Summer Games Done Quick, a charity speedrun marathon that was back with an in-person event for the first time in a few years, was held between June 26-July 3 in Bloomington, Minnesota. And at the end of the week, once all the runs were done, the event had raised an enormous $3 million for charity.
The final tally was $3,021,310.49, all of which will be donated to Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders. When you add that to the $3.4 million that Awesome Games Done Quick raised earlier this year, which went to the Prevent Cancer Foundation, that is a lot of money people are parting with to see runners do some very cool shit with video games.
SGDQ 2022 was the first in-person GDQ event since the pandemic began back in early 2020, so it was awesome seeing a live crowd on-hand to support/react to all the action taking place. If you didn’t catch any of the action yourself, here are some highlights. We’ll start off with this incredible Ocarina of Time run, which beats the game quick, sure, but also does so much more:
Ocarina of Time TAS by dwangoAC, TASBot, Savestate, Sauraen in 53:05 – Summer Games Done Quick 2022
And here’s a Pokémon Emerald run that involved four-player co-op, along with a randomiser that meant every time their Pokémon levelled up, it would randomly change into a different Pokémon. The result was absolute chaos:
Pokémon Emerald by Keizaron, 360Chrism, Shenanagans, adef in 3:14:04 – Summer Games Done Quick 2022
This is a Super Mario Sunshine run that has ups, downs then ups again before it’s over:
Super Mario Sunshine by SB_runs in 2:59:24 – Summer Games Done Quick 2022
And finally, here’s a Yakuza: Like a Dragon run that finished the entire game in less time than it took me to complete a couple of the tougher boss battles:
Yakuza: Like a Dragon by Froob in 4:09:52 – Summer Games Done Quick 2022
If you want to see more runs, or just pick one out of a game you’re particularly interested in, the organisers have recordings of every one of them on their YouTube page.
Back in February, Nintendo made a very out-of-character move and provided access to a huge library of Pokémon Diamond and Pearl’s sound effects and music, even encouraging people to use them in their own (non-commercial) projects. What a lovely thing to do! So of course, three months later, it’s closing it down.
The Pokémon DP Sound Library is an archive of music and sound effects from the 2006 game (and not the recent remakes), which actively encouraged the public to nab the tunes and use them in their own personal projects. From Nintendo, a company we’re far more used to reportingonforstampingontinyhomebrewfanprojects, this seemed a super-positive move. So, just as The Pokémon Company announces record profits, Nintendo is taking the whole thing offline.
The library project is surprisingly friendly in its allowances, given this is Nintendo we’re talking about. It lets people use the music from the game as background music on YouTube videos, play it at non-commercial public events like parties and plays, or even have it played as you walk into weddings.
At the same time, and unsurprisingly, this wasn’t ever the copyleft release it could have been, and commercial re-use is not allowed. Oh, and users had better be super-careful, as it also disallows some fairly ambiguous purposes, including “anything that makes a specific ideological, religious, or political claim.” Which is, y’know, everything ever.
Now (as spotted by Eurogamer), for reasons ungiven, the whole lot is being taken off the internet. The site’s front page now explains that come May 31, 2022, at 9:00 a.m. UTC, the whole thing will be gone. Maybe someone at Nintendo found out they’d made someone smile without first charging $59.99, and that cannot be tolerated.
The message goes on to explain that people will still be able to use the music and effects they’ve downloaded, so long as they do so “within the scope of the Terms of Use and Guidelines,” which of course will be significantly harder to find once they’ve removed them from the website. Which should at least give their miserable lawyers some fun in the future, once said rules have been long forgotten.
Quite why such a fun and pleasingly-presented project should be snuffed out just three months after launch is unclear. We’ve asked Nintendo what’s up, and will update should they let us know. In the meantime, go download the whole lot right now because it’s gone tomorrow morning.
Yesterday, Epic launched the next season of Fortnite, and announced that for the following two weeks all the money it makes from in-game purchases in the popular battle royale will be donated to charities supporting humanitarian efforts in Ukraine. Now, just 24 hours later, and with 13 days remaining, Epic has revealed that it has already raised an eye-popping $36 million.
