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You know, what's funny is that I really just can't stand the pokemon manga, because while it fixes a lot of characters, it also has a weird plot that in my opinion, most often than not ruins the game's plot. Or at least just does things that isn't "pokemon"

Here's my perspective. First of with why Lillie is dressed up like Nihilego in USUM: Is just reused assets, I think we can confidently just agree this is just GF being lazy on how they present the story. And to my perspective with Lusamine, she's turning to a different outlet to cope with grief. As other people have pointed out, Nihilego could be an allegory for alcohol and abuse. Lusamine in SM could be argued to be an allegory for an abusive parent that's struggling with addiction. And that was really powerful for a lot of people. Now, I don't blame people for liking this version of Lusamine, and even relating to Lillie, just like I don't blame them from expecting these characters to be the same in USUM. But I think the core difference is the outlet that Lusamine took in USUM. Perhaps instead of Nihilego she encountered the Ultra Recon Squad and that gave her another coping mechanism. As I interpret USUM, she's not an abusive parent, but rather a neglectful one. She's hyper focused with work and claims to be doing all of it for her family and Alola, but in doing so she's losing track of what's important. In my eyes, USUM is NOT an abusive parent, she's neglecting her children (and I know is a form of abuse but that's not the point) and turned into a workaholic. As I said, I understand why some people think is bad that in USUM Lusamine is "forgive", but I think the context is what's important here. One Lusamine was aggressive and controlling to her children, directly putting them through stress. The other wasn't there, focusing on her job to save the very family she was losing behind her back.

Whats wrong with the artstyle in lets go?? How smooth brained are pokemon fans? So smooth its mind blowing

Accidentally made wall of text again but TL;DR Rose plotline is bafflingly stupid literally any other way to go about it would have been better and there's no way this thing got through the development process unless it was rushed out last second. Another thing about Rose just summoning eternatus for no good reason is that you could have simply madeit so the energy crisis was coming earlier (maybe something like 5-10 years, or you could instead imply that in 10 years or so there'll just be "no turning back" and the crisis would be guaranteed to happen pr something) and had Rose say something along the lines of "hey man I'm not gonna be chairman forever i wanna like leave a legacy and stuff imagine how good it'll look on me to be THE GUY that prevented an energy crisis by taking down a giant murder dragon". Alternatively you could ditch the energy crisis excuse entirely and make it so Rose pretends eternatus "just showed up out of nowhere woopsie" when the whole thing was just a publicity stunt to make either himself or Leon look better, and based on that you can either take the easy way of making Leon not know about it and make Rose be some sort of crazy PR manager, or you can take the harder high effort route and make Leon be in on it and potentially have them frame the whole incident as the Player's fault since Rose and Leon feel threatened that this new rising talent could upstage Leon and his unbeatable status so they want to tarnish the player's reputation/talent. Or you could make rose have his own player, maybe make him some sort of Rose nepo baby, and since he's not good enough to compete rose wants to practically cheat by framing the other players (but mostly Leon) including our Player Character for random crimes sp they'll be banned from tournaments and Rose's nepo baby or inside worker could succeed. That would also sorta vaguely tie into the whole Legacy theme (calling it a theme is an insult to themes everywhere but i digress) that the game sorta tries to have. Like so many characters have half their motivation be wanting to have some sort of legacy or failing to live up to the expectations set up by said legacy (either their own legacy or someone else's) so having a villain character try to tarnish other people's legacies and try to cheat their way into gaining a positive legacy/reputation, and you could have Hop say something corny like "oh golly i might not be the best battler but i would much rather be a bad battler and have fun trying my best than cheat my way to success! That is like so wack yo!!" to have a nice if generic moral of the story for The Childrens ™️ And I came up with that in like ten minutes, there's probably infinite ways to make it infinitely better, and even with the absolute worst execution known to mankind it'd be much better than this

