Rundown (12/21/2025) Slop Unto Divinity

This Week’s Topics:

• Rundown Preamble Ramble: More Like D-AI-v-AI-n-AI-ty and L-AI-r-AI-n!
• Ubisoft Acquires Amazon Games Montreal (Likely Due to Office Politics and Favors)
• GOG Wants You To Pay $5 To Help Them To Preserve Games (And I Say Do It!)
• The Hollow Knight Continues! (Silksong DLC and Hollow Knight Improvements Announced)
• Sega Channel Has Been Preserved! (Through the Power of BONDS!)
• US Video Game Hardware Had Its Worst November Since 1995 (Consoles Might Be Boned!)
• Missy Scrumptious Muses About Pokémon Legends: Z-A – Mega Dimension (Donut-Filled Review Appetizer)

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Rundown Preamble Ramble:
More Like D-AI-v-AI-n-AI-ty and L-AI-r-AI-n!

Let’s see, most of my creative energy has been going into the roundabout skits for Natalie Rambles About 2025— releasing December 31st— so I don’t have a good random topic to spring upon you folks with this preamble. But there is one topic I feel I should talk about, given how much it has been populating The Discourse. By discourse, I mean the loose perceived coalition of game talkers who appear on the platforms I use, because people have been siloed across the internet, and I only have the stamina needed to follow a few streams.

This past week, Jason Schreier of Bloomberg put out an article on Larian Studios’ Divinity. An upcoming turn-based RPG that, according to Larian CEO and founder Swen Vincke, will build upon the studio’s success with Baldur’s Gate III. Which itself was built upon two decades of RPG crafting, in-house skill, and in-house tech. This should have been a fairly standard piece of early hype cycle build up, giving a broad overview without committing too much. Saying they were using a new engine. Trying to ship games in 3/4 years rather than 6. Developing quests in parallel rather than linearly. Bulking up the studio size to make truly massive RPGs that people play for a couple dozen hours… before quitting. (Only 23.5% of Steam players have reached the ending of BG3.)

However, this article earned a lot of flak for a segment about AI, with Vincke talking about how he has been incorporating AI into Larian’s workplace, creating placeholder text, helping people map out their ideas, create reference art, make PowerPoint presentations. All stuff that is used in development, but is removed from the final product. Per what I have heard over the years, I would imagine that this is a fairly common practice at studios, and is generally what is meant when you see statistics about X% of studios using AI in their work. Not necessarily for final asset production or to write dialogue, but to convey and communicate ideas quickly without searching for reference materials.

I was inclined to just shrug this off, as AI tools are being so pushed that it’s not too surprising that a massive studio like Larian is using them. Being able to tell a computer to make a shitty picture that conveys an idea, or write a summary, can speed up communication and help people share concepts easily. Just like how pointing at a movie or series or other game can be faster than describing every machination you want through a deliberate email. And while I imagine that many creatives would rather not use these tools, I don’t buy that they are “more or less OK with the way we’re using it.” If they are willing to accept this, then that does not mean they are okay with it. It means they would rather put up with crap so that they can work at Larian, the studio behind the critically acclaimed Game of the Year 2023 Baldur’s Gate III.

Now, I have some understanding of where Vincke is coming from. He went from some Belgian guy making games however he could to the head of an international developer co-owned by Tencent. His company is bigger than he could have imagined when they were launching Kickstarters a decade ago, and he probably is scared of getting left behind, so he wants to be using all the tools the big companies are using. Or, to his his own words per an interview transcript: “This is a tech driven industry, so you try stuff. You can’t afford not to try things because if somebody finds the golden egg and you’re not using it, you’re dead in this industry.”

I see where Vincke is coming from, but he made the mistake of admitting to using AI and mandating its usage in a climate where anti-AI sentiments are only growing with every passing day. I have seen several people who I respect adopt a hardline anti-AI stance, rejecting the technology outright, or writing off anything that pushed AI as spiritually dead to them. This reaction, an outright rejection of these practices, was definitely loud enough for me to pick up this story. And enough to get Vincke’s attention. Responding to an outpour of negativity, Vincke clarified that Larian uses AI as a reference tool, similar to how people would just google images from other creators and use them in presentations or as a placeholder.

Which begs an obvious question. What was wrong with that? Why do you need AI to do something developers were doing just fine for at least two decades? The art of placeholder art is well established in the world of video games. I have seen developers use giant solid colored backgrounds, basic shapes, things with a PLACEHOLDER watermark plastered on them, concept art from prior games, public domain stuff, assets bought from a cheapo asset pack. All of which, per my reading of the current culture, is seen as respectable next to the output from a plagiarism machine that does not compute what consent is.

Even if something is just a reference, is just a placeholder, why use some crap generated by a machine? Why use something that consumes more resources, requires a subscription to some unambiguously evil tech company, and often requires iteration after iteration in order to get something that matches what you are looking for? It’s not more efficient, it may be faster, but it comes at wildly inconsistent quality. It may look good, but it is built on a database that was stolen from individuals without consent, and for purposes that they could have never imagined. And the more people discuss, look into, and allow AI to affect the world at large… the easier it is to compile a list of reasons people have to hate AI.

