Pokemon Legends: Arceus General Discussion

[BackSet]

If Masuda can remember every little thing he did 7 years ago I’d be impressed. I can’t even remember what I did a week ago.

 

[Esserise]

Because he directed the games, maybe? I mean, if we don't have to put weight on his words, everything GF says should be classified as possibly inaccurate

I didn’t say not to believe what he says full-stop. I’m just saying there’s context to things, and we should be aware of that. If Masuda gives what looks like a vague or flimsy answer to a random off-topic question about a severely outdated issue that we ourselves don’t know the full extent of, then maybe we’d be wise to not extrapolate too much from it.

People make a fuss about what he said, trying to pull these “gotcha” moments where they point out all the times that GF have since made certain elements more complicated than the Flute seems to have been (also, GF/TPC literally distributed the Member Card and Oak’s Letter around that same time, in the same way that the Flute hypothetically would have been, so it’s not as if players weren’t familiar with the process), but like... maybe think about that disparity for a sec? Maybe there’s a reason why it doesn’t seem to add up. Additionally, I think his answer about the Flute doesn’t even make for particularly compelling evidence in the context of arguments about how the games have gotten easier - not only have there been plenty of complicated things since then, but also, there’s just stronger and more meaningful examples of difficulty reduction to be analyzed than “hey that guy once said something about 8 year olds being confused by the Azure Flute”

 

[Fairy Type Arceus]

On a different note, since this game revolves so heavily on the idea of creating the Sinnoh Region's first PokéDex, I hope the creators go all out on the aesthetics since we see at the beginning of the trailer, a bunch of books stacked next to the wooden PokéBalls and upon opening them we see the ecology of Sinnoh sketched out in a Sumie style artwork all very reminiscent of the log books compiled by intrepid explorers who travelled into Hokkaido and documented it's geography, flora and fauna.

Spoiler

View attachment 141239View attachment 141240

Basically I would hope that sort of attention to detail isn't just exclusive to the trailers and when you pull up the PokéDex in-game it wouldn't be the same old boring sprite on a bland background but an elaborate ink drawing on paper pages which you could flick through. Also it would be nice if they took a cue from the Uncharted series and have a short animation of the player character actually take out their Dex from a pocket or something and quickly scribble something down after you've successfully caught a Pokémon.

It really is little details like that which make the game feel like a genuine simulacrum.

Would be really cool if we could write our own pokedex entrys

 

[Joker901]

I didn’t say not to believe what he says full-stop. I’m just saying there’s context to things, and we should be aware of that. If Masuda gives what looks like a vague or flimsy answer to a random off-topic question about a severely outdated issue that we ourselves don’t know the full extent of, then maybe we’d be wise to not extrapolate too much from it.

People make a fuss about what he said, trying to pull these “gotcha” moments where they point out all the times that GF have since made certain elements more complicated than the Flute seems to have been (also, GF/TPC literally distributed the Member Card and Oak’s Letter around that same time, in the same way that the Flute hypothetically would have been, so it’s not as if players weren’t familiar with the process), but like... maybe think about that disparity for a sec? Maybe there’s a reason why it doesn’t seem to add up. Additionally, I think his answer about the Flute doesn’t even make for particularly compelling evidence in the context of arguments about how the games have gotten easier - not only have there been plenty of complicated things since then, but also, there’s just stronger and more meaningful examples of difficulty reduction to be analyzed than “hey that guy once said something about 8 year olds being confused by the Azure Flute”

And exactly how should people decide when to believe to his words and when not to? You have to understand that he is not a random developer who happened to speak about a game. He is the director and now the producer of Game Freak and he should know (and he clearly knows) that when he speaks, he speaks for the entire development studio and not just for himself. So, if the director of Diamond and Pearl decides after 7 years to talk about the removal of the event about the god of pokemon in the games he directed, from my point of view, those words are the words of GF on the Arceus event and for this reason the only truth we can have. If Masuda was drunk or decided to lie, or if everything he said was just to hide another truth, well, we will never know unless Masuda himself changes his version on the matter. But, even in that case, how should we know that's the actual truth if we doubt about his words?
Basically we cannot decide to believe to his words when he says something interesting and not believe to his words when he says something weird. We have to accept the possibility that they decided to delete that event because they found it too complicated for people to understand. Aren't they the same people who made the games easier and easier because kid don't have time to spend on pokemon?

