u/SawkyScribe

Pokemon is a huge inspiration for so many people. Maybe it was their first exposure to anime, maybe ROM hacking was their gateway into game development, and every once in a while, you see a person crediting Pokemon Crystal for their chosen career in zoology. I love how many lives this series touches which makes it odd how much of a black box it is.

So much of what we know about the design process for these games is tangled up in old interviews, deleted tweets, or was obtained by illicit means.

I practically have a punch card for every time a Did You Know Gaming Video includes the line 'this heap of new information comes from a Japanese interview from 2006'. If not translated, there's also all the lost info. One of the former head writer's of the series posted a tweet of the official game timeline before taking it down and James Turner, art director for SwSh, took down every post about behind the scenes at GameFreak. Takeshi Shudō, the former writer for the anime famously spoke very candidly about his writing process and intended series ending which I think he only got away with because his bosses weren't looking and they don't want to bury the words of the dead now.

The most insight we've gotten about the inner workings of the franchise was the tera leak a few years ago. It was so cool to see all of the concepting of games going back to the GBA days, but it came at the cost of the personal info of a lot of GameFreak devs which sucks.

I know when you produce childhood whimsy at the industrial scale the way Pokemon does, it's not incentivized to pull back the curtain and show how the magic happens, but I wish they did. I would love for a full director's commentary of the entire Pokedex from the art team, I'd love to hear about the mind-boggling task of coding for all of the interactions that happen in battles, I just want to know all of it!

I played The Wolf Among Us and this wasn’t some sorted affair with the office secretary. I don’t have to be ashamed to say I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it the way your burnt out desk jockey enjoys taking a slug from their flask between rounds of pushing pencils. Maybe there should be some guilt there. The whole world’s been on TellTale’s case long before they first closed their doors.

I remember a time where beatniks online would toss out the Konami code like a Fed flashing their badge for some gaming street cred, eager and ready to push these games down the stairs like an aspiring widow ready to cash in on her husband’s life insurance. Every bit of game design was written on carbon paper before it got touched up for yet another licensed title, and the choices never quite shook out with the gravitas the player would’ve liked. Well buddy boy, let me tell you this. You aren’t gonna keep that park ranger job much longer if you keep losing your forest for the trees like this. Any detective worth his salt will tell you that when it comes to crime, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So sit a spell why don’t cha? I’ll spin you a yarn and tell you why the game about the big bad wolf ain’t so bad?

It’s a tale as old as time really, working gal gets merced by some ne’er-do-well, and it’s up to a grizzled hero to get to the bottom of it. Well, more mutt-like in Sheriff Bigby’s case. You’re a smart fella, I can tell from the way you wiped your shoes off on the way in. A fella with the kind of acumen you’ve been endowed with knows a fairy tale or two. I can tell you friend, you’re layered like an onion. Every time you cut yourself, someone’s bound to cry, but I can see the kid who still gets giddy when they see some stiff from a story book their old lady used to read them at the center of your herbaceous being. I’m not above saying my eyes lit up like a Christmas tree when I saw a Snow White or a Magic Mirror. If you wanna act like you’re above the simple pleasures of enjoying the sweet and sour flavor combination of fairy tales and a neo-noir crime thriller, then buster I best never catch you with a packet of warhead candies.

I fear you would need to do some arm twisting that crosses the boundaries of friendly horseplay if you asked me to sing the praises of the gameplay. Across five episodes, you’re gonna spend an ungodly amount of time examining little tchotchkes like the world’s most persnickety shop browser. It’s fully functional point and click action, but it doesn’t exactly stir the melodies of my soul. While it’s not re-inventing the wheel, last I checked, most people claiming they’ve pioneered a new kinda maths get thrown in the looney bin. The real splitting of hairs comes when you talk about the choices.

Choices, choices, choices. They’re a terrible thing really. I’d cut it out of me like the cancer they are if they weren’t the only thing that makes me who I am. There’s no shortage of rubes who turn on the old PlayStation grasping around for a feeling of control in the digital world. If you got yourself all twisted in knots about things not panning out the way you hoped, then I may have some bad news to deliver about the human experience, and as a courtesy, I ask you holster that pistol before you wish to displace your anger and disappointment on the messenger. You’d sooner find an iceberg on the surface of the sun than you would a situation in life that went exactly to plan.