• AI is making tech more expensive, and will continue to with the year-long RAM shortage— and now GPU shortage— scheduled for the next few years.
• AI is casting a level of doubt upon any piece of information or photographic evidence seen on the internet, as generative AI removes the skill ceiling when it comes to creating convincing fake videos or photos. You just tell a machine to do it, go through a few iterations, and bam, you have something that most people won’t be able to tell is AI generated, especially if casually browsing on their phones.
• Software is becoming less reliable as programmers rely on AI code to ship features or do the QA work that has rightfully been relegated to humans.
• Electricity bills are going up all over the United States, and the world, as tech companies open up data centers wherever they want, only stopping if the local residents raze hell.
• People are going genuinely insane by talking to something that simulates a real person and reassures them even in their deepest delusions.
• Small websites and creators are getting hammered by AI, their works siphoned and added into a great machine developed by people who think theft is okay if they are doing it. All so they can profit, increase their wealth, and build a greater divide between their top shareholders and the vast majority of humanity.
• A generation of students are using AI to coast through school, writing essays for them, doing their homework, and telling them the answers to tests, all so they can spend more time watching goonable brainrot on their phones instead of studying and learning. Back in my day, I only did that in my bedroom!
• Companies are trying to use AI steal your voice and face so that they can create a digital simulacrum of you. And maybe possibly sell this data to somebody who wants it so they can, I dunno, call your bank and initiate a wire transfer to some offshore account. Make your life hell by posting videos of you saying things you never said, destroying your reputation. Or just make child rape pornography of you so they can either sell it or send it to your employers. It has not happened very often, so far, but the decade is only halfway done.

There are LOADS of reasons to hate AI, but I cannot outright reject AI. It is a fact that AI can be, and is being, used in various fields to do what AI evangelists like to point out. Some work can be best offset to a machine that crunches numbers, analyzes data, and returns results. Tech companies have deliberately rebranded whatever they could to AI, obscuring what this thing actually is.

Is it all machine learning? Am I using AI when I have my local copy of Waifu2x from 2022 (BitDefender does not like the new versions) to enhance low resolution comic pages? What about predictive text on my phone and in my work email? Am I using AI when I center an image in Paint.Net rather than deliberately measuring the pixels to ensure that my header text is centered? I don’t know, and it kind of doesn’t matter, as I need to use AI for work.

As I love to say, I’m a US tax accountant. Accounting has not been as subsumed by AI as programming work, at least not at my rinky dink practice. We don’t use generative AI for emails or anything. I’m a writer and my boss has PhD in English. But we use an AI called CoCounsel by Thomson Reuters. It is a glorified chatbot designed to help us navigate a complex directory to tax law, direct me to notices, analysis, and law text, written by humans, and provide summaries that are largely free of any nonsense. If there is nonsense, I can just check the linked source material. When I ask it for help with a specific legal letter or something, I just do it to find the right structure and voice, using it as a template to be followed. It’s not fully accurate, but I’m a human. I can misread and misunderstand things myself. And this makes the research practice so much faster. Their previous service, Checkpoint, was a terrible search engine with awful UI for finding things, and CoCounsel is just better at giving me the information I need.

And even if I did not use an AI professionally, I find this absolutist ‘never ever use AI for anything’ approach to be, well, kind of stupid. Generative and general AI is mostly bad, most uses that are being pushed are for things that people don’t want, that don’t benefit them, and do not improve their quality of life. Everything about the AI industry is a load of shit, and I want these companies’ technology to disappear, rendering them worthless. But a bad industry does not make a bad tool. It just needs to be measured, controlled, and regulated.

…Except regular people like myself lack that structure. Fuck, the US government wants to actively BAN AI regulation. All a lot of people have is the power of vibes, mindshare, and the ability to express our opinions in a hectic public forum. So… fuck it. We cannot trust these giants with any more power than they already have, so I guess all we can do is divest, tell them to shove what they’re selling up their ass, and watch them flail about. Bully everybody using AI, and then block them.

Is that a shitty solution? Yes. But do I have better, more practical, ideas that the mass of angry disenfranchised leftists and liberals of the internet could reasonably collaborate to do? On a large scale? Nope! But even the dumbest people in the world know how to attack others.

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Ubisoft Acquires Amazon Games Montreal
(Likely Due to Office Politics and Favors)

I have routinely talked about how terribad Amazon is at the whole video games thing. They control a horrifying amount of the global internet yet, over the past decade, they could not figure out how to make a Steam competitor, run a studio, or launch a successful live service. They own Twitch, they own a game streaming service, yet they simply could not figure out how to put the square peg in the square hole. I am admittedly dismissing the challenges that come with running a large company or break out into a market, but did you know they had their own games launcher? Have you bought a digital PC game on Amazon?

Their only truly successful title, New World, is entering maintenance mode and will probably EOS in 2027. They shut down their Irvine and San Diego studios in October. They have done a bunch of layoffs. They partnered with Children’s Snack Food Icon Mister Beefs to promote their new friendslop live service, King of Meat, and it was an unmitigated disaster. They expected 100,000 players, and they got just over 300. I don’t know if they are cursed— if so, I will take partial credit, as I am a witch— but something is rotten at Amazon, and if they leave gaming as a result… GOOD! Get ’em outta here!