 

[BackSet]

Except for Galrian Yamask's evolution, apparently. And Alcremie.

 

[Joker901]

Except for Galrian Yamask's evolution, apparently. And Alcremie.

Sure, that's weird. As I said myself. But I cannot say that they were not completely honest about the Arceus event because of that. The battle frontier was removed, the difficulty level has indeed decreased, so it's just possible they thought the Arceus event was actually difficult and the Yamask evolution was something people could figure out. Who am I to say when they speak the truth and when they don't, considering they are the developers of the games and I am a random person who plays them?

 

[BackSet]

I personally think that the idea of Masuda remembering something that happened 7 years ago and was probably not even all that high on the dev team's priority list is kind of dumb.

Curiosity Side Note: are there any hints about how to evolve Yamask in-game?

 

[Joker901]

I personally think that the idea of Masuda remembering something that happened 7 years ago and was probably not even all that high on the dev team's priority list is kind of dumb.

Curiosity Side Note: are there any hints about how to evolve Yamask in-game?

No one forced him to say what he said.

-"Why did you remove that event?"
-"Honestly? I don't remember."

Again, how should I know if what he said is the truth or not? He said that and that's the only truth I have, otherwise it's just us deciding what truth to believe in.

 

[Emmy]

Curiosity Side Note: are there any hints about how to evolve Yamask in-game?

*Cough*

Spoiler

"Buy now at your local bookstore!"

 

[BackSet]

Nobody forced him to tell us it was too cold for some Pokemon in Galar either but we all called him on that bullshit.

At least, I hope we did because its really dumb. Some of the cut Pokemon were ice types for Arceus' sake.

 

[Joker901]

Nobody forced him to tell us it was too cold for some Pokemon in Galar either but we all called him on that bullshit.

At least, I hope we did because its really dumb. Some of the cut Pokemon were ice types for Arceus' sake.

There are animals that live in cold environments like high snowy mountains that would die if abandoned in the North Pole. Who knows maybe they were afraid some ice pokemon could die

 

[BackSet]

There are animals that live in cold environments like high snowy mountains that would die if abandoned in the North Pole. Who knows maybe they were afraid some ice pokemon could die

You just compared Great Britain to the North Pole. Fantasy Great Britain but still Great Britain. Besides, if it were really that cold nobody would live there except s couple of scientists and penguin Pokemon.

 

[Joker901]

You just compared Great Britain to the North Pole. Fantasy Great Britain but still Great Britain. Besides, if it were really that cold nobody would live there except s couple of scientists and penguin Pokemon.

We have scientists in Galar and we have Eiscue, all the other people are just there on holiday. Theory confirmed.
I was clearly joking.

 

[Esserise]

We have to accept the possibility that they decided to delete that event because they found it too complicated for people to understand.

And I do accept that possibility, I just also think it's possible that there's more to it. Yes, interview comments are one source of information. But tangible examples of the opposite within the games themselves are also evidence, and I'm weighing one against the other and finding the former to be questionable. And frankly, my point in the first place wasn't even trying to characterize Masuda's statement as incorrect or untrue - that's a secondary possibility that I floated, but my primary contention was that our knowledge of the plans for the Azure Flute may be incomplete, and thus Masuda might have been referring to aspects of it that we can't discern from leftover material discovered in an unauthorized datamine, which could explain why his comments seem out-of-step with so many other things.

Aren't they the same people who made the games easier and easier because kid don't have time to spend on pokemon?

Yes, but again, I'm not sure I can stress this enough - context. Even on the bare face of it, "these instructions are confusing" and "players have less free time and more competing options these days" are two very different considerations, and although they can be related, one was in reference to how to handle the distribution of a special item in 2006, while the other was about finding ways to trim some of the excess grinding from the core gameplay in 2013. Lumping them together under a presumed ideological mission is like assuming that someone's financial struggles at age 22 that forced them to stop buying meat for a 2 months are directly correlated to their ethically-driven decision to switch to vegetarianism at age 29. There might be a thread there, but to go ahead and collapse that entire stretch of history into a singular arc is oversimplifying matters.

