments aren’t exactly small either, they take a while to explore. Plus, a few of them do have cut off points, so you won’t be able to explore every single area fully on your first attempt.

But where it succeeds is how well it approaches the content in these environments. You can spend your time catching pokémon or you can do one of the side quests for the hub village which you’ll repeatedly be going back to. Or you can just train up your pokémon. The environments are very varied and they actually do a very good job mixing and matching pokémon by various levels. You know you’re going to have to go back on yourself at some points to deal with certain pokémon, especially to the newly introduced ‘alpha’ pokémon. Those are very strong and very difficult to beat, it might take you a few tries to actually catch one of them, it certainly took me a few attempts. I didn’t manage to really get a significant one until I was about halfway through the game when I caught an Alpha Rapidash.

What the game does very well though is a sense of freedom which is something it has replicated from Breath of the Wild (a game that this is receiving a ton of comparisons towards) the sense of freedom is certainly there, for example, I spent a good chunk of my playthrough for this review fulfilling something that i have always wanted to do but never successfully pulled off in a pokémon game- I managed to get all eight of the eeveelutions. I would urge you to read a guide if you’re going to do that, as it was really time consuming. Though, tasks like that can be quite hard considering that some pokémon like that have really low spawn rates. I certainly found that out the hard way when I missed a torchic that appeared out of nowhere. But the bottom line is, the environments and the gameplay are very addictive. I lost hours in this game just from exploration. This feels like the explorative pokémon game we have all really wanted for years.

• Experience Points Handling

I kind of hinted at this in the last portion of the review, but you shouldn’t really approach this game like you would a general mainline pokémon game. This is mainly because pokémons experience points and levelling up is handled very differently this time around. It once again has an experience share system which I know people are getting a bit annoyed with, but I personally am a fan of it, since it does cut through a lot of the time and does allow my pokémon to level up a bit quicker- I don’t have to have a Magikarp go out there for ages just in the hope I might get a Gyarados soon. This game does handle that well and is very useful considering the level disparity you could have between the pokémon on your team in previous games.

The game also does a brilliant job of giving you experience points for completing side quests and pokémon will gain experience points for gathering resources in the environment such as breaking ore for materials and hitting trees for berries or acorns. Using the environment and side quests to gain experience points all help to really streamline the experience and makes the game a ton of fun as a result, since you wont need to completely rely on battles. Catching pokémon as well also increases the level of the team similar to that of how experience points were handled in Pokémon: Let’s Go for wild encounters.

• The Environments

Each of the environments are very well handled in terms of their design. We didn’t get to see too much of them in the trailers and that was very much to the game’s benefit. You start out with the very basic Obsidian Fieldlands which you’ll eventually break out of into other environments including ice fields and a coastline as well as quite a few others. They all feel very rich and well established. I’ve always said the strength of an open world is when you can use landmarks within the game to help visually guide you through the area and I would say this game does that very well.

They also did a very good job choosing which pokémon should appear in which area including which particular ghost pokémon would appear at night. And by the way the day and night cycles do affect the environment, but It’s only in which pokémon appear at certain times of the day, for example Ghastly and Haunter only appear at night in one particular area. I really liked all of the environments in this game and there wasn’t really a dud in the bunch.

• Completing the Pokédex

Normally to complete a pokédex you just either have to encounter or catch a pokémon. Legends Arceus does something a little more complex and clever, you get a sort of check point system in place for each pokemon which shows how many times it’s been caught, how many times you’ve defeated it in battle, how many times you defeated it using a certain type of move, how many times you’ve witnessed it use a type of move, etc. and you have to reach a score of 10 to fully complete a pokémons entry in the pokédex.

Now you get one point, for example, for catching a pokémon for the first time, but you may not get the next point until you catch two more of those to make a total of three pokemon. And it really makes you think things through in terms of how you’re going to complete this portion of the pokédex, which you really need to figure out because some of the side quests involve you showing a completed entry of the pokédex to a villager in Jubilife Village.

You also might want to think about it in terms of if you’re likely to find a particular pokémon again in the wild. Since Raichu is my favourite pokemon, I definitely wanted one in my team but I had to think ahead to make sure I completed Pikachu’s entry before I made it evolve. And I certainly realised after a while I wouldn’t be able to do this by catching a load of them since they weren’t spawning that fast.

The pokédex system also is aided by another streamlined feature that the game has, pokémon now only evolve if you ask them to. You can have them reach a certain level or certain conditions to make that evolution, but they won’t actually do it until you go into the menu and select ‘evolve’. For example, my Oshawott did get to the stage where it could have evolved but I hadn’t finished its pokédex entry, and of course with the starter pokémon there’s only one in the game, so without training I wasn’t going to be able to do anything more to catch another one. So I held off evolving until I had completed its pokedex entry. Be smart when doing this!

• The Battle System

The battle system works in a couple of ways, the turn based battle systems are still here, and you do this by selecting which pokémon you want to battle and aiming it at what pokémon you want it to battle with, but the system has been refined in a few ways. For one thing, pokémon attack you, so you have to get used to dodging them and perhaps throwing something to stun them before battling or trying to catch them which is something that I would recommend in tight spots that is a bit easier and also buys you some time.

When you actually get to turn based battles, there are some excellent choices made by the developers. For one thing, pokémon that are around the other pokémon in question will join in the battle and you could end up in a three on one battle at some points, so you have to be clever on that front. The game also adds in two extra features for when a pokémon ‘masters’ a move- ‘strong style’ and ‘agile style’. This basically means you can either trade in some of the power stats to gain a bit more speed and potentially get an extra move in, or increase the power at the risk that your pokémon won’t be able to attack for a couple of extra turns but you could finish it off your opponent very quickly. This adds an extra dimension to battles and it makes pokémon battles a bit more strategic, especially when I was looking at the turn order at the side of the screen similar to how battles are handled in Final Fantasy 10.

To put it bluntly, this is probably the best battle system that has been put in a pokémon game to date. Though, if it is to be used in the future competitively, it’s going to need a bit more streamlining to make sure that the system isn’t abused too much by players.

• Selection of Pokémon at Launch

A lot of people complained again about the selection of pokémon at launch, but I don’t know what they’re on about- I actually thought that it’s a very good selection. It’s mostly the generation 4 pokédex, with a few extras throughout the franchise. Though, I would say don’t expect too many late stage pokémon, particularly generation 7 and 8 are not really represented here- in fact most pokémon post-generation 4 are not accounted for here. The obvious exceptions being the fairy evolution of eevee, Sylveon, which I would urge you to get in your party cause it can do some incredibly broken moves. I actually think they did a decent job with the selection and the new forms of pokémon have been very well designed with very interesting new types added to them. I won’t give away too many of them since not all of them have been revealed through trailers, but there’s a good selection here.

• Boss Fights

These are some of the most epic parts of the game. I loved the boss fights. This was demonstrated through a gameplay share just prior to release. They include you throwing balms of a relaxing powder to a pokémon to calm them down until their meter hits zero. Occasionally if they become stunned, you can throw one of your pokémon to battle with them. There’s not too many of these within the game, but when they are brought out they are the most epic moments. They really emphasise the new control scheme which is really excellent, and aiming was never really an issue unless the boss pokémon had really good agility. The camera never really brought me too many issues on this part, and I would say dodging mechanics are really well handled.

Unlike when you faint in the environment, there’s not really a disadvantage to you losing in these battles, so don’t feel too bad if you lose, because more than ever, you’re going to have to be really observant of a pokémon’s pattern of behaviour. Particularly with how they attack you. And you might want to do a pokémon team change if you don’t have any pokémon with type advantages for this battle

Mixed:

• Graphics and Art style

I think the art style is definitely a real standout and while I do disagree with many people that the graphics are not as good as they could be, I don’t think they are as bad as some people are making them out to be. This is a perfectly good looking switch game and I even think it’s one of the best looking pokémon games, but I also think this does bring up a point that the switch’s hardware is not allowing the development team at Game Freak to push the envelope in terms of graphics.

• Frame Rate

The game did run at a consistent framerate most of the time, usually hitting 30fps but it did have the occasional drop. This is particularly with pokémon at a distance that were flying, it exceedingly dropped until you got closer to them. Pokémon at a distance on ground level certainly didn’t have this issue, but it was particularly noticeable with flying types.

• Controls

I will praise controls for the most part and I will stand by that when you’re just doing basic gameplay such as dodging and being stealthy so you can hide in tall grass to gain an advantage over pokémon, it works quite well. The downside is that I think the button matching is not as great as it could be. Particularly I was confused by the fact that the start button doesn’t bring up the pause menu and to bring up that menu you have to press up on the D pad. Believe me, that takes some getting used to. And I did have a few occasions where I was like ‘well which buttons should I press for this?’ and this was sometimes in situations where reaction time was key. But the few issues like the controls never really did enough harm that it took me out of the game.

