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When Good Game Series Go Bad

When Good Game Series Go Bad

I’ve been nervously following the development of Pokemon Sun & Moon for some time. Distantly, as my enthusiasm for post-Kanto Pokemon games has waned in recent years, but still consistently because I was hoping that Sun & Moon would be the games to bring me back into the fold. I truly do miss the Pokemon experience. The grumpy old man in me couldn’t care less about all the new critters – I might as well be playing a Yo-Kai Watch game because I have no idea what any of these things are – but I do want to embark on another journey as a Pokemon trainer.

Unfortunately I don’t think that’s going to happen. Years ago I bought Pokemon X hoping that it would fulfill the same purpose; hoping that it would rekindle my love for Pokemon games and suck up all of my free time. Everything started out really well, and I found the newer art style and all of the characters really charming. It’s when the game actually got going and I started exploring and battling Pokemon that things turned sour.

Pokemon X kind of ran like ass on my 3DS XL. I’m not one of those people who demand 60 FPS at all times – especially not on a handheld – but the frame rates in Pokemon were so jarringly inconsistent that I just couldn’t look past it. Walking inside of a building was fine, skating out in the open was choppy, and battling was a stuttering mess. I’m sure many of you are rolling your eyes right now, wondering when I’ll pull the Pokeball out of my butt, but I can’t help it. Pokemon battles should be the highlight of the game, and in Pokemon X the battles are when the game performed the worst. It took all of the fun out of it for me, and I just couldn’t get immersed.

I began the article by stating that I’ve been nervously following the development of Pokemon Sun & Moon , and that’s because I’ve been worried that maybe the new games would suffer similar performance issues despite Game Freak having several more years of experience with the hardware. Unable to download the newly released demo myself and personally bear the potential disappointment, I decided to look at everyone’s impressions and some streams first. Damn if the game doesn’t run like crap again.

When Good Game Series Go Bad

New 3DS users reported pleasant experiences with the demo, with no slowdown (except when using the PokeFinder). We OG 3DS peasants have to deal with insufferable frame rate issues and slowdown during battle… again. The Totem battles in Sun & Moon exacerbate the problem because in these encounters, the Totem Pokemon can call in reinforcements. Before the other Pokemon even show up there is a marked plummet in performance that some will find tolerable but, as the hipster girls say, “I can’t even.” And before you suggest turning off the 3D, there is no 3D. It’s been removed from battles altogether (I wonder why?).

Why on earth would Game Freak stick with this broken engine that has proven over the course of three different games that it doesn’t run well on 3DS hardware? I would have preferred anything else. I would have preferred 2D visuals with sprites. I would have preferred to wait another year for optimization. I would have preferred this game as an NX exclusive if it meant a more consistent experience.

I may be waiting on a surprise NX version, in fact. I’m not sure I can suffer through another Pokemon game with sluggish battles. It’s the reason I never picked up X after a few hours with it, and it’s the reason I don’t think I’ll be picking up Sun / Moon at all. Am I the only one bothered by this? How many of you are used to the performance of new Pokemon games on older 3DS hardware? Is this the first Pokemon game on 3DS for any of you, and if so, were you surprised by the slowdown during battles and the Pokefinder segment? Let me know in the comments.

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