2520: The Grand Tour

I’ve been watching Amazon’s new “totally not Top Gear, oh wait it is really and we’re not even trying to hide it” show The Grand Tour recently. So far I’ve watched the first three episodes and it’s been a lot of fun.

The show follows Top Gear’s format pretty closely, usually featuring a single longer film split into two or more chunks over the course of the episode, punctuated by shorter regular features that are usually played more for laughs than anything. The longer film tends to offer a blend between Clarkson, May and Hammond’s usual silly activities and some thoughts on their cars of the week, deflecting the common criticisms of Top Gear’s latter years in which people accused it of not really being a car show any more.

The longer features have been enjoyably varied so far. One week featured a hilarious sequence of Clarkson, May and Hammond attempting to complete a military exercise — in this case, the “car of the week” was used to assist them in their getaway from an eventually successful rescue mission — while another featured an attempt to recreate the “Grand Tour” of years gone by, whereby wealthy young gentlemen would travel around continental Europe in an attempt to learn more about culture and the arts. (The latter was enjoyably undermined by Hammond turning up in a noisy Dodge and repeatedly doing donuts at every opportunity while Clarkson and May drove an Aston Martin and a Rolls-Royce in an attempt to be more “refined” respectively.)

The shorter features are a little hit and miss. “Conversation Street” — essentially a part of the show where the three talk in a rather unstructured manner similar to the “news” section of Top Gear — tends to work well, as the group has great chemistry as always, and plenty to talk about. “Celebrity Braincrash”, meanwhile, ostensibly a segment where they invite a celebrity on to participate in a difficult quiz, but where the celebrities in question inevitably die in some comedically ridiculous manner on their way to the tent that plays host to the show, is a gag that kind of ran its course in the first show and would have probably been better served being replaced by something new in subsequent episodes.

Likewise, the show’s replacement for the Top Gear test track is a cool course with some entertaining gimmicks, but “The American”, the show’s Stig-equivalent, isn’t a patch on the understated, mute hilarity of Top Gear’s anonymous driver. Like Celebrity Braincrash, “The American” is a bit of a one-note joke, though thankfully in this case not one that is repeated in every episode.

Despite its flaws, however, I’ve been enjoying The Grand Tour, and it’s proven to be an enjoyable successor to Top Gear. I watched a few episodes of the new Top Gear with Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc and didn’t hate it, though it wasn’t the same at all; the chemistry and sense of genuine friendship that Clarkson, May and Hammond had built up over the years simply wasn’t there with the new cast. Fortunately, with the existence of The Grand Tour, this is no longer an issue, since those who enjoyed Top Gear’s old way of doing things can now simply get more of the same.

Some might call that unimaginative. I would call it eminently sensible on Amazon’s part, and great for the people who just wanted more of the show they enjoyed without radical changes.

2519: Chicken-chan x Lillie, OTP

One of the things that attracted me to try out the new Pokémon game was the amount of fanart it was generating even before its release. The Internet, it seemed, was particularly enamoured with Lillie, a major character in the story.

This animated GIF was the first time I noticed her:

tumblr_ogslhxbqyf1vhwy42o1_500

Said GIF is from the Pokémon anime rather than the game — and interestingly Lillie looks considerably younger in this than she does in the game and her official artwork, perhaps to ensure she is in keeping with the perpetually young Ash — but I found her immediately striking and endearing with her distinctive outfit, cute haircut and adorable reaction to Tauros. She doesn’t react at all like this when the player-protagonist encounters Tauros in the games, suggesting that her anime counterpart may be depicted as a slightly different character.

