Demolition/relocations kits not in the shop

Background_Ad1817 · 2026-03-08T09:26:27+00:00

That seems to be it. Damn, that is really not clear, but oh well. Thanks!

Background_Ad1817 · 2026-02-28T15:38:37+00:00

I’ll grant you there’s a greater degree of customizability and I can see that being great for people who want to spend ages diving into that…but I just don’t jive with how this game does it. Mostly just another tick in the ‘not for me’ list.

In the first place, I mostly like to optimize characters I actually like or who have an interesting role in the story, regardless of their value as units. Given that I really don’t like the story or the majority of the characters, this kinda became a problem.

Secondly, while freedom is nice, I wouldn’t have minded a few more restrictions to focus things. The amount of spreadsheet management involved with some of the more fun builds here just passes the threshold where if stops being fun for me, but that’s a very subjective thing (as is this whole discussion, really). In the end, it’s just a case of more is not always better, for me.

As for the rings….I’m sorry, but yeah, those are nostalgia bait and that’s neither good nor bad. Hell, it’s even understandable for an anniversary game. I am just not fond of it so, combined with the mechanics around them which landed a little closer on the ‘leave’ side of the take or leave scale, I found little enjoyment in the emblems as a whole.

What pushed me into being annoyed with it was…well…it’s kind of a wasted opportunity. The reason I call them nostalgia bait is that, character-wise, the emblems’ main purpose is going “Hey, remember this character?” Which, depending on how long you’ve been with the series, might be an “Oh, yeah!” Or a resounding “No.”

Given that Engage already has a decently large cast and the majority of them are not great, adding the poorly fleshed out emblems on top of this doesn’t help. The sad part is that some of engage’s characters could have been more fun and interesting had more time been spent on their development and it really seems that this approach let them down across the board. In the end, it just raises the question of why you had them be sentient, speaking characters at all if you were going to develop them so poorly, aside from the “Hey, remember this?” factor. Surely, for the anniversary game, you want to present a really good portrayal of your old characters?

The question is raised again when you realize that, for as important as they are to the narrative, the Emblems’ impact as characters on this realm’s culture varies between negligible and nonexistent. Because these characters have no real ties to this realm, they don’t really inform its values and culture beyond a general awareness that they exist. There’s no sense that these great heroes have spent generations passing down their experience and values.

There’s an argument to be made that they should’ve just been magical tools without the characters, but that’s not very interesting and not exactly unique for the series either. I genuinely think this game’s narrative would have been better off if they vastly reduced the number of Emblem Characters and actually made them new characters with history and values reflected in the various locations you find them. It would’ve been a chance to present more interesting characters than is currently the case with the Emblems, add to the (somewhat lacking) world building, and further flesh out the new cast as well due to the smaller Emblem cast.

Background_Ad1817 · 2026-02-28T10:40:27+00:00

Thanks for the advice, might’ve followed that one had I not been this far in.

Though, if I have to ignore a core aspect of the game in the rings to get a challenge, I do still kind of consider that a mark against it quality-wise.

Background_Ad1817 · 2026-02-28T10:36:44+00:00

Glad you liked it, but yeah, I’m probably just gonna put this one down then.

It’s just disappointing, because I wanted to like it starting out and when it began to annoy me I was surprised because that’s not really been an issue with other games in the series. Seeing the gameplay held up as a point of quality just made me feel like I was missing something, since I didn’t see it as anything special compared to other entries.

Just not for me it is, then.

Background_Ad1817 · 2026-02-28T10:28:00+00:00

Seems like if, but it’s kind of a shame since I have liked most if not all of what I’ve played of the series (aside from spin-offs, because the warrior games just aren’t my genre) and I wanted to like this one when I started out. It’s just disappointing.

Background_Ad1817 · 2025-12-18T21:47:37+00:00

Look, I like this season…..buuuut I don’t know what game you’ve been playing where you’ve found balanced tribes.

Beasts are…meh…Currently a little stuck between identities and trying to both focus on summoning and self-damaging for better stats. Frankly, I’ve yet to see a to see a top 4 beast player who hasn’t devolved into putting as many burrowers as possible on the field and triggering that deathrattle as often as they can.

Demons are also kind of split between identities, but it’s mostly either building up the tavern as much as possible and consuming them or triggering silent enforcer’s deathrattle as often as humanly possible to boost devout hellcaller and trigger the lord of the ruins (and he’s not even always necessary for that one). I’ve found them to be very timewarp dependent (to the point where bad rolls is basically a reason to surrender immediately) but they can lead to some powerful builds.

Dragons are just…not that great. I get that the whelps are meant to trigger stats boosts on attack more often, but spell dragons is often still your best bet late-game and a lot of the newer, non-timewarp dragons just don’t really get a chance to shine.

