Found all the Diglett. Loved the second to last reward. Not so much the final reward. Didn't help that someone lied to me and told me they give you a certain shiny for it. Not as high on the busywork as Kyle seemed to be during his stream, especially since some of them devolve to just mashing A everywhere because you literally cannot see them under brush or from the wrong facing camera direction, but they were a good way to force the player to find all the little nooks and crannies of The Isle of Armor. Not that there even are that many, but compared to the base game, I guess there's loads. The map of the DLC area does a pretty poor job representing where the player actually is, and that made finding some of the little islands kind of confusing, but wander around long enough and you eventually bump into stuff. I do agree with Kyle's general sentiment of appreciating GameFreak making quests you do in the world involving Pokemon in interesting ways. I too want to see more of that, just maybe definitely not in pixel hunt hide and seek form.
So the other thing I've started dipping my toes into is total spoilers, so spoilers begin here, and see you on the other side:
Pokemon following you is a fun surprise they didn't advertise before launch, hence the mindful of spoiler courtesy here, once you get far enough into the DLC, but only within the island cause ???, and it leaves loads to be desired. Many Pokemon are strikingly slow moving, much too slow to keep up with the player, even when you're walking pretty slowly. Even many Pokemon with high base speeds suffer from this. There's also really silly shit like wild Sharpedo that well, torpedo towards you, but when you have a Sharpedo following you, it won't take advantage of the same animation and speed to keep up with you, which makes no sense really. Many aquatic Pokemon don't have swimming animations programmed in, so they just stare longingly from the shore at you when you venture into the water, but from what I've seen most of the aquatic Pokemon have no problem coming onto land, even when it involves float flying through the air. Oh, and Pokemon often clip through the ground or sometimes do goofy shit on stairs. Look up Falinks on stairs. Arceus why?!
Still spoiling below and above, tread carefully:
So, they clearly did a bad job again and #GameFreakLied and all that jazz amirite? Well no, there's also alot of good around this feature. Pokemon following you hasn't been a thing since our current generation divided by two HeartGold / SoulSilver, unless you count that trash fire named Let's Go, and in that game you only had the first 151 Pokemon plus Meltan line and Alolan forms that followed you, versus the pretty sizable dex Sword and Shield is working up with the hefty addition to the total this first DLC brought and the next DLC will expand even further. What I'm saying is they had to do alot of animations in this department, and lots of them actually are quite charming. Some goofy Pokemon flop around, some Pokemon drop to all fours to sprint after you, there's an iceberg Pokemon that floats slowly through the water, floaters / flyers will follow you through the air no matter land or sea beneath, and of course the adorable Wooloo will roll after you. Plus every one of them has an animation when you click them that I'd guess is recycled from Camp, but that's more just an assumption than anything. So what I'm saying is they did at least do a large amount of charming work in this department, then didn't advertise it to keep it a surprise, and you'll probably only see 5% of said work while playing normally, similar to Camp animations in the base game. Even flawed as it is, it is still a commendable effort that I hope they stick with and improve over the course of the next couple games until the kinks are worked out and it becomes feasible to sustain. I'll be really disappointed if next DLC we can't have Pokemon follow us anymore or can't bring the Pokemon it adds back to the Isle of Armor to cruise around with.
Alright, no more spoilers for now. Except that stuff above. Don't click that if you're not done with the DLC. But speaking of spoilers, GameFreak apparently left code in for the second DLC, so there's way more I know about that now than I should, including roughly the size of it, all the new Pokemon it is adding, and the basic story structure of it. Why do they learn and then immediately unlearn? The good news is the spoilers actually seem pretty promising. Screaming at myself for accidentally spoiling one of the cool things ahead of time even. If I reassess value combining what I've played of DLC 1 with what DLC 2 looks to be shaping into, yeah it is probably worth the $30, but I still wish some of the ridiculous things mentioned in my rant posts were addressed. Some of this shit isn't even that hard to fix, like adding toggles to certain key items, when I know they already have programmed a world state before you received them to pull from if one had the ability to toggle it off. Hell, the majority of these gripes are small but constant annoyances that shouldn't be that hard to fix, unlike most of the base game's problems. I just have no faith that they will fix this stuff, and after this DLC I imagine they'll still be present in the next, if not somehow yet worse after that.
So yeah, sticking to my personal opinion that I regret buying this Expansion Pass, and I wouldn't recommend you to do the same. Yeah, I know Kyle viewed it way more positively if you watched his streams, and I get it and shared some of his feelings early on, but really the end loop of the DLC is just purely too annoying for me to give it a pass. I feel like you're better off just watching someone else play the short story of the DLC unless you really need to hunt those old Pokemon again, are willing to go through absolute hell to add the g-max gene to your bros, or are way into the beforementioned spoilers. Maybe I'll shift my stance after the second DLC, but don't trust that guy. He's totally biased towards snowscapes.
