New Pokémon Just Dropped

The following is a guest blog by our community member, Regicide.

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It’s 10am on a Tuesday. I’m with my dad who’s visiting from Florida, drinking some Italian espresso, and suddenly my phone goes off with an alert from Twitter.  Serebii, the top Pokémon fan site run by the man himself Joe Merrick, has just reported on some new information on the upcoming Pokémon refresher, Pokémon Legends: Arceus.

With the next tweet almost immediately after, my eyes were blessed by an axe wielding beast, and it’s name was appropriately dubbed Kleavor. A bug/rock type evolution of Syther that somewhat looks like a bird, with huge axes for arms. This new Pokémon is mentioned as a “Noble” Pokémon, perhaps a new special category similar to Totem Pokémon from Sun&Moon. It is described as the “Lord of the Woods”, a fitting one for such an axe wielding foe. 

Serebii Update: Official artwork of the new Pokémon Kleavor, a Bug/Rock-type Pokémon https://t.co/gDbXkHSvkT pic.twitter.com/zcpZcIncQf

— Serebii.net (@SerebiiNet) September 28, 2021

Now I’ve been a Pokémon fan since the original Game Boy days with it’s Red Version, and this was the most badass looking “‘mon” I’ve seen in my entire experience with the franchise. Although, Gengar still stands strong as my personal favorite. 

The accompanying trailer showcased a significant improvement on frame rate, and clearer, more refined graphics that didn’t look as rough as the original reveal. Can this game have more polish at launch than Sword and Shield at release? My hope is that they have a small team dedicated to optimization. This way it runs as smoothly as possible within the short three year development cycle each Pokémon game has. 

As pointed out by Twitter user TAHK0, it seems this schedule that Pokémon relies on each year, has made recent Pokémon games seem less feature complete than other AAA titles. 

This is in my opinion, to keep merchandise sales up in order for Pokémon to remain the top grossing franchise in the world. 

An overwhelming majority of you say 3 years is perfect-

Pokemon SwSh was in development for 3 years.

My point is there’s clear misunderstandings about what goes into game dev, & it’s too easy to find info supporting a view on something even if untrue (like pkmn taking 1 year).

— TAHK0 ☕️ (@TAHK0) June 13, 2020

Now I ask you dear readers, what are your expectations for Pokémon Legends: Arceus? I wouldn’t fall into the same trap I did with SwSh thinking this would be a blockbuster next gen experience for the Switch. But I remain optimistic for Game Freak to develop a quality experience, in a way that few Pokémon games have explored.