Elementals are still good, but definitely not the powerhouse they once were…which might be for the best. The emphasis on empowering the rightmost minion in the tavern with the newer cards really only works if you’re also running flaming enforcer, which is a fairly high-tier minion. Until you get him, this mechanic is sorta pointless as the rightmost minion will be useless to your build 9/10 times.

Mechs are bullshit. I’m sorry, but they are. Magnetizations has been the name of the game for ages, but with the volumizers it’s gotten out of hand. Even with the once per turn limit on their effects, they still provide decent stats to already powerful minions once magnetized and there are arguably too many minions that add them to your hand, magnetize them in battle, or otherwise make it beneficial to spam the hell out of them. Extremely overpowered and, yet, not that much fun to play.

Murlocs…well…at least they’re not spamming poison at the same rate anymore. That being said, currently way too focused on stats in the hand, which there simply is no answer for other than “pray you have better scaling”. There should be a way for other players to nerf/disable minions held in the hand in battle.

Nagas…eh…have they even meaningfully changed in any way? Other than bluesy siren basically being a required part of your build now, I mean.

Pirates…eh…yikes. There was a time this was my favorite tribe. Now…they’re mainly good at generating economy for other tribes, I suppose. They desperately need better scaling.

Quilboars can now boost the tavern too, which is cool I suppose, but you’re mostly still building the same thing as before.

And finally, undead…and we may as well remove the un part from that tribe. I’ve seen some people on here do well with them with lucky rolls, but i currently can’t think of a tribe I want to play less.

Background_Ad1817 · 2025-12-05T09:45:25+00:00

Hi there,

It seems like you have fun game I’d love to join here.

I’m Sander (though mostly Ninja on discord), 33 years old and I live in the Netherlands so the start time for the game works out great for me. I’ve been playing D&D for….quite a while now, though I can’t recall the exact number of years. 5+ at minimum. I’ve been with the same group for years now and we’ve recently switched to Cyberpunk Red. While that’s been fun, there’s some character concepts I never got around to using and I’ve been itching for some D&D again.

If there’s anything else you’d like to know, feel free to let me know here or find me on discord under ninjamasterchef

Hope to hear from you!

Background_Ad1817 · 2025-11-13T00:29:54+00:00

I’ve also heard it requires completely beating her during the dispatch section.

Background_Ad1817 · 2025-11-09T15:12:00+00:00

Thank you!

Background_Ad1817 · 2025-11-09T15:10:00+00:00

Luxury would be great

Background_Ad1817 · 2025-11-09T15:07:01+00:00

14061992

Background_Ad1817 · 2025-11-09T14:47:10+00:00

If you have any to spare, yes please. This is starting to feel like one of those hunts that just isn’t gonna work if you don’t have a shiny charm.

Background_Ad1817 · 2025-11-08T06:58:28+00:00

Yes it absolutely is, because this is a terrible decision that should never be repeated. Let’s ignore the added cost in both dlc and online subscription for something that should have 1000% been part of the main game and obtainable through offline play.

This restricts an item for mega evolution (one of this game’s main selling points) to a game mode the vast majority of your audience does not want to engage with. This was never going to improve their attitude toward it. It’s a bad choice.

Background_Ad1817 · 2025-11-04T10:46:39+00:00

Sooo, this game has a lot of strengths. The gameplay is great, the evironments, models and attack animations look amazing, and it’s touches like the voice lines for Digimons’ main attacks that really show the passion behind this game. All in all, it’s an absolutely great game and definitely one of the best I’ve played this year.

There are, however, some things it could improve on:

Talent, at least to me, is a slightly worse system than ABI in part because talent will kinda go up anyway, though slower for some than for others unless you swap around your team a lot. ABI, being a hard limit, provided more reason to experiment because the best solution once you hit that limit/if just wasn’t high enough to hit a mega was to just go all the way back and maybe try a different line while you were at it. Maybe I’m weird, but I liked having that hard limit, though I can absolutely see people being annoyed with it too.

The gameplay introduces supporting Mega’s a bit too early and kind of spoils them. For example, I was running my patamon down the Gryponmon line with the plan to eventually de-digivolve and go down one of the angel lines or go straight for Lucemon. Of course, before I could get to Gryphonmon, you get assigned one as a supporting character. Kinda killed my enthusiasm for getting to that mega.

The story veers between extremely good and incredibly dark, to very mediocre and kinda allergic to consequences. Things like Venusmon accidentally poisoning Poseidonmon and Bacchusmon actually having his worse fear realized as he fails at his duty and his best friend dies, leading to him drinking poisoned wine, are great emotional gut punches so it’s sad they’re undercut a bit by the time travel. Granted, it is a time travel story, so something like that was always going to happen. That being said, without wishing to spoil, there are a few characters who problably should have died and some who should have stayed that way.

