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This Week in Games - Pokémon Presents 2025

Taisuke Kanasaki's Dear me, I was... is slated for release in Japan this July 31 for the Switch 2, with language options for English, Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian, and Traditional and Simplified Chinese. It'll also retail for 850 yen. No word on a United States release, however...

Man. I don’t know when I’ll have time for more game stuff, I’m too obsessed with getting all the collectibles in Donkey Kong Bananza.

I've been following the Persona Phantom X launch (it's a very fun Persona game!) and Sega has been tossing their spaghetti all over the floor with it - "free" characters that should have been up in a month or two are now being pushed back up to 6 months, there's been a lot of talk about de-valuing F2P currency, and overall, there's the looming worry that since they've messed up Phantasy Star Online 2 to the point that it's barely recognisable now, P5X is potentially going to be headed for an early EoS. I cannot say that it's likely or not, one way or the other, but one thing is clear: I love the game.

Just don't spend money on it. It's the best mainline-style Persona game since probably Persona 3 FES, given all of the stuff they've packed into it. FES was originally a full re-purchase of the original game, got gutted for the PSP release, and then the PC and Reload releases are missing content too - I'm fine with P5X having Gacha and some Unity jank when I've had to sit through worse Persona experiences over the years.

Do you have to spend money to just do the story? I haven't played Phantom X because quite frankly all the memes about the Subway Slammer turned me off and made me think the game's story wasn't very good and just discount Persona 5 but I feel like any good gacha would let you go through the story campaign without having to spend money. In those cases I think it's perfectly fine to not want to spend any money.

Zased wrote:

Do you have to spend money to just do the story? I haven't played Phantom X because quite frankly all the memes about the Subway Slammer turned me off and made me think the game's story wasn't very good and just discount Persona 5 but I feel like any good gacha would let you go through the story campaign without having to spend money. In those cases I think it's perfectly fine to not want to spend any money.

You don't have to spend money so far, but a variety of factors (the lessening of free currency, changes to the soft pity system, the removal of characters from the F2P-friendlier standard banner until half a year from now, the accelerated schedule on top of all that) is making it so that people are saying that even dedicated whales are not going to keep up with the game

See, I was the opposite - I thought a lot of the original P5 villains were so over-the-top evil that it shifted to being comical/ridiculous. The Subway Slammer looks a bit goofy on the surface, but I like the idea that the first two villains of P5X are these smaller-time, appropriately-sized "first targets" for the characters to tackle. IRL, we could prolly name a handful of people that frequently make trouble and post it online (with the last name of "Paul", lol), and yet they don't seem to ever really be reprimanded or stopped - what would happen if supernatural forces pushed them to go further and hurt someone....

It just reminds me of the whole "Dexit" fiasco/controversy back when Gen 8 came out where, if I remember correctly, the official justification from Game Freak/the Pokemon Company was that they could not put all the Pokemon in a 3D game because then the file size would just be too dang large.

There are a couple of different parts to the thinking behind it, but really the biggest reason for it is just the sheer number of Pokemon. We already have well over 800 Pokemon species, and there's going to be more added in these games. And now that they're on the Nintendo Switch, we're creating it with much higher fidelity with higher quality animations. But even more than that, it's coming down to the battle system. We're making sure we can keep everything balanced and give all the Pokemon that appear in the games a chance to shine.

We knew at some point we weren't going to be able to indefinitely keep supporting all of the Pokemon, and we just found that Sword and Shield would probably be a good point to go back and reevaluate what would be the best selection of Pokemon that appeal to the widest audience while keeping into consideration the balance of the battle system. It isn't just going to be all-new Pokemon in the Galar region Pokedex; there's still going to be a lot of favorites that fans will be able to bring over that they've adventured with previously. But yeah, it was pretty much just balancing and getting this optimal selection of Pokemon for the adventure we wanted to provide.

Dr. Wily wrote:

It just reminds me of the whole "Dexit" fiasco/controversy back when Gen 8 came out where, if I remember correctly, the official justification from Game Freak/the Pokemon Company was that they could not put all the Pokemon in a 3D game because then the file size would just be too dang large.

I'm not sure if that was the reason because the part people were bothered by was not super specific outside of saying that aadding animations for every pokemon would take away from the personality of new ones by limiting resources.

Quote:

There are a couple of different parts to the thinking behind it, but really the biggest reason for it is just the sheer number of Pokemon. We already have well over 800 Pokemon species, and there's going to be more added in these games. And now that they're on the Nintendo Switch, we're creating it with much higher fidelity with higher quality animations. But even more than that, it's coming down to the battle system. We're making sure we can keep everything balanced and give all the Pokemon that appear in the games a chance to shine. We knew at some point we weren't going to be able to indefinitely keep supporting all of the Pokemon, and we just found that Sword and Shield would probably be a good point to go back and reevaluate what would be the best selection of Pokemon that appeal to the widest audience while keeping into consideration the balance of the battle system. It isn't just going to be all-new Pokemon in the Galar region Pokedex; there's still going to be a lot of favorites that fans will be able to bring over that they've adventured with previously. But yeah, it was pretty much just balancing and getting this optimal selection of Pokemon for the adventure we wanted to provide.

It sounds more like they just don't have the resources to add animations for all the Pokemon in existence for every game that releases and add unique animations for the new gen's special features. Maybe Champions will have simpler animations or maybe they have made 3D assets for enough pokemon that just slapping them in a Stadium type game isn't an insane amount of work at this point. File size could be a concern still but it's hard to tell based on the interview, if that was the case then it being a pure battle game with no world to explore is probably indeed why it's possible.

I know you did say you didn't want them to reuse models, but if Pokemon Stadium is made to run on Switch and we now have several Pokemon games on Switch, why would reusing those models indicate a quality drop, especially if this thing needs to run on phones too? If animating and modeling all the Pokemon is a big part of the logistic burden then I agree they should save the labor to make the new stuff better rather than redirect resources to monsters they have already spent the more than half a decade building assets for.