 Welcome to my review of Pokemon Legends RCS. I bought the digital copy, but I got sent all of this from Berksala, Norway's Nintendo distributor. Thank you. Pokemon has with their newest entry Pokemon Legends RCS for the Nintendo Switch truly innovated. This game does not play as any other mainline canon Pokemon game, but Game Freak has also said that they consider this game to be canon mainline. This is its own whole new thing, this time being a more open world Pokemon experience with a much more action styled combat approach. I very recently also reviewed Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl on my channel. Just make sure you watch that review as well, which is a more traditional Pokemon game. Now let's have a much deeper look into RCS. And what I have to say about it, story. RCS, the legendary godlike Pokemon, speaks to you and you choose your gender and starting look. At this point I recommend that you go with your desired skin color, the skin color that you want to have in the game, and not go by the hair color or the eye color, because you can change hair color and hairstyle and eye color later, just remember that. You are then dropped through a time rift, sent back several hundreds of years to the old island region of Hisui, where you are met on the beach by a Pokemon Professor. You help him out a bit and he takes you into the nearby village, where you have to work for your food and shelter, basically. Therefore you join their corporation, who wants you to help out with cataloging all Pokemon on the island. The village people are skeptical towards you at first, but very soon they will grow to love you. So much in fact that they will ask you to do all sorts of side quests for them, known as the requests. Now the quests in this game, they are separated between the main line, main story quest line, and the requests, which are side quests. And I'm dead sad to do it all in this game, already. I'm invested. Some examples of how the side quests are. One quest is about helping out with a Mr. Mime that acts suspiciously and sets up invisible walls. Another involving catching three troublesome bee doofs around the village. And some villagers want to see certain Pokemon. Other has mini games for you to try out, like a racing game and a balloon popping game, to name a few. So the lore of this land is that in Hisui, the people of the land, they don't know much about Pokemon, so they're scared of Pokemon. But you are not, not even a tiny bit. The Professor and the Corporation always finds more things for you to do, especially problematic are the rifts happening across the land, making Pokemon frenzied, which basically means they have gone crazy. The story takes you through several big and open biomes, each area with a ton of Pokemon for you to catalog. I like the story, I like the setting, and I like the lore. I feel very at home in Hisui. I'm already familiar with townspeople and I feel like I'm a part of this community now. Gameplay. The starting village acts as your main hub area, where you have a home that I rarely even visit, actually. Several shops, a hairdresser, a clothing store, a farm, a pasture for your collected Pokemon, the corporation building, a training ground where you can teach your Pokemon new moves, a trading post for trading Pokemon locally or online, hell even a photography studio, where you can pose and take pictures with your collected Pokemon. This is Jubilife Village, which centuries later will be known as Jubilife City, in brilliant diamond and shining pearl. Fast traveling is great, you can travel to all discovered camps and the loading screens, they are fast. I love fast loading screens. Ah, looking at USS Scream Valhalla. This is an open area world. Each huge biome is separated, but they absolutely feel like open worlds, because they are huge. The maps of the areas are also great, I can appreciate maps like these, where you can also put down pins for when you want to remember to check something out later, so the map is customizable. So let's talk about the main part of the game, the Pokemon. Creatures that you catch by throwing pokeballs at them, making them become your friends and companions. Catching and collecting them is seriously addicting. Countless of times did I feel overly excited when I discovered new types that I hadn't seen before. You catalog them in your prehistoric version of a Pokedex and each entry has several research tasks to complete. These tasks can be to catch a certain amount of a species, defeat a certain amount with a certain move, evolve them so and so many times. Now you don't have to do all of this. Doing 10 of these tasks is enough so that you get the pokeball icon on each entry in the Pokedex, that means you have completed that species in the Pokedex. But can you imagine the people that are going for perfect Pokedex pages on all entries? I would love to see that. That's gonna take some time to put it lightly. With me, for example, I like to throw food at every Pokemon as feeding them a certain amount of times are sometimes one of the tasks to get research points fast. It's so addicting. As we are used to, you can have six active Pokemon with you at all times and get this. You can throw them out of their pokeball and look at them and pose with them for screenshots. I've never seen this happen before in a Pokemon game, not that I can think of anyway. Evolving your Pokemon is optional and I have so far decided to keep my Ole, a cute little Ole, roll it. I don't like his later evolutionary stages so I'm keeping him cute. I also very early on managed to catch a Eevee and I evolved it to a Flareon using a Firestone that I found in the rocks scattered across the land. So that is pretty easy to do, straight in the beginning of the game actually. You throw a Pokemon at these rocks or at the Berry trees to have them collect materials for you to use in crafting. You can craft pokeballs, potions and all sorts of stuff that you have gotten the recipes for. You can purchase recipes in town. I have to say I'm loving the new pokeball designs. I'm loving it, it's so cute. You can also see in the corporation building if you go into first person mode you can see where they make these balls. I'm gonna show that in a gameplay right now. That was a cute detail. There are other collectables like collecting the over 100 wisps hidden everywhere in the game. I rarely see people mentioning this but that is a collectible and I like it. It sort of reminds us of Korok hunting in