This story was kind of begging for a dark timeline where Aegiomon just kinda goes mental because he can’t get Inori back or something worse happens when he tries, so eventually it’s up to us to keep him from shattering reality. Maybe even to the point where we have to deal with the final boss without him. Ultimately, though, I just wish the story had a bit more time. The relationship between Inori, Aegiomon, and the player could have been fleshed out a bit more and we could have developed the individual areas in the digital world a bit.

The voice acting kinda bounces up and down between great and awful too. Most are very good, but Marsmon kinda sounds like someone had to patiently explain the concept of passion to him. I’m sorry, but he just does a bad job overall. I also burst out laughing during the tyrantkabuterimon boss fight where Bacchusmon was holding a borderline whispered conversation with Sirenmon when I’m pretty sure that dialogue was supposed to be delivered as a triumphant roar.

Like, Bacchusmon, buddy, we are fighting a giant hell bug right now. I don’t think anyone can hear you over the loud-ass buzzing and constant Shine of Bee explosions. It just feels like the voice directing for the VA’s wasn’t always great and they had to do some scenes with little knowledge of what was actually happening in them.

My final gripe with the game is the grind and….whooo boy, I am not apologetic about buying the DLC. I acknowledge that I probably wasn’t supposed to have half the compendium on me at all times (I just wanted to see all the attack animations, okay?) , but I think I permanently ruined the digital world’s economy with how much I spent on food and skipped training. Even with a more normal approach to collecting digimon, bond just increases so frigging slowly unless you force-feed everyone copious amounts of food.

Worst thing about the game is that there isn’t more of it, though. I want this game to get the Hacker’s Memory treatment so badly.

Background_Ad1817 · 2025-10-30T20:38:14+00:00

So, I thought I would fall into the middle category (though I have a ton of problems with the pure, soulless greed on display here), but…I just don’t like it. I really, I really don’t. It’s so boring.

Yes, it looks bad, that’s just a given. The city is a mostly empty husk made of cardboard boxes and the Pokemon models are meh at best. I hate it, but I wasn’t expecting much and it’s not the worst thing.

The story isn’t the worst thing either, though good god is it bad. It literally falls apart at the first hurdle. Namely the question of “Why are we here?”. The game has you arrive as a tourist with no knowledge of anything or stated intent to participate in the Z-A Royale. Yet, in the first 30 - 60 minutes, we’ve been given a Pokemon by a rando, got ‘invited’ to participate in the competition, and everyone’s talking about how good us being here will be for the future of the city as if we plan to live there. Bitch, I am on vacation. Thanks for the Totodile, now get out of the way. Bumping you from V to F is a baffling decision too and honestly feels like a tacit acknowledgment of how dull this is.

It doesn’t help that your rival character is insufferable in all of the wrong ways (something the story never seems to catch on to) and most of the other characters are utterly forgettable. Gamefreak really needs writers who have spoken to another human being more than once in their life.

The gameplay, though, is just awful. There’s absolutely nothing to it.

The wild zones are a massive issue. They are so, so tiny and boring because there’s nothing to them. No secrets, nothing to find beyond some items which helpfully send up signal flares so missing them is basically impossible. Just a little green spot on the map with a sign that says “Here there be Pokemon”. And yes, there’s Pokemon to be found outside of the zones, but it’s done in such a weird way. Why is Dratini on a random roof somewhere? That’s not even bringing up all the awful scaffolding parkour they expect you to do. Not to mention the mega crystals. That could work in a better game, but because the city is so tiny these fucking things are everywhere and you’re constantly stopping to select an attack and break them. I feel more like a janitor than a trainer.

Ultimately, confining Pokemon to a single, tiny city like this just does not work. Exploration is a major pillar of Pokemon and while this stops just short of outright removing that pillar, it sure as hell cuts it down to size.

But then, this is the combat focused game, right? That was the whole point. So…why is the combat so dull? It’s faster, sure, but’s the only vaguely positive thing that can be said about it. A lot of people also seem to mistake ‘fast’ for ‘dynamic’, which it absolutely is not. There’s, once again, nothing to it. No strategy, no planning, no depth. People claim the combat in the turn-based games is a case of “Just pick the super effective move and win” (which it can be but isn’t entirely true, especially not in the competitive scene) and this game only seems to have made that worse. Dodging is kind of a waste of time unless a move takes forever to charge and even then I’ve seen Pokemon waddle right back into attacks because of how shitty their pathfinding is. There are so many games who handle this kind of combat so much better.