• Story

While I would say Legends Arceus has a more interesting storyline, is really good and hits some great moments, I also think it falters in some points. It does get a bit repetitive towards the middle portion of the story, and the game has some questionable decisions in the ending in regards to character motivations. By the end you realise there’s not as much substance to the story as you might think, though I will say the effort was there more so than usual. And the storyline does a good job with building upon the world and characters.

• Post Game

Post games are something I’ve always been complaining about in pokémon games for a while now and this game is no exception. While it does offer you a decent post game including a couple of interesting moments that i won’t spoil and some real challenging side quests, but rather like Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl it does lock the part of the post game behind completing the pokédex. Now luckily, you don’t have to complete every pokémons entry, you only have to have caught one of each pokémon, but that really annoyed me. Especially considering there are no easy breeding chains for getting some of these pokémon. Yeah, sorry, no daycare this time around! So those evolving hacks you’ve got to get shiny pokémon are gone.

The post game also has another issue which I’ll go into in the con section but overall the post game has a real mix match, you do actually get some extra side quests, some of which are very enjoyable but there was kind of a point where i started checking out of this game, it’s not the greatest in that regard and I think it would have helped if another feature had been added to this game.

CONS:

• No PvP

I said I really liked the streamlining of how experience points are handled in this game but it almost amounts to nothing because there’s no player vs player battles and there is minimal player interaction, the only times you’ll be doing it is trainer battles. If you have set the game to be online you can pick up the satchels of trainers that have fainted in battle to gain merit points which can be exchanged for evolution stones and other rare items. But you cannot battle other trainers that have bought the game. And the trainer battles in the game are at a bare minimum- I swear the majority of them are in the post game. This really hit a sour note for me more than anything else.

When me and my co reviewers see a new pokémon game coming out we actually set a system in place where we decide ahead of time who gets which starter pokémon so two of us won’t have an advantage other the other one in the player vs player battles, but this time we didn’t have to worry about it. And of course since there’s no breeding I thought that it would be almost impossible to fulfil the pokedex given that you won’t be able to breed your fully evolved starter with a Ditto to fill in the gaps. Luckily, that’s not the case here but I won’t go into how, but all i’ll say is after you defeat the penultimate boss go speak to the professor.

Bottom line is though, I really wish there was more multiplayer and more trainer battles. Which are some of the things I look forward to the most in pokémon that really serve as an extra bar to the success that I’ve had in training my pokémon.

CONCLUSION:

Pokémon Legends Arceus is the open world game I was hoping it would be. It does have its downsides such as the lack of player vs player and a post game that can feel rather draining but where it succeeds it really succeeds. The open world environments are great and make each excursion feel interesting. The pokedex is actually really fun to try and finish, I really liked the streamlining of how battles worked. One of the things i didn’t mention that i really liked is that you can actually swap pokémon moves so you don’t have to abandon moves completely, you can just swap them in and out which is another fantastic addition.

The storyline is a bit better than usual and I think that it is a very beautiful looking world even though it does have a few popping and frame rate issues, though these are never too detrimental.

If you’re getting bored with the pokémon formula this is the game for you and I highly recommend picking it up. I really hope that this becomes the new norm, and that the next game in this series will bring back a few extra elements like the gym leader circuit and more trainer battles, because I think if they do that they will be in for an excellent extra series that can stand along mainline pokémon. Or, this could even be the new main formula for mainline pokémon. We obviously won’t find that out until Gen 9 gets revealed.

This is an excellent entry to pick up,

Score 9.3 out of 10

Next is Reece’s review

My experience with Pokémon Legends Arceus is that I have completed every side quest and caught every Pokémon at least once to challenge the true final boss in the post game.

Pokémon legends Arceus is an action role playing game from Game Freak and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch and serves as a prequel to Generation 4 of Pokémon with Diamond and Pearl.

Pro:

Open World.

A first for the series is that Legends Arceus has a great and more open world for the player to explore, and while not completely open like say Breath of the Wild is more similar to the Monster Hunter series in that yhebplayer can explore vast zones rather than just one big open map.

While the zones are large expansive areas the player is not forced to only walk or run as they get access to new Ride Pokémon to replace older methods like the bike or HMs, so while the zones feel big it doesn’t take that long to traverse them all while completing side quests or just searching for new Pokémon.

Story.

This is definitely the first Pokémon game to put such a focus on the narrative and story.

As most Pokémon games boil down to beat the league and beat the evil team harassing the area. Instead we have a different goal of catching every pokmeon just starting off being we are roped into solving the issues of the Galaxy Team and the anomaly that brought the player in ancient Hisui.

Through the story it expands upon the lore of the Generation 4 games (Diamond, Pearl and Platinum) and we experience how anicent Sinnoh truly is (Like the name of the region not originally being Sinnoh but Hisui), this continued lore and continuity helps make this feel like the most in-depth region from any Pokémon game.

Filling out the Pokédex.

To fill out a specific Pokémon’s Pokédex entry you need to fulfill the research level of that Pokémon to 10.

You do this by completing a variety of research tasks that vary in complexity from merely catching that Pokémon a certain amount of time to using that Pokémon in battle and using a specific attack a certain amount of times or non combat tasks like feeding the Pokémon an amount of time.

These different ways to achieve research level 10 mean the player doesnt just have to focus on combat all the time and can take a more pacifist approach to the game by only getting the none combat research tasks to 10.

It also allows the player to see a Pokémon in its more natural habitat rather than just appearing from tall grass like in regular Pokémon games, as you can see a Staraptor flying in the air or a Wormadam hiding in a tree that you need to interact with to get it to pop out.

So this level of more realism hasn’t been seen in regular games and is only 2nd to New Pokémon Snap where we saw the Pokémon more acting directly with their environment, but Legends Arceus should definitely be how Pokémon appear in the future as it makes the experience more rewarding.

Character customisation.

A great feature returning from Sword and Shield is character customisation (It was in Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl but wasn’t as in-depth as before).

Now the player can customise their character in a variety of options with more being unlocked as you progress through the game or tackle side quests.

Aside from changing clothes, the player can also change their characters hairstyle, eyebrow and eye colour at the hairdresser. The hairdresser also gets more options later in the story when a character joins the hairdresser, so the player has more customisation options in this game than any previous games.

Post Game.

When the main campaign finishes with the credits a lot of new side quest open up apart from the main post game side quest, these involve the most difficult fights of the entire game and where my enjoyment really picked up.

Then to unlock the final true boss features you having to catch at least one of every Pokémon in the Pokédex, so the post game really features as to catch them is your real test and you will be travelling across the land searching far and wide. As Pokémon hide in every nook and cranny of Hisui with Alphas or rare Pokémon hiding or only appearing in secret areas.

This is also where the extra bonuses from having save data from Sword and Shield plus Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl kick in as you unlock 2 bonus side quests that really add to the post game lore of the game and highly recommend you do them as you will be greatly rewarded for your trouble.

Battle system.

In an interesting feature returning from Sword and Shields DLC of the Isle of Armour where you had to choose a path for Kubfu to evolve either being the Single Strike or Rapid Strike style training.

This is now a mechanic for every Pokémon as you can now choose whether to apply a Strong or Agile version of a move in battle if it is already mastered. This can increase the damage of the move with Strong Style but give you opponents more chances to do multiple attacks in return or using an Agile Style of the move which will do less damage but allow you to do more moves before your opponent can attack back.

The only downside is that the move will now use twice as much Power Points if you use one of these variations compared to normal but the benefits definitely outway it the negatives as if done correctly then you can knock out an opposing Pokémon before it can damage you.

Ride Pokémon.

Another returning feature from previous games this time being Generation 7 (Sun, Moon, Ultra Sun, Ultra Moon) Ride Pokémon have been brought back and you can use them for a variety of tasks.

These replace the HMs from the main games and expand the traversal options like Basculegion allows you to cross all water without fear of drowning or Sneasler to climb vertical cliffs to reach higher vantage points to find new Pokémon.

The first Ride Pokémon you get is also one of the most broken (Intended use), that being Wyrdeer in that it is a ridable deer Pokémon and you can use it to glitch up most mountains if you jump sideways and on none flat surfaces as I used it to scale the mountain to get the Noble Pokemon’s arena in the Crimson Mirelands early.

Sidequests.

As well the main campaign the game also features nearly 100 side quests that reward the player with useful items to help them complete the Pokédex.

The sidequests also give us a more in-depth look in the backstory of these characters and how they tie into the lore and storylines of their descendants like the commander of the Galaxy Team and his modern day descendant becoming the regional Pokemon professor.