Anyway, I digress. Lillie caught my attention for some reason, initially with this GIF and subsequently with a considerable amount of fanart that started popping up around social media and suchlike.

lillie_pokemon_pokemon_game_and_pokemon_sm_drawn_by_mei_maysroom__sample-3411f81deea614fcf976aa1afd62e77b — Source

Here Lillie is seen closer to her depiction in the game, including her bag, in which she carries “Nebby”, a Cosmog Pokémon that she… “acquired” for reasons that are not yet apparent with my progress in the story. This somewhat pensive pose is also more characteristic of her depiction in the game; she’s shown to be a rather sensible girl who cares for Pokémon, but dislikes the world’s love of Pokémon battles because the participants often end up hurt. She’s constantly down on herself for not being a “proper trainer”, and attaches herself to the player-protagonist when the two develop an immediate connection by chance early in the narrative

You can play a male or female protagonist in Pokémon Sun and Moon, but with the Internet being the Internet, the fanbase of video games with Japanese origin loving a bit of yuri and the female protagonist being pretty cute in her own right, much of the fanart depicting Lillie with the game’s protagonist has focused on the same-sex pairing to varying degrees.

female_protagonist_and_lillie_pokemon_pokemon_game_and_pokemon_sm_drawn_by_nonobuki__sample-2843bb2fb9457e1531f556890dfff18d — Source

The pairing is immediately appealing because the two characters are strong contrasts with one another. Lillie is blonde, pale and depicted as lacking in self-confidence, while “Chicken-chan” — so dubbed by a few people here and there owing to her silly hat — is dark-haired and shown to be curious, self-assured and more than willing to poke her nose into all manner of things. Even the way Chicken-chan walks in the games presents an air of confidence; she struts with great pride, while Lillie kind of saunters along, often looking like she’s hoping no-one will notice her.

female_protagonist_and_lillie_pokemon_pokemon_game_and_pokemon_sm_drawn_by_nicola_pixiv_21072914__sample-f2262b8dc37a5a47c28dec8f1eade25a — Source

Naturally, there’s a ton of fanart out there suggesting that Chicken-chan and Lillie are more than just friends, such as this lovely image that looks like it’s straight out of a visual novel. And of course, there are plenty of images that take things… um… a little bit further, shall we say, but I’ll leave you to investigate Rule 34 for yourself if you dare.

cosmog_female_protagonist_and_lillie_pokemon_pokemon_game_and_pokemon_sm_drawn_by_mimikaki_men_bow__c36d04312329f17442b22da9e6b19688 — Source

I really adore seeing the community as a whole get so wrapped up and invested in a fictional (and, one would argue, non-canonical) relationship between two characters in this way. It’s touching to see everyone “rooting” for these characters, and for so much of the artwork (explicitly lewd stuff aside, obviously) to just be so good-natured, positive and accepting that you can’t help but feel good when you see it.

I mean, obviously a lot of the appeal of the Chicken-chan x Lillie pairing is the simple fact that it’s two cute girls being cute together, but in a world where particularly vocal critics are constantly complaining about the “toxic” culture of gaming, the sheer volume of high-quality fanart of this kind — and the keenness with which it’s shared — is a reminder to us all that perhaps things aren’t quite as bad as the world’s perpetual whingers might want us to believe.

2518: The Pitioss Ruins

0518_001

I finished Final Fantasy XV’s main story earlier on. It was a spectacular conclusion, but that’s not what I want to talk about today. Instead, I want to talk about the game’s “secret” dungeon, the Pitioss Ruins.

As you have probably surmised, spoilers are ahead, albeit not story ones, since the Pitioss Ruins is a purely mechanical challenge. I am going to talk about all the different aspects of the dungeon, though, so if you want to encounter it for yourself, look away now.

Continue reading “2518: The Pitioss Ruins” →

2517: Learn as You Play

0517_001

One of the most interesting things about the new Pokémon games is, I think, the online “Festival Plaza” component that allows you to indirectly communicate with other players, earn rewards and participate in communal challenges. It’s also the main hub from which you can challenge other players to battles, participate in tournaments, trade with friends or random people, list Pokémon for trade or seek out specific Pokémon that you’re after and a bunch of other things besides.