In a blog posted yesterday on Epic’s official news page, the company announced its plans to donate proceeds from all “real-money” purchases made in Fortnite between March 20 through April 3. According to Epic, this includes the purchasing of V-Buck packs and cosmetic packs sold for real money. Epic says proceeds from retail in-store purchases of V-Buck cards will also be included, but only for those redeemed in-game during the two-week window. Xbox is also donating all proceeds made in the Xbox version of Fortnite for the next two weeks too.
What’s wild is that Epic also explained that it will be donating the funds it earns as quickly as it can and won’t be waiting for the “actual funds to come in from our platform and payment partners” as this process can take a long time. Instead, Epic will send the funds to the charities only days after the “transactions are reported.”
According to Epic, all the money earned will be donated to a selection of organizations, which includes Direct Relief, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the United Nations Children’s Fund, and the World Food Program. Epic says it will add more charities in the weeks to come.
Read More:Russia May Legalize Software Piracy As Tech Companies Continue To Pull Out
This money is much-needed by folks living in Ukraine who are dealing with the ongoing and horrific invasion by Russia. The war has already led to thousands dead and injured. It has also forced over 3 million people to flee the country, creating a large and growing refugee crisis. Since the start of the invasion in February, many companies around the world—like Sony / PlayStation, Twitch, Netflix, EA Games, and Witcher devs CDPR—have pulled support from the country. Meanwhile, a growing list of nations has enacted and continued to impose strict economic sanctions against Russia.
Over the weekend, two different video game charity bundles raised over $12 million to help support the people in Ukraine suffering from the war.
The latest season of Fornite Chapter 3 went live yesterday, bringing in some big changes and new characters to the free-to-play online shooter. One of the biggest tweaks was the removal of building, one of the game’s now-defining features, from some modes of online play. There are also some new parkour features and Dr. Strange from Marvel is hanging out here alongside Jonesy, that weird cat man, and God’s ultimate sin: Peely.
Game Freak’s first stab at a semi-open world Pokémon game is quite good. In some ways it’s shockingly so. How do I know this? In part because I and a bunch of other players got immediately hooked on Pokémon Legends: Arceus’ first area and wasted hour after hour there doing tons of stuff without even a thought as to what lay beyond it. It’s like Dragon Age: Inquisition’s Hinterlands, except it doesn’t suck.
I thought it was just me who had spent my first 10 hours in Pokémon Legends: Arceus schlepping back and forth across the massive Obsidian Fieldlands exploring, battling, capturing, and running away from terrifyingly overpowered Alpha Pokémon. Not so! My editor confirmed she spent even more time there. And we are not alone either. Social media is filled with people who have been taking their time and squeezing every last drop out of Arceus as they go.
“I was there for 25 hours and my Dex level was 4 or 5,” one player, who goes by DigiAtlas, told Kotaku. They’ve played over 60 hours total at this point and still haven’t progressed past Arceus’ third area. “This has basically been my entire play style for the whole game. I get to an area (on my own or through story progression) and comb through it looking for rare Pokémon, pushing my galaxy team level, etc.”
“I take my time,” another player, who goes by thebrokenbirdy, said. “I’m still in the first map, exploring the world. It’s so refreshing to experience a world where pokemon feel like true living creatures you have to respect instead of annoying spawns you slaughter to gain levels.”
One of the big selling points for Arceus has been the fact that you can walk around an open field and bump into wild Pokémon just like players of the decades-old series have always dreamed of doing. A less discussed aspect of the game, but one that’s no less important, is how it turns that simple experience into an incredibly satisfying grind. One that has kept players busy without burning them out.
“25 hours and I only have 63 registered pokemon in the Obsidian Field lands!” wrote user fakeDABOMB101 on the Pokémon subreddit. “I am still in the Obsidian fields lol, I feel like I am going about this very slowly compared to everyone else..in the end tho this approach has been fun bc I spent quality time with almost all of the pokemon I have captured so far for the dex.”
Unlike in previous Pokémon games where you’re working off of a pre-programmed Pokédex, in Arceusyou’re filling out the very first Dex from scratch, meaning you have to engage with the same Pokémon dozens of times before you can max out its individual entry. This means you’re not just one-and-done collecting, or grinding purely for XP. These data collection efforts earn you money and also increase your Galaxy Team ranks, which in turn unlocks recipes for new items to aid you in your research. The net result is a satisfying progression loop that’s still ultimately in the service of Arceus’ main attraction: helping you discover, capture, and learn about new Pokémon. Mr. Mime has been in the series from the beginning, but players have never seen him like this before.