Breath of the Wild. Just way more simplified. There are also secret notes to collect but I haven't delved too much into that yet. Through the main story you will get rideable mounts making traversing even more fun. There are also traditional Pokemon battles against other Pokemon trainers but you can move freely. This feels super fresh and super new. I'm loving this. Also if you want to run from a Pokemon like out in the field you just run. You can exit and encounter it by just running away from it. There are also the option to do fast or strong style versions of certain moves for the more tactical heavy battles I guess. Also if you are unfamiliar with Pokemon games because some people are unfamiliar maybe this is the first Pokemon game for some people. I'm gonna put it like this. The battles are very focused on elemental weaknesses so there you have it. Also when catching Pokemon sometimes it helps to weaken them before trying to capture them. Other times it's best to just silently sneak up to them while hiding in the grass. So it's some Assassin's Creed stealthy moments going on. I mentioned Assassin's Creed twice in this review. Wow. As you can probably tell already there are a ton of things for you to do in Pokemon Legends RCS. I mean my very first play session with this game lasted eight hours. I couldn't put the game down. I'm serious I couldn't put the game down. I lost sleep that night. I couldn't put it down. There was just no way. This is exploration and collect-a-ton heaven. There are also plenty of clothing to customize yourself with and a huge part of the gameplay is to hunt shiny Pokemon. You will be doing that. Graphics of a section that you're probably the most interested in because I have seen what other people are saying. Tiny Hats for example. She said on the podcast yesterday listen to her podcast. She said the game looks like shit. She did say that. Let me address this. I am only playing this in handheld mode and I am enjoying the graphics. I don't think they are nearly as bad as other reviewers has raged about. Now I did see a dancing onyx and I loved it. No seriously. I think this game both looks good and runs well and if some textures on the ground look a bit low res I'm sure there is a good reason for it and that is most likely to have this game run as smoothly as it does and with such fast loading screens. I think they sacrificed a bit on the graphical department especially with the textures to have the game run smooth and have fast loading times. Why am I doing this? Not even to mention that this is a handheld game. The Switch. It is not the PS5 and it doesn't even try to be. Both NPC characters and all Pokemon has lifelike animations and personalities that come to life through these animations. I also have to regretfully disagree with the people that say that the world feels empty. That's just not my experience with the game. Have we been playing the same game? But full disclaimer though. Most of the footage that you're looking at right now in this review. They have been recorded using the in-switch record feature. So these are the handheld graphics. I can also now in edit show you some docked footage. I play in handheld it's just the way that I am. You can also walk around in first person mode like I mentioned briefly to look up close at things. There is a day and night cycle also weather effects. There are graphical poppins sometimes. And I'm sure you've heard about that. But the sky looks good. We already went over how the ground textures could have looked better. They could. But I was never annoyed at the graphics I have to say. Music. We must have a moment to discuss the entire sound of the game. Which is easily overlooked. The entire sound of an open world game is essentially important. It is what makes the world feel real and believable. You can hear pokemon cries off in the distance. The grass that you walk through. The wind. The rain. The birds. And the soft little soundtrack in the background. Satisfying sound effects too. For everything that you do. It is just good. Every single pokemon has their unique cry and sounds. Like the flapping of the wings of a flying pokemon. And their footsteps. Also your own footsteps. All of these things sound believable. The town music. Although good. I got tired of it because I hung around in town so much. All other soundtrack is fine. Some music. Some places. Sounded slightly familiar to me for some reason. So I'm thinking a bunch of remixes of old familiar music is taking place in this game. The sound of the game is good. Verdict. I had a 13 pages long review. There was just a lot to cover. I feel utterly addicted. I feel like this is the pokemon game of my dreams. They have truly innovated with the series and now there's just no turning back. This game feels like the best pokemon game if not ever. It is definitely now my favorite pokemon game. If you are unsure about this game know this. I approve of the game. It has me completely hooked. It feels very open and free. It feels so new and fresh. This is the correct direction to go with pokemon in the future also. And if you love exploring and collecting in games like I do. This is the game for you. I truly hope you will enjoy this and find as much joy and entertainment in it as I have and still do. Pokemon Legends RCS is sliding straight into my top 10 switch games ever played. It is Pokemon Breath of the Wild. There I said it. Did I find any flaws with this game? I wish I could sort my pokemon in the pasture boxes and I'm also hoping for a ton of DLC to this game. There's a ton of more pokemon that could be released with DLCs and new areas and stuff. I'm just hoping that they will keep adding content to this game. Now I have talked about my ratings before and I was thinking 9 out of 10 but there is no reason for me to not go full out with 10 out of 10 on this game because I have gotten and I am getting what I am looking for. I enjoy this gameplay. There is no reason for me to not go all the way so I am saying 10 out of 10. Maybe I will regret that score later but we can talk about that later I guess. I'm having a ton of fun. I'm gonna go play it now but actually I have to edit this video but then I will play it. I am loving this game and I hope you will too. Now I hope you want to listen to my podcast with tiny hats and follow my Twitter and Instagram. Hit like on this video and subscribe and hit the bell. I need you to hit the bell. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you later.