Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon: Spoilers ahoy ☀

Ugh, I'm so jealous. I've been playing splatoon all morning and I'm pretty sure last night I had a dream where I was showing off a switch to my mother.


I don't really mind missing out on splatfests or new weapons yet, since content is still smaller than it was when I bought Splatoon and my favourite weapon might not end up in it, but my God do I want to sink my teeth into salmon run. Even if it looks even more prone to team-related loss than the regular modes!


One day. One day...

What's your favorite weapon again?

also SALMON RUN IS SO FUCKING FUN, MY GOD. it's absolutely hard and horrifying but it's FUN

and the hero mode is better than the first game's too imo

and i absolutely LOVE the dualies

i've missed this feeling since i regularly played splatoon

Looks like we're finally starting to get some info on Ultra S&M. It's not much yet, but I'll still throw it in a spoiler tag just in case.

Spoiler:

Is it bad that I can't bring myself to care :/ I was never hugely fussed about the originals, more won't make much of a difference. They're not going to be good, anyway - power creep this gen says if you don't have a legendary BST or a mega, you're probably not worth playing.

I think this is the longest I've ever gone without playing Pokémon. I can't even bring myself to turn on the 3DS and get those megastones! And they're good ones! I should definitely do that.


@Spark: Slosher Deco. Which isn't in the game, alas - even if leaks are to be believed, the new Slosher Deco has a *sprinkler*, not a splash wall. Yuck. Even if they make a 3rd Slosher like the Soda Slosher that has a Splash wall, it's not going to have a Kraken equivalent, since the new Deco has that in Baller. At best it could get Ink Armour, and those are really, really slim odds (3rd bucket, that bucket has splash wall, that bucket also has ink armour). RIP favourite bucket set :'( combining that with a *really* damning article on Splatoon 2's online infrastructure and ping rate, and my enthusiasm for getting it has been turned waaaaaay down.



I wonder what OJ is up to?

OJ is currently deceased as far as we can tell.
He got caught up in a million messages of skype hell backlog (like, over 70 thousand iirc) and he can't not read them all for whatever reason.

Anyway hey! been awhile. Quick life update:
-I'm off to college in a few weeks! Headed down south to Georgia, where I'll be studying animation
-Working currently at a summer camp and it's hell i hate kids
-My opinion on lycanroc dusk form is that its dumb as hell and i don't care about it.

*Googles Georgia*

Ah, yes. Yes indeed.

And apparently Lycanroc gets the moves of both forms but it's giveaway exclusive. This is the worst combination of traits.

Sometimes I log in to dA and shudder at all the comments I haven't replied to. But some of them are 5+ years old by now, so. Eh. I think 1000 was my highest backlog. How the heck is OJ getting so many messages...

EDIT: Megastones for Ralts's line and Diancite are out. And Lopunny! Code is POYONG. (?)

Ugh, I was worried they'd make it event-exclusive. Looks like my fears have been confirmed. Although I guess the bright side is that I was never that interested in the evolution line in the first place, and as you pointed out, it's not likely to be all that useful in competitive battles.

Anyways, congrats iT! I hope you have a lot of fun! Just remember to go to class, because you're paying for the privilege.

woohooooo, totally-not-just-ash-lycanroc! .....yeah the marketing for USUM is not very good rn.

also in other news, @dee: trislosher's p freaking good in splatoon2. maybe even too good. 's got bursts and ink armor.

on the other hand though: the dualies are just so fucking fun man
i think the normal dualies are my least favorite by now, but the dualie squelchers (actually the dumbest thing ever, i love it) are great as a ranged alternative and the dapples are SO FUCKING FUN. so nyoomy man

welp the hurricane kinda fucked my College Plans. still got another week i guess

Yikes, stay safe. There was a risk that it was going to hit where I am, but it veered west, so we're only getting the fringes.

New Coro Coro info, meager as it is. Y'all know the deal.

Spoiler:

EDIT: More info, albeit still not very much. It's been appended to the spoiler tag.

boy there sure is a weird amount of clown-related content going on this week isn't there.