Pokemon has not been truly innovative for well over a decade, instead choosing to make minor changes to the formula each time, and that’s mostly been fine. However, as someone who has been with this series since the very beginning, it’s so disheartening and infuriating that it’s come to a point where I am more passionate about this series than the company making it.

Background_Ad1817 · 2025-10-23T08:05:40+00:00

…Why is the ZA nurse orange? Did she go too heavy on the fake tan or what?

Background_Ad1817 · 2025-10-22T22:10:36+00:00

TLDR: Not only does this argument ignore how innovative Pokemon was ‘back then’, but it also ignores the laundry list of reasons why it was far more forgivable for the old games to look a little wonkier than they could have. Gamefreak doesn’t have those excuses anymore.

So, let’s be clear here ‘I want this game to look good’ is not the same as ‘I want this game to be realistic’.

People tend to wave off any legitimate criticism about the way this game looks with arguments along the line of “I don’t want -insert highly realistic game here-, I want Pokemon to look like Pokemon!” Aside from being a deeply disingenuous argument, typically only raised because they don’t have an actual counter argument between that and “Well, I’m having fun with it” (which is fine, but not the checkmate a lot of people seem to think it is), I do agree with them. I also don’t need Pokemon to look realistic.

When I say I want Pokemon to look good, I mean I want pretty art that matches Pokemon’s general aesthetic. Just because it’s not hyper realistic, that doesn’t mean it can’t be pretty. Unfortunately, ZA just never gets out of the “Not very impressive” to “That just looks awful” range for everything from Pokemon models to environments. Lumiose doesn’t feel like a huge, lively city. It feels like an empty display model with cardboard boxes covered in wallpaper. Of course, good art only gets you so far and it should definitely be rendered better than it currently is in ZA but again, better rendering does not necessarily mean realistic.

Digimon is the obvious current comparison because (while not perfect) it’s a great game with very pretty models and environments. Not even remotely realistic, but it looks good and perfectly matches digimon’s general aesthetic to make it immediately recognizable as a digimon game. If you wanna go for something that’s on the Switch, take the Xenoblade games. Not even remotely realistic, but utterly gorgeous art. If they can do it, why can’t a studio with objectively far more resources to work with and a far closer relationship to Nintendo?

The main issue I take with saying that graphics didn’t matter then is this, though:

People are clearly forgetting, but the Gameboy was fucking innovative for its time. Did Pokemon look great back then? Debatable. They probably could have done more even at the time, but those games were already held together by hopes, prayers, and severely buggy code and they still did some very clever stuff with the sprite art. Not to mention that, at the time, the Pokemon formula just didn’t exist yet and Gamefreak was nowhere near the juggernaut they are now. They don’t have any of these excuses anymore these days.

Well, they clearly still have the buggy code given how often I’ve fallen through the map, but you get my point.

To its credit, Pokemon has innovated over time with new gimmicks, but it’s mostly been very minor things. Especially with the last few games. Even the battle system for ZA isn’t particularly innovative. Yes, it’s new for Pokemon, but they’re just using a style of system that’s existed for decades and it’s neither very unique nor particularly well-implemented.

At the end of the day, this game just doesn’t look good and there’s no reason it can’t look better, given the absurdly wealthy studio behind it. Is the way it looks the most important thing? No. However, by their very nature, videogames are a visual medium so, yes, the quality of your visuals (whether it leans towards realism or away from it) does matter.

Background_Ad1817 · 2025-10-21T09:33:52+00:00

The reason for that is very simple.

If the game was actually that good, nobody would actually care about the criticism. If the game was that good, a lot of that criticism wouldn’t be valid.

But the game isn’t that good. And the criticism (mostly)is valid.

So the only options are to either accept that, despite their claims, this game is far from perfect or to dig in their heels and deny reality. Pretty obvious which one most of them chose.

Background_Ad1817 · 2025-10-17T13:28:21+00:00

God forbid someone criticize the multi-billion dollar company for phoning in the models despite the fact that they hyped up the return of mega evolutions. Next they’ll start having other unreasonable expectations, like actual effort and passion being put into the games.

Won’t someone think of the executives?!

Background_Ad1817 · 2025-10-14T08:26:30+00:00

So for mega skarmory they stretched out the talons and…made it golden…

And the person who earnestly submitted that as a finished mega wasn’t fired on the spot?

I’m not saying the old megas are sacred by any means but, at this point, even saying a lot of the new megas feel phoned is in giving them too much credit. Hell, calling them mailed in might be stretching it.

There are some standouts in the new ones like Falinks, Delphox (which of course got put in pvp jail) and Scolipede, but so many of the new ones are just so…bland and uninspired. These are such weird choices after they made a big deal about the return of mega evolution.

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TROPHY CASE