I had absolutely no ideas on Back 4 Blood for a significant portion of my first experience with it. This peculiar game is based in part on an extreme kind of nostalgia, particularly affecting anyone who have ever spent even a single day in the late 2000s in the same room as an Xbox 360. The other half is suddenly contemporary, with all cards, advancement, and rewards. everything seems as if the two cancel each other out at first, making everything look too familiar and too recognizable. In cooperative mode, I’m blasting zombies, collecting weaponry, and scouring the advancement system for cards that may come in handy during my next run. Say this in your most dispassionate voice: Alright.

Fortunately, however, it goes beyond that. I can now acknowledge that I was utterly mistaken after spending enough time poking about in the strangely alluring darkness of the game. It’s intriguing to read Back 4 Blood. In some regions, it is strange. It’s excellent! Very nice.

Its system of runs is largely responsible for this. Back 4 Blood, as you may already be aware, is a near spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead. It was created by the original Left 4 Dead studio Turtle Rock, which was formerly known as Valve South during the Left 4 Dead years before being refounded in 2011 by several significant figures, including Chris Ashton, Phil Robb, and Michael Booth. This background is significant. Aside from the overall morbidity of the cooperative gameplay, Left 4 Dead wasn’t actually meant to be played through just once. You go through Back 4 Blood more than once as well, but this time around it’s designed that way.

This is when the framework of the campaign system comes into play—the “run” part. When you start a run, you have a choice of three difficulties that increase rather quickly, from a very casual breeze to complete, apocalyptic destruction. You will need both a strong construct and a strong squad in order to succeed at the medium or upper difficulty levels, which is where the second component of the system comes in.

You will get in-game money supply points for finishing a campaign task with any online allies—though, rather controversially, not if you’re playing alone with bots. Points called “supply lines” may be used to advance along “supply lines,” which are basically skill trees. The advancement awards you with cards, which are highly significant, intriguing, and helpful, or sometimes some horrible, useless cosmetics, like a beanie, which aren’t.

Each of those cards has a distinct ability; they all start out with a simple ability, like +15 health, and grow more specialized and sophisticated over time. For example, one card dramatically enhances reload speed, but at the expense of never being able to aim down sights. To construct a deck, choose fifteen of the cards you have obtained so far. Afterwards, select a deck to utilize for each new run. You choose one card at a time to enter your active construction when five cards from your deck are drawn between each level. It’s important to remember that the cards are drawn in the order that you built them. In addition, the “horde” has a deck of its own, and the level has other random modifiers added to it. At first, the effect seems like a mediocre randomization method, but then all of a sudden it doesn’t.

Because you can’t unlock new cards when playing solo, you’re stuck with an incredibly tame, low-difficulty horde game that changes at random and gives you absolutely no incentive to replay due to the impossible difficulty of playing higher levels without coordinated teammates and specialized cards. This is why it’s been so controversial. Having enough cards to actually build an interesting deck in the first place is what makes this system work.

The game becomes much more rewarding if you don’t play alone and persevere through the relatively boring first stages as you progressively expand your collection of cards. It is possible to construct very specialized decks that drive you to the brink of “brokenness,” which is, let’s face it, the true appeal of any casual game with builds. I’ve only just begun to explore, but I’ve already seen some games—meetee in particular—that go completely bonkers, combining your character’s special abilities with stamina boosts, speed increases, and team-wide painkilling whenever you slay a zombie (which you will probably do a thousand times on harder difficulties).

All of this is combined with sometimes really entertaining level design that aims for the heightened delight that every respectable zombie game should ideally embody. In one particularly hectic, tower-defense-style level early in the campaign, you have to hold out in a bar full of necessities, like barbed wire, molotov cocktails, and tons of ammunition, all while blasting punk-pop songs from a jukebox that you have to keep safe from zombies’ constant attention. This is done to divert a massive horde. One culminates in an upward “gauntlet” through a residential neighborhood, with many adversaries hurling themselves over the once beautiful picket fences on each side of you. In another, you have to climb up a mine where the objects simply fall from the roof. It’s just an absolute joy to go through these to the saferoom, laughing hysterically over the microphone while covered in guts, mud, and other unimaginable muck. You could also be spraying wildly with a modified LMG in your hands and a cheeky little machine pistol in reserve.

