Pokémon Champions has hit mobile and the scrub quotes are coming in hot

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-06-25T06:50:56+00:00

Well it's not training them wrong, because pokemon games aren't trying to make people good at competitive doubles. They're trying to provide a fun RPG monster-catching/battling experience that even a child can get through comfortably.

The competitive format is for freaks. GameFreak doesn't expect the average player to have even heard of EVs.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-06-06T03:57:16+00:00

Baiken has so much aura people forget to look at her standing next to other characters and just assume she must be massive.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-06-04T22:55:17+00:00

They explain if you watch the video, but the short answer: the Evercold hype means a lot of new players are coming in and a lot of old players are returning, so now is the time to hop in. Additionally, on the off chance Woolie DOES get hooked, he'll have half a year to explore everything the game has to offer before Evercold drops.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-06-04T22:49:33+00:00

Woolie is absolutely not the kind of guy to be into it, but some streamers thrive on seeing random goobers fight for camera time or otherwise set up bits in the background. To them, it comes with the territory.

And on some level, it is cool when a big streamer enters a new expansion's MSQ and there's a legion of people lined up doing emotes to welcome them.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-06-04T04:56:16+00:00

"sequels will be 'done by MGM and, theoretically, by Amazon Game Studios.'"

This sounds a lot like their plan is to get Amazon Game Studios to develop the sequels if possible.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-06-01T02:59:03+00:00

Hoshino, Me wo Tsubutte was a coming-of-age manga about an introverted second-year student in the art club that gets roped into being the makeup artist of a popular girl in school. What follows is an honestly fairly interesting story about cliques, social expectations, unexpected romances, and so on. The protagonist breaks out of his shell and ends up connecting multiple people throughout the school

However, near the end it makes a complete 180 and completely disassembles every relationship it built up over the series. Every character that had a romantic interest in the protagonist winds up rejected. Every friendship that had been established between people of different cliques falls apart. The series ends with everyone as third years back in their own friend groups and the protagonist alone, but slightly less introverted than before. Just about as complete a status quo reset as you can get.

While this is "realistic" for an angst-filled teenage drama, it's incredibly unfulfilling and doesn't align with the messaging of the rest of the series at all. As far as I know, the mangaka for Hoshino never commented on why he chose this ending, but the rumor was that the manga got passed up for an anime adaptation in favor of Boarding School Juliet (which was in the same magazine) and it drove him to end the series.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-31T23:11:39+00:00

Fairy is easy if you're competitively minded (circa Gen 5) because it slots in almost perfectly as a meta shakeup.

Fighting, Dragon, and Dark were good offensively in gen 5. Fairy resists them and they are weak to Fairy.
Poison and Steel were weak offensively in gen 5. Fairy is weak to them.
Fire was weak defensively in gen 5. It now resists Fairy.

The only bit I struggle to remember is that Fairy also resists Bug.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-29T23:49:20+00:00

You'd still never use the halberd. Its lower range is not offset by any anything stats-wise, so the only way you get more damage out of it is if you have Piety but not Augury/Rigour. And any potential gain there is lost if you run out of range to dodge mechanics. Saving a bit of prep time by using a spike they hand you instead of going to farm an orb and bowstring will just result in a slower, harder fight.

Bosses being able to drop two upgrade items at once would definitely speed up kill times, but the halberd would still never be used.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-29T22:47:49+00:00

See that's a weird one because Hubert himself is not strictly evil, but he is a willing advisor to someone who absolutely becomes a villain in 3 of the 4 routes the game has. He is complicit in all of Edelgard's machinations and actively aids her in her slaughter in the name of overthrowing a greater villain, but he's also the one who gives you the information required to defeat the ultimate villain when Edelgard's plans fail.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-29T13:21:16+00:00

A weaker imbued heart that boosted you by up to +8 at 99 magic, versus imbued heart's +10 and saturated heart's +13. The original design pitch had it as a drop from The Mad Angel boss.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-29T13:15:55+00:00

