{"id":5144,"date":"2015-04-15T12:32:08","date_gmt":"2015-04-15T17:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/?p=5144"},"modified":"2015-04-15T12:23:00","modified_gmt":"2015-04-15T17:23:00","slug":"forever-rumblin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/?p=5144","title":{"rendered":"Forever Rumblin’"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple months ago, Nintendo rolled out their first freemium Pok\u00e9mon game for 3DS, Pok\u00e9mon Shuffle<\/strong>. I’m told that it’s the average mobile F2P match-em-up, but with Squirtles and Lucarios instead of candy beans or whatever. I played the crap out of it, in fact\u00a0I\u00a0continue to\u00a0play a little bit each day, and I still haven’t spent a single cent on it. It helps that it is fairly regularly updated with new content and competitions.<\/p>\n

Last week, the second free-to-play Pok\u00e9mon\u00a0spinoff came out: Pok\u00e9mon Rumble World<\/strong>. Like the previous games in the Rumble series, it’s a fairly shallow action game that has you punch your way through scores of toy Pok\u00e9mon and hoping to maybe take some home with you at the end of each stage. It’s good, simple fun, and World is the best incarnation of it yet.<\/p>\n

\"pkmnrw\"<\/a><\/p>\n

For starters, it’s not the “keep giving us money and we’ll let you play more than five rounds a day” kind of F2P model. No, it’s more like you get the game for free, and then you can give up some bucks to unlock more content within it. And that content is all either permanent upgrades or new stages, too. Also, there’s a hard limit on how much money you can spend on the game (about $35), so it’s more like you’re buying a full game bit-by-bit instead of paying it all up front.<\/p>\n

This is a pretty great model. Especially since the premium currency (pok\u00e9diamonds) are easy enough to come by for free in-game. There are daily challenges that\u00a0reward\u00a0skilled players with\u00a0pretty decent payouts of pok\u00e9diamonds, streetpass milestones that award bunches of pok\u00e9diamonds, and if you streetpass people or have 3DS friends that are playing the game, their Miis\u00a0can pop in and sometimes give you a diamond.<\/p>\n

So there are two way you can play: take it slow and unlock everything for free, or pony up and have all of the game’s content delivered to you as soon as possible. Not too shabby. If you hit the spending limit, the game even gives you 20 free pok\u00e9diamonds every day to fritter away on the usual silly freemium things, like reviving if you’re defeated in a stage, or being able to play a stage again without waiting for the time limit to expire.<\/p>\n

The only thing I really don’t like about Rumble World is that adding a specific monster to your stable requires a massive amount of luck. For one, simply getting a defeated Pok\u00e9mon to join you is random, nothing you can really do about it. Not every Pok\u00e9mon assigned to a stage appears every time you play that stage, which complicates things further. Worst of all, each world is divided into several areas, each with a pre-set Pok\u00e9mon loadout, and you get to play one stage per visit to a world, and even then it’s picked randomly.<\/p>\n

Certain Pok\u00e9mon seem to only appear in the “FEVER!” version of each stage, which, as far as I can tell, comes about totally randomly. Like everything else. Needless to say, there are a lot of RNGs working against you if you’re trying to catch ’em all. It’s very much a “hope for the best” kind of situation.<\/p>\n

On the upside, it’s still pretty fun to just carve your way through the stages, bopping Pok\u00e9mon left and right. The way that the game mechanics and pok\u00e9mon moves and strength levels work, it gives you lots of opportunities to play as monsters that otherwise amount to useless data. For example, I’ve been playing as a really strong Durant lately, and Durant is a Pok\u00e9mon that has gotten exactly zero\u00a0respect from me previous to this game. I use it\u00a0because it’s quick, strong, and has a really efficient Bite attack. Contrast with Golbat, a Pok\u00e9mon I normally love, but whose Acrobatics attack is really unwieldy in Rumble World, making it difficult to use effectively.<\/p>\n

Certainly, Pok\u00e9mon Rumble World is not a deep game, but it’s a decent way to kill some time now and then. And who doesn’t love the adorable little toy versions of Pok\u00e9mon? So yeah, I’d recommend it. Besides, it’s free. What do you have to lose?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple months ago, Nintendo rolled out their first freemium Pok\u00e9mon game for 3DS, Pok\u00e9mon Shuffle. I’m told that it’s the average mobile F2P match-em-up, but with Squirtles and Lucarios instead of candy beans or whatever. I played the crap out of it, in fact\u00a0I\u00a0continue to\u00a0play a little bit each day, and I still haven’t … Continue reading Forever Rumblin’<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pokemon","category-video-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5144"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5149,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5144\/revisions\/5149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}