Spoiler:

Yeah, things could definitely get interesting.

Spoiler:

I'm sure we all saw the clip of Hau/Player Character/Lusamine, too... so it looks like it's not going to be the BW2 to SM's BW, then, even if it does end up widely diverging later.


Not wholly surprised. Or at all I guess. But there was a *hope* - the last genuine 3rd version we got was BW2. As much as I dislike BW, BW2 was pretty solid across the board and was only soiled in my mind by its aesthetics and relative proximity to what was, at the time, one of least favorite games in the series. USM is on really, really shaky ground for me.


I don't want to moan about it too much, that's no fun for anybody, especially when the game isn't actually out yet. But I think it's important to be consistent about these things; I don't want to be one of those guys that says in gen 4 "gen 2 was my favourite!" and then in gen 5 "gen 3 was my favourite!" and then "gen 4 was my favourite" come gen 7. For the record: I have always thoroughly enjoyed gens 2 (except Crystal), 3 (except Emerald and FRLG), 4 (Except Platinum), and 6. 5 was a noticeable outlier on my preference list until 7 blew it out of the water, this is a personal judgment and not a statement of broad fact. I have a lot of reasons based on where my preferences have fallen in the past to be very, very doubtful re: whether I'll enjoy USM. I had been hoping the third version/remake would have been more of a BW2-style sequel than a heavily revised origin story.


Hope everything has started improving for you weather/college-wise, iT.


Random stuff from me, house purchasing is long and boring, but I should be in by Christmas if not the end of October, I joined my University's astronomy club, which is kinda cool even if we haven't done anything yet, I'm going to Iceland in a few weeks, which is neat, and yesterday I got a K:D of 17-1 in a 3v4 Turf War in Splatoon (1) with the Custom Range Blaster, which is very neat (although totally inconsequential).

It's interesting that you seem to dislike third versions. I think I'd have a much better view of Gen IV if I'd skipped Pearl and started with Platinum, and while I enjoyed Ruby at the time, Emerald definitely felt much more polished.

Anyways, good luck with all the house stuff!

Nah I agree generally. Given an equal opportunity, I'd prefer Platinum to Pearl, Emerald to Ruby, etcetera. They're solidly better games with more content (even if it's not always as much content as you'd hope). The problem is that 90% of the game is a game I've already played, and they come too close to the originals time-wise that generally my primary feeling is "been there, done that". XY is an interesting outlier for me because I loved the region so much that I really wanted to see more of it in a third version, and having ORAS spaced it out just long ago to make it seem fresh again. Whereas BW2 came out immediately after BW with nothing breaking it up, making it seem kinda like extensive DLC - and now the same is happening with USUM, except *without* the benefits of being a dedicated sequel, and I dislike SM even *more* than I did BW.

I can see that. Although strictly speaking, you also had that kind of break between RS and Emerald.

Interestingly enough, my reason for wanting Z/X2Y2/Mega XY/whatever they would have called it is kind of the opposite of yours. I really disliked Kalos, mostly because it felt shallow and incomplete, and a third version would have given GameFreak a chance to fix that. It's very much the same reason I'm tentatively excited for Ultra S&M; the originals really felt like they got rushed out the door too early to go with the anniversary, and now GameFreak's finally getting to show us what they'd wanted Alola to be all along. That being said, I don't know why Z couldn't have been the anniversary celebration instead, but I'm sure Nintendo has its fair share of manglement like most companies.

They decided against Z presumably because they'd prefer to celebrate the 20th anniversary with a brand-new game and region, I'd imagine. Z would be too intrinsically tied to XY to stand out as 'the anniversary game', imo.

anyways USUM is... an interesting beast. I usually liked third versions (platinum was a godsend bc dp were Kinda Awful), but recent games have set a standard in a way. BW had no standard third version, but a duo of sequels with way more changed to their essence - which was especially good since they were the most plot-heavy games at the time. XY, on the other hand, had no third version period. While I would've liked to seen one in some form, that kind of set the idea that they might be choosing to give up on their old method of pushing basically-just-dlc/patches as full games.

