It’s June, so three things: It’s about to get real hot here, companies are becoming rainbow again to act like they care, and there’s a bunch of game news happening despite the best efforts of the usual organizer for that.
Apparently Sonic Frontier, the latest 3D Sonic game, has gameplay footage. And it looks very empty and weirdly designed. Like they took some Sonic levels and kinda just exploded them all over some open environment. It somehow looks like it makes less sense than a usual Sonic level that acts like highways are normally spiraled loops that cars somehow drive on. I’m trying to figure out how this approach can even work. Also there wasn’t really much for enemies to jump on. The idea of “Sonic but Breath of the Wild” seems like it needs a lot of refining. At least the Pokémon version of that seemed to work out fairly well and got me interested enough to check out that game. Wild Pokémon actually being threatening and being able to catch things without the song and dance of battle menus.
As far as the new Pokémon games coming out not too long after the previous ones, they’ve also got updates. I do have to be honest about how I’m not really feeling strongly about most of the designs they’ve revealed up to this point now. And yes I am still working on the review for the Gen 1 and the revisit of Gen 8 now that it has all its mons, I’ve just been busy with everything else. But at least we have this one mon named Smoliv that I’m calling the Olive Gremlin: When you’re here, you need to leave. It’s a green orb with a grumpy monster face. That works for me.
As far as box legendaries I think I prefer Miraidon, the synth dragon. We don’t really have a ton of robot mons in Pokémon, unlike Digimon where they keep showing up and have a ton of missiles. Some people think it looks like a dick, in shape, not so much personality, no idea what the personality is like. We’ve had several other mons that look like that, like Palkia and Combusken and probably many others depending on some Freudian factor or whatever but those are the most obvious examples I’ve got. I was just most reminded of that synth open species thing, those robot lizards that show up less often than those Protogents with their antivirus stuff that rips off of Super Why or whatever they actually are. Also the box art dragons seem to both be based on motorcycles of some type with their chest wheels.
And then Toby Fox is apparently still working with Game Freak, this time providing more than one song for a Pokémon game. I wonder what weird references are going to be crammed in there. Seeing as I barely know anything about those paint comic things it’s probably going to be a lot I won’t know about. Inevitably that one song ends up in there as some secret skeleton monster fight.
Now I just wonder if anything else that catches my interest in developments shows up over the month. I think there’s going to be a ton of weekend demos on Steam at some point, if I have the chance to download and play a few of those I’ll probably do a writeup on that as well.