While some sidequests like the infamous Spritomb side quests take way too long to complete without a guide and end up more of a slog or chore to get through the rest are great and have good character moments or dialogue like helping residents of the village come into contact with Pokémon so they are no longer deathly afraid of them. As this is the first time some of these people have met wild Pokémon and don’t automatically assume they are friendly like modern day characters in Pokémon.

Reuse of established NPCs.

Due to this game being set several hundreds of years before Generation 1 we can see the reuse of existing character models.

This is an ingenious method of saving time and resources since they didn’t need to create new character models from scratch and they could add new lore to the series, a minor one I enjoy is the character of Charm who has the appearance of Agatha and Bertha from Gen 1 and Gen 4 characters who had a fan theory for a long time of being related which is now almost confirmed as Charm uses the ace Pokémon of both characters with Gengar and Rhydon.

So it is a really fun nod to the long time fans to see how these ancestors relate to their modern day decendents and the added lore between them and fill in some of the missing gaps in the lore.

Available Pokémon.

242 Pokémon are in the game at launch if you have save data from Sword and Shield as well as Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl.

This gives the player access to a large variety of Pokémon along with most of the Pokédex for Generation 4 along with some new surprises for players to discover.

There is also a large variety of Pokémon between each of the zones with at least 80 Pokémon in each, and while there is some overlap between the Pokémon there is enough unique Pokémon in each zone for players to be constantly switching up their teams as they discover new Pokémon and fill out the Pokédex.

Merit system.

The Merit system exists in this game to give the player some form of online interaction with other players online since online battling is no longer in this game.

So you earn Merit by returning another players bag in the overworld for when they faint against wild Pokémon. By returning the bag you get given a small amount of Merit and the chance for an extra item that the other player was carrying.

When you collect enough Merit points using the online mechanic then you can trade in those points for rare items using a shop in the hub village, this includes rare items that are hard to obtain like the Linking Cord which can evolve Pokémon that normally evolve by trading (This should be an item in normal Pokémon games as trading with another player can be very frustrating if you don’t have any local friends who also play).

Pokémon evolution system.

A new feature that is great for this game is that you can choose when to evolve your Pokémon when it has reached the correct level threshold.

In older games you had to manually cancel evolution every time the Pokémon levels up with the use of the B button unless you gave your Pokémon the Everstone to hold which is always a bad choice as it means you couldn’t hold another Held Item. In contrast now you can evolve when you want to and not forced to manually cancel the evolution every level which is a great quality of life improvement.

Catching mechanics.

Instead of the long running tradition of players being scared of Pokémon lurking in the tall grass now it’s the opposite where players hid in tall grass to sneak behind a Pokémon before chucking a ball at the back of the Pokémon’s head.

All memes aside this is a refreshing change of pace as now you can catch Pokémon outside of traditional battles and use stealth tactics and a variety of items to get the jump up on unsuspecting Pokémon.

These tools range from berries and cakes that you can throw on the ground to distract a Pokémon by making them eating it or by using Stealth Sprays to mask your footsteps making it harder for Pokémon to hear you approach, so you can get into a more advantageous position before pelting them with balls.

Con:

No online battles.

The biggest aspect of the mainline Pokémon games when you have beaten the main campaign to play against friends or random people online in Pokémon battles so you can see who has the best team of Pokémon.

I was looking forward to trying this out with my fellow reviewers this time with the new regional evolutions and battling mechanics.

Unfortunately while online trading of Pokémon exists as a feature the online battling hasnt survived which is a shame as that’s what gave Pokémon is big identity as an Gameboy game in that you could challenge your friends on the playground and it lead to trainers bonding closer with their partner Pokémon.

Graphics.

One of the biggest downsides of this game is just how poor the graphics look, as even The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild which was a Wii U game and launch title for the Switch has way better texture work for the environments.

The most obvious downside is the state of the ground in the environment as in stark contrast to how beautiful the sky looks during day and night but the ground always looks like a blurry mess.

The water tiles are also repeated continuously on the rivers and oceans that really make the waters look bad. This just seems like an issue due to a rushed development time since in the Isle of Armour DLC for Pokémon Sword and Shield had much better looking water tile textures.

In cave environments there is a bizarre artifacting effect on the player characters with the anti-aliasing in the game creating an outline of white pixels almost like a glitchy aura, that is difficult to look at without causing eye strain.

No voice acting.

This game desperately needs voice acting as there is more dialogue boxes than ever in this Pokémon game and GameFreak even went out of their way to animate the mouth flaps of the characters to simulate that they are taking but all you get is silence.

A better example of would be Breathe of the Wild that had great voice acting for its characters and was a launch title back in 2017 compared to Legends Arceus in 2022.

No moving between areas.

A big quality of life update that needs to happen in my opinion, is that you cannot travel from one of the major 5 zones directly to another e.g. Obsidian Fieldlands directly to the Cobolt Coastlands.

Instead the player has to return from one zone to the home village and then go out of the village gate to bring up the map with the option of then travelling to the new zone. This feels like it could of easily been streamlined with a menu option when viewing the map to change zones.

Boss battles.

One of the most anticipated events hyped up for in the trailer comes down to throwing bags of food at the boss Pokémon repeatedly.

In theory you are supposed to send out your Pokémon to do battle when you hit a damage threshold but if you hit them with another balm then it skips the ability to send out your Pokémon to battle.

This happened to me so much that for the first 2 bosses I didn’t even send out my own Pokémon to fight them as I drained their health with balms. This only stopped for the remaining bosses due to not throwing as many balms in rapid succession so that I could actually fight the bosses with my team.

I would of preferred more varied ways to battle the bosses instead of it turning into a button mashing versions of a shooting game, as you deal way more damage just circling the bosses so their attacks don’t hit you and you keep chucking balms to drain their health within a minute.

A good solution to this repitition would of been to utilise the mount Pokémon in a bigger role as you normally get them before a boss, like Basculegion to evade the boss Pokémon while throwing balms in mid-air like you can with Pokéballs to catch Pokémon, instead of being stuck in a small arena on foot going in circles.

Removed features.

While Legends Arceus brought a lot of new features, it also removed standard features that have been in the series since Generation 2 (Gold, Silver, Crystal) with Held Items to help your Pokémon in battle with strategy.

Another big feature is the removal of Pokémon abilities in that certain Pokémon are now pretty much non-viable as some Pokémon like Carnavine no longer has its levitate ability so it can be damaged by ground type attacks.

Quite a few moves were also removed and this hurt a lot of Pokémon, for instance Torterra which you can get as early as the 2nd zone no longer learns Earthquake which is the best ground type move by a mile. So you are more funnled into using the more typically strong Pokémon or the new exclusive Pokémon since the old Pokémon are more limited movepool-wise.

Difficulty/NPC Trainer battles.

Due to the limited number of Trainer Pokémon battles due to lore reasons compared to normal mainline games this means that the game is a lot easier than normal.

Even before the postgame most trainers don’t have a full team of 6, so if you go through the game with a team of 6 Pokémon then you will find yourself steamrolling the opponent’s with not a lot of difficulty.

You also don’t need to worry to about levelling up your team as you get experience just by catching Pokémon like in recent Pokémon games, so your team will always be higher in levels than your opponent’s Pokémon if you catch a moderate amount of Pokémon and complete side quests.

Ride Pokémon limitations.

While the Ride Pokémon are all useful they do feel unbalanced, as they all of them apart from Wyrdeer feel really slow especially with Ursaluna and Sneasler so much so that fans have created mods to increase those Pokémon movement speed and it just plays a lot better.

Then some Ride Pokémon only have very limited uses like Ursaluna who acts more as a big sniffer dog, but they move so slow that you can nearly outrun it on the floor and almost all the sidequests you need it for to sniff out people then those people can still be found on foot and is normally faster that way as the radar from Ursaluna is very short range.

Braviary is also disappointing as the final Ride Pokémon because you expect to fully be able to fly with it, but instead it works as more of a glider in that you can never regain height as you fly and instead have to land and then reuse Braviary to get a decent initial updraft.

Some story aspects.

While the story is great for the most part there is a plot twist that happens towards end of the main story that seems really out of left field that was so jarring that it takes you out of the experience.

Although this was the first time that a major twist in Pokémon actually got a real reaction out of me in recent years but it was so illogical that it definitely soured the end of the main storyline for me.

Character animations.

This is a minor gripe I have with the game is the walk/run cycle of the player character as when running while changing direction the character model kind of breaks with the limbs flapping around and looks very unnatural.

Then during conversations in cutscenes with dialogue then the characters just stand around and repeating the same movements a lot on a loop. Another example is when they need to change what happens with an event then instead of animating what happens they suddenly cut to black then cut back when the animation happens off screen. This seems a bit lazy and that they didn’t have time to make in between animations.