That’s one of my theories at least for why players aren’t feeling the need to rush through the game’s main story the way they’ve tended to do in past Pokémon games. It also helps that the Obsidian Fieldlands is itself so big and varied, with a surprisingly diverse array of rare and beloved Pokémon to chase. There are over 60 different types that spawn, ranging from Bidoof to Togekiss. There are small Pokémon and big Pokémon, Alpha versions and Shiny ones. Some that spawn during the day and others that only come out at night. And then there are the Distortion fields which change things up even more.
It’s the opposite of the open-world filler some games have made us so used to. No wonder it’s keeping players busy.
Most wild Pokémon are incredibly standoffish in Pokémon Legends: Arceus. When trying to catch them, I’m used to having to sneak up to them in the tall grass, or pelt them with food until they look somewhere else. They’ll often run away or attack trainers if provoked. Mr. Mime, on the other hand, wants to give you a little show, and the creature’s memorable antics are making quite an impression on players.
Take a look at this Mr. Mime who poured themselves a cup of tea while settling into an invisible couch:
The most striking thing to me is that this Mr. Mime doesn’t go into alert mode when they spot a trainer. Usually, a Pokémon will either choose to fight or flee when they notice you. This one’s just pretending that the trainer isn’t there. You’ve gotta admire Mr. Mime’s dedication to the craft.
Despite being an artist at heart, however, even Mr. Mime has to abide by battle rules, especially when you engage them in battle. This Alpha Mr. Mime (one of the larger, more aggressive Pokémon) straight-up walked off when a player called out a Snorlax. Though it may look like Mr. Mime is peacing out of this encounter, she’s actually just creating space between herself and her large Snorlax opponent, but the nonchalantly aloof way that she turns around is hilarious. It almost feels like she’s doing it for attention.
One of the fun mechanics in Arceus is that your party members can interact with each other when you let them out of their Pokéballs, in ways that have more life and character than what we saw with the camp feature in Pokémon Sword and Shield. Check out these Pokémon cheering after Mr. Mime performed invisible barriers for them.
Not everyone is a fan of Mr. Mime’s antics, however. During one player’s battle with a wild Mr. Mime, one trainer’s Graveller rolled away after his opponent tried to mimic walls in front of him. While it’s normal for Pokémon to back away a little bit when there’s not enough space, it’s funnier to think that Graveller said “no PDA in public, please.” I have to admit, Mr. Mime has a lot of commitment to the bit. I would have expected her to have at least a little bit of self-preservation when defeat or capture was on the line.
The entirety of Hisui is Mr. Mime’s stage, and everyone is an audience member. Even when they don’t want to be.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus is the biggest Pokémon installment in quite some time, and as such, it can be a little daunting, even for experienced players. There’s a ton of stuff to track from new items and Pokéballs to Pokédex entries and updated Pokémon forms.
Here are some things I think you should keep in mind during your adventures.
ABC: Always Be Crafting
Inventory space is a limited commodity in Pokémon Legends: Arceus, and the only way to expand the amount of stuff you can carry is paying fees to a Galaxy Expedition Team member that quickly become exorbitant. That’s why, whenever you have some time to catch your breath between battling Pokémon and hunting down rare species, you should pop over to a crafting bench (or, eventually, use your portable crafting tools) to condense those materials into more useful items.
Too many apricorns and tumblestones? Turn those two stacks into Pokéballs, which you probably have on you already. Grabbed a bunch of caster ferns while searching for wisps? You can combine those with spoiled apricorns and balls of mud to make sticky globs, the perfect item for stunning a Pokémon that’s grown too angry to catch. Heck, I’ll sometimes find myself crafting things I don’t even need just to free up space for a stack of items I’m not currently carrying.
If you tend to hoard, keep on top of it and you won’t be surprised by the game saying you’re lugging around too much shit as often.
Screenshot: The Pokémon Company
Wait for Pokémon to show you their backs
With so much to do in Pokémon Legends: Arceus, it can be tempting to rampage through the Hisuian countryside, throwing capture balls willy nilly at any Pokémon stupid enough to enter your line of sight. And while early on that method feels like the most effective route for catching a lot of Pokémon in a short amount of time, it quickly becomes clear that even moderately strong monsters will do everything they can to stay free.