In typical Nintendo fashion, all the technical side of connecting to the Internet and communicating with other people is made as painless as possible — so much so that were it not for the lengthy connection process and the message on screen that says when you’re connected to the Internet, you’d think you were just playing another part of the main game. But you’re not; you’re in an area where every character you meet represents someone else who is playing the game somewhere in the world, and the things they say reflect things they have done and choices they have made.

One particularly interesting aspect of the Festival Plaza is the fact that you can host “missions”. These are simple minigames that usually involve running around the plaza and either talking to the correct people based on their greetings to you, or answering their questions correctly. The more points you score with correct actions, the more Festival Coins you earn, which can subsequently be used on Festival Plaza’s attractions.

What’s interesting about these missions is that it’s not just you playing them. Host one while you’re playing online and you may well notice your “total score” increasing faster than you’re contributing to it, and the number of participants rising. This is because when someone hosts a mission, other people connected to Festival Plaza at the same time receive a message and have the option to take part. Everyone who takes part gets rewards, and the higher the overall total score at the end — which can usually be inflated considerably by just a few more participants — the bigger the rewards everyone gets. It offers a nice balance of simple gameplay, light competitiveness — there’s a leaderboard at the end of the mission to show who contributed the most points — and jolly cooperation. And with Nintendo’s typical lack of direct communication facilities — something which I’m increasingly thankful for with the growing unpleasantness of many online playerbases — the whole thing just feels like a nice bit of fun.

The other interesting thing about these missions is that you can learn something from them. Some of them challenge you to name the correct types of Pokémon that would be strong against another particular type, for example, while some of them challenge you to pick out people who are naming specific types of Pokémon. But these missions aren’t all about the game itself; some of them are straight-up educational and seemingly developed in the interests of making people from all over the world feel a bit closer together. Of particular note are the “Language Lesson” missions in which all you have to do is find the people who are saying “hello”, “goodbye” or “thank you” in a given language. You’re given the set phrases to look out for in the mission information, then after that it’s up to you to remember them. By the end of the couple of minutes the mission takes, you’ll feel confident at saying those three phrases in another language, which is pretty neat.

Since Pokémon is primarily aimed at kids, despite a considerable adult-age enthusiast community of competitive players, I’m not anticipating any of these missions will get into anything too deep or complicated, but they’ve been a nice diversion from the main game, they feel in keeping with the overall tone of the whole thing and I’ve learned a thing or two from them, both about Pokémon in general and a couple of foreign languages to boot.

2516: Alola!

0516_001

When I’ve not been playing Final Fantasy XV, I’ve been giving Pokémon Moon a serious shot, as I’m determined to try and understand the obsessive appeal the series has. And I think, finally, I’m starting to “get it”.

Part of this is, as I described a few days ago, the fact that Sun and Moon have refined their systems and interfaces to a level where I’m not frustrated by a lack of information any longer, although I do feel there’s a certain amount of “assumed knowledge”; an understanding that many of the people who are playing this have previously played at least one Pokémon game to death. This leads to a certain amount of flailing around in the early hours as you try to figure certain things out — though pleasingly, the game does actually take the time to point out what common series abbreviations like “TM” stand for, which is something I don’t recall X and Y doing.

Pokémon has evolved considerably over time. I played Red and Gold when they first came out on Game Boy, then set the series aside until X and Y which I gave a go for a bit but didn’t really feel, although there were certain aspects I did like. Chief among these was the amount of customisation there is in the game, which has really come to the forefront in the 3D installments. I’m a sucker for any game that gives me the opportunity to play a cute girl and dress her up in cute outfits, and Moon certainly hasn’t been disappointing in this regard, with plenty of hair and clothing options to choose from. (I actually found myself not wanting to customise X and Y’s default female character because I liked her standard look so much, though I understand there was a similar situation here.)