Now... I'm still not sure how to feel about USUM. Having brand-new Pokémon is GREAT! I'm really glad they've been saying completely fuck it to people close-minded enough to think that just because something hasn't happened before, it's impossible. They've done that with sequels, with the lack of a remake, with the lack of a third version, with legendaries that can evolve, and now with mid-gen additions to the dex... it's stupid how stubborn people can be with their religious obsession with patterns, and seeing those get broken makes me really happy.

At the same time, I'm worried - I liked SM, but the game's crazy plot-focused. I've been saying for a while that they need some crazy mixups and extra content in there to make this a worthy purchase for anyone who's not a superfan. New mons is a step in the right direction, and so are the interesting totally-defs-not-evil figures in the back of the recent USUM poster and the such, but we know for a fact the earlygame bits with Lillie are the same, and the Lusamine-Hau-MC cutscene seems to happen just about the same way too. Overall... it's kind of a mixed bag right now. I've got no doubts they'll reveal more Z-moves and Alolan forms that might help push it over the edge (depending on their quantity and quality), and maybe new proper mons as well, but... I'm not totally sure whether I'll buy the games. Might wait a bit after release to see what people say.

Obligatory "Hiveswap (act 1)" is out and the reviews are actually solid". In case we forgot why we're here :V Might pick it up later tonight, I'm more enthused by it than I am about USUM.

That said, I'd still rather play Splatoon 1 than either, so...

I bought it, but my computer is shit and the game's not exactly perfectly optimized, so the cutscenes are basically unwatchable. Got a refund. What I played was fun though, and I'm watching the rest of it online at least.

The Steam page mentioned that they put out a patch to improve cutscene playback and a few other performance issues, so it might be fixed by now. Either way, throwing it on my Steam wishlist.

More news, nothing really spoiler-worthy.

More old pokemon added to the nat dex. This was a given!

Alolan Photo Club looks kinda like what contest dressup in DPPT wanted to be. Still probably a gimmick though.

New Mantine Surfing game. Looks... pretty sweet, actually. Not gameplay wise, could be shallow (eheheh) as all hell for all we know, I mean visually it looks pretty gotdamn sweet. If it had been in the original SM trailer we'd all be pretty amazed.

Box legends are heavier than the originals but keep their original counterpart's typing, as far as Toy listing information goes.

Well, now we know at least two more Mega Stones should be available in the games without events. Granted, GameFreak could still pull the same stupidity with them that they did back in XY, since the relevant species are once again version-exclusive.

I'm also intrigued by Mantine surfing; hopefully it means we'll get to do some exploring of the oceans between the major islands.

Also, I'm absurdly happy by the fact that the trailer showed an Inkay, since that suggests it'll be in the new Alola Dex.

Oh my goodness it looks like I stopped receiving notifications about new posts in this thread so I figured it had died or something but boy was I wrong.

Honestly, I haven't really kept up with Pokemon news--I mostly used to use the Pokemon subreddit to keep up to date, but for some reason I feel like post quality has gone down there in the past few months and don't frequent it as often anymore. But since US&M/USUM/Ultra S&M (what is the actual acronym we're using help) is coming out at some point (I need to look this up too), I should probably start catching up again...

(Also Hiveswap is cute and the music is great and it makes me laugh a lot--I'm pretty happy with it so far, and I haven't even finished Act 1 yet! And Worm podcast, yes, also I've started to get addicted to Worm liveblogs/read-throughs, help. Oh, and I finally got a Switch but all I have is Mario Kart and also Sonic Mania that my boyfriend bought.)

I think USUM is the "mainstream" acronym, but you'll pry Ultra S&M from my cold, dead hands; besides, the people championing USUM seem to be the ones who went with SuMo last time around, so their judgment is already suspect.

Honestly, there hasn't been all that much news yet, which is a little worrying at this point. Although it looks like the US is getting shafted yet again in terms of preorder bonuses: the so-called Starter's Pack includes a keychain of the respective version's mascot and a serial code for 12 Revives.