Sword and Shield comes out this week, and while it will likely break all kinds of records and make all kinds of cash, there has been a lot of controversy around the dishonesty of Pokemon developer Game Freak.
Putting all that aside, one of the game’s new features is ‘Dynamax’, a battle mechanic that sees Pokemon grow several stories in size for key battles throughout the game. This new feature replaces the acclaimed and popular Mega Evolutions from previous games. And I hate it.
While I am personally agitated by the direction Game Freak is taking their Pokemon series, I can’t help but feel duped in so many ways with this new set of titles. Mega Evolution was awesome, and nothing about the Dynamax reveal seemed even remotely interesting. They are just bigger, and only a select few Pokemon see any design changes when they transform, but even that doesn’t seem to serve any real purpose. It’s just form over function, which is unacceptable.
Mega Evolutions were really cool and saw some neat effects and design styles take over some of our favorite Pokemon. For me, Mega Alakazam was one of the coolest looking designs in the game. He was fun to use, and collecting the Mega Stones was a neat journey in some cases. Unfortunately, Dynamax is just a boring stat boost that makes Pokemon bigger and that’s really about it.
Apparently, Dynamax also only lasts for a few moves, and only appears when you are facing Gym leaders. And Gym leaders save Dynamax for their last Pokemon, meaning that you can expect the same outcome and strategy from each leader. This means that you are far less likely to use Dynamax yourself since it’s only real use case is against other Dynamax Pokemon.
Earlier today, we covered the #GameFreakLied controversy, where it was discovered that Game Freak, who claimed the National Dex was cut, leaving out hundreds of Pokemon because they had to ‘redo all the character models by hand‘, didn’t do that at all. In fact, all the character models were exactly identical to their Sun and Moon counterparts.
Now that we know what the real truth is, and that they blatantly lied about it, it’s safe to assume that the reason Mega Evolutions didn’t make the cut, was because Dynamax was easier. All they had to do was make the Pokemon larger, which is even further proven because the large Pokemon appear to be the same triangle count, but with larger triangles making them significantly less sharp on rounded portions of their models.
I would trade Dynamax 1,000 times over to get Mega Evolution back. That was far less of a gimmick, unlike Dynamax which appears to be the most lazy feature added yet. Ugh, hopefully, Nintendo and TPC take Pokemon away from Game Freak. That team just can’t handle the scope of where Pokemon needs to be in 2019.
