[DFOnline] ZOMG MOAR POKEYMANZ…

…but do we still care?

So apart from me being facetious, the long-awaited Gen II Pokemon are finally out, which took them long enough. After egg hatches they had patched in earlier and not counting for the legendaries you can’t get yet and it comes out to… 87 new ones? (Okay, 85, you can’t get Smeargle, probably because it learns moves based on “sketching” them and it would be not one, not one and a half, but eight championships bitches to code, and you can’t get Delibird, don’t know why.)

The good:
• Unlike the initial launch the servers aren’t totally fucked so it’s actually possible to play!
• New Pokemon means new Pokedex entries so it’s a shot in the arm for leveling for the higher-up people who actually kept playing (like, um… me?)
• Update also means you get extra candy and stardust (used to strengthen) for catching evolved Pokemon, because otherwise they were extra rarity and extra crap for absolutely no gain and I wasn’t wasting all these balls (hehe) on goddamn Pidgeottos and Raticates when I can catch three!
• New Eeveelution cheat names (Sakura for the Psychic-type Espeon, Tamao for the Dark-type Umbreon)
• Unown’s kinda cool, no idea if they come in every letter of the alphabet plus ? and ! or what.

The bad:
• The bastards didn’t give extra box storage space for the flood of new monsters.
• Blissey (the evolved version of Chansey, but if you’re reading this you probably know that) is a game-breaker in its being a massive wall due to the insane amount of HP. And naturally everyone you know except you will have one by now because zero Chanseys showed up by me during the Valentine’s Day pink Pokemon/double candy event. I got a shit-ton of Porygons but that doesn’t help me, now does it? (Edit: And then walking to the store just now I hatched a Chansey with enough candy to evolve it. So now I have a Blissey and everyone else can suck it.)
• Evolution items which I bet will be next-to-impossible to get. (Haven’t gotten any yet.)
• Still only limited to one use of the Eeveelution cheat names. Which sucks because I have a nearly perfect stats Eevee, want to evolve it into Vaporeon (which is still the strongest of the five possibilities) because it would outdo mine and I can’t because I used the name limit. (I guess I’ll make it an Espeon, Umbreon surprisingly kinda sucks.)
• Still no P2P trading, so I can’t pass Hermana and Padre Weaselo my Asian exclusive Farfetch’d with the promise that I’m going to get it back when it’s been registered in the Dex.

So, the question asked above is, do we still care? I’m gonna go with… a little. There’s a smaller but still warring community in my neck of the woods (although the balance of power has shifted from Valor/Red to Mystic/Blue with my fellow Instinct/Yellow hitting often enough to at least get some benefits), and Saturday night after work I went driving around the Pokegyms near me and was able to get in and saw another guy in a car doing the same (also Instinct). Not sure if it’ll be the shot in the arm the game wants because it’s still cold out for the most part, but it’s a nice add and when warmer weather comes maybe then it’ll get more active.

I’ve also been playing Fire Emblem Heroes, another mobile game. I’ve always liked the Fire Emblem series but due to some reason or other (lazy) I’ve never played through a full game. I found an emulator of FE7, the first one to come to the States, online but it got taken down before I could finish it. Its main selling point is the permadeath feature—over the course of the game you get a total of 20–30 units, but have one of them die, like your best one, they’re gone for the rest of that file. And the game autosaves, so don’t try save scumming or resets.

It’s the strategy bit of the Fire Emblem series with a story that’s essentially “we can bend time and space to meet and summon characters from a dozen or so games and the other country in our world has the opposite power and is fighting us about it.” So, an excuse plot. At the moment since I’m still knocking out the story mode at higher levels I still gain the in-game currency to summon characters to join your team. I imagine that will get to be more of a pain in the ass when I’ve finished it at every setting and that may be the point I delete it.

Also there’s no permadeath and weapons don’t break from use, probably so people don’t ragedelete the app when the RNG got them some really good unit only to have it die because they accidentally left it exposed to whatever beats it in the rock-paper-scissors weapon triangle. And maybe because you only can have 4 characters on a map so losing one kinda fucks you over for the level. I don’t know. That does make it Fire Emblem Light. But it kills some time and it isn’t micropayments through the roof to get to Level 4, so if you like the series it’s okay, I guess. Will I pay real money for the in-game currency? No, I have principles.

All right, that’ll do it for this one. If you’ve been playing anything good, recommend it. Anything shitty, mock it. Anything mediocre, meh it?