Ok so I wrote a massive wall of text by accident so TL;DR this game is everything wrong with pokemon and it's still ok 5.8/10 Too much -water- lack of dev time. Sword and shield seems like a victim of lack of dev time in a more subtle way than Scarlet and Violet but in a much worse way imo. To me it's clear that they had passion for a lot of this game and wanted to make it good, but at some point they wanted to do too many things at once in the plot and just sorta in general. Now in a mormal game they'd be able to hold it back a bit to solve these creative issues and decide what path to focus on, but here they realized they had to release this within a deadline, said "fuck it let's just get this done we'll make a good game next time" and just sorta did everything at once without really caring about how to make it all fit. Now pretty much all Pokemon games do this to an extent, they try to appeal to millions of different people at once and end up doing very little that amazingly, but this one feels special because instead of trying to focus on multiple aspects at once that different people enjoy about a pokemon game, they sorta do like multiple different takes on the same things at once?? Like you simultaneously have the pseudo open world wild area gameplay and the hallway-esque normal routes, you have the plot dividing itself between a low stakes tournament plotline and a high stakes "pokemon are randomly Dymamaximg and shit's gone wild off screen" plotline and an even higher stakes but incredibly stupid "i am summoning a world destroyer because climate change" plotline, and you can even see this in the Pokemon designs since around half of these are wacky guimmick mons with insane proportions and designs and the other half feel like "generic animal except cartoony and sometimes painted a different color" reminiscent of older gens. As a whole Sword and Shield is hilariously unfocused and lacks direction, in a charming way to me honestly. It feels like it wanted to transition into open world games but was just scared of alienating the playerbase by suddenly going full open world. Can't really blame them though even if a lot of people want pokemon to change half the time they actually change something a large section of players end up hating it. Sword and Shield feel almost like a perfect example of what's wrong with pokemon as a whole: tries to appease everyone at once and be ambitious but due to a lack of dev time or focus it gives up halfway through and seems almost unable to do anything above "good" to save it's life with some major exceptions here and there, refuses to properly use it's great formula and when it tries to change it said changes need to be one comically small step at a time, it'll just add some flashy sorta cool guimmick to the game that isn't nearly as much of a gameplay changer as it pretends to be (but isn't even close to inconsequential so if you dislike the guimmick then good luck, better be luckier next gen), it directly forbids you from participating on the story (only ocationally letting you serve as a hitman or muscle for the characters that actually matter) and it will still somehow be fun enough and have enough new and improved good content in it to feel more than worth the purchase for most people (me included, even though i don't think I've legally played a pokemon game in my life lmfao) despite being such a rushed unfocused clusterfuck 9 times out of 10. But like if i can be completely honest, though i just called it "an example of everything wrong with pokemon" I can't really bring myself to hate or even dislike this game. Kinda like the franchise as a whole it still does quite a few things right here and there, a lot of it's bad parts aren't bad enough to be major detriments to my enjoyment of the game, and the downright awful stuff is so incompetent it gains tons of ironic value while becoming interesting topics of discussion It's practically impossible to call this game "good" without blatantly ignoring it's many flaws, but it's also hard for me to call it straight up bad. What i can say is that it's just a waste of potential due to a lack of dev time, and it's unfortunate that pokemon is seemingly never moving away from this tight schedule of releasing a new mainline game every 2.5 years and a whole new gen every 5 years because this franchise could truly be something absolutely amazing, but we have to settle for "pretty good but flawed", and even then put an asterisk on the word "good" there.

the fact that its wasted potential but still one of the best games is crazy

Z is finally real

It makes sense that the most undercooked game would have the most waster potential, but as stories go I also think it's a pretty weak story. At the time the game came out the overpopulation debate had already started to cool down. In that sense you could say that for example Sword and Shield has even more missed potential as it fumbles a more relevant topic. X and Y has a lot of potential, but I think it needs a full overhaul and maybe we'll see a better realized version in Legends Z-A.

I like both versions.

