This is the most exciting spin-off title in this franchise in concept. I said it.
Let's get the complaints out of the way:
- "It's not a Gen IV remake"
- "It's not Gen IX"
- "It's not Crown Tundra news"
- "It's not Let's Go Johto!"
- "There's too many Gen I Pokémon"
- "It's another Free 2 Play game"
OK good, so now we can talk about the game itself.
The Switch doesn't have any notable MOBAs on it, so this is a wide open market and more importantly playerbase in order to develop into something actually pretty huge. The mobile market having crossplay would have excited me massively a few years ago too, since it's easier to hide a phone under your desk at school than a Switch.
The mechanics of the game? Honestly they seem good. There's nothing groundbreaking here, but having customisation and branching in-game choices is nice and if they balance everything properly it should lead to having to cater your movesets depending on matchup, which helps to prevent gameplay getting stale. The combat seems relatively diverse for a mobile-catered MOBA with at least a discernible difference between long ranged and short ranged attacks, and fusion attacks as a gambit / nuke move. The impression I got of the game from the trailer is it isn't just a generic MOBA with a Pokémon skin, rather that it's a Pokémon game morphed into a MOBA. And that's exciting.
As far as micro-transactions are concerned: Yes, there will be micro-transactions because it's a MOBA and MOBAs have micro-transactions. That's how they're designed and it's how they've been designed for years. I don't quite understand why this is being criticised because it's not gonna be a "spend 5 hearts to play a game, they'll slowly refill or you can spend money to keep playing!" system. MOBAs rely on having a large cast of characters to cater to lots of different playstyles and roles. Characters usually have a period of time where they're free to try out on a constant rotation, so players can get a feel for the playstyles and decide which characters to use their collected in-game currency on. If you play fairly consistently, you'll never have to spend irl money at all in order to pick up the characters that you get along with. Usually the only things locked behind a paywall are skins, but it's more standard in MOBAs to give out free lootboxes than in other genres.
Let's look at the Pokémon included so far:
- Venusaur
- Charizard
- Blastoise
- Pikachu
- Clefable
- Machamp
- Gengar
- Snorlax
- Lucario
- Talonflame
It's relatively impossible that this is the final roster of characters. MOBAs depend on a wide variety of characters both to fill different roles on a team, and to cater to different playstyles in those given roles. 10 Pokémon simply isn't enough, and so the fact that 8 of those 10 are the Gen I staples shouldn't be too concerning. This is still the hype-building stage and it seems that they're taking building hype seriously by revealing this game a week later than the others in its own video. It allows for the announcement video to be shared around and for MOBA players to see characters they recognise, but also ones they don't but that still appeal to the male-dominated 20-40 year old playerbase that MOBAs have, like Talonflame. Plus. the whole point of MOBAs is that more characters are released one-by-one for years after the game is first released, as long as the playerbase is there for it. And even if they're not playable, the wild Pokémon are pretty diverse including characters like Joltik, Rotom and Swablu, who would be fairly difficult to turn into player-controlled characters looking at the mechanics (requiring long-ranged and short-ranged attacks).
tl;dr Sorry that this wasn't what you were expecting, but this is the first time Pokémon has tried to expand into a new genre since GO and it's needless to say that that went well. Micro-transactions are standard in MOBAs and it's also standard not to make players feel like they're really missing out if they don't spend money, so if you don't want to make use of the micro-transactions, don't and you'll still be able to get mileage out of the game. And this isn't being developed by Game Freak so honestly we can have high hopes -- the past few years have shown that third parties are better at making Pokémon games than Game Freak themselves are.
Appreciate this for what it is because what it is is really cool.