However, it seems that at least one of their studios will survive under the tutelage of a new master, as Amazon Games Montreal is being acquired by… Ubisoft? Huh. I guess they had some Tencent money lying around and wanted to acquire an in-development game to appease their Chinese masters.

Amazon Games Montreal is currently developing a MOBA named March of Giants. To me, it looks like a DOA project that would not really make a dent in a genre that has been cemented by the likes of League of Leggings or Donta 2. If people are playing an online game that they already like, that their friends know and play, what reason do they have to switch? It does not mesh with the output of modern Ubisoft, but per the press release, this does not seem like the main draw for Ubisoft. Instead, the main draw appears to be the studio heads, Xavier Marquis and Alexandre Parizeau, who were former Ubisoft leads. With Marquis having been Rainbow Six: Siege’s creative director and Parizeau being a producer and managing director who oversaw a lot of Ubisoft’s biggest titles from 2015 to 2021.

To me, this seems less like a strictly financial decision and more like Ubisoft leads looking out for each other, with some benefits to Amazon. While Montreal wants to be the Mecca of North American game development with their generous tax breaks, Amazon is likely looking to shut down whatever studios they can. However, closing down a studio before they ship a live service, that is about 70%/80% complete, that had a public alpha, after working with the local government for tax breaks, is a bad move for several reasons. Amazon would, likely, rather avoid the drama and get something to recoup the R&D expenses. The staff would rather not lose their jobs. And Ubisoft’s management is probably receptive to receiving a pre-assembled team of Montreal-based game devs, led by Ubisoft men.

It’s all a very usual business drama situation that crops up in a lot of industries, just not often with gaming or with names this big.

Ubisoft will handle the upcoming release of March of Giants. Amazon will handle some marketing for the game. The title will be released whenever it’s done. And presumably the developer, who will need a new name, will begin working on an existing Ubisoft IP after March of Giants comes out.

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GOG Wants You To Pay $5 To Help Them To Preserve Games
(And I Say Do It!)

While I have not been avidly gobbling up their output, I have been very happy with GOG’s continued efforts to promote game preservation. Just in general, really, as that was the thing they were founded on. Their efforts with the GOG Preservation Program have brought back many titles whose licenses were left in limbo or were just not available for sale, and made them readily accessible for a cheap price. Their library is not huge, but it is growing steadily, and the more these games sell, the more resources they can put into bringing back games that otherwise only live on through piracy and fan patches.

Simply put, I like GOG… and they are now asking for money! Specifically they launched a $5/month patron plan for people to support their initiative with some nebulous benefits. Access to a Discord server, your name on a supporter page, and a profile sticker. It’s not a subscription or anything, basically just a Patreon ‘I just wanna help’ support tier with substantial personal benefits. And I am personally all for it. It is just a way for people to chip in a bit and help out games preservation. Not unlike donating to the Video Game History Foundation. And I am going to openly support them. It’s a way to make me feel like I am doing my part.

Although, I do want to poo-poo them for doing the modern subscription thing where they bill you based on when you signed up, which I frankly hate. It makes it so much harder to manage subscriptions compared to if they went out the first, the fifteenth, or the last business day of the month. I bloody hate how Patreon does not let me just repackage my patronage into ONE charge that I pay on the first of every month. It’s a waste of my time, a waste of data, and probably results in higher payment processing fees.

So I will not subscribe to this plan YET. But I will on January 1st.

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The Hollow Knight Continues!
(Silksong DLC and Hollow Knight Improvements Announced)

This is more of an obligatory bit of coverage, but I may as well bring it up, as it is significant to a significant amount of people. As my review output and progress reports have indicated, I did not throw my head into Silksong (2025), née Hollow Knight: Silksong, this past September. Nor did I really check out the general consensus of the game, beyond noting that it was well received, except for people who found the highly precise input requirements a bit too much for them, leading to requests for an easy mode. I liked the original Hollow Knight (2017) a fair bit. Even though its reputation was inflated by a particular undesirable genre of person that likes to dismiss everything they don’t like and hold up the few things they do as transcendent experiences. I don’t think I would dig Silksong, as I am not the best when it comes to precise inputs, especially when juggling multiple flavors of mobility. But despite the Gamers™ being a bunch of Gamers™, I still respect both games.

The actual story here is that developer Team Cherry announced that Silksong is receiving a free “nautically themed expansion” scheduled to be released in 2026. A move that I find surprising, as Silksong was already a 40+ hour game for some people, and after it took so many years, I assumed they put everything they wanted to into the game.

In addition to this, they are also in the process of updating the original Hollow Knight. Incorporating various fixes and changes, adding 16:10 and 21:9 support, and more, along with a free Switch 2 Edition for owners of the original. Because if developers can make the game run smoother or at higher resolutions, then why not release a Switch 2 Edition? People will play it, they’ll talk about it!

…And that’s all I have to say. If you can’t tell, I’m channeling my angry critic energy into the 2025 Ramble, so my mind is elsewhere at the moment.

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Sega Channel Has Been Preserved!
(Through the Power of BONDS!)

Another thing that I ought to mention this week is a bit of good game preservation news. The Video Game History Foundation has recovered 144 ROMs related to the Sega Channel. For those not in the know, from 1994 to 1998, Sega operated an on-demand gaming service where, with a mail order adapter, people could download and play games on their Sega Genesis through the power of television cables. This included a rotating library of games, demos, and various tips provided directly from Sega, all for a monthly fee.