No Pokémon Home support.

Like the Pokémon Gen 4 remakes with Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl this game also lacks the ability to connect to Pokémon Home, so any Pokémon we catch are currently locked to the game cartridge and cannot be transferred off for safe storage.

This is a potential problem because without Pokémon Home and Cloud Saves, then if your Switch gets damaged and your internal memory storage destroyed then all your progress will be lost with no way to recover due to no Cloud Saves.

Save files.

Unlike The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, this game (Just like all other Pokémon games) still does not offer multiple save files, so if you want to experience the game from scratch with no progress then you will lose all your current progress and Pokémon with no way to recover them.

This is why Pokémon Home was essential to this title, because without it then if you fully  complete the game like I did with beating the true final boss and completing the Pokédex then you don’t want to lose all that progress just because you want to play the game in a different way on your next playthrough.

Pokémon pastures.

I wish the pastures had a sort option since they are very important to the main goal of catching all Pokémon but it is a real pain if you want to try and organise any of the pastures as your only option if you want to rearrange them in any order is too very slowly do it yourself.

Conclusion:

The best none traditional Pokémon game that Game Freak has released in recent years that wasn’t a complete tonal spinoff like New Pokémon Snap was.

I would definitely recommend this game to returning players or people who were let down with the more recent entries being Pokémon Sword and Shield or Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl.

I also recommend that players continue on after finishing the main campaign as that’s when a lot of fun side quests open up and the difficulty kicks in for the fights if you thought the game was too easy leading up to it.

Score: 8.5

And finally Elliot’s review

I’m not the only one who’s thought that Pokémon games have gotten somewhat stagnant over the last decade, right? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not implying that they’re bad and I’ve definitely had fun with each one I’ve played, but, you can’t deny, with how easy the games have been getting lately – even Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl were super easy and they were remakes of more difficult games – and how little the formula has expanded, the games have grown a little tiring, which has left many players, myself included, wanting something a bit different. So when Pokémon Legends Arceus was first announced and we saw that first bit of gameplay from it, it peaked the interest for a lot of fans. And after playing it, I can confirm that this is not only a breath of fresh air for the series, but is also one of the best Pokémon games we’ve ever gotten. 

The game takes place in the Hisui region, during a time long before the Sinnoh region we know and before Pokémon and humans battling together was a commonality. You play as a Pokémon Trainer from the Sinnoh region who has travelled into the past through a space-time rift that resides above Mount Coronet (oh great, it’s another bloody isekai). You meet Professor Laventon, a Pokémon Professor who works for the Galaxy Expedition Team based in Jubilife Village, who asks for your aid in capturing three Pokémon that he’s lost. After doing so, he takes you to Jubilife Village, where you meet Araki/Rei, Professor Laventon’s assistant, and Cyllene, Captain of the Survey Corps. After proving your prowess in catching and battling Pokémon, you’re accepted as a member of the Galaxy Expedition Team and are given the task of finding and capturing Pokémon to complete your Pokédex, and to calm the Five Lords of the region that have been sent into a frenzy by the space-time rift. I actually really like the story, while it’s clearly not going for awards, it’s a fun time and gives you an actual reason to go out and find Pokémon (at the very least it’s better than what the main games do, like seriously, you’re a well renowned Pokémon Professor and you don’t have all the Pokémon catalogued, really?!).

I don’t think I’m in the wrong when I say that this is one of the best looking Pokémon games we’ve had to date. The graphics and art style is a mixture of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Pokémon Sword and Shield and it looks amazing. The environments are so vibrant and colourful and the character and Pokémon models look just as good as they would in any other Pokémon game. Definitely one of the biggest concerns when we saw the first bit of gameplay back in 2021, was the frame rate – which was just choppy and made us very worried. I’m very happy to confirm that the frame rate has been majorly improved since that trailer and runs at a very consistent 30fps. The music also gives off major Breath of the Wild vibes while also sounding reminiscent of previous Pokémon games. A number of songs are very soft and soothing, adding a lot of ambience to the overworld, while other tracks will just make you think “Yep, this is definitely a Pokémon game”, being very upbeat and action heavy, a lot of them sounding a lot like remixes of what you’d hear in Diamond and Pearl. I seriously cannot praise this soundtrack enough, it’s probably my favourite soundtrack in the entire series.

Though this game gives you the same goals as the rest of the series does – catching tiny creatures in little balls and training them to beat up other tiny creatures with – this game is very different. First of all, while other games in the series have more of a focus on the battling side, Pokémon Legends Arceus leans more towards the catching aspect of the gameplay. For starters you no longer need to engage other Pokémon in battle in order to be able to catch them, now you have the ability to sneak up to them then aim and launch a Pokéball at them, and wait to see if they get captured or escape. I can’t deny, this is my favourite new feature in this game, I started getting tired of having to go into battles to try to capture Pokémon in the other games, so the fact that I can just throw a Pokéball and hope for the best is a major benefit. It also adds more tension, as if the Pokémon doesn’t stay in the ball it increases the likelihood of it noticing me. If a Pokémon spots you when you’re attempting this, they’ll react in one of three ways, they’ll probably do nothing but blankly stare at you as if there’s nothing wrong at all (though I’m pretty sure that this is exclusive to Bidoof), they’ll possibly try to run away, completely vanishing after a few seconds, or, most commonly – especially  in the later areas – they’ll start attacking you, making it impossible to catch them without facing them in battle. 

That’s right, it’s not just your Pokémon that are in danger of getting tackled or struck with thunder, now wild Pokémon will try to attack you directly if you’re spotted by one. Some of them will try to tackle you head on while others will cast projectile moves that will be more difficult to avoid. While avoiding some of these creatures will be easy to do, others will go to the ends of the earth chasing you. If you get hit too many times, then you’ll end up blacking out yourself and you’ll be sent back to the last area camp that you rested at, so be careful, especially if you’ve made a lot of progress during that time. 

One of the more threatening types of Pokémon you’ll encounter are the Alpha Pokémon. These creatures are distinguishable by their larger size and red eyes. They have moves that they wouldn’t normally learn by levelling up and will normally be several levels higher than what you’ll be used to by that point. It’s highly recommended that if you spot one of these Pokémon or they spot you that – unless you have the Pokémon of a similar or higher level – you run like hell, as these will likely decimate your party and are near impossible to capture outside of battle. 

Battles in this game work the same as they do in other Pokémon games… for the most part. It’s still the same turn-based battle system with each different type having strengths and weaknesses, though there are some small differences that actually adds a lot to the game. First of all, when a Pokémon learns a new move it doesn’t automatically get added into its moveset and replace an already existing move, instead you have to go into the menu and swap the move out with another one if it’s one you like or want to experiment with, and if it’s not what you desired you can always swap it back for a different move that you preferred before. While I know you can do this in other Pokémon games with the Move Tutors, the ability to do this without having to find one is amazing, it gives you more of a chance to test out new moves and to give yourself more of an advantage in different areas. 

Another big change is the turn order. For the most part the turn order stays the same as in most RPG’s – each combatant takes it in turns to do an attack – but depending on the stats of the attack and it’s user, you may be able to dish out more than just one move in a row. A menu showing the turn order will be present during every fight, by hovering over different moves you may notice the turn order shift, letting either you or your opponent have an extra turn. The heavy attacks may shrink the number of moves you’re able to do while the lighter but quicker ones can increase them. If that sounds complicated already, just wait because it’s about to get more so. When a Pokémon levels up it’s possible that they’ll have “mastered” a move. This will allow you to switch what Style – Strong Style and Agile Style – you want them to use. Strong Style will make the attack more powerful and deal more damage, but in turn it could cause your opponent to have an extra attack if used, meanwhile Agile Style will make the move quicker and lead to you getting an extra turn at the sacrifice of less damage. Of course your opponent also has those abilities, so they could easily give themselves extra turns as well. I really like this mechanic, it adds a lot more strategy to the game and gives a lot more risk to a battle system that was pretty basic up until that point. 

As you play through the story, you’ll encounter boss fights against the Five Lords of Hisui, legendary Pokémon who have become frenzied by the space-time rift. If you go into these expecting to have a normal battle, you’d be sorely mistaken. These battles are a combination of you throwing balms at the beast, occasionally sending your Pokémon out for a brief battle, and running away and dodging its attacks like you’re playing a souls-like. Aside from a couple of duds, these fights are exhilarating, forcing you to use the skills you’ve honed from lobbing balls at unsuspecting Starly, but also focusing on your timing with avoiding their attacks in a small area. It’s honestly a lot of fun. 