That title scares me, Wally is my favorite pokemon character of all time.

it really is a bare bones game, isnt it? pokemon camp needed more to do, routes could use more trainers and offshoots, cities felt empty because we couldnt visit shops and houses, and a general lack of reasons to take time to explore/go back to places. and it's got a gorgeous overworld aesthetic (wild area gloom aside, and people who wish it was botw aside) that would benefit from reasons to stick around and figure out how to find a certain item stuck on a ledge or behind a snorlax. part of the reason that i really disliked the DLC was because SWSH would have been THE series that would benefit most from <the updated third game that gets released a couple years later.> Pokemon Spear could updated and patched so many things people have complaints about, and used the DLC content as their reason why people should give galar another chance

The way you pronounce Eternatus had me so confused to which pokemon you were talking about haha.

Great video! :) I'm also a big fan of New Snap and you demonstrated it so well. Some remarks: - Wonder why Beheeyem (22:44) does this thing with its arms? It's actually mind controlling the nearby Golurk. If you hit Beheeyem with an apple, it will make Golurk run at you. A different Beheeyem will summon more Golurks that come flying like rockets into the area. Another example of natural behavior and cool animations, Golurk just being a golem controlled by some psychic Pokemon. - True, taking pictures is the central gameplay element. But saying that the game is bad cause you're "just taking pictures" is like saying that Super Mario is bad cause you're only jumping and running. Mario is much rather about precise arcade gameplay and Snap is mostly about exploration. You're constantly having thoughts like "can I get these two Pokemon to start a fight? Why does this Pokemon look sad? What happens if I do this or that..." and the game constantly rewards you. - I want to stress out the crazy amount of content and the love in detail in New Snap. There's so many different maps and almost a thousand different pictures to collect, but there's also everything else: various settings, online-stuff, editing pictures, quests and achievements, a beautiful photodex and map dex or even the depth of the photo evaluation algorithm (just an example: when two Pokemon interact, it often counts as a synergy multiplying the other Pokemon bonus by 10 and allowing you to use mid-placement, focussing in between the two Pokemon for perfect placement score. There's a lot of stuff like this allowing you to take esthetically better pictures, although it does take a lot of time to get into this). To me it is a really complete and well-thought-through game :)

Non of your arguments about the map "feeling" new holds up when you can easily bring up a person who played botw alot and who can realise nothing much significantly changed on the surface (outside of the main dungeon locations), and the only means of enjoying the surface past some sidequests is just zooming across the map, this is no longer exploration, its just hunting for new content. The novelty of the familiar will fade and the game fails completely in making engaing new places to explore The new content in totk is worse than what they made in botw. The depths and sky islands combined dont compare to the diversity of places and biomes in botw hyrule. Even content wise the depths is lacking severely, outside of some zonite collections, amibo armor loot that makes no lore sense, and lighting up some roots, its got nothing of substance, that justifies its size, it even reuses the main dungeon bosses, even botw didnt do that. The sky and depths dont feature anyhting like unique npc, ancient towns, or ancient zonai ghosts, only rarru and minaru in this game. Nothing can be learned from their culture other than they liked mining alot Imgaine if hyrule was just a desert, and that was botw's whole map, people would shit on it, that's how the depths feel past the novelty of lighting up a few roots

I think Wally would benefit from having a battle with you after you get Norman's badge. That way he'd have a battle after Badge 2, Badge 5, and Badge 8. It'd be pretty evenly spaced and make him less prone to disappear from your mind.

Megas were the best, and Terras are the worst gimmick IMO. Gigantamax was a nice middle ground. Kinda feels like they're evolving backwards.

In the original Ruby & Sapphire, Wally is at the very end of Victory Road. Emerald put him at the beginning for some reason, though he does come from the interior.

Dude as cliche as it is to say you really deserve more subs. This video is very well put together and your argument is well thought out and evenhanded to the strengths and weaknesses of both Emerald and ORAS. Very well done!

