Samias

I don't have the shiny charm yet, but last night I got that shiny Crabrawler. This morning I found a shiny sneasel, and just now I got a shiny magnemite. I apparently picked up some super luck...

Tabata has said in interviews he doesn't want a trilogy, but Nomura and SE have given interviews where they DID want one. [spoiler=Speculation]I hear the story is quite brief in this game and doesn't feature certain characters as much as you'd expect. The doors are definitely open for a sequel.

Some male swimmers in past games had their speedos altered to cover more skin. But those swimmers weren't fanservice. They just wore a swimsuit that most American parents would find a little too revealing, despite being entirely non sexual. However the male swimmers in SM is plenty fanservice and he is wearing regular swim trunks. I caught my first shiny, a Crabrawler! It continues my cursed trend of every Iron Fist mon having a -Attack nature though...

At least compared to X and Y, the boys clothing selection is at least remotely comparable. Pretty much all the girl's clothing is casual tanktops and shorts too. I mostly saw the same shirts for boys and girls this time around. Girls definitely get more choices but overall they tried to have a little more parity in this game for the main pieces. Here, the difference is mostly in neckline of the shirts and then a slight edge in accessories. In XY the female wardrobe completely eclipses the male one with additional dresses and coats, not to mention the socks as iirc boys didn't get to swap their socks at all.

Yep, Sugimori has been doing the trainer art the whole time. He just saw the designs coming out of modern anime and decided that's what he wanted to do as well. However he is no longer the main designer for the Pokemon themselves, nor does he do all the official art anymore, hence the slightly different style to the Alola Pokemon. I mean the whole "girls have more clothing options" thing really stems from the fact that real life clothing stores also skew something like 70/30 women's and men's clothes. Just because of dresses and skirts, women simply have more options period. The only thing that is a huge letdown is the hair, to be honest. There's no reason as to why boys can't style their bangs like the girls can.

All FF games drop the ball somewhere. Not a single one is flawless. Also lack of females will be resolved sometime later, judging by the trilogy structure that has been proposed. If you want a great female cast 11 and 14 are pretty great in that regard. And 13 would have been if Lightning had more personality than a soggy cardboard cutout.

I ordered the game with two day shipping and my Amazon discount but I waited on reviews and some opinions from friends before dropping cash. I'm cautiously optimistic since FF14 is probably my favourite game of the current gen, but FF13 was one of my most reviled games of last gen. I feel like the 15 team is closer in structure to the 14 one, so we'll see.

Catch all the UBs in a post game quest line. Your reward is at the end.