This also applies to a large portion of the shorter, maybe even more informal PvP mode. I had forgotten how awesome this was in the first Left 4 Dead games—a feet-up, half-awake, guffawing mode that was flawlessly timed for the hours of 12 to 4am. It functions essentially the same as the originals: you play as a team of humans against a team of zombies, then you switch roles. The only differences are the minor adjustments made to the levels, so it’s not so much a game of cat and mouse as it is a desperate attempt to escape as long as you can against the horde or a hectic dash for your life as a deadly bubble of insects (or whatever) encircles you.

It also helps that there are a few more opponent kinds in both PvP and the storyline. The three main types of zombies are: a large, “tall boy” type that can withstand a lot of damage and strike you with a large arm; a sneaky, nimble type that spits, jumps, and grabs; and a gigantic, exploding type that can attack you from a distance or approach you and blow itself up (don’t call it a “boomer” to avoid the lawyers getting upset). Although they do grow a bit monotonous in the campaign, each of those three subclasses—tall lads who grab, not-boomers who remain at a distant distance, and so forth—makes for enough variation to keep things interesting in PvP.

Really, it is the primary problem. There is a certain amount of repetition, and certain opponent designs aren’t as well done as the others. For example, most bosses lack inspiration; they are just Big Zombie monsters who squish bullets and push you about a little. Furthermore, I’m not a huge fan of the horde deck concept as a whole. Occasionally, it unleashes an improved version of mayhem or one of the more intriguing bosses (there’s an utterly repulsive “thing” known as a Hag that charges at you from afar, snapping up a comrade via a face-hole that resembles a worm before sinking into the earth). Its tiny little T-Rex limbs and terrifying theme tune provide it a great change of pace from the typical big boy opponents. At other times, however, the combination turns the levels into a true dirge.

Additionally, this may terribly tamper with the cards. The whole idea of that system is that you plan ahead. However, when you find yourself in a level, even with your powerful, chaotic LMG build, full of alarm-like zombies that, when triggered, summon a wave of enemies, all of the lights are out, all of the doors are alarming, and all of the enemies are tougher than before and require multiple powerful hits to take down, you may find that the enemy deck is forcing you to play stealthily. A good LMG could also be absent for a time since, except from the two that are also randomly generated and can be purchased at the beginning of each level with run-specific cash, all weapons are randomly generated. (And maybe your weird stranger buddy is really a bit of a zombie themself, charging into those alarming doors with the rest of your squad almost out of gas, but don’t even get me started.)

All of that is unfortunate, and it goes hand in hand with an overall feeling of clumsiness in certain areas. Take the peculiarity of having a sort of “hub,” which is utterly unnecessary and very 2015: a location where you can move around and physically interact with NPCs to get three words before accessing a menu that you can already access by opening the menu. Speaking of NPCs, the plot of the game appears to have completely vanished. It appears that some military guy is the one who introduces them, and everyone else fumbles around trying to buy new weapons before you begin a round. Eventually, you just start to notice the occasional non-sequitur about blowing up a bridge or saving a guy, and then you just tune out.

Luckily, however, neither I nor I imagine anybody else plays horde-based zombie shooters for their compelling story. Even though it’s a blunt instrument, you may cope with a poor roll on the level-modifier dice by simply ending the current run and beginning a new one if you’re at the beginning of one. Beyond that irritation, the user experience aspect of the game is really great. This includes cross-progression, cross-platform play, and chapters that, upon finishing a run, let you dash out to the hub-slash-menu to unlock a few more cards and adjust your decks before moving on. In essence, the entire experience is similar to a roguelite with checkpoints.

Basically, it’s practically there. Nearly really unique. Although it falls short of that, Back 4 Blood is still an amazing, untidy delight of a game. That’s quite an accomplishment as well, given that it achieved this by successfully putting a progression system on a beloved, cult favorite series that is best characterized as the video game equivalent of a bong.

Riot Games, the massive League of Legends company, makes the bold move into television with confidence and style, but Act 1 is a little too formulaic at times.
Editor’s note: just to let you know, we do go into some minor tale stuff here, but most of it is already known if you know the characters from the games previously.

Like everything Riot Games does these days, Arcane is a visually arresting new animated series, with the first act debuting on Netflix this past weekend and the second on the 13th. The money is very much on the screen in this one. It is an unexpected pleasure, full of winks and nods and sparkling blue nuggets of lore, exactly as I’d hoped, and indeed guessed, a studio of Riot’s already formidable standing could deliver. As a League of Legends fan (to my everlasting shame), this is. As an enthusiast for quality television, however, I must admit that I’m surprised. Arcane is real, quality television.