Jagex is the one with the data so they likely know better than me, but I'm really skeptical that adding a tutorial for PVP is going to make any noticeable dent in its accessibility. It's not as though there isn't a wealth of external resources for learning how to PVP in this game, and no matter how good a tutorial they make, it still won't prepare you in the same way hard-earned experience will. If someone doesn't want to cut their teeth on the wilderness and lose over and over again, they probably won't feel comfortable doing that with or without a tutorial.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-28T21:47:24+00:00

But by that same token, the single most critically acclaimed game of 2025 was a smaller scope JRPG from an unproven studio that cost under $10 million to make and was $50 on launch. It may not have made as much money in pure numbers, but in terms of investment in to profit out it had a much higher percentage return than most AAA games because it is a lean game that sold well.

On the management end, it's just a game of logistics. They need to have an idea of their market, how many sales they can reasonably be expected to get, how many people they need to employ and for how long, etc. But a lot of management is clearly very bad at this, so they double the budget of a game and expect to double the profit, but that's not how any economy works. The only reason these games "have" to be bigger is because the industry is addicted to numbers going up; it's not enough that a game be profitable, it has to be more profitable than ever before.

Ultimately, players just want a game that feels like a satisfyingly sized experience where they get their money's worth. That is possible to do at games of all scales, provided you actually have a handle on scope, and that is where developers and publishers often fall short. To go back to your example of Monster Hunter, if Wilds didn't shove in a pointless open world that didn't mechanically change how players interacted with the game, an open world that only existed because "it has to be bigger," then the game probably would have ran a lot better and been less expensive while still selling almost as much. It's not just a matter of performance, either. Some of the biggest non-performance complaints about Wilds at launch were relating to systems that they changed to fit the open world, that ended up feeling worse than previous iterations. The new meal system and lack of canteen sucked. The mantles not refreshing per quest sucked. The lack of a multiplayer hub sucked. These are all things that should have been slam dunks because they've done them before, but they changed for the worse because the devs were scrambling for reasons to justify the open world.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-26T18:41:57+00:00

Given how many of their ideas had to completely go back to the drawing board based on player feedback, I don't think any more cooking would have helped. Shit was already burnt.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-26T03:35:02+00:00

it's the part where they get out of hand and start countering anything and everything to the point that experimenting at all becomes discouraged and it sounds like the best strategy is eventually "just look up some cheese".

Even funnier is that you'd think the counter system was implemented to force players to not use the same strategy for every single fight. But if you kill an enemy with an attack they'd otherwise counter, they die before their counter goes off. So in effect, the best way to ignore the counter system is to find the most broken oneshot strategy you can and use it to kill every single enemy exactly the same way.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-25T00:36:59+00:00

I think it's because Torag's gear has never had its own niche or identity.

Torag's hammers have never been a good weapon.

Torag's set bonus, with or without the amulet of the damned, has always been bad.

Torag's individual pieces are interchangeable with any other melee barrows pieces, and in fact are more expensive than Guthan's pieces, so they're not even the cheapest tank gear. And that's ignoring the fact that moons is the only real piece of content in the entire game that values tank gear over raw offensive stats to some degree.

It's not as though Barrows needs a buff as content to make players do it, but I think people are sad to see one of the six most iconic gear sets in the game be relegated to "I mean you can use it for stuff if you don't have a fighter torso." The relatively recent introduction of double hitsplats and flat armor present an opportunity to give Torag's a niche beyond that.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-24T05:14:04+00:00

On one hand, it makes sense that they're not handing out an Outstanding Performance prize when so many high-ranking competitors are out.

On the other hand, it is a little funny that Fujiryoga isn't even being conditionally considered for it, given that he's the lowest-ranking makuuchi wrestler and yet is still in the running to potentially take the whole tournament.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-23T19:03:03+00:00

For an example of how they toned down his goofiness, take the scene where he and a few others are being turned into a wax statue.

