Pokémon Sword, Shield cut cast in half
The newest installments of the Pokémon games have made many changes that have angered long-time fans.
January 13, 2020
Pokémon is the best-selling video game franchise and the highest-grossing media franchise of all time. Pokémon has a huge market for collectibles, plush toys, and what they are most known for, main series Pokémon games.
The newest games in the main series, Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield, were both highly anticipated games since their reveal trailer back in February 2019. Everything was looking great for Pokémon fans with a new main series game on the horizon, but nothing prepared the viewers of Nintendo’s E3 presentation for the new news about the game’s development.
E3 is the biggest video game conference of the year held annually in LA during June. The purpose is to advertise video games that are in development. At Nintendo’s Pokémon presentation, Junichi Masuda, President of the Pokémon Company revealed that not all Pokémon would make it into the game.
Over the years, more and more Pokémon have been created, bringing the total to 802 Pokémon. Pokémon Sword and Shield only feature a total of 400 Pokémon because Masuda stated that he wanted to be more expressive with the animations of each individual Pokémon. Not even the original 151 Pokémon fully survived.
“That’s a stupid move because the original Pokémon are the most unique,” said Chemistry teacher and Pokémon fan Julia Balistreri.
Here lies the problem. A Pokémon game has never had to cut down the amount of Pokémon.There have only been new additions with each generation of games that were released. The Pokémon company’s excuse was that it had to be done to achieve higher animation quality yet most of the animations in Sword and Shield have been taken from previous games, making no progress in their quality.
Certain animations for major characters are stripped directly from the code of the most previous games, Pokémon Sun and Moon.
Balistreri said, “They are just being lazy. I mean, economically they probably did really well, but they should have worked on it way more.”
The fans’ outrage over this resulted in the game getting review bombed by people who never even bought the game. These changes have even split the fan base into two sides, people who will deal with the change sand the people who are boycotting the game.
“I will not buy the new games because I don’t like the fact that they aren’t really an upgrade from the previous games and they cost $20 more,” said Jamar Kittling ’20.
A new feature called dynamax is replacing the old mega evolutions and Z-moves from previous titles. Pokémon normally introduces new features with every generation of Pokémon but now they have cut out the old features that fans loved.
“I don’t like them taking out old features to make room for new features every game,” said Jamar.
Despite this, many fans have looked past the flaws and enjoyed their time playing.
“Pokémon is a childhood game of mine and I love to play it with friends,” stated Tomizo Callejas ’20. “While I miss many of the Pokémon that were cut, we got new Pokémon this generation to make up for it.”