Moon’s online feature — the Festival Plaza — is a little peculiar in that true Nintendo “no direct online interaction!” way, but it’s charming, endearing and friendly in, yes, that true Nintendo way. Not only do you get the opportunity to ogle the wonderful avatar creations of other players — both from your friends list and randomly gathered from online — but you also get to interact with them in various ways. Perhaps the most appealing part of all this is the fact that it’s possible to populate your online profile with a questionnaire covering all manner of different topics, and there are a wide variety of different responses you can give to the prompts — some sensible, some nonsensical. This allows players the opportunity to express themselves and their personality without the potential for unpleasantness that unfiltered direct online communication often brings with it.

As for the main game itself, the setup has been enjoyable so far. In typical Pokémon fashion, you set out from your childhood home to have an adventure, largely prompted by the local crazy professor. Along the way you encounter a rival (who is more of a friend in this character than in some previous installments) and a recurring team of villains (who are, as usual, comedically incompetent in this installment, with the main difference being that the general populace of the Alola region knows how comedically incompetent they are rather than living in fear of them) as you seek to prove your might as a Pokémon master.

I like the fact the structure of the game has been shaken up a bit from “get to each town, visit gym, defeat everyone in there” from the previous games. The new “trials” concept covers the same basic ground, but seems to handle things more like a traditional RPG dungeon, with objectives to complete along the way followed by a boss at the end. I’m interested to see how this develops further in the game — I’m still on the first island at present.

I’m not yet quite sure if I’m “doing it right” with regard to my team makeup and levelling strategy, but I’m sure there are no mistakes I might make that can’t be corrected with a little grinding or, if the worst comes to the worst, catching a fresh new Pokémon of a particular type. In the meantime, I’m genuinely enjoying Moon, and I’m keen to see how the game develops in its later hours.

2515: Life in Eos

0515_001

Still plugging away at Final Fantasy XV, and still having a lot of fun. I’m now up to Chapter 8, as I eventually ran into a roadblock in Chapter 3 where part of the map where several sidequests concluded was locked off and thus I had to progress further to be able to continue. Along the way I enjoyed some spectacular story sequences, but now I’m back on the sidequest train for the moment.

I’ve been very much enjoying the whole experience of Final Fantasy XV so far. While the sheer amount of sidequests and other distractions around the game world absolutely kill the pacing of the main story if you don’t have the self-discipline to focus on that first and do all the other shit later, all that side content is enjoyable to do. As I noted in my first impressions a few days ago, the whole game feels like an inversion of the usual Final Fantasy formula, in which a wide variety of things are open to you from almost the very outset of the game, and you’re simply able to immediately go and do whatever appeals to you the most.

Like Xenoblade Chronicles X, an open-world RPG that had a rather similar structure, I’ve been enjoying how much all the side content makes the world feel like a fleshed-out, lived-in place. Through numerous sidequests — and the conversations your party members have during these quests — you learn quite a bit about the world that you might not discover if you just focused on the main story. The town of Lestallum, for example, is one with a pretty strong gender divide that has come about naturally over time; the women (who are “built”, according to Gladio, who one can infer from his enthusiasm is all about the thicc girls) work the industrial jobs such as maintaining the power plant in the city, while the men run the market stalls, restaurants and shops. You might not notice this immediately if you just pay it the flying visit you do in the main scenario quests, but Holly’s series of sidequests explores this side of things a bit further.

I’ve enjoyed the dungeons, too. I think I’ve cleared them all now — with the exception of the high-level deeper levels that open up once you’ve completed the main story — and they’ve been pleasingly different from one another. Particular highlights included the Crestholme Channels, a labyrinth of sewers beneath the outskirts of the Crown City, and Costlemark Tower, a complex dungeon with a shifting layout that you have to carefully navigate your way through in order to reach the boss at the end.

