 You know what I love the most about Pokemon? It's not the memories. It's not playing fire red on my GBSP back in the day. No, it's how Pokemon has always tried to spam me and others out of money. Pokemon Unite released a week ago. Fun game. I actually do like it a lot. I'm enjoying the game. However, I've come to very quickly realize it is pay-to-win and I have proof. A lot of it. Let's talk about that. If you don't know what Pokemon Unite is, it's a Pokemon game that wasn't developed by Game Freak on Nintendo. Actually, Tencent had the rights to make this one. Tencent is the same company that owns League of Legends and Pokemon Unite is also a MOBA just like League of Legends. MOBA stands for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. The one I'm most familiar with is Dota because I've played Dota 2 too much. Now, I'm not here to review the game. I mean, I like it and I'll probably talk about some things I do like about it as we go along. But for the purpose of this video and proving that it is pay-to-win, we're gonna stick to just what we need to know. In a MOBA and this one specifically, you have ten players, five on each side. Each player picks a Pokemon and they will control that and only that Pokemon through the whole ten-minute game. Each Pokemon have different and unique ways of playing, special attacks, attacks and even base stats. Not that we know what any of these Pokemon's base stats are because the game doesn't tell us. Something we're gonna get to later and something that's really weird. Now, in other MOBAs like Dota or League of Legends, when you start playing, your character is naked, essentially. You don't have any items, beefing or powering you up. But as you play and you defeat creeps and enemy heroes, you get gold, which you can use to buy items in that game, in that round that you're playing, that temporary item and then it resets the next time. And you only use the gold that you earn while playing that round to buy said item. That's where Pokemon Unite differs from games like that, because in Pokemon Unite, it's very streamlined. You don't go in arounds and then buy items or do any of that while playing. You actually equip items onto the Pokemon in the main menu and then you take whatever items you want into the game. And that's where we find our issue. Because the items that you equip, which you do have to buy from the store, however, you can pretty much buy any item just using credits that you earn from playing. The actual buying the base items isn't too much of a hassle. There's three slots you can fill up on each Pokemon and you can fairly easily fill those up with whatever items you want for free. The issue becomes each of these items can then be upgraded from level one, where it starts, all the way up to level 30. This is where it becomes pay to win. Again, I have proof and I've recorded tons of comparisons of a bunch of different things and we're going to get to all of those. But first, I need you to understand what it is we are comparing in those clips by the items that I'm holding. Also, what it took to get the items to that point. Nyeh, it's me, Eugene. And I'm back to try and hack into your system once more. Just checking for that pesky ExpressVPN around here. No, no, no. Japan. Once again, they turned on their ExpressVPN and changed location, which then routed their connection through one of ExpressVPN's 3000 plus servers hiding their real location and sending me here. And I was just about to hack into all their social media accounts. What am I saying? I'm in Japan. I love Japan. I'm going to find a maid cafe. Not using ExpressVPN is like going to the bathroom and not closing the door. Everyone's going to smell what you did in there. ExpressVPN will help protect you from situations like that one, but also many others, whether you're at home, at work, or even in an internet cafe, anywhere you access online. But there's a fun side to using ExpressVPN too, like with services such as Netflix. Those services actually have a ton more content that's region locked, but you're still paying full price. I mean, screw that. Take your ExpressVPN, plop yourself in Australia, and boom, bam. You got South Park, Rick and Morty, Brooklyn Nine-Nine. You can try it with all different kinds of places. Just see what pops up by going to expressvpn.com forward slash beat em ups and find out how you can get three months of ExpressVPN free. I'm honestly not even mad this time. I wonder where to send me next. Uh, I am choosing to use Gengar for this. And I decided that the best items to test with Gengar would be Shell Bell, which improves the special attack and cooldown of abilities. Floatstone, because it improves the movement speed up to an extra 120 points, which if you've played a MOBA, you'll know how broken having that much extra move speed can be. And finally, Rocky Helmet, which improves my overall HP by almost 300 points and defense by 42 as well. But yes, I have all these level 30 now, but let's talk about what it took and how much money it took to get here and how long it would have taken to get here if I didn't spend that money. Let me break this down and let me know where along the lines, if at all, you get confused by all of this. The thing you need to upgrade the broken items is called an item enhancer. One item enhancer is 10 tickets. But, you know, items at level one, they'll take three item enhancers to level up. So there's no point in just buying one. And they start jumping up in price quickly each time you buy one by 5, 10, 20. And by the time you hit level 29, it'll take 300 item enhancers to go up one level. Once you run out of the tickets, and you will quickly, you can use Aeon Gems to buy the item enhancers instead. Aeon Gems is what you buy with real money. It takes one Aeos gem to make 10 Aeos tickets. And since just using 10 tickets to get one item enhancer is pretty much useless, you're going to want to do this in batches at