This was the 90s, so all of this was new, futuristic, and so novel that people were willing to accept the jank of setting this up and waiting a few minutes to download a couple megabits. And while Sega Channel was innovative, it was merely one of many 90s ventures that tried to define what online gaming could be. Services like Nintendo’s Satellaview, Catapult Entertainment’s XBAND, and even Sharkwire Online for N64 were all trailblazers in their own right. They were glimpses into an optimistic digital future. Obscure innovative bits of gaming ephemera… that double as excellent examples of how easily online dependency can erase gaming history, forcing preservationists to dig deep in order to do what corporations are too scared to do.

VGHF has partnered with Gaming Alexandria to share 144 ROMs related to Sega Channel, covering nearly every version of Sega Channel from 1994 to mid-1997, along with prototypes like a web browser. Yes, they were making a damn Genesis web browser! Along with two previously thought lost games with Garfield: Caught in the Act – The Lost Levels and The Flintstones Movie The Game, and various Sega Channel versions of games that were cut down to fit within the restricted file size limits. All of which I’m sure will be of great interest to the niche of Sege heads and Mega Drive hackers, but that’s not all.

As part of their quest to get all of these ROMs, VGHF also recovered a deluge of internal documents from Michael Shorrock, the Vice President of Programming for Sega Channel, and has made them available as part of their own collection. Some of these documents are restricted, so you need to ask the Foundation to view them. Others, however, are not restricted. Like internal documents about an unreleased PC game service called Express Games.

I just learned about this while writing this segment, but Express Games was meant to replace Sega Channel in the late 90s by offering emulated Genesis games for download on Windows PCs. The idea was that they would take existing Genesis games, modify them to support online multiplayer, and include a library of family oriented games, even educational games. Because this was the era of the family computer and back when parents were the gatekeepers to gaming.

If that sounds insane, that’s because it is, but Sega of America in the 90s was a CRAZY company. And I love them for that. They made strides with the Genesis, had this possibly exaggerated beef with Sega Japan regarding how to handle the Saturn, and were going in all sorts of directions in the mid 90s. They were sunsetting the Genesis, keeping the Game Gear around just ‘cos, pivoting into educational games with the Sega Pico. They were porting Saturn games to PC with titles like Virtua Fighter 2 and Panzer Dragoon, because why the hell not! It was the school of anything goes, and they made a helluva impression. They did so well they traumatized people! Ask a 40-year-old about Shenmue and watch them DIE!

As always, I’m just elated that such preservation efforts were successful. And in an industry as hostile towards its own longevity as gaming, you need to cherish the small victories when they come.

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US Video Game Hardware Had Its Worst November Since 1995
(Consoles Might Be Boned!)

So… this does not look very good.

Circana, Inc. is a market research company that provides data on pretty much any industry one can think of in the United States, and are one of the best sources of information for physical video game sales figures in the US. If something is sold, they catalog it, and Mat Piscatella, a Senior Director at Circana, probably talks about it publicly. This past Wednesday, Circana released their November data for games and the results look… pretty dire.

November is typically THE big month for video game sales in the US due to Black Friday, numerous high profile November releases, and some lagging October releases that people didn’t get on launch. …And per Circana, or rather IGN, who paid for the full details, there was a considerable drop in terms of video game spending and sales compared to 2024. Though, I want to take a moment to distinguish the two. Spending refers to the dollars brought in, not adjusted for inflation. While sales refers to the number of units sold. And to keep things extra clear, I’m just going to list the big takeaways, comparing November 2025 to November 2024, with bullet points:

• Hardware, accessories, and console spending are down by 4%
• Content spending is up 1%
• Subscriptions spending is up 16%
• Mobile spending is up 2%
• Hardware spending is down 27%.
• Hardware sales dropped to 1.6 million, their lowest since 1995
• Physical game sales are down 14%, also their lowest since 1995
• Accessory sales are down 13%
• Xbox Series sales are down 70% (This is good, as Microsoft has spent years assisting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and made Xbox a shit product)
• PlayStation 5 sales are down 40%
• Switch 1 and 2 sales, combined, were somehow down 10%

Piscatella has refrained from making any sweeping statements, because he’s a data guy, but he highlighted something very important to understand about the current climate of buying games. The average price of a games console in November 2025 was $439 per unit. In November 2019, it was $235. In the past 6 years, game consoles have gotten nearly twice as expensive.

To me, this could mean a couple of things: Game prices have passed the threshold a lot of people are willing to spend for a game system— $200 to $300 was the sweet spot from 2005 to 2019. A significant amount of consumers lack the means to afford entertainment hardware given the dismal job market this past year. Most of the people who wanted to get an Xbox or PS5 got it last year or earlier this year, to avoid the tariff price hikes. The enthusiast audience already bought the Switch 2 while others are just waiting for it to get a true killer app. Or maybe people just refuse to pay more for an electronic device after decades of experience has told them that electronics are supposed to get cheaper.

No matter how your interpret things though, this is not good. And when combined with the manufactured shortages that are or will affect the prices of RAM, GPUs, and storage devices, I think things will only get worse. Tech companies have seen the value of perpetual revenue, and they know that if they double the price, a lot of people will just subscribe to rent things rather than pay an artificial premium to own it. I always thought that the phrase “You’ll own nothing and be happy” referred to things like homes and cars. But… I guess it fill soon apply to fucking computers too.