 

[Joker901]

And I do accept that possibility, I just also think it's possible that there's more to it. Yes, interview comments are one source of information. But tangible examples of the opposite within the games themselves are also evidence, and I'm weighing one against the other and finding the former to be questionable. And frankly, my point in the first place wasn't even trying to characterize Masuda's statement as incorrect or untrue - that's a secondary possibility that I floated, but my primary contention was that our knowledge of the plans for the Azure Flute may be incomplete, and thus Masuda might have been referring to aspects of it that we can't discern from leftover material discovered in an unauthorized datamine, which could explain why his comments seem out-of-step with so many other things.



Yes, but again, I'm not sure I can stress this enough - context. Even on the bare face of it, "these instructions are confusing" and "players have less free time and more competing options these days" are two very different considerations, and although they can be related, one was in reference to how to handle the distribution of a special item in 2006, while the other was about finding ways to trim some of the excess grinding from the core gameplay in 2013. Lumping them together under a presumed ideological mission is like assuming that someone's financial struggles at age 22 that forced them to stop buying meat for a 2 months are directly correlated to their ethically-driven decision to switch to vegetarianism at age 29. There might be a thread there, but to go ahead and collapse that entire stretch of history into a singular arc is oversimplifying matters.

Ehy, if you want to believe that his words are incomplete, do it. I'm not trying to convince anyone. I just trust what he said, because it's actually something I believe GF could have thought.

 

[EmpoleonProd]

You all are thinking way too deeply about the Azure Flute issue. It wasn't a hard event to complete, I'd know because I hacked it into my Sinnoh games with an Action Replay. It's more likely than not that they simply forgot to distribute it and by the time they could've, they had the GameStop Arceus that you just showed up to the store and downloaded it onto your game (because I also did that as a kid around the same time period).

 

[Joker901]

You all are thinking way too deeply about the Azure Flute issue. It wasn't a hard event to complete, I'd know because I hacked it into my Sinnoh games with an Action Replay. It's more likely than not that they simply forgot to distribute it and by the time they could've, they had the GameStop Arceus that you just showed up to the store and downloaded it onto your game (because I also did that as a kid around the same time period).

I mean, how exactly is it more likely that they forgot to release the God of Pokemon? No seriously, I'm interested, how exactly is it more likely that they lied about that event and simply forgot about it? XD

 

[EmpoleonProd]

I mean, how exactly is it more likely that they forgot to release the God of Pokemon? No seriously, I'm interested, how exactly is it more likely that they lied about that event and simply forgot about it? XD

Fairly likely, there was A LOT on their plate in Gen 4 as far as distributing events, particularly with the abundance of Key Items required for each event, it's no different than Faraway Island in Emerald, which was technically never officially released for the English games, simply a matter of forgetting to distribute them or logistical reasons/budget reasons preventing them from doing so, nothing more nothing less.

 

[Joker901]

Fairly likely, there was A LOT on their plate in Gen 4 as far as distributing events, particularly with the abundance of Key Items required for each event, it's no different than Faraway Island in Emerald, which was technically never officially released for the English games, simply a matter of forgetting to distribute them or logistical reasons/budget reasons preventing them from doing so, nothing more nothing less.

Sometimes I feel like you people think of GF like some buddies in a café deciding what to do for the night rather than the studio that created the biggest franchise in history.

 

[EmpoleonProd]

Sometimes I feel like you people think of GF like some buddies in a café deciding what to do for the night rather than the studio that created the biggest franchise in history.

The Azure Flute Arceus and the GameStop Arceus both were coded to trigger the Arceus event in HGSS, so I'm fairly certain them releasing the GameStop Arceus was simply meant to be an inexpensive alternative to distributing the Azure Flute, although each Arceus started the event independently, so if you hacked the Azure Flute like I did, you got to do the Creation Trio event twice in HGSS.