Outside of completing the story, you’ll be spending most of your time trying to complete the Pokédex. This will easily be the quest that you sink the most time into as, unlike the other Pokémon games where you just have to capture the Pokémon once in order to complete its Pokédex entry, there are a lot of requirements to completing this one. Each Pokémon entry has a variety of requisites to complete in order to be able to complete it. Each one will involve you defeating and capturing a ridiculously high number of them as well as their own unique requirements, such as having them evolve a certain number of times, capturing them during day or night or seeing them perform a particular move a number of times. When you deliver your data to Professor Laventon, you’ll be rewarded with money for each Pokémon you’ve captured, as well as research points for each new bit of data you find. When you’ve collected enough research data, you’ll be able to report back to Captain Cyllene and increase in star ranks (of which there are ten), each time you do, you’ll be able to capture Pokémon at a higher level as well as new crafting recipes. This feature is something I don’t only think is very good for the game, but that I think this game needed. Seeing as this games primary focus is on exploring large open landscapes in the hopes of finding new Pokémon, catching one once and then never again will have put a major damper one the games core mechanic and made it a lot less fun, so adding more incentive to encounter them is crucial. 

As you play the game you’ll likely find yourself completing requests given to you from people across the Hisui Region. There are a large variety of side quests in this game, from capturing particular Pokémon, to finding a certain amount of items, to battling them. The rewards from some of these quests are pretty great as well, some will give you more customizability options for yourself, others will give you items to help your Pokémon in battle, some will even give you crafting items or recipes. 

As much as I really like this game, there are unfortunately some things that I’m not too big a fan of. First of all is a lack of camps and fast travel points. Seeing how each area you explore is very expansive and will take you a while to travel, you’d surely think that there were a good number of fast travel points and camps… right? Sadly, the amount presented to you is dismally small. You’ll be battling a lot of Pokémon while traversing these terrains – whether intentionally or not – and thus you’ll have to find yourself wanting to return to the camp somewhat frequently in order to resupply on items or revitalise your Pokémon. This unfortunately means that you’ll be teleporting back to the camp at the area’s entrance a lot and likely having to trek all the way back to where you were. [WARNING: this part contains minor spoilers, if you don’t want to be spoiled head to the final thoughts] Another problem I have with the game is with one of the mounts; or to be more exact with Braviary. In every area you’ll receive a mount that you’ll be able to summon at any time. Each one has their own ability that makes traversal much easier. Braviary is the flying mount that you get in late game, and while he is for the most part useful, my main gripe with him is that while he can glide and dive towards the ground there is no way to make him ascend higher. While this may sound like a nitpick, I found myself rarely using him because of that. Believe me, there is nothing more annoying than using him to fly only to crash into a cliff and having to swap to a different mount because you can’t make him ascend. 

I know I spoiled my thoughts on this game at the very beginning, but I’m going to say it again anyway. Pokémon Legends Arceus is without a doubt the best Pokémon game we’ve had in years. It took a formula that we’ve seen done to death at this point, and found a way to make it fresh and exciting again. I have no problem in saying that this is the best Pokémon game currently out on the Switch and I encourage everyone who owns one to give it a go. I had an absolute blast playing it and I’m certain that you will too, even if you’re not a Pokemon fan.

9.2/10

Halo Infinite

(Available on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC)
(Xbox Series X|S version used for review)

Halo Infinite was supposed to be a launch title for the Xbox Series X and S, however after large concerns over the state of the graphics during a gameplay demonstration in the summer of 2020 it was pushed back be development studio 343 to come out a year later. This did do damage to the momentum of the Series X and S but it seems to have done fine with good Game Pass deals. Microsoft also offered an excellent deal by not only offering cross saves between the PC and Xbox versions in the same way that the Master Chief collection did, but that the multiplayer would be free and the campaign would come to Game Pass. If you’ve played previous Halo games then you’ll know exactly what you’re in for, it’s still the innovative First Person Shooter you’re used to. The big difference in the campaign this time is that it’s an open world game with a quite a few side quests. The multiplayer is also the similar to previous games with the most notable features not at launch being Forge mode and co-op campaign

Pros

• Graphics and frame rate: Halo was delayed by a year to improve it’s graphics and if that was the case then it was a year well spent. Infinite looks brilliant especially on the Series X where it really shines. While not quite as good looking as fellow exclusive Forza Horizon 5 (likely due to beginning life much sooner with Xbox One in mind) it is another good example of making the most of the Series X hardware. The frame rate is also well done as well. It hit 60fps consistently with minimal instances of frame rate drops and it surprises me given how much it has to render with the open world
• Multiplayer gameplay: Now in recent memory I have not been one to really go nuts for the multiplayer in Halo with the excellent Master chief collection kind of bringing me back to a certain degree. Infinite is in my opinion a very well executed multiplayer experience. Most of the best modes are here (flood being the only notable one that was gone) and it mechanically feels like it is a little bit more accessible to new players which is a good thing given how many people will be picking this up with a game pass subscription. While I know some fans are not happy with the aim assist options, I do find a good entry point and is not a win button against a skilled player. The map designs are also excellent and really have a lot more personality and distinct features to give a real sense of locations on the map, something that felt lacking in Halo 4 and 5. It also ran well almost consistently, rarely was there lag or performance issues on my end and I tested on both PC and Xbox. The cross play and cross saves also work very well which was made evident when I took part in Good Vibes Gaming’s Executive Producer stream which involved several players from America and UK playing. This was a game involving about 12 players and while we did have issues in regards to setting on the Xbox console for cross play which hindered our experience initially once it got running it ran very smoothly at least on my end. If you’re having trouble getting a cross play game going, I would recommend checking the Xbox settings it did manage to work in our case.
• Customisation options: While it sucks that most really require real money to get with a stupid crypto currency to pay to get them, the amount you can do to the suits this time really can allow you to inject some of your personality into it. Some of this has it’s own issues which mainly revolve around the way levelling up works which is required to get customisation gear for multiplayer and I’ll get into it later but I really think the team did a good job balancing badass qualities with a bit of humour in it’s selection. For example, there’s some excellent colour schemes like the Gold and Red one I got which makes my Spartan look close to Iron Man but I also put a teddy bear on his lapel and cat ears on his head for funny effect (the latter of which trending big on twitter when it was released in the store). Overall, I look forward to each option I can give to my suits and seeing it then in the games I play. It also was an excellent call to allow for multiple voices from the Spartan’s to allow them not to be confined to one gender. Everyone has the right to see themselves in their avatar no matter who they are and 343 went in a good direction with this.
• The grappling hook: I know this is only one new feature of gameplay, but I love the grappling hook. It’s clear that a lot of the recent Doom Games influenced Halo Infinite, and this was a cool feature which added tons of strategy to taking on enemies and really allowed me to zip around the map with ease, which given the open world nature of it was welcome. It also is incredibly good fun to hook up an enemy with it the be drawn to them and finish them off with a melee hit. Got me killed a few times but was so worth it. Between this and Persona 5 The Royal, who knew you could improve games so much with a grappling hook.

Mixed

• Story: The story in Halo Infinite is one of trust. Following the events of the previous 2 games and Cortana’s actions (which I’m still kind of pissed off about) with Master Chief landing on the new Ring and teaming up with a pilot and a new A.I. to re-establish the UNSC forces to fight back against the Banished. It does have some good character development on both the heroes and villains and when it got going, I actually really liked the story this time round. The 2 problems I have are that the story takes a bit of time to really get going and by the end it feels a bit too short. The campaign on average lasts about 10 hours currently and is a bit open ended by the time it’s finished with the main story. Now 343 studios have said that this is the last Halo game for a while so the campaign should get expansions in the future but know it’s a bit of a short story at this point in time.
• Open world design and Campaign gameplay: Now I was sceptical of how an open world Halo game could work but to the credit of the developers, they have done something quite interesting with it. The strengths are that there is exploration and side missions though not many of too major consequence. The world however is not too varied in terms of environments just lush Greenland, Ruins or Banished bases. Given the variety of environments in the multiplayer maps I was hoping this would transfer to the campaign map but right now it’s not quite there. I also will reflect the opinion of Modern Vintage Gamer who said that he felt the map feels unfinished. There is not as many missions as you’d expect and there’s a lot of big portions with not much on the map. As for gameplay well I did like it for the most part and the controls are smooth and precise. Where I think it falls down a bit is the Doom influence there is a lot of times where I felt there were too many enemies onscreen and this is especially noticed given that the weapons in Halo are destructive as Doom and you don’t have the stylish executions that you get in Doom that buy you time and health. I did enjoy the boss fights even when one in particular was really hard though I found myself a bit overwhelmed at times when the Halo game I played in prep for this was the original trilogy on the Master Chief collection. That being said I, would not describe any section I took on unfair or even aggravating and I would consider doing a co-op campaign in the future if I have the time and friends willing to play it (more on that later).