(As a side note, Costlemark Tower presently has a bug in it where sometimes if you’ve done things in the “wrong” order, beating the boss will not trigger the final cutscene and award you with the weapon you’re supposed to get for clearing the dungeon. If this happens, exit and re-enter the dungeon, work your way back to the boss room and trigger a somewhat glitchy cutscene. You then have to fight the boss again, though the bug means that you can’t target it unless you’re able to trigger a Summon spell. You can, however, fling magic at it; Blizzard spells are particularly effective, so stock up on those before going in for an easy victory.)

I think I’m just about coming to the limit of sidequests that are left to do before I’ll be obliged to continue on with the main story. At about 57 hours deep in the game so far, I’ve already very much had my money’s worth, but I’m keen to see how the story continues and concludes — and also very excited to explore what sounds like a considerable amount of post-game content.

2514: Ghost Train

0514_001

A short while ago, Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 was considerably reduced in price on the PlayStation Store, so I grabbed a copy. I’m a big fan of the previous Pac-Man Championship Edition games — particularly Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, which is one of the finest arcade games ever created — but had heard mixed reviews about Championship Edition 2. Still, I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

The first thing I’ll say about Championship Edition 2 is that its big new structural addition — a so-called “adventure mode” — is total garbage. It consists entirely of time attack phases in which you have to eat sufficient dots to make a piece of fruit appear — very rarely is this the entire maze worth of dots — and repeat until you have eaten sufficient fruit to clear the stage. At the end of every block of near-identical levels is a supposed “boss fight” in which you do exactly the same thing, only with a giant ghost bashing into the background every so often.

“Total garbage” may be an exaggeration in retrospect, as these challenges are mildly diverting, but they miss the entire point of Pac-Man Championship Edition, which is to score as many points as possible against a strict time limit.

Fortunately, the Score Attack mode is a lot of fun, and Championship Edition 2 is a different beast from its predecessors in a number of ways.

Firstly and most significantly, bumping into a ghost no longer immediately kills Pac-Man, unlike all the previous incarnations of the game including the previous Championship Edition installments. Instead, Pac-Man bounces off the ghost, though bumping into one several times (or once on Expert mode) causes the ghost to become “angry”, which makes it speed up, chase Pac-Man and become fatal to the touch. However, sometimes it is desirable to do this, since making a ghost angry causes it to fly up in the air and out of the way for a couple of seconds, so you can deliberately provoke a ghost in order to clear a path for yourself.

Secondly, the “ghost trains” introduced in Championship Edition DX work a little differently. There are several modes of play — the first has four ghosts wandering around, but only one of them forms a train when Pac-Man passes by a sleeping minion ghost, while the other two form up to four trains in total, one for each ghost. Unlike Championship Edition DX, minion ghosts don’t join a train by a ghost passing them; they immediately wake up when Pac-Man passes by them and automatically attach themselves to one of the trains, even if it’s nowhere near where the minion was. This allows you to create huge ghost trains by planning your route carefully rather than having to manipulate the ghosts AI.

Eating a power pill works a little differently, too. Power pills only spawn on certain mazes after you’ve eaten a certain number of dots, and consuming one causes the ghosts and their trains to turn blue in the traditional manner. However, in Championship Edition 2 they move on set routes that are specifically marked on the maze, allowing you to predict where they are likely to go and head them off easily. Said routes tend to branch in several places in the harder mazes, so it’s not as easy as it sounds, but by learning the routes and the way the ghost trains attempt to avoid Pac-Man, you can become more and more efficient.

Oh, and ghost trains have to be consumed from their head now rather than from any point. This can be surprisingly challenging, though chomping your way through all four ghost trains in the maze, which causes both the train and Pac-Man to go flying through the air in a ridiculously overblown display of acrobatics, is immensely satisfying.

Bombs work differently, too. Rather than blasting the ghosts up in the air for a moment as in the previous installment, bombs now send Pac-Man back to the starting point of the maze, which can be a quick means of retrieving the fruit if it’s spawned and you’re a long way from it. However, bombs are worth quite a few points at the end of your allotted time, so it’s worth holding on to them as much as possible; more can be acquired by consuming every dot in a maze rather than just the amount required to spawn the fruit needed to progress.

