Archive
01/21/07 Tamanta's English name?
Serebii claims that Tamanta's English name is Mantyke. He was right about Chatot, so I figure it might be a good idea to take him seriously.
01/20/07 Gotta love Pokémon.com...
Sorry about the lack of updates here at the Cave of Speculative Theories lately. There hasn't been very much of particular groundbreaking interest in the news.
But there has been some, so to recap: Pokémon.com has revealed quite a few translations in its D/P section. Professor Nanakamado is called Professor Rowan (although funnily enough, they wrote the Japanese name on the latest page of information... awkward slip-up, dearies). The ability Moist Body has been given the name Hydration; however, Manaphy's signature move Heart Swap keeps its name. The starting city of Futaba Town is called Twinleaf Town. Team Galaxy is called Team Galactic. The gadget is called a Pokétch as most people had guessed, and, wait for it...
Diaruga and Parukia have been officially confirmed to be Dialga and Palkia.
W00tw00t. Better go change the spam verification here at the CoST. :P
(Chatot has been officially confirmed as Perappu's name, by the way.)
Lastly, Pokémon.com has also revealed how to get Manaphy in Pokémon Ranger. Go there for the full instructions.
12/19/06 PBR Pokémon actually FLY when they use Fly.
Look at Skarmory towards the end.
12/18/06 More PBR videos, Perappu's English name and American D/P release date!
There are more videos of Pokémon Battle Revolution to be found here. You need to download the DivX player to view them, but it's free and these are pretty nice-quality videos and the guy doesn't always start with the same Pokémon, so I'd recommend them.
Among the more noteworthy things I've discovered there so far off the top of my head is that Machamp has been fixed up and now actually has fingers rather than mittens with tacky lines drawn on. Nice one. I think they were very sensible; it was undoubtedly very much to ask for them to remodel every single one of the existing 386 Pokémon, but at least they're fixing some of the worst ones. I'm getting fairly confident, without actually knowing it, that they probably fixed Charizard. If anybody finds a video with Charizard in it, please let me know (there might even be one there; at the moment I've only watched the first eight). Rain Dance also looks pretty cool; the camera gets covered with raindrops and stuff.
Anyway, I doubt you're all interested in watching PBR videos, so I'll get to the other things. Serebii insists that Perappu's English name is Chatot, but he doesn't appear to say that it's been officially confirmed so I'm going to take it with a grain of salt until it is official. (He also says that the ninth movie is called Pokémon Ranger and the Temple of the Sea in English, by the way.)
Recently, Pokémon.com put up a D/P section (with shockingly bad-quality Sugimori art on it - don't they have access to high-quality versions of the files? o_O), and thus it's only appropriate that it has also been revealed that Diamond and Pearl will be coming out in America on April 22nd next year. They've clearly not gotten very far with the translation of the games yet, because the page refers to Futaba Town by its Japanese name, with "All names are tentative" noted at the bottom. Bleh, that would have been the perfect place to find out some English names and tickle our curiosity into name-guessing, but apparently not - the page contains nothing new.
Stay tuned for more news undoubtedly coming up soon.
12/15/06 Battle Revolution videos
So we have some longer Pokémon Battle Revolution gameplay videos from a Japanese person who owns the game.
I don't think I mentioned this yesterday, by the way, but the announcer from the Stadium games is definitely back.
So, let's get right to the first video. It's a single-player battle on a happy fun parade arena of some sort. And as we see the trainers send out Ledian and Smeargle, we see that they are, indeed, recycled Stadium 2 models. Bummer, although Smeargle and Ledian are among those Pokémon that never really looked that bad before. But then out comes Butterfree, and to my great disdain, they're recycling it as well. Seriously, that Butterfree always bothered the hell out of me. << Oh well.
The Pokémon are still not animated when they come out of the balls, but while the move selection screen is up, your Pokémon performs its "special attack" animation in the back, which is kinda cool, because even though the awful rabid-grasshoppers-on-steroids breathing animations are back, you don't notice it as much because you don't have to look at your Pokémon breathing all the time and instead can watch it do backflips or whatever it is that it does, just as a show-offish thing. Which is nice. It looked too awfully unnatural on Colosseum and XD. We can also see that the game is navigated using the Wiimote as a pointer.
