Location Taken: Fraser River, British Columbia
Time Taken: June 2010
Siiigh… After I wrote that long rant on Pokemon X yesterday, I realized I still had the game running from checking on how many pokemon I’d caught. So I hopped into the game to start catching the rest of the ones I was missing.
After a quick check on my favorite pokemon info site, a quick Fly over to the right town, and a wander into the wilderness, what should I find but the exact pokemon I was looking for? And not just once. I ran into the pokemon I was seeking right after entering the region about four or five times. The only one that gave me any trouble was Dedenne, which took around five minutes of wandering in the right area before one showed up. And guess what? Five of the seven pokemon I caught were in quick balls. Quick balls overpowered!!
I also started some of my usual postgame activity of breeding and trading pokemon, but with as few new pokemon as there are, that’s going to be fairly simple. Though so far no one’s willing to trade me a Slurpuff for my freshly hatched Froakie. So sad, so sad. The pokemon that evolve via trading are annoying to get if you have only one game and no friends that play. At least there’s a Global Trade System so I can actually manage to get them eventually by trading with strangers…
Still, I had expected this to be a hundred-hour game, and I’ve only put 41 hours into it and am running out of things to do. I’ve put 132 hours in Pokemon Black, 90 hours into White 2 (which was in the same generation as Black and had only a handful of pokemon I needed to catch), 162 hours into Pearl, and a whopping 258 hours into HeartGold! I’d tell you how many I put into the earlier games I’ve played (Red, Gold, Crystal, Ruby, and FireRed) but I either don’t have a functional system to start them up to check my time or I’ve restarted the game from the beginning a few times and the time listed is not the whole amount. Or both. I’m planning on replaying HeartGold and Pearl soon, too, now that I’ve gotten all the pokemon I caught and want to keep off of them and into my Black cartridge.
But with those times, running out of things to do at 41 hours (less than half the nearest other!) is just sad! I mean, that barely even makes my rule of economical entertainment, where I want to get at least one hour of entertainment out of each dollar I spend on it! Many video games make that mark, with enough going over to cover the cost of the equipment as well, but stuff like going to the movies fail it, which is why I’ve seen very few movies in my life and have played many video games. But the game cost $40, so I only just hit that point with it when playing last night. So sad, so sad…
I’ve got several series that I usually expect to hit at least a hundred hours of game play per game with, and the Pokemon series is one of the top ones. The Rune Factory series is my other DS series that does that, and the Elder Scrolls series is my big one for the PC. I’ve also played two games, Minecraft and Guild Wars 2, for well over a thousand hours each (talk about getting my money’s worth!). Those are all games that just have enough content to them that it takes a long time to run out of things I can do. But this does mean that any time one of those series comes up short I feel really disappointed in it, even if 41 hours is a respectable amount of time gotten out of a game in most cases.
I guess I’ll just mope around looking at pretty pictures of foggy rivers. Or play more Minecraft and Guild Wars 2. One of the two, at least.