Extra lives also show up at predictable moments — every 1 million points — as collectible items in the maze, and these are worth huge points at the end of a game, so it’s in your interest to collect them before progressing to the next maze. They’re easily missed, so the mark of a true pro Championship Edition 2 player is going to be planning their scoring effectively so that they hit a multiple of a million points at a suitable moment to grab the extra life without inconveniencing them — and not, say, crossing the million boundary on the changeover between levels, which causes you to miss out on the opportunity to collect the extra life altogether.

There’s quite a lot to Championship Edition 2, then. Fundamentally, it’s still based around Pac-Man, but it’s pleasingly distinct from its predecessors and fun in its own right. It has a couple of irritating factors — most notably a lengthy, non-skippable and rather unnecessary tutorial sequence before you can play Score Attack or Adventure mode, and, of course, Adventure mode itself, which is a waste of time — but on the whole, once you get stuck in to chasing the high scores, it’s a lot of fun. And, like its predecessors, it’s a game you can easily spend several hours enjoying when you really have more important and interesting things to do with your life.

2513: Blood Rage

My regular gaming friends and I tried an interesting new tabletop game this evening: Blood Rage. It’s a game themed around Norse mythology with a particular focus on Ragnarok, and there’s a lot to like about it.

Each player takes on the role of a particular faction. Each of these factions start out the same, but there are various means to upgrade them over the course of the game, mostly through the hand of cards you draft at the start of each of the game’s three phases. By specialising your clan in a particular way, you can take aim for big points at the end of the game, and the interesting thing is that martial dominance is not the only way to be successful at the game.

A big part of the mythology behind the game is the idea of attaining glory through various means. You don’t have to win a battle to attain glory — though it often helps — so long as the battle itself was suitably spectacular. It’s eminently possible to set up your hand of cards and your clan’s upgrades in such a manner as to benefit you more to lose battles than to win them — though there’s something of a tradeoff here in that losing battles may end up allowing an opponent uncontested access to a useful area of the board.

There’s clearly a lot of scope for building up your forces in various ways, and indeed attempting to get as powerful as possible is one way to victory. But there are a lot of interesting balancing factors in play, too, most notably the finite resource of “Rage” that you have to expend on your various actions in each phase. Once you run out of rage, you are unable to take any more actions in that phase — not even free ones — aside from responding to the “call to battle” that transpires when a player attempts to pillage a region for its upgrade token.

There are, however, various means of manipulating the game to your advantage. One particularly fun card I acquired early on adds no strength whatsoever to your forces in combat, but allows you to steal a rage point off the winning player if you lose the battle. Other cards allowed you to gain points when your units were destroyed, or when you reclaim them from “Valhalla” at the end of each phase. There’s also a significant point bonus for any units you have in an area destroyed during the Ragnarok phase at the end of each of the game’s three stages.

We didn’t finish a complete game this evening, but we got most of the way through one, and figured out enough to understand how it all works. It seems like a really cool game that I’m looking forward to trying again at some point — and it has some absolutely gorgeous miniatures included for both the various factions and the recruitable monsters you can add to your forces through the upgrade mechanics.

If you’re looking for a fun, interesting and pretty varied game with a lot of interaction between players — and rules that allow a good degree of depth without being overly complex — Blood Rage is well worth checking out. Hopefully we’ll have the chance to play it some more in the new year.

2512: Police, Stop!

One of my many not-particularly-guilty pleasures is terrible police documentaries. Not the kind that deal with actual hard-hitting crime like murders and whatnot, but the shows that are typically on late-night TV and focus on the more mundane parts of the police force such as traffic and rail cops.

