Cross stitch pattern of Falinks from Pokemon Sword and Shield. This is a special Will o’ Wisp pattern for my patron Noémie Santana. If you want to join my awesome patrons then head on over.

Grid Size: 102W x 90H
Design Area: 7.14″ x 6.29″ (100 x 88 stitches)
Colors: 12

My patron, Noémie Santana, is a sylph living in disguise as a human. They work as a glazier installing glass on tall skyscrapers. Their friends always worry about them being so high up, but Noémie likes being close to the clouds.

It’s kind of funny, I borrowed my friend’s copy of Shield right before the restrictions started and we haven’t met up since so I can’t give it back to him. I have been slowly  playing through it and I can say that the game is a step up from the Let’s Go games. I’m liking the new gym challenges and the music is top notch. I still feel like there’s something missing that would make me recommend it.

I feel like it falls into some of the same problems that the Detective Pikachu game did. The lack of voice acting restricts the intended audience. Children under seven would enjoy the kid centric story, but you can’t expect them to read the heavy amount of text. This is a modern kids game on the Switch that doesn’t have voice acting and it’s weird.

There are moments during battles and in cutscenes where the characters mouths will move and nothing will come out as if they planned to do voice acting but cut it. It’s especially glaring when the dark type gym leader is singing in a concert, and just awkwardly mouthing the words.

I’m not without praise for the game though. I love the creative level design. Cities seem more lively than ever before and routes are less linear than the Let’s Go games. Locations feel unique and there are only a few generic looking routes. Exploration is fun and I love how there are tiny microquests tucked away in places you might not find on your first playthrough.

Honestly, I think Sword and Shield are a great starting point in the series. It’s accessible and simple. I just think I might be getting tired of the core gameplay loop of bland turn based battling.

I suppose the puzzle of finding out what types are super effective is where the challenge comes in for new players, but the answer is the same in each game. They have a mechanic where the first time you encounter a pokemon, the game doesn’t tell you if your moves will be effective, and every other encounter afterwards, it tells you. I think this would be a fun mechanic to expand upon.

What if you when you used a super effective move, then the game would tell you that move type is super effective in subsequent battles, but you still have to try each move type separately to learn it’s weaknesses? When you talk to NPCs and they say Totodile is weak to electric attacks, then it would actually unlock that prompt. Right now, the pokedex just straight up tells you what type an unknown pokemon is. What if you had to figure it out for yourself until you caught it?

Okay so maybe my idea kind of sucks, but what I’m trying to get at is that there is a lot of potential variety in the Pokemon world. Nintendo struck gold when they licensed Pokemon to Niantic for Pokemon Go. There’s no reason why they couldn’t do it again with other developers. Maybe not quite the scattershot licensing that Warhammer has, but come on. You can’t tell me that the Pokemon license is so delicate that they would hand it out to just about anyone for merchandise, but not do the same for games.