Cons

• The way experience points are handled for online multiplayer: I really hate this. The customisation options are locked behind this as well as the real-world money and you’d think your performance in multiplayer. However much more of your experience is delivered through daily challenges which, yes, can get you to try out other weapons and modes you wouldn’t normally try, but at the same time it’s also kind of annoying and it’s really inconvenient. You don’t even get a bonus for winning which is extra annoying.
• Missing features at launch: It does feel a bit off that modes are missing most notably Forge and Co-op Campaign. Now it has been confirmed that these will be added down the line with an estimated arrival of 3-6 months after launch. When it comes to forge that’s not too big a deal, it is annoying it isn’t here but it will be there for the people that want it for multiplayer. The players that’ll benefit from that mode are the ones that are sticking with the game for the multiplayer anyway. As for the co-op campaign, that stings more given that I’m not sure I want to start a new campaign just to play co-op with my friends months down the line and I’m not sure they want to either. The player base for the campaign might not be on the game after that time and it feels like this feature being missing might’ve been worth a bit more of a delay.

Halo Infinite is a pretty good return to form for the series. The campaign has it’s issues but it has been one of the more enjoyable ones in recent memory and I have been particularly enjoying the multiplayer which with these maps has been my favourites since Halo 3. The graphics also really justify the year long delay since this game looks really good. I do have issues with features missing, the story needs expanding with updates and the way multiplayer experience points is handled does make me annoyed and is an indictment on the current state of the industry. That being said this is a good companion piece to the Master Chief collection and if you enjoy Halo I suspect that this might bring you back

Score: 8.4/10

Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl

(Available on Nintendo Switch only)

For the record, all 3 reviewers picked a different starter, Reece had Turtwig, Elliot picked Chimchar and I took Piplup.

I’ve been a huge Pokémon fan for years and have been excited for most of what has been prepped for the series 20th anniversary. One of the projects was the inevitable remake of the 4th generation of Pokémon known as Diamond and Pearl versions. However, the initial trailer was not very exciting for a lot of people. For one thing, unlike the previous remakes of Pokémon games it wouldn’t be handled by usual development studio Game Freak since they are handling the upcoming Pokémon Legends Arceus. The job was instead handed over to ILCA, and there was concern surrounded by this change.  Second, was the art style that was more chibi as a way to reflect the DS era that the original games came from rather than do what other remakes did of using the new generations style (in this case it would’ve been Sword and Shield). It also was becoming clear there wouldn’t be too much new added to this version and with all of that many were deciding to skip it, but should Pokémon fans skip this one or not? and is this good for people that never had Pokémon Diamond and Pearl? Be aware I am a Pokémon fan, but I don’t go as far as to go nuts for things like IV training and Shiny Hunting so don’t expect too much in on that. Also, for the sake of not having to type a huge amount Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl will herby be referred to as BDSP for the remainder of the review.

Pros

• Familiarity in gameplay: If you like Pokémon, all the familiar gameplay is here with it’s typical turn-based RPG mechanics. Not much has changed from the original games it’s very much the same experience you had on DS if you played it and if this is your first play through of this generation it should be familiar gameplay if you’ve played any Pokémon game prior. As a very faithful remake of Diamond and Pearl it succeeds very well and it’s probably because I’m an old school Pokémon fan that my opinion is, that when it comes to gameplay; if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. It’s probably one of the reasons I wasn’t a huge fan of Pokémon Sun and Moon it messed with the formula a bit too much. I do think the Pokémon formula works and this is one of the games that proves it since even though this game has issues (which I’ll go into) there is something addictive about the gameplay loop of trying to catch that one Pokémon you’re after or beat that next gym leader.
• The underground: The underground received probably the biggest change. It’s now a much bigger map and not only involves several walls to dig into for special items like Evolution stones if you’re lucky, and you can improve your chances by playing online, but you also now have several caves with rarer Pokémon that are worth going for. I really enjoyed doing this in my downtime and if you want a fire type Pokémon and don’t want it to be Ponyta this is a good option (in my case I caught a Magby and evolved it into a Magmar). That being said it will be frustrating since these Pokémon have a much lower catch success rate and the only method, I found that was largely successful was dragging out the battle and using a timer ball.
• The HM implementation: HM’s have always been an annoying part of Pokémon as they often force you to give a Pokémon a move, in order to deal with an environmental hazard. Granted Surf and Fly are 2 of the best moves in their respective elements but they still felt annoying. Future games managed to take this issue away and there was a concern that the progress made would regress. Fortunately, the team has chosen not to do that and has instead given you access to the moves, but you don’t need to teach any Pokémon those moves to deal with environmental Hazards. You just need to have encountered the TM machine with the move and beaten the correct Gym Leader to gain access to it. From there a wild Pokémon will be access to let you surf on the water or fly to a town you’ve already visited which is very welcome.
• Gym leaders: Gen 4 may not have had some of the most memorable gym leaders, but they did have some of the most challenging. In most Pokémon games the gym leader really sticks to their chosen element so you can’t go in Leroy Jenkins style with one or 2 Pokémon that are strong against it. In Gen 4 it seems like every gym leader throws a curveball at you really forcing you to think and train up a few extra Pokémon and you may want to look up a guide, so you have a good idea which Pokémon you want to prioritise training. For example, the final gym leader uses Electric type Pokémon so the obvious choice was to train up my Onix since it had access to ground type moves, but I also was aware his team had an Octillery and a Ambipom so I prioritised also training my Medicham and Raichu in preparation. There are quite a few challenges coming from the gym leaders and don’t get me stated on the champion Cynthia who I only beat with 1 HP stop Spare thanks to a well-executed Hydro Pump. She has to be the most challenging Champion battle ever, prepare to have many a frustrating loss.
• Post-game: BDSP actually has very good post game content. I don’t want to spoil it for those who have yet to experience it so this’ll be pretty blank, but you can have a lot of fun when you’re done with BDSP.

Mixed

• Graphics and art style: This might be a something people disagree with me on but I think that while I like the graphics of the art style of BDSP and haven’t been opposed to it as much as others I do think it’s weaker then what we got with the other 2 mainline Pokémon games on the Switch (those being Sword and Shield and Let’s go Pikachu and Let’s Go Eevee). If I were to rank them, I’d put Sword and Shield Highest, followed by the Let’s Go games and then BDSP. Now what I did like about it was the way it did a good job giving a modern update to the DS era as well as the very well-done battle animations. Much of the resources for this game were taken from the Let’s go games for Pokémon and battle animations which wad when the game looked best and I kind of wish they went a bit further and really tried to replicate that style for most of the game since I stand by those games looked very good. However, as it stands I did appreciate the games graphics though thought it could be better.

Cons

• Large amount of post-game is locked off: This really peeved me off. Once again, I don’t want to give away too much about the post-game, but I will say many Pokémon you can get in the game are not available without completing the National Pokedex. Now if you’ve been playing the game and faced pretty much every trainer prior to beating the league and go to each of the lakes afterwards as well as hatch the Manaphy egg you get as a mystery gift for starting the game before February 2022 you should have 150 of the 151 but there’s one Pokémon that’s not in any trainer battle and can only be seen on a Friday which is extremely ridiculous, in fact I decided not to wait and traded for it with my co-reviewer Reece.
• Plays it a bit too safe: while I was praising the familiarity of it, I do think the lack of many new feature and the real lack of a change in art style of mechanics does give this the impressions of a franchise going through the motions. Say what you like about the lead up to and release of Pokémon Sword and Shield but there was still some excitement and sense of something new. This game doesn’t have that or even the sense of going through a previous region from a new perspective leading to an underwhelming result.
• Customisation options: One of the things I’ve enjoyed about all the games form X and Y onwards is the ability to customise your trainer’s appearance and it is present in this game. However, it’s gimped beyond belief and is limited to only a few options and can only be changed in 1 town. As a result, your options are incredibly limited in this regard in a way that wasn’t in previous games
• No Pokémon Home support at launch: I want to use some of my Pokémon from Pokémon Shield but was unable to since it supports for BDSP is not available yet. It was really annoying since there was some lower level Pokémon that would’ve benefited from moving them between games and really annoys me that I’ll have to wait until sometime in 2022. Granted when that does happen it’ll probably come with support for Pokémon Legends Arceus as well but I kind of hoped it would’ve been there at launch.

Pokémon BDSP is a good remake that I enjoyed though it has the issues of being underwhelming and having much of the post-game locked behind getting the National Dex. It also suffers from being a game with a lot more limited options which cannot be put down to the hardware it’s on. That being aid as Pokémon game it does work and I did enjoy my time playing it though having this game come between Sword and Shield and the upcoming Legend Arceus does make this feel like Stopgap entry in the series rather than the next big thing. I would most recommend this if you haven’t played Diamond and Pearl since in many ways it is the best way to experience it.