To answer the obvious, no, you are not need to be a fan of League of Legends in order to play Arcane. It’s a precursor, and the clear aim is to attract a fresh audience via a completely different media, some of whom could even become devoted to it. When exactly League of Legends’ “now” arrives, Arcane is set a few years prior. It basically follows a few younger characters that are drawn from League of Legends. Those in their late 30s are in their early 20s, those in their mid-300s, such the Yoda-like Yordle scientist, Heimerdinger, are in their early to mid-ish 300s, and some whom frequent gamers would recognize as being in their 20s are really in their teens and tweens.

Riot has actually been creative here, all around. It’s a great approach to strike a balance between the two: an equal entrance point for inexperienced viewers and an onslaught of recently added knowledge for LoL aficionados. Arcane is set in the twin cities of Zaun, a “undercity” that lives under Piltover, a dazzling steampunk paradise of scientific (and economic) advancement, and Piltover, a steampunk land of freedom, security, and money. It’s a clever setting because, in terms of League of Legends’ Runeterra (and related “realms”), it’s the one that balances the safety of something familiar – humanoids, guns, fairly modern technology – with something a little bit different – the combination of magic, the comparatively unpopularized steampunk genre, and Heimerdinger’s peculiar yellow hair that kind of looks like a giant brain.

Arcane is innovative in many respects, but it’s also quite safe in many other respects. Riot seems to be revolving around this idea. You’ll notice that the new games released after League of Legends, such as the auto-chess spinoff Teamfight Tactics, the card battler Legends of Runeterra, and the tactical shooter Valorant, all fall squarely in the middle of their respective genres, offering a kind of severe competency first and novelty second. It might seem a lot like those games while switching to Arcane.

Characters are one prominent, inescapable example in this case. Arcane’s protagonists, Vi, Jinx, and Jayce, as well as supporting cast members Ekko, Caitlyn, Viktor, and Heimerdinger, are all League of Legends champions. League of Legends champions are often associated with very recognizable archetypes, and sometimes even other well-known figures. For example, Jinx is a skinny, violent, and chaotic villain that fits the description of Harley Quinn. By the time of League of Legends, Viktor is a smart, resentful scientist who comes with a robotic arm, much like Doctor Octopus.

This is very essential in League of Legends, and it’s also part of the fun. MOBAs are, at their core, role-playing games with specialization, advancement, and a unique type of immersive character, but they’re also really intense, packed with action-packed, fast-paced gameplay. It implies that the heroes of the game must all be instantly recognizable, shown in broad strokes, and distinguishable from the chaos just by their outward look, their four powers, and maybe a dozen or so vocal barks. More than in previous iterations like the occasional short animated trailer with a few cocked eyebrows and cool flips, or even a feature-length film, bringing those well-realized, but ultimately fairly shallow characters to life in a television series means the writers have had to undergo a kind of retconning of depth, well beyond the already significant lore reworks LoL has undergone in recent years.

It does appear in some locations. Arcane covers two simultaneous storylines, at least in the first four episodes that I’ve seen thus far. One centers on a teenage orphan named Vi (which, it turns out, is shorthand for Violet) and her younger sister Jinx (née Powder), who are competitors in the “present day” of League of Legends as they navigate crime and more risky mischief in Zaun. As a result, the B-plot centers on the handsome and intelligent Jayce, as well as his glitzy scientific endeavors on the surface. Viktor, Professor Heimerdinger, and his very wealthy childhood friend Caitlyn are all featured, as are other Academy members.

The issue is that you often get the impression that you’ve seen these characters’ story a lot before. Vi is the good-hearted person compelled to act immorally by external circumstances alone. Ahead of an important turn, Powder, who is younger, is repeatedly told she is “not ready” for the actual action and spurned by her older pals. Jayce has a subdued, hesitant haughtiness. Caitlyn’s upbringing in a high society contrasts with her bravery and determination. Viktor is a brilliant man who may have given that talent away too easily for his own benefit. Once a pioneer, Heimerdinger’s age and experience have made him cautious and conventional. Characters undergo well-telegraphed character development, but because of the sheer number of them and the relatively short amount of time Arcane devotes to each on-screen, there’s less time for just character, between the big, broad beats they must all hit on cue. This effect, along with the fact that Arcane originated as a series itself, can sometimes make the entire thing feel more like a lore-expanding exercise than a storytelling one.

