Pokemon Generation 8's Downloadable Content

I can’t even fathom how boring this is going to be.  DLC is already the part of a game least likely to be interesting or worthwhile, in my experience, and Nintendo especially has a bad track record with it.  And that’s DLC for games that are otherwise good to some degree.  What will a less engaging piece of Pokemon Generation 8 even look like?  After the main game, my expectations are low enough that I might count it as a win if The Isle of Armor isn’t entirely a minigame about laundering your underwear and The Crown Tundra isn’t a snow shoveling simulator.

Then again, who knows?  Maybe Game Freak hunkered down, got serious, and actually gave an honest effort to making these DLCs, to make up for the blahpocalypse they’d foisted on us with the main game.  We live in a world where shrimp can make implosions as hot as the sun with their punches and Alex Kurtzman hasn’t been literally torn apart by a mob, so clearly anything is possible.



The Isle of Armor: I’m sorry, Nintendo, you want me to find how many Diglets?  I thought you just said 150.  It sure looked like 150.  But I know that’s impossible, because if you were asking me to find fucking 100 fucking 50 fucking Diglets, you’d trigger a Gold Skulltula episode in me and I’d have to charter an international journey to your offices to murder every last 1 of you.

For real, though, here’s the deal: this DLC is boring.  Shocker, isn’t it?  Something related to Pokemon: Generation 8 isn’t especially compelling?  Truly a surprise.  Basically, the entire plot of this add-on is that you travel to a little island, join a dojo, become a master at said dojo, and raise a martial arts bear Pokemon.  And if you’re thinking to yourself that most of that premise sounds like it’d have trouble filling the expected time and content of most games’ tertiary sidequests, then congratulations, you’re too smart to work at Game Freak!

Not that a small premise can’t be entertaining, of course.  With the right cast and the right content, anything can be a compelling story; hell, Non Non Biyori made a gripping sports anime scene out of a recess game of knocking rulers off a desk.  Unfortunately, however, the content of your rise to the top ranks of the dojo is mostly uninspired time-padding sidequest errands, given by and connected to by-the-numbers NPC characters and a mildly annoying antagonist whose personal story is facile and forgettable.  All so that you can be the top dog at some mom-and-pop dojo that they keep touting as a place Leon trained at.  Yeah, because that’s a ringing endorsement.

And then later, Hop shows up.  Yaaaayyyyy.

I will give The Isle of Armor a bit of credit on the point of Kubfu, or at least for the concept behind it.  Eventually you’re given a little martial arts bear Pokemon called Kubfu, and tasked with completing sidequests that are designed to build a friendship with him/her.  This is actually a really good idea!  It’s a totally different avenue to acquiring Pokemon, wherein the process is you going to the trouble to do things to build a real, creditably positive relationship with the creature that you’re going to expect to fight for your benefit.  The idea of approaching Pokemon collection as something that’s at least somewhat a 2-way street, of earning their trust and friendship rather than just magicking them into a tiny ball without consent and moving on, is a great direction to take.  One which you’d THINK the series would have started implementing decades ago to try to prove its bullshit about trainer-Pokemon relations not being inherently immoral!  The idea that you’d actually have to earn Kubfu as a companion, create an emotional basis for his/her willingness to fight for you, is definitely a step in the right direction.

Sadly, the actual process of this is uninvolved and insubstantial.  And, as the stupid Let’s Player I watched* demonstrated, there is absolutely nothing stopping the player, once Kubfu’s personal journey is over with, from just sticking him/her in the PC and forgetting about him/her forever, which really does undercut the lasting impact of the journey of friendship you both went on together.**  Obviously that’s a matter of what the player decides, but seeing it happen before my eyes did kinda lessen what slight hold the story of Kubfu and Gloria’s blossoming friendship had upon me.

Still, as I said, the idea behind the Kubfu part of this DLC is a good one.  If Game Freak had actually given it the slightest effort, it might even have been good!  But they didn’t, nor did they appear to try at any other part of The Isle of Armor’s story, and so this DLC is as bland and purposeless as the rest of Generation 8.  Don’t waste your money on it.


The Crown Tundra: This one is kind of funny.  Not intentionally, mind you; writing jokes takes effort and effort is a foreign fucking concept to Game Freak.  But it’s funny in the sense that the whole thing feels kind of like an exasperated, frustrated parental meltdown.  It’s like Nintendo's just so fucking tired of hearing the players whine about being dissatisfied with this subpar game, and this whole DLC is the company’s response of, “Fine!  FINE!  You win!  What do you want?  You want Legendaries?  GO AHEAD!  Take them, take them all, just take every goddamn one, I don’t even care any more!” as they grab Rayquazas and Mewtwos out of a sack and hurl them at the players’ faces.

