I cannot wait for 1.0! Only 4 days away!

At least they were wearing their masks, many people I worked with during the pandemic kept masks in their pockets or hanging from the rear view mirror in their cars, but refused to wear them for any reason.

I don’t remember much about the combat from the ds games other than the enemy ai could be cheesed by running around the perimeter of the battle arena while waiting for abilities/geos to cool down. If they had a better ai or higher difficulty I would take any of the combat options though!

Edit: found old ds and first game, played for a bit and the combat is alright, would definitely benefit from a lock onto enemy feature, and better enemy ai. The circling the perimeter works even better than I remember and allows for easy battles. The movement in combat also has some drift to it which I remember disliking alot back in the day. Also the using geos as an ultimate weapon in battle is still satisfying, upon using one you get a sick cut scene of the ultimate spectrobes you used and brings back lots of memories of using them in tough battles to turn the tide! Forgot about how you level 3 separate stats which each can add levels to the spectrobes which made building specific stat based spectrobes super engaging. Also the incubator rooms (4 of them!) allowed you to feed the minerals you excavated to the spectrobes. Also the excavation mini game is lightyears ahead of what pokemon implemented in Gen 4 and way more engaging! Using the ds mic to blow away debris brought a smile to my face all these years later. This honestly should have been the pokemon killer it was made out to be.

Spectrobes, spent a ton of time in all 3 games as a kid. Apparently the 3rd game sold pretty poorly even though I would argue it was probably the best of the 3. It had just about everything one would want from a pokemon rpg, it even allowed for 2 players! Super upset that Disney killed it :(

New entry should absolutely follow the footsteps of the 3rd game (origins). Only thing I would hope that is improved is some of the terrain paths were kinda narrow and hard to accurately maneuver the horse-like mount around. That super frustrated me as a kid as it was much faster than walking, but all the time you ended up losing from getting caught on terrain, having to dismount/dismiss the mount, turn around, then resummon/remount made it more efficient to just walk.

The combat was fun enough on the 3rd, but my absolute favorite part was the excavation of fossils. Trying to go as fast as I could while also being super careful to not damage the fossil and having that linked to better stats for spectrobes was SO much better than breeding/catching new pokemon to me. It felt much more engaging than hoping for good rng.

If they won’t make a new one, the least they should do is remaster the games for switch. Which they also probably wouldn’t have to do much for the remaster as I would argue even the original version looks the same/better graphically than the latest pokemon releases for switch.