Score: 7.8/10

As I said you might want to save some money back for Legends Arceus but I would say first time players should still pick it up. Other than that, wait for a sale and I stand by that Sword and Shield with the expansion pass is a better Pokémon Game than BDSP.

And now Reece’s review

My experience with Brilliant Diamond is that I have finished the postgame after unlocking the National PokeDex and cleared all the extra content.

I played Brilliant Diamond almost exclusively in Handheld Mode of the new Nintendo Switch OLED. This was my preferred way to play as I found the game didn’t look as good when blown up on the TV using Docked Mode as the new chibi art style doesn’t lend itself well to be stretched over the large screen due to almost static trainers who look more like Funko Pops in the overworld.

Pokémon Brilliant Diamond is a remake of Pokémon Diamond that was released on the Nintendo DS back on 28th September 2006, making these remakes 15 years after the originals came out.

The developer for this Remake is Ilca (I Love Computer Art) who have only worked on one Pokémon game prior being Pokémon Home, this is weird as Pokémon Home is mostly a service to transfer Pokémon between newer games like Sword and Shield while serving a storage system than a full game. Other games they have worked on are Nier Automata and Dragon Quest 11 but haven’t stated their actual input on the games with some sources saying they didn’t add any code and only worked on some visual aspects of those games.

It is also the first non-Game Freak developer to be working on the core series of Pokémon with the only overlap being the director Junichi Masuda who was the Director, composer and plot scenario creator for the original Diamond and Pearl and gave people some hope going into these remakes when they were announced.

Pro:

Graphics.

The chibi art style is adorable and is very reminiscent of the art style of the Overworld sprites pre-3D models like X and Y.

The characters now look more like Funko Pops which is funny for some characters but very disturbing for others (I’m looking at Cyrus for that)

The biggest improvement I noticed was the water texture which is probably the best it has been in any Pokémon game except New Pokémon Snap, along with new water physics that cause waves the appear as you traverse through the waters of Sinnoh.

The battle arenas are now the best in the series seen notably with the Gym Leader battles as seen with Fantina (The 5th Gym Leader) as her arena is now filled with stained glassed windows. Unfortunately, this doesn’t translate into the overworld battles where most arenas are disappointing and the Rival fights where they take place in a void with a coloured background.

The lighting is a massive improvement over Sword and Shield as seen in the environments on certain routes (Eterna Forest with its light beams) or areas like the Pokémon Hideaways within the Grand Underground.

Some Modern Pokémon influences.

Some new features have been implemented from more recent Pokémon Games which greatly help the experience.

This is like the Ride Pokémon feature from Sun and Moon in that instead of needing HMs for puzzles you can summon random Pokémon instead to do that for you. This is definitely felt most in the Victory Road which in the originals needed a total a 5 HMs to travel through so you were forced to compromise on the move set of some of your Pokémon and mostly players alleviated by using Bidoof since it could learn 4 HMs at once, so you only needed another Pokémon to use 1 HM. (This is what also led to the fandom calling Bidoof a God in memes due to how much it was used by the player base).

Another addition that seemed inevitable was the inclusion of the Fairy Type which wasn’t available in Sinnoh before and makes Pokémon that received this new type much more appealing to use, especially since the Pokémon known for having no weaknesses like Spiritomb now has a Fairy weakness and the Champion’s strongest Pokémon now gets destroyed by one Fairy Type attack.

Travelling Pokémon are back.

A beloved feature of some previous Pokémon games was the ability for having some of your Pokémon following you, this feature was last seen notably in Sword and Shield’s DLC with the Isle of Armour.

This does make the game more immersive for the most part, although for others it seems to be bugged or look very bad like Ekans (Which actually slivered in Pokémon Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee) but it is still great fun to see your favourite Pokémon following you and you unlock this ability not to far into the main story.

The only downside of this is that they failed to bring the proportions of the Pokémon over from Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee where the Pokémon were to proper scale and could keep up with the player. Unfortunately, now their walk cycle and speed is so slow that they rarely walk with you and will start teleporting into and out of the PokeBall causing a jarring effect and can now block the player as they are treated as a physical object compared to previous games where the player phases through them or they move behind you.

Con:

Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl.

Carrying on the business decision to release 2 versions of practically the same game to make players double-dip if they don’t have friends to trade with is just not a good move for consumers. While only promoting the vision that the company only cares about profits over making the best experience for the player since minor content is locked behind a second copy of the game.

This is due to the game featuring almost the exact same contents apart from a few exclusive Pokémon to each, but in my opinion since these are just remakes they could have combined both to make one game as the Regional Dex is only 150 Pokémon, so it’s not exactly a huge roster and people who looked into the code found that when they got early copies of the game that they are the same ROM with the only difference being a flag in the code to say which version you bought and loading that content and players can turn that code the other way and make Shining Pearl load up if they are playing Brilliant Diamond. (This was highlighted for me by an article by Nintendolife)

The story is too easy.

This is a problem that was made way more severe in that the EXP Share can now not be turned off by the player a decision brought over from Sword and Shield and Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee.

This means that when you catch a Pokémon or beat a Pokémon in battle then all of your party members will get experience and level up.

While a noble idea that was made to cut down on grinding for levels, this does mean that it is incredibly easy to become over-levelled so that no trainers pose a challenge for you. As I finished the game being only a few levels under the Champion, who was meant to be a difficulty spike with Pokémon over 10 levels higher than the other members of the Elite Four before them.

Due to these changes, it really sucks the enjoyment out of these games as no other trainer or gym leader poses a challenge as your Pokémon will be a higher level than theirs and almost always instantly knock them out and win without much strategy. The only difference being the Elite 4 still pose a challenge due to their competitive ready teams.

“Mostly a remake.”

While this was marketed as a modern faithful Remake of Diamond and Pearl and while some changes seemed obvious like including the new Fairy typing to old Pokémon to coincide with the newer games.

Unlike those games, it also implemented some changes from Pokémon Platinum Version like the expanded PokeDex from that game, but those Pokémon being locked in the Grand Underground instead of the Overworld.

Another massive change they made for seemingly no reason was the big change to the Pokémon Contests in that all the strategy of planning out your moves has now been replaced by a lazy rhythm game that boils down to just pressing a button periodically.

It also removed TMs being unlimited uses from the current Generation back to the Gen 4 way of being one-time use and instead of HMs you can now summon a random Pokémon to do the HM move for you in the Overworld.

If Ilca wanted to make faithful remakes why include some improvements from later games and not others that would have improved the game as a whole? It’s like having your cake and trying to eat it too, as it feels lazy in that the Dev team didn’t know what kind of game, they wanted to make due to changing core gameplay mechanics.

Postgame locked behind a (mostly) missable Pokémon.

In my opinion, this game failed to fix a major flaw with the original games in that you cannot finish the Sinnoh regional PokeDex until you see Drifloon but if you finish the Valley Windworks, not on a Friday then you will miss the static encounter for it and there is no trainer in the overworld with one (except a gym trainer who requires you to fail a basic math problem to encounter) but unless you fail the problem then there is no trainer with one.

So, unless you know to go back to the Valley Windworks on a Friday to encounter one then you cannot access the National Dex and postgame. This is not very user friendly to new players as by the time you finished the main story there is a high likelihood you would have forgotten about the Valley Windworks.

I would have suggested just adding a Drifloon to a random trainer’s team on a main route since it is not difficult to fight to solve this issue or just adding it to a patch of grass next to the Windworks.

Games felt rushed.

The game is missing features that should have been included on the first release as you cannot even transfer Pokémon from other games into Brilliant Diamond, so you cannot complete the full National Dex as several legendaries are not in the game (Such as Celebi, Arceus and Darkrai).

This also ties into the massive number of bugs in the game (Some of which have been patched out while others remain). For example, the speedrun for this game is currently at 17 minutes alone or how you can get softlocked in the 8th gym and can’t escape unless you use a secret option to rollback your save, but if you can’t do this then you will have no choice but to restart your game over from the beginning.

The game also wasn’t made with 3D movement in mind as the game is still based on a grid system but when you have full 360-degree movement with the thumbstick then the game falls apart when you have to do any tight platforming, as there were several times when I accidentally jumped over ledges I didn’t mean to when I just wanted to walk perpendicular to them. This also extends to the bike as you constantly get snagged on the hitboxes of the environmental hazards like rocks, so movement somehow feels even less fluid than when you use the D-Pad and are stuck to 4 direction movement.

Hidden Bases.

Unlike the original Diamond where you can furnish your Hidden Base with all manner of furniture from TVs, bed to sinks, now you can only put down statues that boost the rate for some Pokémon to appear.