I’m not sure why I enjoy these shows so much, but I have done for quite some time. I think part of it is the fact that I’ve always taken a certain degree of pride in being law-abiding and resent those who get away with breaking the law — consequently, I rather enjoy seeing people who have done something wrong get into trouble.

I get the impression from these shows that it’s not particularly fashionable to be in favour of the police or of “authority” figures in general, and as such the shows themselves tend to be skewed rather more in favour of the police than the criminals. Good PR and all that. All that said, even without the inherent bias in the shows I’m pretty sure I’d find it tough to sympathise with a drug dealer or twat driving an old banger without any insurance.

The one thing that does bug me a bit about the police depicted in these shows is their ridiculous overreliance on business-speak and jargon. It’s never a car crash, it’s an “RTC”. It’s never a house, it’s a “property”. And God knows what they’re on about with half of the charges. “Aggravated vehicle taking?” No, mate, you nicked a car.

These documentaries aren’t going to win any awards for quality television or hard-hitting journalism, and often end in a rather unsatisfactory manner explaining just how the people the cops in the episode spent tailing managed to not get locked up for the things they clearly did, but I still find them enjoyable nonetheless. They’re not something I’d find myself actively watching in favour of something else, but as something on in the background — usually while we’re trying to get to sleep — they’re hard to beat.

On that note, it’s an early start tomorrow so it’s time to get to bed and hear Jamie Theakston explain what ANPR is for the 500th time.

2511: Maybe Catch Some of ‘Em

0511_001

I decided to give Pokémon another go with the latest installments Sun and Moon, specifically Moon, since Andie picked up a copy of Sun.

I’ve only spent a little over an hour with it so far but already it looks as if Sun and Moon have addressed some of the things I found frustrating about the previous installments, and that, coupled with reports from friends who say it’s a lot more story-heavy than previous Pokémon games, makes me think I’m probably going to enjoy it a lot more.

One of the things that always frustrated me about earlier Pokémon games was the fact that it was pretty vague about things like debuffs and suchlike. “Pikachu’s attack fell!” the game would say. “How much?” I would want to know. “Does that debuff stack if the opponent keeps using the same move?” Neither of those answers were particularly forthcoming in previous installments — or if they were, I certainly didn’t know where to find them.

In Sun and Moon, however, there’s a handy mid-battle status screen that allows you to see that yes, debuffs do stack, and how many times your Pokémon has been inflicted with a particular debuff. (It still doesn’t tell you how much your stat has been reduced by, but you can make an educated guess as to the impact according to the levels of your Pokémon and your opponent.)

Even better, Sun and Moon use information from the Pokédex to allow you to quickly see which moves are effective, super-effective and not very effective against your current opponent, negating the need for constant flipping back and forth between menu screens or keeping copious notes on what was weak and strong against what. Doubtless for some purists learning all this stuff was part of the appeal, but the way Sun and Moon does things is a lot more friendly to people like me who haven’t invested thousands of hours in the series as a whole.

These niggly little features aside, I’m impressed with the overall presentation of Sun and Moon, a lot more so than previous installments. While X and Y had some reasonably nice character models, their proportions were a bit weird in comparison to the official art. In Sun and Moon, meanwhile, the characters look just like their hand-drawn counterparts and are animated well, to boot. The only sign it’s running on the underpowered 3DS hardware is any time the camera gets a bit close to a character and you can see big jagged pixels on the textures.

I’m not far enough in the story to be able to comment on it as yet, but the early introduction of the character Lillie — current darling of the fanart community, from what I can tell online — gives the story some interesting momentum right from the get-go, and the incidental characters are appealing and fun. In particular, the protagonist’s mother is extremely likeable, helping to make your character’s home feel a lot more… well, homely.

I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops further; I’m going to give it a proper chance this time around, even if I am currently attempting to juggle it with Final Fantasy XV, which is monopolising most of my gaming time at present. Perhaps I’ll finally understand why people go apeshit for each new Pokémon release.