I personnally loved lusamine in SM and series,ultra isnt that bad,but they sorta made it feel like children were wrong wich was incorrect

Thanks for reviewing our game Anglerfish. We explore kind of the same concept in a slightly different direction in our new game Security: The Horrible Nights, which has a demo out on Steam. This time it's not just one thing that changes when you die, but a whole new story that starts.

I think Wally is a good character, but whether he's a good or bad rival depends on how you define that character role in the story. Like maybe Game freak needs to come up with "first partner" term for rivals cause he'd for sure fall under that. I think the take that HE considers YOU a rival, but the feeling isn't exactly mutual is a good one, and I think the distance between the two of you during the game really makes the relationship feel even more one-sided compared to Blue or Hau. Idk. Wally breaks the rule of "show don't tell" in the sense that we barely *see* his growth until the very end. Even though we're able to call him or hear about him on the radio, those were obscure features that the average player wasn't incentivized to explore in depth and was therefore likely to miss out on. But at the same time, Wally's disappearance and irrelevance to the Aqua/Magma plot is what makes him him, and especially in the originals this is done to highlight his independence - while you were out saving the world, he was studying the blade. I really think that the added cutscenes in ORAS with him in Petalburg and outside of Victory Road help bridge the gap between his original appearances and help the player remember him. While I would have liked an intermediate battle after the 5th gym I have a lot of respect for the decision to NOT include one since I feel like it also would have undermined the buildup to the final battle somewhat.

One of the 3 Pokemon games actually worth buying on switch (snap, mystery dungeon, arceus)

You should make a vid on mystery dungeon dx :) another underrated gem

Am I the only one who dislikes his new battle music?

I mean wally is a bad rival he's way to weak and a pushover but he at least tries and is a better rival unlike some of the other rivals we've been getting like nemona or hop

GOTY so far. Wonderful talk em up.

- Swsh was beyond super lazy -we barely got any new Pokemon -the storyline sucked you don't even fight the evil team untill your about to fight leon -hop was a stupid annoying down your throat hand holdy rival stopping you every route to talk to you -you can tell they rushed through the game and cut corners big big time - the dlcs weren't better - the raid dens sucked - the gimmick sucked - the evil team is such a massive joke team yell seriously - the max raid dens sucked to the fact that you could only choose one Pokemon from the raids was beyond stupid

It didn't help that the game was suoer super hand holdy you get stopped every route and the rivals sucked and the champion was such a JOKE

Hope you had a good day

IMO, Wally could have replaced may/brendon in some story scenes but honestly I choose to believe he wasn’t in the main story because it wasn’t his, it was ours. He showed up some but he had his own story we didn’t get to see.

That Victory Road battle in ORAS is pretty cool, but I always get caught up in weird symbolism with it. The flowers there look like red spider lilies to me, flowers associated with death in Japan. Unless I'm missing a crucial facette about the flower language of that breed, this feels like it confuses whatever arc he's supposed to have. Did he conquer his illness and it's supposed to be a triumphant tune and battle? Did he pull through inspite of his illness but is still doomed? Heck if I know. The set piece is cool, but I can't think about it more than that without getting a headache. Other than that, I think he's still undercooked in ORAS. They fleshed out the presentation for his climax and beefed up the dialogue, but I think a big problem is that we interact with Pokemon characters mainly through battles. Blue ambushing you and always having quite rare pokemon to drive home your pokedex rivalry. Silver having multiple fights that could be considered difficulty spikes but also are unique because he doesn't heal his pokemon like many other major trainers. Hop actually abandoning his starter Wooloo for a bit in pursuit of finally getting powerful. All of these rely on battles for characterization. Wally's arc barely has to do with pokemon, so his team can't tell you much about his arc and even if it *could*, there are no battles to symbolize his gradual growth. You only spur him on twice (once by helping him catching a pokemon, once by lighting a fire in him by beating him) and then the next time you actually battle him, he's a badass. The contrast is harsh. It might seem reductive to just throw out all the additional dialogue and scenes, but the reality is that he is barely present for the main way you interact with character arcs in these games. Had Wally occupied at least some of the Brendan/May fights, that would have helped him tremendously in my opinion. May/Brendan aren't even on the badge journey. They occasionally talk about getting a badge, but mostly are out there to collect pokedex data - and even just leave for home midway through, but they feel more present than Wally because of their battles despite this unfocused and cut short journey of theirs.

