Tag: Warner Bros.

This ain’t Monster Hunter, this is Pokémon Sword and Shield!

This ain’t Monster Hunter, this is Pokémon Sword and Shield!

♪It’s the most wonderful time of the year~♪

There are few things which I will openly admit I have a massive bias toward.

Pokémon is something I unabashedly have a ginormous bias toward.

Pokémon Crystal was my first video game outside of some silly educational titles featuring Sesame Street or Elmo. I’ll always fall back on the story that it helped me learn how to read when I played with my Mom all those years ago because that memory is precious to me.

So whenever a brand new entry in the Pokémon series is announced, I truly feel young at heart.

It happened with Sun and Moon.

It happened with Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee.

And by god it’s happening right now with the announcement of Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield for the Nintendo Switch.

I know some of you must be wondering I got up at 6:00 a.m. just to watch a video game get announced. Especially when real life political things are happening.

Let’s just say I had to get up extra early for some meetings and intentionally overdid it to watch the Pokémon Direct live.

Though the announcement was seven minutes long, it offered a lot of hype.

Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield are new mainline games set in the Galar region. Kanto through Sinnoh were analogous to different parts of Japan, Unova was analogous to New York, Kalos was analogous to France and Alola was analogous to Hawaii.

Galar will take us into a world modeled after post-Industrial England:

Everything about the theme feels right. Sword & Shield as names evoke the Knights of the Round Table knowing this region is London.

Towns look stuffed with industrial imagery of steaming cogs and stone chimneys set under foggy weather.

The new gyms, or at least the grass-type gym, looks like a Soccer/Football stadium.

Oh, and let’s not forget it all looks fucking gorgeous.

I was a huge fan of the Let’s Go graphics because they were faithful to the original Red/Green/Blue/Yellow while updated for the Switch’s capabilities.

But just off of initial screenshots alone, Sword and Shield look like Pokémon games set in Breath of the Wild Hyrule.

That game’s minimalist style had an almost watercolor quality that screams out with the creative possibilities of a Pokémon region.

Just look at the battle screenshot. Its models may look similar to previous generation’s Pokémon, perhaps to save time, but having that countryside villa in the background is stunning.

It looks a lot better in the original video than it does on Twitter screenshots.

The trainer models also look better than ever, featuring more realistic humans akin to the mobile app GO, but with far more personality than even Sun and Moon achieved.

Hopefully this time the protagonists will make more than one facial expression, too.

But of course, we can’t talk about new Pokémon without delving into the starters:

Grookey
Scorbunny
Sobble

Images courtesy of Serebii

Good old Serebii.

Based on first impressions alone, all three of these starters are way too cute for their own good.

Unlike the Alolan starters where I immediately had a favorite (#TeamRowlet), I don’t know that I have one among these three.

The last time we saw a simian starter in Chimchar I wound up being a huge fan of Infernape. So the Grass-type Grookey has a shot.

Bunnies are also a favorite of mine in Pokémon, with Mega Lopunny being the first IV/EV trained ‘mon I ever bred in Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. So the Fire-type Scorbunny has a shot.

But the Water-type Sobble is a wild card. It looks like Mudkip and uses a camouflaging  gecko design reminiscent of Kecleon.

Any reference to Hoenn is appreciated, and that’s two in one!

I’ll honestly have to see their evolutions to decide who I want to stick by.

While these are the only Galar Pokémon we’ve seen thus far, I’m sure Game Freak will introduce us to the rest before the end of the year. Even if I do wish they would keep some more secrets this time.

In the meantime, we know the Galar region will represent a wide-range of Pokémon from other regions.

In this trailer alone we can see a Zweilous, Flygon, Wishiwashi, Hoothoot, Munchlax, Tyranitar and so much more.

It feels like watching the latest Detective Pikachu trailer all over again. 2019 is shaping up to be a fatastic year for Pokémon.

That’s just about all we know so far.

Obviously I’m very excited to learn more, and there’s no doubt the next few months will be full of Sword and Shield information posts like I had for Sun and Moon!