However, and this is really important, those personalities are instantly captivating and the rhythms are masterfully performed. Part of this stems from my viewpoint as a player; I consider myself to be as heartless as anyone when it comes to fictional character attachment, but as a devoted fan of Viktor, I found myself strangely, intensely drawn to him when he was on screen, moving. At times, it felt like watching recently found 8mm film of a parent from before I was born: this is my guy; this was his life. It’s strangely, almost shamefully, emotional. It’s obvious that spending thousands of hours playing League of Legends with a small group of elite players affected me in a way beyond just improving my dexterity (or blood pressure).

Riot’s partnership with Fortiche, a French company that has previously worked on promotional events like music videos for the major K/DA K-pop events in League of Legends, produced Arcane’s animation, which is nothing short of remarkable. Arcane seems to be a piece of static, hand-sculpted concept art come to life at first view—actually, at every glimpse. It may sometimes seem eerie and strange. Sometimes I get the impression that this painting aspires to be something other than what it is—a moving image that yearns to remain still, propelled into an abnormal gait by some kind of prohibited necromancy. However, it is always powerful, reaching its pinnacle during both the calmer, one-off glances, chuckles, and shrugs that provide such a pleasant touch of texture to the action, as well as the times of strong, frightening violence and screen-filling explosions.

Through that animation, Arcane manages to achieve some real subtlety, gentle enough to cut through the broader strokes of its plotty story. Seldom does more than one thing at a time actually move on-screen, or at least rarely does it seem that way, evoking the classic, staid Japanese animations like Neon Genesis Evangelion. We can all see what’s happening to Powder—she doesn’t even have to sneak; she just leaps into her Anakin-like metamorphosis into Jinx—but that inevitable moment doesn’t lessen its poignancy or awful outcome. Not to mention the inevitable conflict between Viktor and Jayce—I haven’t seen it occur yet, but I’d bet pretty much everything on it. It’s important to note that some have pointed out possible queer-baiting in this instance, which could be problematic depending on how things work out. Having said that, there’s also a case to be made for this being a straightforward bromance, and platonic, emotional male relationships are also important for entertainment in their own right.

Even with all of this, there are still just four episodes total—the first three acts plus a little portion of the second. The most important thing to keep in mind is that we are skimming over these people’ pasts at the speed at which the series is unfolding. Arcane is a single series that was probably meant to be self-contained, but given that there are a good six other locations on League of Legends’ planet Runeterra, along with an additional two “realms” for good measure, I imagine there is enough to spend a season in a new place every time.

The “good TV” fan in me disagrees, but the LoL fan in me loves it as I am addicted to a fast-paced origin tale and can’t wait to see more of it applied to more of what I love. In its second and third acts, Arcane would greatly benefit from just slowing down, spending a little more time with the limited cast of people it already has, and appreciating them as characters rather than entities that have to be developed programmatically at a breakneck pace. It’s vibrant and alive, and it’s an amazing delight. However, the best of contemporary TV is, ultimately, all about the slow burn. Which will just add to the sense of relief for those who are waiting for that great, decisive explosion, like Jinx.

Pokémon Diamond and Pearl in their original form were odd, unbalanced games. The remakes reduce them to a smooth, but entertaining, remake.
Now, let’s discuss the Experience Share. A basic feature seen in every main series Pokémon game since 1999’s Pokémon Gold and Silver, the Experience Share (abbreviated Exp. Share) allows you to share the experience a Pokémon receives from defeating other Pokémon with the other members of your party. There are a numerous uses for it, but the main one is to improve your gaming experience: the Exp. Share is the most powerful tool you have to control the game’s difficulty, enabling your whole team to level up more quickly when it’s turned on or more slowly when it’s turned off.

Since then, the experience itself has evolved from being earned solely through battles to involving all successful catches of wild Pokémon. This is because public tastes have changed over time, and main series developer Game Freaks has changed along with them. Lastly, and perhaps most benevolently, it has been locked to “on” for the whole of generation eight with the release of Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl.