Wally is great enough as he is, I love him in a vacuum and personally feel like he's serviceable enough for what he does in ORAS. However... He's the blueprint Kieran was made from. I cannot overstate how much I adore the "special rival" role they both fill, they stand out _so_ much against all the Blues or Haus pokemon has. (Also, both of them half make me want to lose, or at least give them a hug after winning against my own will.) I still have to form my own proper _Thoughts™_ on Kieran from DLC part 2 and would die for a video on him too!

I adore Wally and was really inspired by him as a kid back in the RSE days but yeah he's way too underutilised. More battles in ORAS postgame not locked behind the Battle Whatever (I always forget the name XD) would've been really appreciated, and seeing Wally attempt the E4 or something would've been fun. As for connecting him with the main plot... Honestly I think leaving him out of the main story was valid in ORAS (less so in the original RSE) but they REALLY should have included him more in the Delta Episode. Like imagine if Wally sided with/was helping Zianna when she's running around doing her sketchy stuff? It would've been really eyebrow raising and made the player go 'Wait, WHAT is going on? Why is Wally helping her???' especially if they took advantage of Wally being a character the player trusts/has friendly feelings towards and made Zianna even more sketch than she already was~ But yeah. Wally's less a rival and more a friend. Kinda wish he got to be a little more of both but still one of my fav 'rivals' in the series <3

Thank you for still posting, i care so much about your success and I dont want you to give up on RUclips

I do love how his conditions improved so much that he went to Alola in Sun and moon, participating in the battle tree (or whatever it was called)

Second favorite rival, loved the setting in his second Oras fight

Wally's was a rival I actually cared about and wanted to see improve

The rival in Black and White 2 was interesting in that he had an actual character arc related to the plot and themes of the game. I think the rival is a character that should be used to forward the plot, convey the themes of the game, or both. The "jerk rivals" have character arcs.

I just realised how weird it is that Norman helps Wally get a Pokémon when moving to another town but we are canonically moving from Johto to Hoenn in RSE and we don't get shit except as an accident

I see him as more of a Protégé than a rival and when he finally catches up to you towards the end.

This is a really thorough video! Thank you for the detailed analysis; I played through the original Gen 3 games as a kid and ORAS in my senior year of high school. I wasn’t aware of Wally’s Match Call dialogue in Emerald; I only discovered the instance where he’s out of service near the end of the game. I think it’s cool that you can still interact with him during the main story and that he doesn’t just disappear for 90% of the game like he does in the original RS! 21:51 This is inaccurate, though. Wally only challenges you at the beginning of Victory Road in Emerald. In RS, he challenges you at the very end, just like in ORAS. Emerald only changed it because it was kind of obligated to switch things up in as many ways as it could to throw off people who already played RS.