[spoiler=E4]I like the fact that the final fight in the Elite 4 has so many possibilities, but fighting Kukui the first time is everything I wanted. He is not the Champion but he is the league's founder, so being able to fight at the top is his dream come true. But you are literally fighting Kukui from the Champion's side of the arena, so I don't consider Kukui the champ. His Braviary is crazy though. First turn he set up stealth rock with Lycanroc, then he proceeded to abuse tailwind and brave bird on Braviary and shuffle unfavourable opponents using whirlwind. Madness! It definitely had me on my toes. I wonder how he could have ever lost to the Kanto E4! Lance spammed barrier and agility on a hapless Venomoth! Also the E4 was quite a bit different than I thought it would be! Interesting to see Nanu and Hapu duck out to prevent the E4 from being totally decimated by the same kind of team for all four members. There's never been a flying type specialist in the E4 but they have been a glut of dark type and ground type trainers. Before the Elite 4, Hau really stepped it up... holy crap. His Raichu's psychic was a real problem. But the real shocker was the insane bulk of his Incineroar. My Primarina could only take off about 2/5ths of its HP with Moonblast while I was 2HKOed by earthquake... how embarrassing. I even had the level advantage. My EVs and IVs in sp atk must be pretty bad while Hau's are amazing. [spoiler=My team]Because of the EXP Share, I swapped out members of my team frequently. I felt very free to experiment and rainbow beans made it easy to boost new members' hearts with Refresh. I started with Popplio and reset a few times until I got a female. She also happened to have a Timid nature so that's cool even if her speed is not amazing. It does give her a little boost and only dimishes a stat she doesn't use. She was mostly a mainstay of the team except when she got overleveled and I boxed her for a little bit, only to pull her out for endgame. Butterfree, Makuhita, Crabrawler, Yungoos, and Pikipek were all very temporary transients. Magnemite was too, but I took it with me until midway through the 2nd island. I caught a bagon without hunting for too long so I put it on the team because early dragons are cool. Meowth stayed Meowth for a very long time until its defense became a liability and it couldn't reliably get off a thief attempt. I still stole the Petaya berry from the totem Salazzle. It had pickup so I got a sun stone very early, which is good for my team... I did get a Fur Coat persian which did OK. In a multibattle with friends I used its nasty plot + snarl to good effect with some coverage from Power Gem. It really is much bulkier than it looks even if technician is probably better. But it did get dropped after island 3. I went through several Petilills to get one I liked. My very first one had Chlorophyll, which is nice for a sun team, but my team ain't that. I eventually caught another with Own Tempo and evolved it right after obtaining Giga Drain so it would get Quiver Dance after. I did give up HP ice for HP rock, but it was good filler. Lilligant's coverage is truly awful but it was able to sweep up the abudance of ground and rock types with a few quiver dances under its belt. Spent time in the box for being overleveled but was brought back for the Elite 4. I found two female salandits!! I kept the Sassy natured one but in retrospect I should have kept the Mild one. The Mild Salandit was traded for a Goomy, but since it didn't have Sap Sipper I didn't bring Goomy onto the team. Salazzle was an amazing team member though ground types destroyed her easily, and her physical durability overall was not good. Toxic was awesome. She was eventually boxed for being overleveled but for whatever reason I didn't bring her back. She still enjoyed some use in some multibattles I had with friends. I needed Stufful and I simply hunted for one vigilantly. At this point my original team of Primarina, Lilligant, Shellgon, Bewear, Salazzle, and Persian was getting overleveled so all of them got boxed except for Bewear, who I love dearly. I picked up a rough skin modest gible for a comfey off of GTS. Since that nature sucks and I see why the owner tossed it, I proceeded to breed a real winner in a Jolly rough skin gible. ROUGH SKIN IS SO GOOD. Gible replaced Shellgon because I needed a ground type and Garchomp is a favourite of mine. The updated evolution level meant I got garchomp much earlier than expected. I found Elekids and because I'd been lacking electric types, it stayed on the team. My friends helped me evolve it into electivire just before the E4 but as electabuzz I didn't feel like I was missing out on anything. Araquanid was a temporary member but Water Bubble Scalds even off that piss poor sp atk will punch a hole through anything. Absolutely ridiculous powerhouse. I picked up a Plume fossil from Konikoni and Archen is just a monster. It's amazing. Archeops was a true blue MVP with STAB acrobatics off a +attack nature. It was Brave so it could have been better, but acrobatics, rock slide, crunch and u-turn offered extremely good coverage coming off of staggeringly high attack power. It also still outspeeds most of Alola. It took a thunderbolt like a champ from Raichu, and even in red HP its u-turn took off a huge chunk of HP from its opponent. So good. Also it looks super goofy in 3D and I love it more than I ever loved it in Unova. It was a monster then, and it's still a monster now. The last slot was kinda empty for awhile, filled with Pokemon I was simply leveling to fill Pokedex entries with. Happiny, Cleffa, Igglypuff, Magby, etc. By endgame, my final team was Archeops, Primarina, Electivire, Lilligant (own tempo), Garchomp (rough skin), and Bewear (fluffy). Bewear was the champion of tanks, completely unfazed by physical threats. Archeops was the offensive powerhouse with serious pivot potential. Garchomp was a good secondary tank. Electivire, Lilligant, and Primarina were coverage nukes when needed. Electivire in particular pulled some real weight near the end so it was a good pickup, but they all had some moments to shine.

I've seen some games get delayed at Gamestop/other retail too, lest we forget Nintendo couldn't ship out enough copies of Fire Emblem Awakening to fulfill demand when that was released. Things up in Canada can be touch-and-go at EB Games due to uncertainty with pricing when it comes to our currency. NoC tends to not release any MSRP until a month before release and as a result, EB Games doesn't open preorders. However Pokemon is a colossal release and usually those are never impacted.

Just some random coloured stuff...

Yep, that was me. I figured if I was going to ask for something I should also contribute!

Thanks for all your hard work! I'd like to make a request to have Pelleas translated, being one of the new primary characters in the game.

Uhh the remaster actually switches the Skyrim engine to the updated engine used for Fallout 4. It might not be any significant remake of content in the game but it does support a much better lighting system and utilizes a different form of anti-aliasing which softens everything up. For PC, the biggest difference is going from a 32-bit game to 64-bit and being able to utilize more than 4GB of RAM at once. On consoles, there is no question that the remaster is an improvement on the base game because the last gen suffered from extreme RAM bottlenecks. I think in the current generation, Elder Scrolls is Bethesda's star franchise while the Fallout series is more niche. Not to say that Fallout 4 isn't a mega hit, but Skyrim's play time statistics on Steam are well above average and have been for a surprisingly long time. Also, Mass Effect 3 was on the Wii U and while it didn't run great during heavy action sequences, it was there. It didn't sell well because Mass Effect 3 had already been on the market for months, though. After all, the Wii U wasn't THAT underpowered compared to the 360, however it sacrifices the power of its specs to stream to the Wii U gamepad and that caused a lot of games to have issues with slowdown that they didn't have on the PS3 or 360. Early on the Wii U also had Assassin's Creed Black Flag and CoD Black Ops 2, and both games ran just as well as their counterparts on other systems. In fact there's quite a few people who praised the ability to play those games on the game pad while giving up the TV to their kids.

