The Great yet So Terrible Max Adventures

So, Pokemon Sword and Shield’s second DLC has just come out. I couldn’t tell you what praise it has come out to, because I’ve not bothered reading any reviews of it yet, but I have played it and I do have opinions about it. Specifically, I have opinions about the new “Max Adventures” that have been introduced; a new spin on Max Raids and Dynamax Pokemon.

What are these opinions, were I to summarise them? Well, simply put:

Conceptually fantastic. Mechanically terrible.

Let’s start with the “conceptually fantastic” shall we?

Dynamax Pokemon in raid battles have always been stupid to fight. There’s very little strategy involved in the battles because of the Dynamax’s ability to nullify stat changes on a whim and disregard abilities for a turn, and their ability to generate shields at specific HP percentages. Combined, these factors mean that strategic play just isn’t possible or rewarding; you are always better in a Max Raid to just smash the enemy Dynamax with as much damage as Pokemonly possible every turn and to use offensive, damage-dealing moves to smash through their shields.

In Max Adventures, Dynamax Pokemon have completely lost the ability to generate shields, and any non-legendary Pokemon has also lost the ability to “grow desperate” and take multiple turns in a row. While they can still nullify stat changes - something I think is a misstep to allow them to still do, personally - they seem to do it less frequently. Similarly, they are now considerably more susceptible to status effects such as Burn, Paralyze and even Freeze. The removal of the shield mechanic in Max Adventures means that strategy actually works against Dynamax enemies now and there are a valid use for moves such as Skill Swap or Entrainment to juggle Pokemon Abilities around, a slightly more valid use for stat changing moves with some limitations, and status effect moves.

Similarly, Max Adventures now forces the use of rental Pokemon rather than your own. I am of two minds of this, but as we’re starting with positive first I will go on the record to say that overall, I like this change. Much like the removal of shields encourages strategic play in battle, the forced use of rental Pokemon encourages strategic routing through a den, and can generate some very interesting scenarios. For example, on my way to a Grass type Legendary, there was a Charmeleon on route that looked mighty tempting. However, choosing to fight the Charmeleon was a very risky play as two Pokemon on my team were grass type. It was high risk, but overall high reward, as Charmeleon would be an inevitably better Pokemon than any current one, and so I decided to take the risk. The end result was using up three of my four faints, and getting blown out of the Legendary fight despite a valiant attempt, so in this case I failed. However, the fact that a situation like this can happen is actually something I really enjoy, and it’s probably the most challenging that Pokemon has ever been for… well, uh, years. How embarrassing.

Rental Pokemon encouraging strategic routing - and use of Pokemon you might have never used otherwise! - together with Dynamax Pokemon allowing for a more strategic battle is a fantastic and excellent concept. It is a breath of fresh air and some semblance of challenge that the series has sorely lacked for a long time, and it takes me a little bit back to my Pokemon Stadium days where you had to build teams out of rental Pokemon and then engage in a gauntlet of different battles one after the other.

HOWEVER.

How the Good was turned into the Very Bad

It is shamefully obvious that people at GameFreak did not actually QA test this feature in the slightest. They have not bothered to even add so much as a single line of code to AI trainers, if you happen to have to (or want to) play in offline mode, for starters. AI have always been lauded to be absolutely terrible in Dynamax battles because of their preference for spamming stat moves that won’t matter or not utilising their type advantage moves to instead spam Light Screen or Reflect. I’m willing to say that AI have probably lost both more Max Raid battles and more Max Adventures than players, worldwide, because they are just that poor. The fact that GameFreak didn’t bother to even consider trying to improve trainer AI for Max Adventures blows my mind and is something I generally can’t forgive; this feature was the most complained about feature of Max Raids since Sword and Shield released and there is no way the company wasn’t aware of the negative feedback on trainer AI. Yet here we are, one and a half years later, with bad trainer AI still ruining Sword and Shield’s special gimmick.

Dynamax Pokemon also remain considerably bullshit, all things considered, and this is a problem exacerbated by the rental system which I fear becomes a scapegoat. Dynamax Pokemon can still completely nullify stat changes, which makes certain rentals like the Swords Dance physical attacking Alolan Sandslash useless and completely invalidates their existence in the rental system. Similarly, Dynamax Pokemon can also completely ignore status effects; imagine my joy when my Swampert froze Rayquaza with Blizzard when it had red HP, knowing that next turn I’d be able to beat it… only for Rayquaza, at the start of that next turn, to just unfreeze, remove all stat changes, and then attack twice in a row to knock out two members of my team and crash me out of the den via knockouts. And I don’t mean “Rayquaza thawed out” either. I mean it literally just removed the Freeze status effect, it didn’t naturally thaw out: the status just disappeared so it could reset stats. There is no reasonable explanation why this happened beyond GameFreak not QA testing their system to ensure that Dynamax Pokemon couldn’t ignore certain status effects like Freeze when resetting stats and nullifying abilities.

Finally, many Pokemon have dual typings, and for some of them, this dual typing would greatly impact the strategy you would use against them or Pokemon you would use. Max Adventures, however, only show you one type at random. Worse still is that you are given no reasonable amount of time to assess the map and pick a good route; you barely have enough time when selecting which path to identify the half-covered silhouette of your would-be opponent. Legendaries are completely submerged in purple fog, meaning it is impossible to identify what they might be. That psychic Pokemon could be Mewtwo… or it could be Lugia, who is Psychic/Flying and so meant you could have strategised an electric Pokemon pick up, or it could be Solgaleo which is Psychic/Steel which you might have kept a Fire type for, or it could be Lunala which is Psychic/Ghost who you totally would have taken a Dark type move against if only you had known. So much potential for strategy against the regular Dynamax en route and the final Legendary encounter are completely destroyed because the game doesn’t give you a full set of information or the time to try and identify what you might be fighting. Maybe I’d be more okay with the game not giving me a full set of information if it at least gave me time to think about the route I wanted to pick (especially if I’m only taking AI! They aren’t going to care if I take an extra thirty seconds) but instead the game refuses to give me information and refuses to give me time to try and decipher what I can.

In Conclusion

Max Adventures is fun, and it has a lot of potential.

It is utterly and completely ruined, however, by the very strange design choices and very obvious lack of care and QA that went into it. I’m very worried that the rental system will become a scapegoat for the actual problems that bring the rental system down, too, because the rental system really isn’t that bad! Of course, it does suck not to be able to use your own Pokemon in a game where getting the perfect Pokemon is easier than ever, but that doesn’t mean the system is fundamentally broken. The issue with Max Adventures is everything else; the lack of time to pick paths, the ability for Dynamax Pokemon to flat out cheat even without shields, and the garbage tier AI that will sabotage more of your Max Adventures than you’re ever really willing to think about.

I really want to like Max Adventures. I really want to see them come back in the future or be expanded on because I think they have a lot of potential. But that is going to require GameFreak to actually play their own game, properly QA test it so they can see how scenarios in it work (like how a Dynamax Pokemon reacts to being frozen, or in this case, how it just doesn’t stay frozen) and to actually spend more than five lines of code on AI so that they aren’t completely worthless to a team. (Looking at you, Lightning Rod Raichu who will only use Speed Swap and Light Screen, and never it’s one electric move when it is the only Pokemon in a party that can use an electric move and hit the enemy with it. Or looking at you, multiple AI who use Light Screen on the same turn. How did nobody put in a flag to make sure AI don’t try and use screen moves on the same turn multiple times?! How did you miss that, GameFreak? Right, right. You didn’t care.)