Wally is a very special character to me, because I felt a connection like no other when I first faced him at Victory Road (long essay incoming, I'll leave a TL;DR, I didn't expect to write for this long, oops) My most treasured Pokemon memory is when I was around 10 years old finishing Omega Ruby, my second Pokemon game ever after X. I was a very shy kid, so when I first saw Wally I instantly related to him, and liked seeing him when he popped up. However, like almost everyone playing Hoenn, I forgot about him for most of the game, he didn't show up enough and I had my own story to make, especially because I took a lot of detours and took my sweet time progressing But then, I got to the end of Victory Road, thinking about finally getting to fight the League... but then he showed up... The passionate way of speaking, him challenging me to a full fight just before the League, the sheer fact of him being even further than I was, his upright stance instead of the nervous one he had at Mauville, the serious look he gave his first Pokemon before throwing his Pokeball, the scenery, the flying roses, and of course, the music, such a display of confidence, epicness, but most of all, growth. The cherry on top was Gallade, the tiny weak Ralts I didn't think much about is now a bladed psychic fighter, with the power of Mega Evolution, a power that I believed only I had (I didn't think much of Maxie's Mega Camerupt), showing his Mega Evolution animation, covering himself with his bright white cape before proudly showing himself, with Gallade's cry enhanced with the Mega effect (Gallade's cry is one of my favorites ever)... I was shocked, and Wally's words of hope after losing only reinforced that idea that Wally is now way more than a tiny kid I helped, he is my equal, but what really got me was that, looking inside, I felt he was my superior, as I was still this shy kid that could barely stand up for himself, while he is here travelling around the world, getting stronger, getting more courageus, and promising me that this won't stop him. He gave me a Dawn Stone as a gift of gratitude, and I instantly knew what I had to do. And so I continued, beat the game and all of that, maybe even the Delta Episode, I don't know what came first, but at one point I felt compelled to do one thing: I went to the same route Wally got his partner, and I caught my own Ralts, I trained it, I evolved it with the very stone Wally gave me, fulfilling my unspoken promise, and raised that new Gallade into Lvl. 100 Wally stayed in my mind as someone I wanted to be, representing what I was and what I could become, and Gallade, coming from the shy and weak Ralts that barely shows his eyes, turning into the noble warrior capable of protecting others, Gallade (in fact, something that I believe is a coincidence, but still means a lot to me, is that Gallade's ability was Steadfast, becoming faster after every flinch, as a way to show that every fall will only make him stronger, and then in Mega, he gets Inner Focus, as a way of finally stating that nothing will make him flinch ever again) Gallade has been my favorite Pokemon ever since, and Wally has been one of my favorite characters ever solely based on what his story made me feel back in the day, and I still feel the same way TL;DR: I liked Wally as I was a shy kid when I played ORAS, but when I fought him at the end, I found myself inferior to him, as he grew so much while I stayed the same. This compelled me to catch and train a Ralts to Lvl. 100, evolving it into Gallade with Wally's Dawn Stone, and Gallade has been my favorite Pokemn ever since As I said, sorry for the long essay, but stuff like this really comes from the heart for me, and I personally wouldn't have it any other way. This video was amazing, I pretty much agree with all of it, and now that I'm here, I'll leave my take on Wally, which is: Wally is a good to great character, but a subpar to bad rival, and that's because of what you said, he isn't our rival, WE are HIS rival, and his story is good but disconnected from what a rival must mean to the player

I kicked wallys gardevoir with with blaze kick. I call it diable jambe and my blaziken is called sanji

the reason wally is at the end and not at the begining of victory road is because on Ruby and Sapphire he is the last encounter, an ambush like the typical rival (Green/Blue or Silver) do now... I think it's fine to have him on his own journey, buttt it's kinda jarring he being blissfully unaware of the near end of the world treats that were groudon and/or kyogre him not being present on any of the magma/aqua encounters is what makes sense (to me) as to why he had time to catch up and surpass the player (collecting the badges)

I think some other games circumvent the problem of not seeing Wally’s development because we play as someone else by having multiple POVs. We’ve never seen POV changes in Pokémon games afaik, but that’d help in cases when GF creates parallel storylines that don’t get involved in the main quest Edit: oops typed this before I got to the end where dual protagonists are mentioned mb

I love Wally, and honestly didn't realize we saw so little of him throughout our journey because he is such a fleshed out character. This is how a friendly rival should be written- the way the future gens made the rivals- I just feel like they have no substance.

I counted 30 steps. Also, Wally in ORAS is at the end of VR because it's the same in RS but not in Emerald. In Emerald he's at the entrance because he didn't had the necessary HMs to get across VR. Which is sad. The Adventures manga version of Wally is the best. Too bad Emerald took over as the Dex Holder *sigh*