Of course, Pokémon is all about disturbing nature as much as possible, so there are plenty of things you can do to make capturing “friends” an easier task. First and foremost, you should always approach Pokémon from behind. Hitting monsters in the back, you see, improves your chances of capturing them, and you even get a free attack if you start battles with a back throw. Pokémon Legends: Arceus lets you know you successfully hit a Pokémon in the back with a special, more dramatic sound effect.
All those different berries you’re carrying can also be used to distract your prey. If a Pokémon won’t look away from the tall grass in which you’re hiding, just toss one over its head, wait for it to turn around and start munching, and then throw that Pokéball at its butt. Monsters that eat razz berries will be even easier to catch. Other than that, you’ll want to follow the basic rules of capturing Pokémon from previous games if you get drawn into battle: lower their health as much as possible (the move False Swipe, which will never make a Pokémon with more than 1 HP faint, works wonders in this regard) and inflict status effects like sleep and paralysis.
Watch your Pokéballs
Battles against wild Pokémon don’t end when you throw a Pokéball. Nope, those little suckers are going to do everything they can to break free. In previous games, this was indicated by a short animation of the Pokéball rocking back and forth that told you how close you were to actually catching the monster in question if it didn’t work that time.
In Pokémon Legends: Arceus, this whole process is shortened to play nice with the game’s more active gameplay loop, but you’re still going to want to keep a close eye on how your Pokéballs behave after throwing them. It’s all about how high the Pokéball gets off the ground while the Pokémon struggles. A short hop means you’re probably catching whatever’s in the capture device, but if it leaps into the air and seems to be venting a whole lot of steam, watch out, because you may need to try again.
This becomes super important when catching rare Pokémon, like alphas or shinies. When a Pokémon breaks free, you have a short window during which you can aim and throw another Pokéball. If timed correctly, you may even get a free back throw for your trouble. If you’re trying to catch something important, don’t run off until you’re absolutely sure that Pokémon is staying put.
Cancel throws
The game doesn’t teach you this, but you can cancel throwing Pokéballs or Pokémon with a simple press of the B or Y buttons.
Not really much to elucidate here. B simply cancels the throw and returns you to a neutral state while Y cancels the throw with a dodge roll. If you square up a toss but realize a Pokémon has moved or the environment isn’t optimal, this is a great way to avoid wasting resources or scaring away potential captures.
Screenshot: The Pokémon Company / Kotaku
Pay attention to the turn order
Pokémon Legends: Arceus takes a page from fellow role-playing games like Final Fantasy X and Shadow Hearts: Covenant by showing turn order during battle. While Pokémon battles normally play out with a simple back-and-forth format, the addition of agile and strong style move variations or the ability to catch a Pokémon unawares means there can be moments where you or your opponent can take two actions in a row.
That said, turn order isn’t visible by default. During your very first battle in Pokémon Legends: Arceus, be sure to hit the Y button so as to not deprive yourself of this valuable information. The best part is that you only have to do it once for it to stick around for the rest of the game—well, unless you accidentally hit Y again, of course.
Low-level Pokémon can still kick your ass
We’ve all been there. You’re running through an area with wild Pokémon, absent-mindedly traveling from point A to point B and wrecking whatever happens to crawl out of the grass. Maybe you’re also watching a TV show or YouTube video to pass the time as you hunt for shinies. Some moments in Pokémon games don’t require a whole lot of attention, but Sinnoh help the trainer who doesn’t keep a careful eye on their progress in Pokémon Legends: Arceus.
Just about every Pokémon you encounter in this spin-off, from early-game Bidoof to the giant, frenzied alpha monsters roaming the countryside, can seriously kick your ass if you don’t take them seriously. I don’t know why that is. Perhaps they were just more powerful before becoming widely domesticated. In any case, you’d be smart to approach every battle in Pokémon Legends: Arceus fully stocked with healing items as well as a few revives because, more often than not, you’re gonna take a beating.
Also, be careful starting Pokémon battles with multiple monsters around. More than one Pokémon can and will be drawn into battle against your solo partner if you’re not cognizant of your surroundings, which only exacerbates the chances of getting your shit pushed in.
Screenshot: The Pokémon Company / Kotaku
Stare down human opponents whenever possible
A cool thing about battling in Pokémon Legends: Arceus is that your trainer is given free reign to walk around a limited area while the mythical creatures are tearing each other to shreds. I like to use this opportunity, at least when I’m facing off against another Pokémon trainer, to walk over to their side of the battlefield and look them right in their eyes.