We are just spiraling to a future where Apple will only lease their phones, mandate that people scan their face to use them, and then send every action to their data center so that they can more efficiently monitor them.

Fuck’s sake.

Akumako: “Actually Natalie, not to break the vibe you got going here, but Newzoo, an analytics firm for gaming, is actually projecting a 7.5% year-over-year increase in revenue for 2025, based on January to November data.”

That still includes December projections though. Imma wait until Matthew Ball puts out his 2026 article before I FULLY analyze the industry’s 2025, and in instances like this, I am going to believe the pessimistic view more than the optimistic one..

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Missy Scrumptious Muses About Pokémon Legends: Z-A – Mega Dimension
(Donut-Filled Review Appetizer)

Mega Dimension, the $30 DLC expansion for Pokémon Legends: Z-A, released on December 9th, 2025, less than two months after the launch of the base game. However, Natalie temporarily shelved it on December 10th, 2025, so you get ME — Missy Scrumptious — instead! Of course, this guest segment has the Natalie.TF seal of approval, so consider the following spoiler-filled review of this DLC an appetizer to hold over all two of the Pokémon-playing fans in the audience until Natalie publishes her full thoughts next year.

Right out the gate, Mega Dimension bucks the trend of the prior two mainline Pokémon DLCs by releasing in the same calendar year as its base game, introducing just two new main characters, zero major map expansions, and being completely locked behind the post-game – after all, Legends games seem to be all about breaking Pokémon’s conventions, so why shouldn’t their DLCs? However, the problem arises in it still being the same price as those previous expansions, so it begs the question of how GameFreak hopes to justify that price. And the answer is…!? Uh, poorly.

Y’see… Mega Dimension pushes Legends: Z-A past its limits — and not always for the best. The already plain Lumiose City map is milked dry by forced, randomized grinding in cramped corners between each story beat, where Pokémon pathfinding AI makes much more frequent mistakes (now less forgivable thanks to the short timer on exploration), and the only reprieve on offer is a long list of cute, but still largely shallow side quests. We know from the Teraleak that GameFreak’s priority was to keep this DLC under-budget, and it shows: padding is the name of the game.

The story, basically, is that portals are spontaneously opening throughout Lumiose City, leading to a mysterious other world of… tiny pockets of Lumiose City, but all white and featuring small pools of random Pokémon spawns. In order to save the city from being subsumed by this “Hyperspace Lumiose”, we need to dive in and survey it, but we can only do so for limited amounts of time, dependent on the quality of the donuts we make through the help of the young Ansha, daughter of Kalos Champion Diantha, and her pet Hoopa.

This is the third in a line of food-making mechanics in these games, following Galar’s curry and Paldea’s sandwiches, as well as the least convenient and least avoidable — you need to have a donut on hand for every portal you want to go through, and unlike in past games, you can only make them at a specific, singular spot on the map, so get ready to do a lot of fast traveling. Making them in bulk is not an effective strategy, because you’ll be getting progressively higher level ingredients from each Hyperspace visit, which you’ll need to take on progressively higher ranked pockets.

Travelling around Lumiose once more in pursuit of these portals will reunite Team MZ with all the major faces of the Z-A Royale from the base game, along with newly returning Korrina from X and Y to help with all the new Rogue Mega battles. Her redesign looks ridiculous and I love it.

For an X and Y sequel, base Z-A was relatively light and front-loaded on returning characters, and part of me is miffed that we didn’t get more in this DLC. Much like Lumiose itself, the decision to reuse assets here seems like a financial one more than anything, but on the other hand, this money-saving scheme affords the writers a chance to expand upon these characters after we thought their stories had ended – a luxury not often afforded to the humans in this series. And as Natalie said in her review, Z-A’s original cast managed to be one of the strongest thus far, so I really don’t mind getting additional lore on them and seeing the pairs intermix beyond their obvious partners.

Corbeau in particular gets top-billing here, with his Rust Syndicate being the ones to send you out on surveys and tell you when you get to continue the story… for some reason. They’ve essentially recreated the gameplay loop from the base game of going out and earning points in order to tackle the next boss, but I guess reusing Quasartico as the organizers of the whole ordeal would’ve been too on the nose.

Now, crucially, Sword and Shield and Scarlet and Violet’s DLC areas were accessible independent of base game plot progression, with all the Pokémon they entail (or, well, most of them). This meant that they were not only post-game romps, but transformative to future playthroughs by greatly expanding team building options. Z-A launched with a pretty modest number of options compared to those games (230 vs 400 each), so it stood to gain even more from post-launch additions. But locking everything in this DLC behind the credits means that you can’t use any of the ~130 new options in future main story playthroughs without trading or Pokémon HOME (whenever that update comes out). Not to worry though, because you still have this whole expansion to test out the new ‘mons in, right? Weeeell… kinda.

Okay, so like, the whole gimmick of Hyperspace Lumiose is that all the Pokémon here are above Level 100, a first for the series. But of course, GameFreak’s not actually about to go and change literally everything downstream of this just for some DLC marketing sell, so Pokémon can only be past 100 in Hyperspace Lumiose. For the wild Pokémon who spawn there, this means they revert back to more mundane levels once caught. And for the player, it means crafting the best donuts possible to acquire as many bonus levels as they can… because they won’t be getting any new ones while they’re here.