The possibility that the Legendary Pokemon pandering overload in this DLC is an actual temper tantrum notwithstanding, I guess I would say that The Crown Tundra is the best thing about Pokemon Sword and Shield.  Not because it’s good, because it unequivocally is not, but because this is the first time that something in Pokemon Generation 8 has had a real, honest-to-Arceus plot in which you’re an actual participant.  It’s not exactly much of a story, basically boiling down to “help a has-been Pokemon trick a horse into letting him sit on it, and then track down some more Legendaries because some helicopter dad’s daughter ditched him on their family vacation and he’s lonely.”  But hey, even that crap still at least involves the protagonist being a legitimately important figure in the DLC’s events, so it’s a step up from having Leon tell you “Stop thinking about stuff and just go play sports, nerd,” every time you so much as think about trying to get involved in the main game’s plot.

Not helping matters is the fact that the major figures of this add-on are generic and boring as all hell.  Like, even Honey, Mustard, and the antagonists of The Isle of Armor had more personality and nuance than Peony, Peonia,*** and Calyrex.  Appropriate to Game Freak’s lack of interest in their work, Peony seems to be written under the assumption that cramming artificial enthusiasm into a person, and nothing else, is all you need to create a character--it feels kind of like someone who thinks the only thing you need to do to make an argument more convincing is to talk louder was the one to write Peony.  Peonia, meanwhile, is just basically the exaggeratedly weary sigh of a teenager made into a human being of its own, and Calyrex is little more than an exposition machine for himself.

I guess I can at least respect The Crown Tundra for the fact that the largest part of its story involves a quest to help Calyrex, a Pokemon, regain status as the famous forest king of local myth.  This involves directly interacting with Calyrex, including having him outright speak to you, and ends with Calyrex voluntarily becoming your Pokemon as a show of gratitude for your assistance in restoring him to his former glory.  Having a Pokemon consciously be the central figure in a plot arc, and having it regularly speak to the protagonist, is a hell of a huge step in humanizing Pokemon as a whole, and the idea of a Pokemon’s joining you by its choice instead of just because you decided to beat it within an inch of its life and trap it in a ball, is something that this series could really benefit from further exploring.  The fact that we’ve had both Calyrex and Kubfu, in a row, treat the act of becoming a kept Pokemon as voluntary, something that’s earned rather than demanded, could be a promising sign for this stupid series actually getting ready to develop into new directions with its storytelling.  Or it would be, if Nintendo hadn’t already disappointed similar optimism previously.  Still, it’s at least a decently respectable approach in the here and now.

Oh, right, there’s 1 other thing this DLC adds, that being the Galarian Star Tournament.  Basically, it’s an elimination tournament of team Pokemon battles with all the Gym Leaders and some other notable figures from the game and its add-ons.  The cool thing is that you can pick any partner you want!  Oh, but not her.  No, no, not her, either.  Um, and not him, obviously.  What’s the matter with you?  By “any,” Game Freak clearly meant “either Marnie or Hop, no one else.”  Duh.  What, you thought it might be mildly diverting to fight together with someone other than the most obvious characters you’ve already been teaming up with all game long?  Well too fucking bad; you can only do that after you’ve beaten the tournament once already and have absolutely no remaining reward- or story-related reason to go through it again.

Why?  Because Game Freak low-key hates you in a very passive-aggressive way, that’s fucking why.

Anyway, yeah, The Crown Tundra is boring and you shouldn’t bother spending your money on it.



Well, as expected, the verdict on Pokemon Generation 8’s add-ons is not a positive one.  I do think it’s safe to say that they’re probably some of the best content that the game has to offer, but much like the statement that My Hero Academia is 1 of the greatest shonen animes to date, this is less of a compliment to the 1 thing as it is an indictment against everything it’s compared to, to somehow be less than what is clearly garbage.  Nintendo keeps up its unbroken DLC losing streak with Pokemon Sword and Shield.















* You didn’t actually think I was going to PAY for these things, right?  I may not learn my lessons fast enough, but I do still learn them.  I’m not paying for another Nintendo DLC until I can verify ahead of time that the solitary character trait of 1 of its main actors isn’t just the way she sighs.


** It’s actually kinda sick, really.  The majority of becoming besties with Kubfu involves bringing him/her to various different scenic spots, seeing the world together.  So you can be both the person who opened Kubfu’s eyes to the joys and wonders of the world all around him/her, and the person that forever takes that away from Kubfu as you incarcerate him/her in a corner of a PC box.


*** At first it struck me as kinda weird and laughably vain that Peony basically named his daughter after himself, but then I remembered that people do this all the time in real life.  But then I remembered that I also think it’s weird and laughably vain when the real life people do that, too.