These long periods of hype building up to the catharsis of a wonderful game have to be one of my favorite things about the Pokémon franchise nowadays. I live for the endorphines of new reveal trailers.

But what do you think about our first look at Sword and Shield, the Galar region and those new starters?

Let me know! I’m all kinds of ready for more and more Pokémon.

Featured Image courtesy of the official Pokémon Twitter account

Fantastical Creatures

/me hopes that title is different enough to avoid any sort of legal action from Warner Bros. or J.K. Rowling

With Dad at work and Mom + Aly off in Disneyland where the youngin’ was marching in a parade (which would be a much more exciting story if it was mine to tell), I had the house to myself today.

So obviously I partied hard with some friends, got messed up on drugs, died and am now writing this from the grave.

Boo.

In all seriousness, I didn’t party too hard and become a spooky, scripting spirit. As cool as that would be.

I actually had a chill afternoon all on my lonesome. I didn’t even leave the house outside of going to the gym.

After two weekends of running around doing things with relatives, it was nice to take it slow and focus on my own stuff. Mostly because all of the running around made me fall behind on my novel-writing schedule.

20 pages a week doesn’t seem like too much until you get hit with the roadblock of a death in the family.

But luckily, I was able to rectify that setback with a nice, quiet day on the couch.

At this point I’ve made it to ~35 pages, with my goal being at least 40 before tomorrow.

So far everything is shaping up far nicer than in my original 12-page attempt at a draft. I’ve actually made it past the first major set piece of the story: An underground cavern with a single room at the end of it.

… Exciting, I know. I promise it sounds better with in-depth descriptions!

One of the more interesting bits of research I’ve done recently to push my writing forward was, as the title suggests, finding the right mythical Tolkien-esque creature to fit the slot of an antagonistic race for my main characters.

Luckily my friend Sam is a bit of a Dungeons and Dragons savant and came up with a whole bunch of possibilities when I asked if there were any good avian-themed monsters I could use.

Why avian specifically? It was a jokey idea when I was writing that early draft that started when I described a helmet as beak-like, and stuck so I could make one of my characters call them “birdbrains.”

So… Bird people. Seemed legit.

I didn’t quite expect there to be so many different kinds of bird people, however. There really is a ton to unpack when you delve into the inner-machinations of an experience like D&D.

Probably the most obvious and well-known example is the Harpy.

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Courtesy of DnD Beyond

Pretty famous representative from Greek mythology. Not a bad choice, but a little too much of a monster-monster for my tastes.

The kind of creature you can see mindlessly attacking, but not necessarily forming an advanced society.

So next came the Kenku.

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Courtesy of Giger’s 5E D&D

Definitely a closer match, given their clear propensity for humanoid dress and a variety of roles in warfare.

However, the crow look is a bit too inherently evil-looking, and they are quite a sinister race apparently. Was looking for more of a neutral appearance.

Plus they cannot fly in the lore, which is something I wanted to include.

So Kenku were a no.

Luckily the third choice, Aarakorca, was perfect.

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Courtesy of DnD Beyond

Check out these majestic bastards.

Not only are they a perfect blend of humanoid and avian features to make for a fairly human-like sensibility in my story, but the extra lore features from D&D — their obsession with self-grooming, bilingualism, status as traveling explorers and the fact that they look like giant birds while flying — make great tie-ins to my story’s purpose for them.

Namely… To be a surrogate for Napoleonic-era French society.

Yeah, that’s right.

It’ll be even weirder when I write about their leader riding around on a horse despite being a literal birdman. And I love it.

Being able to gather all sorts of new knowledge on interesting fantasy creatures has been a great pleasure of mine over the course of this project. It’s essentially an amalgamate of some of my favorite video games, movies and books in the fantasy genre, so the more I can include the better.

Wargroove is the big contributor of new ideas to my concoction at the moment, but that game deserves its own story another day.

In the meantime, I’m going to get back to writing so I can finish this section I’m in the middle of. Who knows, perhaps I’ll start to trickle out passages and chapters for advice in the near future.

All I know now is that this line kind of defines my brain.

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