No battles in Hyperspace Lumiose reward the player with EXP, or money for that matter, deemphasizing the value of any one particular battle. Instead, engagement with the environment relies upon the incentive of earning Survey Points, which will usually ask you to catch X number of Pokémon or X different species, pick up items, defeat trainers in the Battle Zones, that kinda thing. This is fine on paper, but given just how many Survey Points the player is asked to earn throughout the course of the DLC, there’s a genuine problem with running out of storage space in the PC Box for new captures. It happened to me, it happened to Natalie, and it can happen to YOU! Furthermore, this makes it so that the only reasonably efficient way to train up any new captures is by stuffing them full of EXP candy, which is… inelegant and impersonal, to be sure, but entering Hyperspace with any less than Level 100 Pokémon is objectively suboptimal.

Wild Zones at least benefit from the intrinsic motivation of housing the newly available Pokémon, but the fact that spawn pools are randomly generated means that you could go hours without access to random old ‘mons like Meowth or Zangoose. I have a general grudge against chance-based content in games for this reason, which have always been at the core of Pokémon, but this DLC has a freakish obsession with it – not even the donuts you make have guaranteed effects, just broad categories correlating with each flavor stat. Long gone are the old days when Pokémon were intentionally placed in specific areas where they could reliably be found. Now, the randomness of Hyperspace Lumiose robs players of all agency but to sit at the anti-homeless benches and reset the spawns. Wait, isn’t that a shiny hunting method? Why do I have to do that just to catch Porygon!?

On the flipside are Hyperspace Battle Zones, which… you can and probably will pretty much ignore until the post-post-(post?) game. They lack both the intrinsic reward of catching new Pokémon and the standard reward from vanilla Battle Zones (money and EXP), so outside of Bottle Caps and the occasional rare Poké Ball type, they’re just not very interesting! In fact, I’d go so far as to say they’re actively annoying, because the pathfinding is BUSTED in this DLC.

Your Pokémon making mistakes on how to carry out their real time-actions were uncommon and forgivable enough in the base game, but in Hyperspace, they will routinely run straight into the geometry in front of them or decide to go the most roundabout ways to reach their destination before they perform a selected move, and you can’t cancel out of these moves once they’re selected, which goes from dumb to actively detrimental under the stress of the donut-calorie-timer. Even normal Battle Zones always had a bit of jank to them, but it never dawned on me until playing this DLC that all of the required fights, be they main plot, side quest, or Rogue Mega, made sure to put the player in a flat, wide-open arena with little obstructions.

Not to fear though, because there is something else new to do outside of Hyperspace: side quests. Lots and lots of side quests. Mega Dimension adds a whopping 80 featuring the newly available Pokémon, a 67% (hehe) increase over the base game’s amount, making 200 in total. Again, as far as I can tell, none of these side quests will appear until after you’ve already beat the base game. A handful are rematches against or otherwise incorporate the main characters, which is cute, but the majority are more of the same generic NPC stuff from the base game. To its credit, the writing of these NPCs is even zanier than before (to such a point that I worry what’s in Lumiose’s water supply), and there are even a few follow-ups on base game quests which help justify the post-game setting, like Raichu owners from two separate quests coming together to double battle you with their new Mega Raichu X and Y, gifting you their stones after.

But alas, the gameplay in most of these quests are… just not very exciting. Walk the bread dog around the park, give away a Mimikyu or Porygon or Foongus, pick a name for a backstreet, load a Farfetch’d you’ll never use again with EXP candy so it can fight other endgame-level Farfetch’d, spend a million bucks on coffee. Even as someone who wanted more Z-A… this just isn’t the content Z-A needed more of. If you cut it down to just 40, you’d probably have a solid selection of cute scenes, but this volume of chores that don’t amount to anything just becomes obnoxious and starts to feel like cheap padding. I was lucky enough to have a two month break in between this time, but how is this all gonna feel on replay, or to anyone who won’t get the game till Christmas? I can only imagine how deflating it’d be to finally finish off one giant checklist of nothing-gameplay, only to get another stacked on top of it.

I think this is the final blow against Mega Dimension’s post-game setting. The unique advantages it offers to the story are appreciated, but it lacks the transformative power of its predecessors over the game it’s attached to, instead filling that hole with an artificial content grind and shameless busywork. Z-A is easily my favorite 3D Pokémon game, so it sucks ass that any thought I have towards replaying it will now forever be tinged with dread at the prospect of doing all that again.

… Also, partway through the story, it’s revealed that Hyperspace Lumiose is not actually a “real” alternate dimension, but rather, the collective unconscious’s memories of and wishes for the real Lumiose (So wait, it’s just Mementos from Persona 5?), making the “Mega Dimension” subtitle something of a misnomer! Bit of a false advertisement considering there are other Pokémon games where we actually do dimension-hop, no? Okay, okay, I’m just being pedantic, but wasn’t that always the point of Hoopa’s portals in the first place?