Does this provide any tactical advantages? Maybe a status effect for making your opponent nervous? Nope, not really. It’s just a fun thing to do.
Don’t release Pokémon until you fill four pastures
Pokémon Legends: Arceus, more than any game before it aside from maybe Pokémon Go, encourages the capturing of massive amounts of Pokémon. Fortunately, it also gives you adequate room to store them all, but at some point, you’re going to have to get rid of a few. My tip: Wait until you fill multiple pages of the storage screen to make the process of releasing Pokémon a much simpler affair.
Upon topping off a fourth pasture, Pokémon Legends: Arceus gives you the ability to mass release Pokémon. The option to select dozens of Pokémon at once to send back into the wild is so much better than doing so one by one but, again, this isn’t something Pokémon Legends: Arceus announces with fanfare. It just sorta happens and it’s up to you to notice the little button prompt at the bottom of the screen.
Take it from me, it’s much better to let those Pokémon accumulate for a bit.
Don’t be afraid to release Pokémon, either
The other side of the coin, naturally, is seeing how much room you’re given to collect Pokémon and being wary of releasing them at all. That’s also a bad idea!
Every time you release Pokémon, whether solo or in a group, they leave behind little presents for you. I don’t know if these gifts change further into Pokémon Legends: Arceus, but over the first few hours of my adventure, I’ve collected a buttload of grit dust, gravel, pebbles, and rocks, all of which are used to improve secondary Pokémon stats known as effort levels.
Like EVs (effort values) and IVs (individual values) before them, effort levels aren’t something you need to concern yourself with if you’re just playing Pokémon Legends: Arceus casually. But those of you who prefer to min-max your role-playing experience, you can read more about the process on wonderful Pokémon info repositories like Serebii and Bulbapedia. Then again, with even normal enemies being pretty tough, it might be smart to think about utilizing effort levels sooner rather than later.
You can turn off the HUD
Do you feel like the Pokémon Legends: Arceus screen is too cluttered? Well, you’re in luck, because nestled within the settings menu is an option to enable HUD toggling.
After turning this feature on, all it takes is a simple click of the right thumbstick to get rid of all the UI elements clogging up the screen, perfect for taking pictures of the game’s lush countryside and wild Pokémon.
Another photography tip: holding the left trigger puts you in first-person mode, another great way to get up close and personal with your Pokémon. For example, here are two alpha Bidoof that I caught one after the other last night. They are my large sons.
Screenshot: The Pokémon Company / Kotaku
Vibe
You’ve probably noticed already, but Pokémon Legends: Arceus is huge.There’s no reason to rush through it.
My last tip for this wonderful game is to savor it. Enjoy the adventure. Spend an hour here or there between story missions to wander through one of the game’s many areas, watching how wild Pokémon interact with their environment. Take out your favorite Pokémon in town and snap a few photos of their interactions. Before you know it, the adventure will be over, you’ll have collected a full Pokédex of shiny, alpha Pokémon, and there won’t be anything new to see until the next game.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus is a game decades in the making. It really does feel like the culmination of everything the developers have learned since the series debuted in 1996, not to mention something of a love letter to fans who have long asked for a more open-ended, organic Pokémon experience. Sadly, we’ll only get to see it for the first time just once, so do everything you can to cherish these moments of unknowing.
Pokémon do not mess around in the ancient Hisui region. Life might not be nasty, brutish, and short, but it’s far from breezy in Pokémon Legends: Arceus. That’s especially evident in some of its more RNG-based side-quests, where hard work and determination can’t overcome bad luck. Arceus does a lot right, but forcing you to spend hours hunting Buizel is not the way.
If you’ve been playing the latest Switch Pokémon over the weekend like so many others, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about. A villager “request” (what the game calls missions) very early on called “Big Buizel, Little Buizel” tasks you with finding a specimen of the orange sea otter that’s at least 2’8″ big. Sounds simple enough! Pokémon in Arceus come with lots of variation, so catch a handful of Buizel and see which one’s big enough.