This isn’t a huge deal in the other generation eight games, Pokémon Sword and Shield, because the games were designed to function that way, at least in theory. Regardless of how you feel about the way they pace the game, the opposition trainers, their Pokémon, and their levels were included with the mechanic in mind, and the game was made with some thought given to it as a whole. However, it goes without saying that Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl were not created with an always-on Exp. Share in mind.

These are remakes, albeit very closely so, of Pokémon Diamond and Pearl from 2006, which are very different games from Sword and Shield from 2019. As a result, the outcome is predictable: the eighth generation’s easy, weightless momentum is dropped into the world of the fourth generation, with trainers, encounters, and opponents essentially the same in terms of level, stats, and strength as the originals. This implies that even if I was only ever up against trainers, collected wild Pokémon that had never been caught before, avoided all other encounters, and sometimes switched out a’mon from my party, I was still eight or ten levels ahead of my opponents the whole time. I could attempt to avoid as many trainers as I can or cut down on the number of Pokémon I usually carry on my team to offset that, but those options aren’t very good and could be easily avoided by just giving the option to disable the Experience Share.

The fact that this is so representative of Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl overall is what really sticks out, however. The original games were odd, uneven affairs, featuring some peculiar battle difficulty spikes, a notoriously bizarre type imbalance (a game that was largely Steel-heavy and only had one Fire-type evolution line to counter it, Ponyta and Rapidash, if you didn’t choose the Fire-type starter), some strangely easy-to-miss HMs, and a strange blend of Chibi and Pixel Art. The result of Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl’s catch-all attempts to smooth that over—like the parachuting in of the always-on Exp. Share—is something more bluntly palatable but far less natural, smoothed in all the wrong places like an oil-based portrait yassified through FaceApp. They’re coarse and awkward, but crucially, at least characterful as a result. Put plainly: they’ve just mastered the incorrect material again.

In the series, Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are in a difficult position. The Pokémon Company is releasing a main series game for the first time that wasn’t created by Game Freak. BDSP is being handled by ILCA, which stands for I Love Computer Art. ILCA is the company that created the Pokémon Home storage app and has assisted in the creation of games like Yakuza 0, Dragon Quest 11, and NieR: Automata. Additionally, it’s coming out only a few months ahead of Game Freak’s Pokémon Legends: Arceus, a prequel rather than a remake that takes place in the same Sinnoh area as Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum from generation four.

Pokémon fans have been demanding “Sinnoh remakes” for months, if not years, hoping for the same modern makeover as the previous three generations of FireRed and LeafGreen, HeartGold and SoulSilver, and Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. This puts them in a difficult situation. Nevertheless, because the Pokémon Company is known for its unpredictable nature, we should expect two distinct game types rather than the standard current-gen graphics and mechanics adapted to old games. Legends: Arceus introduces Pokémon into a quasi-open world with what appears to be the most sophisticated mechanics to date, while BDSP takes a somewhat conservative approach, eschewing features like freely moving cameras, more intricate models, moves, and animations, Mega Evolution, and the modern equivalent of Dynamaxing in the hopes of drawing in new players and satisfying nostalgia in the hearts of Sinnoh fans.

It’s unfortunate for more reasons than one, since the three previous remake cycles produced some of the finest games in the series and brought a feeling of completion with them, adding new features to graphically improved versions of intricately designed game environments. It’s unfortunate since BDSP are often a lot of fun, and there’s a strong feeling of wasted potential.

The arrangement seems to be the same as in Diamond and Pearl, not Platinum, which had a significant amount of additional content and an enlarged Pokédex of monsters to capture, including a few more Fire-types. In general, the older two are chosen if there is a discrepancy between those two and the improved version. For example, the narrative revolve on the events of the two originals, the Hearthome Gym is the fifth gym you’ll encounter rather than the third, and the Pokémon you may find in the wild match the identical versions as the originals.

The Grand Underground, a reimagined area beneath Sinnoh’s surface with miniature Wild Area-like rooms, visible Pokémon roaming the overworld (standard random encounters are all you get topside), and an extremely addictive mining minigame that grants you some useful items, is where things sort of merge. Although there are theoretically even more encounters in this area than in Pokémon Platinum, the majority of them are still locked behind late-game progress, meaning you have to complete the main story in order to access them. This is a little disappointing. That’s unfortunate since, after you’ve completed the majority of the plot in which you might have utilized them, there isn’t much of a need to go back and collect all these other Pokémon.