… Aaaanyway, with the collective unconscious in mind, Darkrai is natural fit for this story’s unwitting antagonist, sporting a kinda sick new Mega in a 3D reimagining of New Moon Island. I admit this is not as cool as, say, Deoxys in ORAS to me, because Darkrai has nothing to do with Kalos’ lore and was already recently made obtainable in Legends: Arceus. Still, as a supporter of Death to Event-Exclusive Pokémon (DEEP), I can’t complain, but it’s funny that the game frames this as the end, with a climactic group meet-up outside Prism Tower (again) and credits sequence, only for the Rogue Mega fight to be pretty tame and the main quests to pick right back up after, Ansha’s original goal of meeting Rayquaza still unresolved.

Of course, what’s a Rayquaza without a Groudon and Kyogre for it to chew out? A surprisingly understated selling point of this DLC is that it’s the first time that the Primal Reversions from Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire have been made available on Switch. Kind of inevitable to include them in the new Mega-game since ORAS ingratiated itself so deeply in Kalos connections, but even so, I am not immune to the giddiness of fighting them (especially Primal Kyogre, who I adore) in HD, real-time combat …Even if I’m having a bit of an existential crisis over playing the fanservice-y nostalgic retread of a Pokémon game I grew up with.

It’s not all easy breezy though, because there is a pretty artificial-feeling 70k Survey Point grind before you can actually face them. Geez, what are we surveying at this point when the source of the whole phenomenon has already been taken care of!? Not new content, that’s for sure. This grindy diversion can actually take longer still if you just slap together donuts haphazardly (like you’ve probably been doing this whole time), because the Hoenn trio all demand donuts with very specific stats that can only be made with some variety of rare Hyperspace loot.

Your average Hyperspace Wild or Battle Zone is not putting out enough points to get to 70k quickly though, so to supplement this, rematches against the numerous Rogue Mega fights thus far begin to spawn throughout the city, netting 10k points for each victory. They are by far the most reliably efficient way to grind, but God do they get old fast.

To be clear, I’m actually quite fond of Rogue Mega battles… in moderation. They take a lot of what works about Raid Battles in Sword and Shield and Scarlet and Violet and combine it with the player damage mechanic introduced in Legends: Arceus to create boss battles that are completely unique to a real time combat system. But when doing them back-to-back-to-back, especially under the additional stress of the timer, the obnoxious attack patterns that were cute the first time become increasingly grating, regardless of their difficulty. After all, some BS is inherent to making any fight against a single Pokémon remotely challenging.

…Funny that I should say that, because the difference could not be made more clear than how GameFreak decided to unveil the 19 new Mega Evolutions added here. Seven of them have the honor of full-blown Rogue Mega battles, four are gifts, one is an online ranked battle reward, and one is a yet-to-be released Mystery Gift. Leaving six that just unceremoniously spawn in Hyperspace by chance like any other Pokémon, which you might not even get until after Darkrai. I won’t bother scrutinizing particular designs; they are all just Pokémon to me, but the difference in spotlight they get is just another thing in Mega Dimension that feels so random.

Nevertheless, after Groudon and Kyogre are caught, you move on to Rayquaza, which itself requires a 100k Survey Point grind after you just finished the last one. If this is starting to sound repetitive, it is because I want to instill in you how much it is so. Luckily, this is the actual final boss, and unlike Mega Darkrai, Mega Rayquaza has the difficulty to back it up in a pretty sweet recreation of Sky Pillar. Your reward for getting this far is a scattering of post-post-post game side quests that give you a hardy handful of Mythical Pokémon more or less for free. GOOD!

If that sounds surprisingly generous, fret not, because catching the remaining Legendaries available — Latios, Latias, Coballion, Terrakion, Virizon, Keldeo, and Meloetta — rivals Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon’s wormhole minigame in how much of a tacked-on time-waster it is.

To claim these rare Pokémon and finish your Hyperspace Pokédex, you must accrue 25k more Survey Points for each and every one, in order to send out a Special Scan for high-ranked pockets, while Hyperspace Lumiose continues to produce zero new content to explore in the meantime. But there’s a catch: your reward is not guaranteed. You are just as, if not more likely to receive yet another Battle Zone or Wild Zone for all your work. These Wild Zones at least grant rare Pokémon like Baxcalibur, Rotom, and Overqwil (but did they have to be this rare?), but as we discussed, the Battle Zones, which in my experience seem to be the most common, offer next to no substantial reward aside from Bottle Caps and the tools to go on more surveys ad infinitum.

I wish I could say there was some sort of pity system at play here, or a script the results follow, but as is common with this series, if there is such a mechanic, it is completely obfuscated from the player. All I can tell you is that in my 6 or 7 (hehe) attempts, I have only scored a Legendary portal twice, which leads me to take it at face value and assume GameFreak really does just want us to waste a completely variable number of hours if we want access to all the Pokémon here. Oh, and to add insult to injury, any portal that spawns Legendaries will be completely devoid of loot or survey tasks to complete to get to the next one any faster.

I cannot help but view this decision as the latest iteration of a concern Natalie expressed in her Sword and Shield DLC Ramble, that GameFreak wants Pokémon to be forever games, more brazenly with each new entry. Legends: Arceus indicated a break from this trend, being overwhelmingly focused on the single-player experience, but it seems that Mega Dimension wants to artificially draw out Z-A as long as possible, in an attempt to keep players coming back day after day. Though, I can only speak for myself here, but I find this strategy weird because it has the opposite effect on me. Looking out into the future and seeing a dozen more hours of grinding for the damn Swords of Justice, who have been in every other Pokémon game since they debuted anyway, just turns me off entirely from playing further. If I wanna play everyday, I will do so online, not doing this.