They're recycling attack effects as well; many of them look very similar to those found in Colosseum and XD. However, some have changed; most notably, they seem to have made some effort to make some attack animations faster, especially Sleep Powder and Ice Beam somewhat as well (in fact, I love how Ice Beam looks now...). It's a little disappointing that the Pokémon are still just continuing their breathing animations when they're asleep, though, and not moving at all when they hurt themselves in confusion just looks silly. They should have done something about that.
Some more creative camera angles than in Colosseum and XD as well.
Now, on to the first Wi-Fi battle. Again, the guy uses Ledian and Yukimenoko, which annoys me a little; if he's posting videos of the game on YouTube, he really should vary the Pokémon he uses a little, y'know? I mean, we all want to see how the new Pokémon look.
I don't think there was really any real physical contact in the previous video, but there is quite a bit here, and it looks nice. I love the area the battle is taking place in as well; it's a crystal cave, and it looks very cool.
We see that Mawile, Walrein and Shadow Ball's animation are recycled (albeit smoothened in the case of Shadow Ball) as well. One thing that I really like in this video is how after Yukimenoko uses Hail, we see the Hail still going on during the move selection - I was really hoping for that - although for some reason not while the Pokémon are attacking or the trainers are commanding. The camera becomes covered with frost during the hail and becomes wet during Surf - nice bit of realism there.
The next video has another Wi-Fi battle, and yet again, he leads with Ledian, although his other two are now Erureido and Crobat. The other guy leads with Aerodactyl, which I can't tell if is recycled or improved or whatever because I don't think I've seen it before on Colosseum/XD, but it doesn't look too bad in any case. Interestingly, this battle appears to be taking place in the arena that we saw in the very first video - the one with Pikachu and Groudon versus Wailord and Deoxys - or one very similar to it.
Crobat and Blissey are recycled as well (much to my dismay, Blissey still does that ridiculous, pointless stepping back and forth in her breathing animation - bleh, rabid grasshopper on steroids), but Seismic Toss has a new, AWESOME animation. While it looks kinda tacky to have Blissey suddenly run (ridiculously slowly) to the camera and motion for some sort of a throw without touching Crobat in any way, what comes after makes up for it, because there we see Crobat actually fly an exaggeratedly high distance upwards and then crash back into the ground. That animation OWNS. I'm going to have to give a bunch of my Pokémon Seismic Toss now.
The worst part, I think, is that they have not opted for physical contact for cutting moves. We just see Aerodactyl spin a little in the air before a red cut appears across Crobat. I guess it would have been difficult to do cutting animations properly for all Pokémon, but meh. :/
The fourth video has him, yet again, lead with Ledian and then use Erureido. Admittedly then comes Dodrio, which we haven't seen before, but I'd really like to see that Jolteon, you know. <<
Here we see that Weezing and Dodrio are recycled as well. Yet again, Dodrio runs ridiculously slowly. Come on, it's supposed to be fast. It's not going to be prancing around lifting its feet all high but moving only a couple of inches in each step.
I just noticed that Pokémon are still not being animated when they miss with an attack. Bleh. Come on, what IS so difficult about animating the first half of the animation but not the second (the one where it actually hits?)
Explosion looks neat, though.
Now, the last video I find especially interesting for one reason: It has Scyther! :D And what's more - wait for it - Scyther is NOT recycled. In the older games, Scyther used to be kind of hunched over moving its scythes; here, Scyther looks more like it's sitting, which is admittedly not much of an improvement, but hey, you've got to give them points for doing something. And annoyingly enough, it also flies ridiculously slowly towards Ledian to attack. Come on, you're speeding up battles; why don't you allow the Pokémon to run/fly a little faster for physical contact? But then it slashes - and oh, I adore that one fraction of a second where it's slashing. The model is awesome, even though it has a stupid-looking breathing animation. <3 LOVE.
Anyway, to summarize: The slowness of the Pokémon running up to attack is probably the biggest problem with the game so far. It looks odd for Goukazaru, Blissey, Dodrio AND Scyther. Just what did they do that for? I don't get it. I mean, the Pikachu in the preview video is running much faster, really. o_O Bleh. And another thing I miss from that first video is how Wailord's fainting animation came seamlessly after it was struck by Thunder; now we see a little jump between the recovering animation and the fainting animation (although it's nonetheless leaps and bounds ahead of Colosseum and XD, which actually gave us a short, extremely tacky fade-to-black in between). Oh well.
Now I'm feeling an urge to see how a Pikachu using a physical attack really looks in the game.