Pokemon Shield First Impressions

My first Let’s Play!

Only mere days before the release of Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, I decided to pick up Pokemon Shield and do my first ever lets play video!

Playing video games was how I usually played, due to the nature of the types of games I prefer (think RPG’s with long 60 hour stories) Theres a lot to discuss when it comes to their story but not many people to discuss it with since not many people play these games.

So I figured, why not just play the game and discuss my thoughts as I played the game. And better yet, I can even discuss my thoughts after each Let’s play if I think of something else!

First impressions on Pokemon Shield

So far I have been enjoying Pokemon Shield. The visuals are a huge step up from the other previous mainline Pokemon Games on preceding consoles such as the 3ds. The 3ds was the first to introduce 3d mainline Pokemon but I feel like the hardware just was enough to introduce it. With Pokemon Sword and Shield, the games feel graphically like a 3d game built for console. While the mechanics themselves feel like every other Pokemon game, it feels really good to be able to officially play Pokemon on a non handheld screen in HD.

Returning to a single screen for Pokemon Combat

One thing I noticed was that since we no longer have dual screens, the Pokemon Battles have the battle menu’s overlaid on top of the battle itself, which we hadn’t seen since the third generation of Pokemon, which game out a decade since the release of Pokemon Emerald.

The screen does have more stuff, but the UI elements are nice, there are shortcuts to use a Pokeball and since I’m playing on an external monitor for my Let’s Play, I don’t feel like the screen is too cramped.

Thoughts on Pokemon Shields intro to the world of Pokemon

One thing that immediately stood out to me in the beginning was that we were introduced to the world of Pokemon through a video the player watches on our phone. It shows that Pokemon the show adapts its games to how we actually life life; a world where we get all our information from Smartphones. This makes me wonder what role Rose plays in all this. It doesn’t seem like he’s a professor, so he maybe he’s an actor or a Pokemon announcer (or maybe even a Pokemon influencer to parallel to the real world)

Either way, I hope we get to see Rose again and see what his role is, he just introduced himself with his name with no indicator for what he actually does!