a time. So the most you can do is 500 tickets for 50 gems. Gems cost $1 for 60 gems, all the way up to $100 for 6,000 gems. Now, depending on what package you get, you'll get a few bonus gems. But let's just use that as a base rate. Are you confused? Probably. Because I've done the math once already and I'm lost. Again, I can't remember how this broke down. This, and this is exactly the super predatory actions that games like these take to confuse young people specifically, but myself, and anyone bad at math or anyone in general, into not realizing how much they're spending or how much things are actually worth. Because you have this item, which is sold in tickets, but if you run out of tickets, you can use gems, which is a different amount than tickets, and the gems you pay for, and that's a different amount too. And that's the point. I have no idea how much anything actually costs. I just know that I keep going into the eShop and then it's all gone. To fully upgrade, one item costs $2,587 of these item enhancers, or almost 26,000 tickets, which breaks down to about $45 per one item hitting level 30. Which, which, I don't even know where to go with this. So to upgrade all three to level 30 is going to cost you $135. There's items that will make you attack faster or it will increase your attack speed, but that's not good for a Pokémon like Gengar, because I don't care how fast I'm attacking normally, it's all about the special attacks. But if I want to get good with like Machamp, then I'm going to have to upgrade that item too. Three is like the base. You have three slots. You want to at least complete one Pokémon, but for another one, you might have to do it again. Let's just say you do it one time for one Pokémon, it's going to cost you $135 plus tax to get it all the way up to level 30. And you might be thinking, well, I don't, you know, I just won't do that. I just won't do that then. That's a lot of money. I won't do that. Um, and maybe you're thinking I won't even worry about the items. Well, I will show you soon why you're going to want to worry about the items if you want any hope of being competitive or not getting owned. But let's say you go the other way and you're like, well, I will worry about them then, but I'll let it happen organically. You know, I'll get there naturally. I'll play the game a lot and I'll just use whatever rewards I get to level up. Okay, that's one way of doing it. Uh, it's also a lot more math. Um, and I burnt myself out even getting that $135 number. Probably should just look to my PayPal receipts. Um, thankfully, yep, that's a waffle on red. It did some bigger breakdowns for us here. So shout out to them. This is what they've called the long grind ahead. Given that it takes about 26,000 tickets per item, so 78-ish thousand tickets to fully upgrade a set to 30 or three, how long would it take to obtain that? It looks like the daily missions are currently rewarding 100 tickets per day. That would equate to doing 498 days worth of daily missions to complete the set. So you would have to play every day for 498 days, completing all the missions each day to do what I did in 20 minutes by getting out my credit card or actually by logging in a PayPal. Well, actually just by going to the eShop. It's all saved to pay. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how I did it. I did it in like 10 minutes. Okay, let me show you what this has done to my Gengar. Now, again, they don't show you the base stats for any Pokemon, which is really weird for a MOBA. I have no idea what Gengar's actual special attack is or any of that. All I know is what I've added to it. Let's dive in to speed first of all. Here in my first clip I would like to present to the jury of brokenness is just me running down the middle of the game. I just go from top to bottom. Let's see how much faster I am. You can see that I have already on the right gotten far further to the point where I can see this dreadnought at the bottom of the screen already. A good one to two seconds before no item Gengar can see it. And again, a lot of these examples, I'm going to have to explain a little bit for people that don't really understand or comprehend MOBAs, but this game is super competitive. I love it. I actually love this game. I love this genre. MOBAs have always just equated chess to me, because chess is a game of wits. It's a game of smarts. And each individual piece does the exact same thing. So it just comes down to how much better you play, or in this case, you play as a team. So the fact that my powered up Gengar can see this dreadnought early means if this was a game, then I could see the enemy a couple seconds early. I could get into a fight. A couple seconds earlier. I can get places sooner, but even bigger than that in many ways, is I can get away quicker. It doesn't seem like my defense boost is really doing much for me, probably because Gengar already has really weak defense, but I wanted to test it anyway. I've mostly powered up my attacks more than my defense. You can see how much extra HP I have here, which is nice. But enough of me being attacked, I didn't really power that up. I powered up my attack. So let's see how much more damage I can do to this Eldegoss. You can see that my Dream Eater move is doing 2,736 damage without any items on. With items on, it's doing 2,842. So we're not talking about a couple of extra points anymore. We're talking about almost 100 more damage. But we also have my Shadow Ball move, which is doing 14.58 with no items, and 16.42 with items. So all up in this fight, I hit Eldegoss with 3 Shadow Balls and 2 Dream Eaters, totaling about 500 extra damage. And then cooldowns. The other thing I pay to improve. But since the cooldowns are so short on Gengar, Alolan Nine Tails has a 13-second cooldown on its Aura Veil. Casting Aura Veil at the same time, as soon as it comes off cooldown, about 4 or 5 Aura Veils in, I'm starting to lap the