It’s still an improvement, though, and one of the few instances where BDSP improves upon the originals successfully: the Grand Underground is enormous, inspiring a sense of wonder and exploration as if there’s a whole other half of the game to literally dig into whenever you fancy it, even though that half of the game is relatively one-dimensional. It’s also fun and, crucially, a bit weird, which Pokémon must always be in some way.

The other adjustments are rather small. A brand-new rhythm-based minigame has been added to Pokémon Contests, a specialized section of the original games that is enjoyable for role-players and completely independent. Talking to the locals, you’ll hear a lot about how you can choose to be the kind of Pokémon Trainer you want to be, how you can go through Gyms to defeat the Elite Four and save the world, or how you can just collect adorable Pokémon to use in competitions. However, as fans of the series are aware, fantasy doesn’t really make sense and never has in Pokémon games. You can do the latter, but in order to truly enjoy it—that is, to acquire more moves, capture more Pokémon, and collect more Poké Ball stickers, which is a little new addition—you will still need to complete the former.

The redesign of hidden moves, or HMs, the metroidvania-style skills that restrict your advancement in Pokémon games, is the last significant change. They are divorced from the moves themselves in BDSP, which is important. They are mapped to the Pokétch, a screen you may bring up picture-in-picture to utilize on the go. You may use an HM freely in the wild without teaching any moves to Pokémon in your party or bringing anything with you if you have the Pokétch app for it and beat the corresponding Gym Leader. Rather, a wild Pokémon will do the rock-smashing and tree-chopping for you. Typically, this is a Bidoof, which seems like a humorous throwback to it being the preferred HM slogger in the originals. It’s a very welcome change, though it’s a little strange that Game Freak and company haven’t come up with a more personal solution yet. For example, it would be great to have a Pokémon that you’ve caught help you even if it’s not in your party. This seems especially feasible now that you can access your storage boxes to swap Pokémon at any time, anywhere.

The other modifications are all minor, but very welcome additions to the user experience, such as instant access to the box and the option to launch a Poké Ball straight from the combat screen without reaching into your bag. The feature that lets you have a Pokémon in your party follow you behind is a clear standout and has been a frequent request from fans, who are happy to see it return. These are little details, but they give the world life, and that vitality is what makes Pokémon so popular in the first place—after all, these are games about the wonder of nature. It is stated clearly in the term.

The aesthetic comes last and is always subjective, albeit it is very difficult for me to adore, and I imagine it is for many others as well. This style is chibi, but only in a very literal sense; it has overly simplified character models with sticker-like eyes, underanimated Pokémon, and uninspired attacks. It gives off the impression that someone was trying to recreate something, but not sure what. The impressionist, often lyrical pixel imagery that prompted the player to fill in the blanks with mystery and creativity is no longer present.

The substitute is a simple, flat object. It sometimes verges on being excellent; the gentleness of sunrises and sunsets is often lovely, serving as a pleasant reminder of the enjoyable day-night aspect of the originals. The key to that ultra-tactile hygge world is the minute details in both visual and acoustic detail, which Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl can’t match. For example, a polyester carpet next to a hand-spun woollen rug hints at but falls far short of the cozy, Animal Crossing-like feeling. Additionally, it seems to lose some of the accuracy of the original’s straightforward up-down-left-right movement in the process; for example, walls become strangely sticky when partially run against with the analog stick.

And it pretty much sums up these games, regrettably. It is really annoying, not to mention that despite their oddities, the originals were at least memorable for their oddities, and their excellent organization is still unmatched. The series’ crucial, almost unparalleled atmosphere of awe is derived from its intriguing side locations and big secrets. One such spot is the truly eerie Old Chateau, which is located in an easily missed portion of Eterna Forest and has flashing red eyes painted on it. The massive, imposing Mt. Coronet, which rises from the region’s center and seems to be trying to drag you into its magnetic depths. Sinnoh’s mines, marshes, and ruins. the many side missions and riddles involving legendary Pokémon like Darkrai and Spiritomb. Continues without end.

It’s all still there, fantastic, and well worth your time. If you’ve never played the original Pokémon games, wonderful Diamond and Shining Pearl include a genuine, palpable, and wonderful game that you should definitely play. But you’re better off with the originals themselves, in my opinion, since these remakes smooth over so much of their worn-out feel.