No, the Wolf Among Us ain’t a paper fortune teller, it’s an experience for you to test those highfalutin morals you’re always espousing in a neon-drenched world that just doesn’t give a damn. It’s not about if Tom, Dick, or Harry escaped the justice you wanted to dispense, its about those quite moments after the consoles been powered down when you’re alone at night turning that decision over and over again in your head as if it were real. Those woodlands, those things I did, they tumbled in my mind till they took on the appearance of shined stones. How low would you stoop to stop the wheels from falling off the wagon in a world where ‘happily’ has nothing to do with ever after?

My dreams for the Wolf Among Us season 2 are dead and gone. I’m no dame who gets her hopes up over false promises of an engagement and then gets all misty eyed when my finger never gets acquainted with a ring. The jig was up for TellTale long before the band conductor ever put down the baton. The company had eyes bigger than its stomach, and thought it clever to always wear a corset to every dinner party.

They pumped out art at the industrial scale, and in doing so plummeted so deep into the red that the script kiddies at the computer must’ve thought they were programming at the bottom of a used menstrual cup. Even now that the Studio’s been resurrected like it’s Good Friday, the scarce screenshots we’ve gotten have given me no hope of a sequel. I know when someone’s giving me a false lead. I’m content with what I played and contentedness is in short supply these days.

Friend. I call you friend inasmuch as I call everyone who passes into my office friend, a small courtesy with no weight behind it like a perfunctory Gesundheit being offered to a sneezing stranger in an elevator. No friend, you and I don’t know the first damn thing about each other, but I invite you to play this game, soak in the sights a little, and see if you get to no yourself a bit better afterwards.

So Charizard Y the best sun setter in the format and maybe one of the best megas in the game but I've been struggling to get a move set that feels just right.

I've lost so many games to Heat Wave misses but that kind of huge spread damage is too good to pass up, Weather Ball is a great single target damage, and Protect is a must- what should move number 4 be?

At first I ran air slash for another stab option, but it's low power, not perfect accuracy, and most things that take it for super effective or neutral damage would probably just take more from Sun Booster Weather Ball. Right now I'm running Scorching Sand so I can hit Archaludon and Kingambit in rain but it's low power and most of the time I'd rather just get sun up again and hit HW or WB. I've seen some people run Overheat, but 3 fire stabs seems a bit much (although tbh, 90% of the time I'm clicking fire moves anyway).

I'm floating between Master Ball tier 4-2 so I wouls like to address prominent threats there

While Breath of the Wild is one of the greatest open world games of all time. A true industry defining classic that was a true joy to play when it released- it doesn't hold up much on repeat playthroughs though. Once all of the wonder and awe at the scale of Hyrule comes to pass, and its deepest held secrets are committed to memory, there really isn't much to keep you coming back. I say this and have yet to uninstall the game since I bought it on account of there sheer pleasure I get just existing in Hyrule.

The are games with more realistic graphics, more robust haptics, deeper lore to get lost in, but very few titles have the sense of physicality and sensory immersion that this game has. Miyamoto made the first Legend of Zelda trying to capture the joy of exploring caves as a young boy, but I feel like BotW captures the full-bodied experience of being outside in nature like nothing else.

Walking the great plains of central Hyrule is a gentle chorus of tall grass and emerald tree tops sinking and bouncing in the breeze. There's an eerie openess to the Gerudo desert, with everything around being distorted by the constant dance of baked arid air. The quiet of climbing Hyrule's mountains is interrupted by little else but the scrape of your boots against hard stone and the sound of loose rocks tumbling away under your foot. Even link himself gets this attention to detail, with his animations selling the exertion of his journey, and all of your equipment sounding of with little metal clangs as they bounce on your back.

I see no great appeal in trying to relive the highlights of my journey through Hyrule, but the constant promise of the verisimilitude of the world that Nintendo created always pulls me back in. If you love being out in nature like me, I'm sure you understand what a crowing achievement the world of Hyrule is.