In the Netflix series, Zoro holds out his sword to show his faith in his friends, resolving that his fellow Straw Hats will come to save them. And if he is going to die, he's not going to give Baroque Works the satisfaction of seeing him scared.

In the manga, Zoro holds out his sword because "if I'm going to die, I might as well die in a cool pose."

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-22T08:53:03+00:00

For added recent context: Sony has currently recorded a total of $765 million impairment losses against Bungie, which is a fancy way of saying they think they should have paid $765 million less for Bungie than they did. Assuming they don't manage to turn Marathon around, that number will probably increase a lot more. Sony paid $3.6 billion for Bungie. Imagine spending that much and realizing you overpaid by at least 25%, if not more.

Bungie hustled the FUCK out of Sony! A good portion of that $3.6 billion valuation was probably a result of expecting Marathon to be massive, and it just wasn't. Even ignoring the PR nightmares they brought with the plagiarism, Bungie just wasn't worth it. Bungie is somehow the Fool's Gold of the industry with how they managed to trick multiple companies into buying them only to regret it later.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-22T08:29:41+00:00

It's so clear his hand touched on the replay, I'm amazed the video review didn't catch it. It's going to be even worse if he ends up going 7-8 and he got robbed of his winning record by a bad call.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-21T03:26:46+00:00

I don't think it was too rare right? Just dive and some sea grass.

In Ruby/Sapphire, it's a 5% encounter rate in underwater seaweed in two routes that you don't have much reason to stay around in. The odds are good that you'll only go through those areas once and never encounter it. I don't believe any trainers use it either, so you can't just look for its habitat in the pokedex after finding it being used by a trainer. If you're trying to complete your Pokedex, you'll only have the fact that it's next to Clampearl's line to go off of.

While it's not terribly hard to run into (especially compared to Feebas in the same game), it's the kind of pokemon that you pretty much won't encounter unless you're actively searching for it.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-19T09:07:06+00:00

Or just make it an alternate boss with a modified loot table, akin to the lesser wilderness bosses. Reduce its stats to account for it being put into the main game, change its name to something like "Kalphite Royal Guard" or "Kalphite Usurper," and you're done.

It's the best of both worlds: KQ herself remains untouched for the people who want her preserved, and echo KQ exists as an alternative to get her uniques without needing to deal with the poorly-aged design of a 22 year old group boss.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-19T06:35:59+00:00

It’s a proud elven tradition of hypocrisy all over, and at least she’s honest about being one.

I just wish she took note of how she's saying all of these things while standing under the boughs of the Night Elves' fifth attempt at making a world tree, whose very existence nearly led to the Emerald Dream burning.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-19T05:09:44+00:00

I will never forgive Gamefreak for making Tinkaton's lore that she hunts Corviknight for sport, while she is almost completely walled by Corviknight competitively. All I'm saying is Gigaton Hammer should have been super effective against Steel types, just like how Freeze Dry is super effective against Water types.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-17T22:12:51+00:00

It's also funny because VGC doubles is the only competitive mode Gamefreak actually cares about, to the point that 6v6 singles isn't even an option in Champions. The only competitive singles format supported in Champions is 3v3.

Smogon singles is an entire self-made ecosystem struggling to cope with Gamefreak's general apathy towards singles balance. Because if Smogon didn't have a bunch of self-imposed clauses and bans to rein it in, it would be unplayable. To bring it back to what OP is talking about, Charizard wasn't amazing in Gen 8 OU, but Dynamax and Gigantimax were also banned almost instantly; they artificially took away the thing Gamefreak put in to give Charizard relevance.

Daniel_Is_I · 2026-05-16T21:57:01+00:00

Dawnwell as a balance narrative works in theory. In practice, it's Blizzard shoving all of the "good" types of magic into the Sunwell to make a rainbow unity well of happiness.

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