So these Hidden Bases feel less personal and now just feel like Statue rooms instead of having the old customisation back with an additional statue room on the side. The last remakes that feature Hidden Bases being Omega Ruby Alpha Sapphire still allowed you to put down the old furniture to allow you to customise your Hidden Base to feel truly your own and special.

This also ties into the “Trap” mechanic being absent from the Grand Underground where you could put down traps outside your base to stop other players entering your base or going down your tunnels, so you cannot even protect your Base from others in a joking sense.

Randomly forced to have at least 2 Pokémon with you for the main story.

One of the fun aspects of the Pokémon series is going back and playing with self-imposed challenges. This is what leads to the phenomenon known as “Nuzlocke” which almost every Pokémon Youtuber/Streamer has done.

A challenge I have tried to do in several of the games is beating the game with only one Pokémon, but for some reason, you are required to have at least two Pokémon for one random Pokémon Battle in the Story meaning that this challenge is impossible, as no other mandatory story battle forces you to use 2 Pokémon at once.

Original DS sounds locked behind postgame.

Even though the remixed soundtrack and sound effects are nice, I don’t see why it would be locked behind the postgame. When it should have been an option from the start as there is no downside to letting the player choose between them as it is just a Key Item you receive. As it boils down to a simple toggle that could have just been in the options menu instead of a Key Item at the start of the game.

Conclusion:

An above average attempt at modernising Diamond and Pearl, but it fails to live up to the hype it built up by not being a “Faithfull” Remake as it changes some things but not implementing other changes that were desperately needed to help this game live up to its potential.

If you don’t have access to a Nintendo DS and Diamond/Pearl then I would say this is an OK introduction to Generation 4 but for the best experience, I would recommend getting Pokémon Platinum Version as that was the definitive way to play Generation 4.

As a remake the Pokémon series has produced better products with Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire plus Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee, both these previous remakes elevated the games they were remakes of whereas Brilliant Diamond feels like barely an improvement over base Diamond outside the Grand Underground.

But if you are an experienced Pokémon player then these games lose a lot of appeal, since they feel very dated and worse in some respects than the originals, and most players will be playing these games till Pokémon Legends Arceus comes out early next year.

Score: 6.8

And finally Elliot’s

Final team: Lucario (Lv.61), Alakazam (Lv.65), Luxray (Lv.67), Infernape (Lv.68), Dialga (Lv.62), Staraptor (Lv.64)

If there is any mainline Pokémon game that I get very nostalgic for, it’s got to be Diamond and Pearl. Pokémon Diamond was the first mainline Pokémon game I ever owned, up until that point I had only played the spin-off games, like Pokémon Colosseum or Pokémon Mystery Dungeon. So needless to say, I, and many others, were desperate for a remake of those games, which we got when the game was announced during a Pokémon Direct in February 2021, and eventually released on the 19th November 2021. 

I doubt that I need to explain the plot to this game, as it’s basically the same as any other Pokémon game. You’re a new Pokémon Trainer in the Sinnoh region, exploring the region to catch as many Pokémon as you can and take on the Pokémon league by defeating the eight Gym Leaders, all the while battling the dreaded Team Galactic and stopping them from taking over the world. As I said, it’s not really anything new, but that’s to be expected and is by no means a negative. 

As to be expected, the game’s presentation has been massively improved. Of course, the 2D sprites and environments have all been made 3D and it all looks absolutely fantastic. The environments look really good, the 3D really makes them stand out more, and the character models look clean and almost like something you’d find in a Harvest Moon game. The music has also been improved, while many still sound pretty much the same as they did in the first game, others sound a lot less bit-compressed and almost sound like other instruments have been added to make it better. 

The game plays like any other Pokémon game, you travel the Sinnoh region, battling trainers and catching Pokémon you find in the wild. You encounter wild Pokémon by exploring caves or rummaging through patches of long grass, when you do encounter one, you have the opportunity of catching them by throwing a Pokeball (or any of the other types), of course, just throwing a ball does not guarantee capture, thus it’s often best that you deal a bit of damage and maybe give them a status element to make it more likely. You’ll also run into other trainers who will approach you and challenge you to a Pokémon battle (you know, like any random stranger would). In all honesty, there’s not really too much point in explaining how this game works, so most of this review will instead be on the changes they’ve done to this game and how they improve or worsen this game.

Something that you’ll notice is that a lot of the elements from the newer Pokémon games have been transferred into this game as well. For example, when you defeat or capture a Pokémon in this game, every Pokémon in your party gets the EXP received from winning rather than just the ones that battled, though they do get less. While this feature doesn’t detract from the enjoyment of the game, I still feel conflicted by this. On one hand, this greatly decreases grind in the game, meaning that you can battle the Gym Leaders and thus get through the game much quicker, on the other though it really takes away a lot of the challenge with the game, as I found myself way over-levelled in almost every battle. As I said, this doesn’t lessen the fun you have with the game that much, as someone who is a bit of a glutton for challenge in his games, it does make the victories feel a little hollower. This also in general led to me going into long grass less, which meant that I didn’t catch nearly as many Pokémon as I normally would have, and seeing as the main gimmick of Pokémon, it really puts a damper on the overall experience. 

Another change that came from the later games is the HM’s. For those who don’t know, HM’s (hidden machines) in the old games were moves that you can teach Pokémon in the old games, but unlike regular TM’s, you could use HM’s an unlimited number of times, and they were required to beat the game with. In Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl on the other hand, the HM’s are instead regular TM’s that you get multiple of, and you don’t need to teach the moves to Pokémon in your party in order to be able to use them. This, if you ask me, is a blessing. One of the things that I didn’t like about the old games is that I had to teach these to Pokémon when I would much rather have them learn different moves, so this change is a major improvement to me. 

Speaking of improvements, you are now able to access the PC (where you store your Pokémon that’s not in your party) from wherever you want. While, personally, I didn’t use this feature very often, I can definitely see why this is a great quality-of-life improvement. The ability to just be able to swap out Pokémon in your party, from in the wild, a Team Galactic hideout, or a gym is very useful. Again, I didn’t use this, but I do see the benefits. 

Definitely the thing that’s been most improved upon is the underground. After the second gym, you talk to someone in the city and they’ll give you an Explorers Kit, which will let you access the Grand Underground. Just like in the original, when down there you can mine cracks in the walls for items, get an underground base and interact with other players. In this game, they’ve added areas called Pokémon Hideaways, each of these areas will have their own themes (like swamp or volcano), and you’ll be able to encounter different Pokémon that are native to those kinds of areas. These areas give you a lot more incentive to explore the Underground than you had in the first game, especially seeing as a lot of the Pokémon you can find there are ones that are very difficult to find on the surface. 

Just like in the original games, this game also includes the Union Room, where you’ll be able to interact with other players and trade or battle. Unlike that game though, you can play with other players online as well as locally, and you now don’t have to go to a Pokémon Centre to access it. As long as you’re in the wild and not in a key story area, you are able to press the Y button to enter it. While I did really like this and it made me and my friends trading a lot more convenient, I do wish that you could access it from wherever rather than denying me access to it in certain areas. 

Of course, you can’t really talk about a mainline Pokémon game without talking about the Gyms and, to be honest, I remember them being better. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the puzzles even if some were a bit of a headache (looking at you Gym #7) and the Gym Leaders were really fun to fight, but regular battles in the Gyms felt kind of lazy. While they are good in the early Gyms, as you get further into the game you can tell that they were running out of Pokémon and just threw whatever ones in. The most disappointing one of these was the 6th Gym, where the most common Pokémon I fought was Onix… and it was a Steel type Gym. 

The most I can really say about complaints is that they’re pretty much the same complaints as what I would say about any other Pokémon game. Things like the game being too easy (especially when compared to the original game), the random encounters in caves happen way too frequently, things like that. The only complaints that I really think are worth mentioning is that the post game content is locked off until obtaining the National Pokedex, which you can only get by completing the Regional Pokedex. Luckily you don’t have to catch every Pokémon in order to get it, but it’s still an annoyance to have to do. The other one is that you can’t use Pokémon Home to transfer Pokémon from other games into this one. It will be a feature a few months from now, which is better than nothing, but there are no doubt a lot of players that would much prefer to be able to access it now rather than later, especially seeing as most of them will probably have moved on by that point. 

Overall, I did have a lot of fun with the game. It was really awesome to be able to play through my favourite region again and catching all the Pokémon that I could. If you asked me whether I preferred this version or the original however, I couldn’t really say. On one hand, a lot of the improvements make a lot of this game less of a headache and really help lessen playtime, on the other, I prefer the challenge that the original game had, and I feel like I had more fun playing that when I did as opposed to playing this one, I guess it ultimately depends on preference. In the end, I do recommend this game, it’s definitely the best Pokémon game on the Switch, and I’m certain you’ll have a good time with it. 

8.2/10