other one. It's that this 4.5% starting to show a lot more how much longer than no item having Nine Tails is having to wait to cast moves. In these fights, it really does all come down to split seconds. The amount of times I wish an ability had come off cooldown just a moment before it did. And I could have had the upper hand in a situation. But let's see what happens when you take these improvements into the game. So here's a situation where I am on the ropes. We're all fighting near Zapdos. Obviously pretty close to dead here. They're doing some work, but I'm hanging in, hanging in on a thread, on an absolute thread. And I managed to get the kill. I should have been dead. If I didn't have my items, I can 100% tell you that right here, when I'm on this platform, I wouldn't have had the HP. Not to mention I am getting a defense boost. And a lot of the heroes hitting me are heavy attackers. So not only would I have had more damage taken to wipe me out, even if I didn't have the extra HP, I have that extra HP covering me as well. And it not only helped me get away here, it helped me actually get a kill. Like look at the health I have at the end here. I not only have a kill, but we managed to take Zapdos, which means I have 50, I have the max amount of pulls, and I can go and dunk him for double the points here in the last two minutes, and probably won this game here. This is probably like a game winning move right here, me going and dunking those and getting that score. Actually I'm curious what the end score was. We might have smoked him, but I at least paid to win that situation. We won by 40 points. I actually did pay to win that game, because if I had died there, we wouldn't have won, because I wouldn't have scored. Hands down, I paid to win that game. I could have won that game a year and a half from now, if I didn't pay, and I had earned it, I paid to win that game. I mean that just, it sucks for the other team. I don't feel good about that. I don't feel like I deserve that. Again, the chess, like I, I don't feel like I outplayed that guy. I feel like I outpaid that guy. I just came up with that. Also there's so many other things to think about here when it comes to what advantages I am actually getting. Here's a game where I played with Zorora, because someone took my Gengar and we lost terribly, because that Gengar sucked and I didn't do much better. I was still MVP. But here in this situation, I've got pretty low health, and there's three of them. I can see that this Gengar who sucks is pretty low health too. If I didn't have as much HP as I did, and I was less, I probably wouldn't have the confidence here to try and stick around. And that happens a lot where I have just enough HP where I feel I could probably get away with doing something crazy here, especially with my extra attack. I could probably get away with doing something and hanging around a little longer than I should. Okay, here, here again. This is another one where I should not have been alive. It wasn't a great turnaround for me, but it did lead in Venusaur getting killed. I'm on like no health already. I am standing in the fountain a little, which is barely keeping me alive. But right now, I should be dead. We already know my extra HP in defense would have, I would be dead. I even get down to a slither of health. For the enemy team, they're still having a work on me. They're still distracted. They can't dunk. They can't go after Gengar. They have to still finish me before they go about the rest of the game. When I should be dead, if I hadn't paid for it, I should be gone and out of their way. And while I do end up dying here, it's not before I get a huge attack on this Venusaur and leave it so Gengar literally just has to stub Venusaur's toe and now Venusaur is gone, dropping whatever balls it had. Now only can it not dunk, but when it comes back, it's going to have half the balls it had and have to try and get back and dunk again. And it's out of the game for a while. I'll stop beating a dead horse because I think I hope I've made my point. I only recorded a few games, by the way. All those clips were from two or three games and I got all of that. To summarize, this game is obviously pay to win because it takes way too long to do it organically and naturally. And it feels really weird that it's Pokemon because again, I've grown up with Pokemon and I've grown up with Nintendo and these are two companies that are usually so wholesome. I mean, the worst thing we have to deal with is usually just paying $60 for remastered and ports and stuff like that. And that, that feels pretty bad, but they're not a company that typically goes down this alley. However, I do have a whole nother video on Nintendo's greedy microtransaction practices on the mobile market. Some of them even worse than what we've seen in this game. There's the side of it where Pokemon is so kid-friendly and child-friendly and now you're introducing these practices into that. And there's also just removing Nintendo and Pokemon from the equation altogether and looking at it as a MOBA and thinking about the MOBAs I enjoy and what makes a MOBA work, putting pay to win in a MOBA just ruins the whole thing. It just destroys the balance. As soon as you add that into a MOBA, it ruins it. And it's a shame because it actually is fun. That said, I paid for it now for the video. So like a dirty, cheating whale. I'm gonna at least play for a little longer and make the most of it. What are your thoughts though? Do you think this is pay to win? Am I making a big deal and overthinking it? Let me know down below. Like the video. This is just a quick one while I'm working on my Skyward Sword and Monster Hunter reviews. But this practice just made me feel sick and didn't sit right with me, so I wanted to get something out on the topic. Hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next one. That will hopefully be a lot more fun and lighthearted. Bye.