The Pokémon Direct was weird. When they mentioned 2006, I was concerned they were going to crank out Diamond and Pearl remakes already. Fortunately it’s a remake of the first Mystery Dungeons handled somewhere else, so that will help the fans of the side games. Then it got to the “main event”.
Of course somehow even the video had bugs, where it repeated itself in the middle and then was cut off right at the end. It’s not a good sign. But they’re doing what I wish Madden and FIFA would do and having an expansion pass (or as I call them, expand ass) instead of another version or two. At half the price of a full modern game for all the added content, it’s a “steal”. I know that the expand ass is roughly the same price for Smash, but I haven’t gone in on that yet since I still don’t know who all the fighters are yet. That wasn’t announced in this specifically Pokémon-focused Direct, big surprise. However I still don’t know if they’re planning to release a full game later this year or next. It would be more ideal to space them apart given how it feels like games in modern times are often just being thrown onto things if they’re a frequent release.
Essentially, the content seems to be featuring a few new monsters, as well as DJ Mustard and some “certain person” who makes the player go to the far north to encounter weird trees and afro-sporting deer Nihalanths. A promotional event got added ahead of time that features Klingon Slowpoke due to the forehead thing.
On the plus side, it means not having to buy an entire new game to get to the new content. Also, they’re allowing monsters introduced and re-introduced in the expansions to be brought back to players without at no cost to them (aside from Online subscriptions if trading online). So they are ending up patching in previous monsters after all. I wouldn’t count this as a sign on reversing the culling. It just means I have more spreadsheet tracking to do as we find out who shows up where.
However, it’s a separate expand ass for each game due to the differences the versions have, of course. It just gets more expensive for the self-titled “super fans” who buy both games, as this would effectively be the price of the third version. Plus I’m not sure just how much is going to be in the expansions as far as story and features, but there is a slight feeling of things being dropped from the initial game to be reintroduced in a paid content pack. However, at least monsters, and possibly items found in the expansions, can be traded back, meaning it can remove some of the pay-to-win angle that might be brought up, depending on how viable stuff is and so on and so forth.
Long story short, I still don’t see myself buying the game, and I’m unlikely to be playing it anytime soon as well, given the number of holds at the library seems to be about constant. I’m not saying to gift it to me. I might play it later. However by the time I’m able to, it’s very likely I’m going to be tending to an island so I might just be busy playing around with that instead. In addition to the many other games I’ve picked up and need to get through. Also, I don’t know that they’ll release a version coming with the expand ass content later on since they might just want to focus on a release of whatever the new games would be, so it generally means paying up even on used copies for bonus stuff. As such is the case with “game of the year” or “complete” editions these days in physical form, where it’s the same disc as before, maybe patched, but a download code included for the other content, so to get these physically it’d take a good sale to get everything. And to not sell out.