Anyone who thought Shenmue 3 was a victim of poor game design really needs to play Pokemon Legends: Arceus for perspective. To complete the game, you need to catch every single Pokemon, but a handful of them only show up in special “space-time distortions” that have a random chance of spawning in every ten minutes or so. Here’s the kicker though, actually playing the game (catching and battling Pokemon) pauses the timer and so it’s better for players to sit around AFK and wait for one of these random events to trigger.
Over the course of the past few days I’ve probably spent the best part of five hours just waiting (to be fair I’ve been watching YouTube and dossing around on the internet as well) for these events to trigger and have only had two of them. To make matters even more frustrating, I’ve only managed to find one of the two Pokemon that I need on these rare occasions and so am still sitting around waiting for a chance to find the other as I type.
In case it’s not already clear, this is just me venting, though it does blow my mind that Shenmue 3 caught so much flack when PL:A has been heralded as one of the most innovative Pokemon games in years. To be clear, it’s not a terrible game by any stretch of the imagination, but some of the design choices really are baffling.