But while some players have lucked into a big Buizel (or Alpha Buizel) in just a few tries, others have been harvesting armies of Buizel to no avail. “It took me 63 buizel to finally find one. Not 10 minutes after, there was one of those mass encounters and an alpha appeared,” wrote one player on the game’s subreddit. On Twitter, one player even found a Shiny Buizel before they found one over 2’8″. The whole affair is made even worse by the fact that you can’t check Pokémon sizes until you’re back at camp.
One of the more sure-fire ways to complete the request is to wait until after you’ve defeated Kleavor, the first Noble Pokémon you face and effectively Arceus’ first boss fight. After that, all Pokémon in the Obsidian Fieldlands will have a chance to start spawning in their Alpha form which are almost always bigger, on average, than their standard form. But since “Big Buizel, Little Buizel” is one of the first requests you get in the starting area of the game, players have been hammering at it early on and watching a chill time turn into a grindfest.
There are some other requests along these lines in Arceus which aren’t hard so much as painfully contingent. “Wurmple’s Evolved!” requires you to show a villager a Silcoon, which is a rare spawn out in the wild but doubly hard to evolve since it’s predicated on a seeming combination of chance and the Wurmple’s underlying personality type. “To Bloom or Not to Bloom,” meanwhile, requires you to max out the Pokédex entry for Cherrim. That in turn requires you to either evolve it from Cherubi which spawn only in certain trees or catch one later in the game and record it using petal dance over and over (which requires level 47).
While RNG has always been at the heart of what playing Pokémon is all about, Arceus’ traditional Monster Hunter-like RPG structure has filtered that logic down into even some of the most benign-seeming quests. I’ve grown to appreciate playing the Shiny lottery as part of Pokémon’s self-directed end-game fun, but I do not need that bullshit in the game’s official to-do lists.
I haven’t yet encountered anything as bad as the despair-filled hunt for Mythoclast in Destiny 2’s Vault of Glass raid (some players have done it dozens of times and still never gotten its most prized loot), but Buizel hunting was already enough to put me on edge (I’m still searching for my large, adult Pokémon). To anyone else still after Schrödinger’s Buizel, good luck and godspeed.
A new Pokémon game means, well, new Pokémon, and Pokémon Legends: Arceus is no exception. And while the latest installment in Nintendo’s flagship role-playing franchise may skew from the series’ foundational elements in interesting ways with its fluid, open-world gameplay, some of these debuting Pokémon still come with unique evolution requirements that may not be obvious at first blush.
Take Ursaluna, for example. A new, third-stage evolution for the Teddiursa/Ursaring family, Ursaluna augments its predecessors’ singular Normal typing with a secondary Ground attribute, expanding the amount of moves it can learn and bolster via STAB (same-type attack bonus). A unique Ursaluna can also be used as a mount, which has the special ability to dig up valuable items, like the peat blocks in the Crimson Mirelands that just so happen to be necessary for kickstarting Ursaring’s evolution.
Whether cultivating peat through excavation or completing requests, however, obtaining a bigger bear isn’t simply a matter of shoving the decaying moss down your its throat. To evolve Ursaring into Ursaluna, you also need to make sure there’s a full moon in the sky (Ursaluna…get it?), which can be forced by repeatedly resting at your camp until nightfall. You’ll know you meet all these requirements when, after using the peat block from your inventory, any Ursaring in your party become marked as compatible for evolution.
Getting a Kleavor, the Scyther evolution The Pokémon Company has featured in just about every Pokémon Legends: Arceus trailer so far, also requires a special item. To evolve Scyther into Kleavor, you’ll need black augurite, which can be acquired in various ways. These methods include defeating Graveler in the wild, breaking ore deposits with your Pokémon, or excavating treasures atop the rideable Ursaluna mentioned above. Some players with early copies of the game report that black augurite also becomes available for purchase further into the story.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus also features a group of Pokémon that evolve by performing specific moves 10 times: Hisuian Qwilfish (use Barb Barrage in Strong Style to get Overquil), Basculin (use Wave Crasher in Agile Style to get Basculegion), and Stantler (use Psyshield in Agile Style to get Wyrdeer). Furthermore, Pokémon evolutions that previously required trading with another player (Haunter to Gengar, Kadabra to Alakazam, Machoke to Machamp, etc.) can now be initiated with a new in-game item known as a linking cord instead.