…Oh, also, Zeraora is here, after you’ve beaten everything else. It has a Rogue Mega battle and stuff. It was very clearly meant to be an event thing, but at the very last minute they decided to just bundle it in instead, so it feels entirely disconnected from everything else. The fight is annoying and I have no passion for Zeraora, so… that’s that.

So… the verdict? Does Mega Dimension justify its admission fee, according to the standards set by past DLCs? Uh, fuck no! But this review has been pretty critical; you already knew that. It’s a shame because there is some good stuff in here, to such a point that I do feel like I’d be missing out for not playing it, but it’s just structurally dysfunctional in a blatant attempt to save resources and move onto the next thing! But if you’re someone like me who really liked Z-A and wants more of it, well trust me: you will get it here. So much of it you’ll be sick!

Wow, that was wordy. Time to never do this again, byyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!

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Progress Report 2025-12-21

So, this past week I watched Jurassic World Rebirth and The Water Horse. Rebirth was probably the most whatever Jurassic Park movie since Jurassic Park III, and it really feels like a successor in the worst way. There are no returning characters, it undoes the events of the fifth and sixth movies by killing off dinosaurs that ventured into new climates, and the film… sounds almost fake. A pharmaceutical company needs dinosaur blood from three dinosaurs to create a heart medication, and some executive recruits four people to acquire these samples. An action girl who looks like a supermodel. A nerd who works for a museum. A Black guy with a boat. And some European guy who likes guns. They venture to a forbidden dinosaur island to take the samples they need, but get sidetracked by a completely unrelated family. A Hispanic dad, his little daughter, big daughter, and the big daughter’s shitty boyfriend. The main crew rescues them, heads to the island, gets in a boat wreck, and then Jurassic Park action ensues.

There’s really no good hook or gimmick here, it’s just a bunch of people wind up on dinosaur island, again, and need to grab blood samples before leaving. Some people die, but not many, and the surviving heroes decide to say screw you to big pharma by making this new heart medication open source. Which I don’t think is how modern medicine works, but whatever. The family feels unnecessary, just included because Jurassic Park movies typically involve children in some capacity. The characters don’t have any memorable quirks to them. And while some action scenes do work well, others feel far too fantastical or formulaic. Like that damn inflatable raft that a T-Rex could not destroy. It is the safe franchise fare that studios want to put out, but does not really inspire much of anything, and I’d imagine this is by design. The last movie was highly criticized, just put out some content to get the masses back in the theaters.

The Water Horse was pretty good, but after watching so many kids movies with Cassie, the formula felt a bit too familiar for me. It’s a kid gets an alien pet movie, and hits most of the same beats, with the most unique element being the WWII Scottish setting. In fact, I think I liked looking at this movie more than the movie itself. Because Scotland New Zealand is pretty. It’s characters and plot beats are a bit too baked into archetypes for it to really stick with me, but I cannot say any part of it was done poorly. So… shrugs.

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2025-12-14: Bad day. Watched Jurassic World Rebirth and The Water Horse with the friends in the Shrine, which ate up 5 hours. Then I kept chatting with Ouran, Rain, and Missy about things for four fucking hours. I love spending time with my friends, but holy shit is that a commitment. Still, some-fucking-how, wrote 4,700 words for the year-end Ramble.

2025-12-15: Wrote 1,000 words for the GOG and Ubisoft bits. Wrote 5,500 words for the 2025 Ramble. I was running out of writing steam and spent too long working on a spreadsheet project.

2025-12-16: I had to a decent bit of work today, did some compiling for the end of year Ramble, and kept messing with my spreadsheet project. Wrote the 300 word Hollow Knight bit, wrote 5,100 words for the Ramble. Though, I realized that Obsidian counts words in links as words in the document itself, so… I might have done goofed a bit with some of my prior counts. Oh well! Not changing my methods!

2025-12-17: Wrote 1,900 word preamble and 1,200 words for the Sega Channel and video game hardware segments. Tried to come up with a header image, and decided to just take the pigs eating vomit from the Divinity trailer. I was not sure how to brighten it, but I apparently this is EXACTLY what you are supposed to use the Highlights / Shadows command for in Paint.Net. Decided to edit this Rundown as well. I wanted to continue work on the Ramble, but I had to reread some segments from last year’s Ramble for reference. Then I started a new section, coming up with a new character, but I only got 500 words in before I lost my creative energy.

2025-12-18: Wrote 3,600 words for the year-end Ramble, posted this Rundown, sans the Missy Scrumptious bit.

2025-12-19: Wrote 3,000 words to cap off the 2025 Ramble. Edited 13,000 words of the 2025 Ramble, somehow! Added Missy’s Rundown segment. Worked on some dialogue with Missy Scrumptious for the finale.

2025-12-20: Finished editing the remaining 18,900 words for the 2025 Ramble, started work on the header images for each section. Mostly basic edits using existing assets, and one sprite collage. Still have two more to do, and I also need Missy’s final assets for three other headers. …Student Transfer V9 is coming out next week, innit?

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