Trickster is not the worst class if only because Lucky Seven and Acrobat are ridiculously good skills to have. I took Acrobat onto Valkyrie... the movement of a flier with the lack of arrow weakness is ridiculous. Staff utility is also always helpful and Levin Swords are the most plentiful of the non-book magic weapons. Sorcerer is probably the best class in a run about self sufficiency. Nearly impossible to kill because Nosferatu is broken as hell once weight is taken out of the equation. Worst class is probably Taguel. Being locked to 1 range forever is not great. They've got good speed and effective damage vs beasts (but not vs Walhart), but otherwise they are completely overshadowed by the manaketes' significant advantages in strength, defense, and attack range. Dishonourable mention is probably War Cleric for a lack of good users, lack of Bolt Axes without DLC, and having its skills overshadowed by other classes. Bowlock in this game can be an advantage in Lunatic+ due to the prevalence of counter. But otherwise Sniper is pretty bad, but there's niche cases when you don't want to counter on EP.

Funny how the book calls Sigrun the "most able pegasus knight of her time", but she's statistically outclassed by Marcia and Tanith. Good ol seperation of story and gameplay. I wish RD had fleshed out Astrid's Crimean knighthood more, knowing she's a Begnion noble of relatively high standing.Unfortunately she's such a minor character that they don't really flesh her out except for her romance to the knight of most dubious competence.

I love dusk balls because I almost always play at night, plus they get a boost in caves. Runner up would be heavy balls, which tends to be the ultimate legendary catcher with the insanely high x12 catch rate at the highest levels.

In the TCG you could ever only use 4 cards of the same name, regardless of differences in HP and moveset as well. I realize TCG=/=video game but with all we know about Pokemon with different forms like Wormadan, they still count as the same Dex number and you could only use one.

Decidueye being part ghost is also probably a nod to its "stealth" elements, as the wings are something of a ghillie suit for camoflauge.

Cynthia is extremely popular. She even got her own Nendoroid and her theme made it into Smash 4's Pokémon League music rotation. She is really memorable thanks to her strong and diverse team. Her Garchomp was very scary back in the day. It took a long time for my Empoleon to finally outclass it.

The GCN and N64 had multiple games. I rather enjoyed Hey You, Pikachu! and the two Stadium games on N64. On the GCN, the Colosseum games were hard, but were the closest we'd ever had to a full Pokemon adventure on consoles. It wasn't until the Wii and Wii U where the company responsible for the console spinoffs started pouring their effort into Trozei/Shuffle instead. Plus portables started offering a "good enough" amount of power to deliver a core battling experience and innovative spinoffs, while HD graphics became more and more expensive and home consoles became less popular in Japan. It seems the Pokemon company is content just releasing multitudes of spinoffs to consoles because they tend to license out the material since the Pokemon core games have become so large. Where time used to exist to work on Stadium, now all the spinoffs are handled by outside companies and Gamefreak focuses any time on the side to work on smaller projects like Drill Dozer, Harmoknight, Pocket Card Jockey or Tembo the Badass Elephant. Gamefreak is basically set up into 3 teams at any given time, it seems: One team for the "core" game (with overlapping dev schedules as well as they tend to do pre-dev for the next pair of games while the current game is in development), one team for remakes, and one team for something unrelated to Pokemon. Once Sun and Moon arrive, we'll see if the team responsible for remakes is working on something based on the number of hints NPCs tend to drop about the next game in the series. It will probably continue to be on the 3DS as Gamefreak has never been the first company to hop on a new system. Black and White 2 came out after the 3DS was released with some 3DS enhanced features, but neglected to be exclusive to the 3DS to not lock out the younger audience that doesn't upgrade as fast. My bets on the first Pokemon game on the Switch will be a complete version of Pokken with all the arcade extras that have been coming out. Nothing has been said about updates to the Wii U version, after all, but Pokken managed to pull better numbers than Street Fighter V on initial release.

I think a lot of Pokemon who aren't viable in singles can be monsters in doubles. Smeargle is merely very strong in singles but there's no Pokemon to take off the pressure for it to switch in and set up. However it is one of the gods of double battles, nearly indispensable on many teams. Many Pokemon who rely on a setup before becoming a monster are stronger in doubles, which makes trick room and weather teams more viable as well. A strong tank with Follow Me can help take off a lot of heat from their partner.

Every so often Gamefreak just has something that makes no sense... Rhydon and the Nidos having Surf (and Tauros, and Snorlax??), and Slowpoke's line having Flamethrower come to mind.

They showed BOTW because it's also in development for the Switch. It's like how Twilight Princess had both a GCN version and a Wii version, but the Wii version was mirrored and had motion controls and a different UI. However the Wii was backwards compatible with the GCN version of the game since Nintendo had used PowerPC architecture for both consoles, until the removal of the GCN controller ports in later Wii console revisions to cut costs. The Switch will have its own cart for BOTW but can't play Wii U games, due to the lack of asynchronous gameplay. The portable screen is not akin to the Wii U tablet and you either play on the TV or you play on the screen. You can't do both at the same time. They also moved on from PowerPC to a custom Tegra chipset from Nvidia, which means hardware cheats used by devs will not port gracefully to the Switch either. However it will be easier for the Switch to handle ports from PC games, thanks to Nvidia's infrastructure. Hence why we'll likely see more enthusiasm from western devs for the new system, at least in the first year or so as they work on ports. The Switch has inherited much of the tech behind the Nvidia Shield + Nintendo's household brand power.