As you can see, Pokémon Legends: Arceus is more than just a basic remix of the traditional Pokémon formula. It also rethinks fundamental aspects of the series like how Pokémon evolve, adding a unique spin that makes Pokémon growth feel more organic than simply meeting a specific level threshold. Better yet, Pokémon Legends: Arceus is so big and experimental that we’re sure to discover new details as we spend more time with the game, so stay tuned.
Early copies of Pokémon Legends: Arceus somehow broke street date last week, setting the internet ablaze with details about the highly anticipated game. We recently took a look at all the new pocket monsters players will be able to train when Arceus launches on January 28, but now it’s time to get into the important stuff: giant Pokémon that folks are being weirdly (if unsurprisingly) sexual about.
Just a warning, everything from this point on will veer close to spoiler territory, so tab away if you’re waiting to see Pokémon Legends: Arceus for yourself.
Pokémon of the same species come in a variety of sizes in Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Sometimes you’ll need to catch multiples of the same size while undertaking the game’s research tasks, but it’s unclear if size comes into play elsewhere. One classification of Pokémon, however, always tips the scales, causing some of the taller specimens to absolutely tower over the player. These are known as alpha Pokémon.
“During your expeditions, you’ll sometimes run into alphas: Pokémon that are larger than normal and have glowing red eyes,” the official Pokémon Legends: Arceus website explains. “Alphas will chase you down and attack you when they notice you. They’re tough opponents, but they’ll become great allies if you manage to catch them. They may even drop rare items if you defeat them in battle.”
According to folks who are already studying the inner workings of the game’s code, each individual Pokémon in Pokémon Legends: Arceus is assigned a size value ranging from zero to 255. This number scales the creature’s model in the game world, producing Pokémon that can be very, very small to monstrously huge. Alphas are always given a 255, making them the largest Pokémon in the game.
Social media is currently being inundated with people infatuated by these huge Pokémon, especially when it comes to species with more human-like qualities.
“This is gonna be this year’s Lady Dimitrescu situation isn’t it,” wrote one Twitter user, comparing a picture of a tall Gardevoir to Resident Evil Village’s massive vampire lady.
“With these big Pokémon in Arceus, we’re about [to] enter the ‘plz step on me’ era of Pokémon,” joked another alongside a screenshot of Lopunny.
One comment on the r/PokeLeaks subreddit even had the audacity to introduce the phrase “Machoke me daddy” to my internal monologue, where it will unfortunately live on as an intrusive thought for the foreseeable future.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus hype is reaching a fever pitch, a din of excitement that’s only grown with the last week of leaks. Here’s hoping this experimental Pokémon game lives up to its lofty potential. In any case, you still have a few days to come up with lewd captions for your giant Pokémon screenshots, so get cracking.
They’re coming right for us! Gif: Nintendo / Kotaku
With the release of Pokémon Legends: Arceus right around the corner, Nintendo has released a new gameplay overview that shows off the downsides of adventuring in the time before pocket monsters and humans became the best of friends. Avoiding the tall grass is not going to save you when Garchomp and Snorlax are coming for your blood, kids.
The ancient Sinnoh region, known in Legends: Arceus as the Hisui region, is not always a walk in the park. Sure, you’ll be able to toss magical spheres at tiny adorable starters, plucking them out of their natural habitats without a care in the world. But if you hope to triumph over some of the area’s more massive denizens, then you’re going to need a bigger set of balls. The image of an angry-eyed Snorlax charging at the game’s main character is going to stick with me for a long time.
The video itself, currently only in Japanese, is an overview of the game’s features and systems, most of which we’ve seen in action previously. Your character wanders the open areas of Hisui, collecting Pokémon to fill out the first Pokédex. Some monsters will come easy, others will require weakening via battles with you and your stable of friends. In town you’ll be able to craft, buy, and sell items, and pick up missions. In the field, you’ll set off from your base camp. As your explorer rank increases, you’ll gain access to new locations, and rideable Pokémon are the key to getting to hard-to-reach areas.
If you watch closely, you can catch a glimpse of something even more horrific than an angry, aggressive Snorlax. Imagine you’re wandering the region, come across a shiny Pokémon in the wild, and then this happens.
The first of many to get away. Gif: Nintendo / Kotaku
Ah, the joy of watching overworld shinies fly off into the sunset before you’ve even thrown a single Pokéball. This game is going to be good, or at least good at generating salty sweet tears. Pokémon Legends: Arceus arrives on Nintendo Switch on January 28. Good luck.