So you’ve completed Pokémon Sword and Shield‘s Gym Challenge and made Hop reconsider his career choice as a Trainer in the process. Beyond that, you’ve wiped the self-assured smug off of Leon’s face and dethroned him to take your rightful place as Galar’s champion. All in a day’s work, then, but now that you’re the best Pokémon Trainer in the land, what’s next?
The answer, of course, is Sword and Shield‘s Wild Area. The sprawling lowlands are absolutely teeming with treasure to find and critters to catch, but above all else, the zone is home to perhaps the best endgame feature Game Freak has ever introduced to the RPG series – Max Raid Battles. Or they would be, at least, were it not for the developer’s infuriating decision to populate the often genuinely difficult encounters with criminally idiotic AI.
In fact, so terribly underpowered and inept at decision making are these so-called teammates, that players have started voicing their frustrations on social media. One Trainer, in particular, has attracted the ire of many due to their insistence on using the most useless Pokémon, Magikarp.
https://twitter.com/MarciAlex801/status/1199861821433237504?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1199861821433237504&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcomicbook.com%2Fgaming%2F2019%2F11%2F28%2Fpokemon-raids-magikarp-dynamax-gigantamax-nintendo%2F
tfw you gotta do a 5 star raid battle solo and the game gives you a magikarp and a wobbofett pic.twitter.com/lJuXFnL82S
— Oh, to be a great green orc (@hpantsu) November 28, 2019
https://twitter.com/novascrawlers/status/1199529930100334592?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1199529930100334592&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcomicbook.com%2Fgaming%2F2019%2F11%2F28%2Fpokemon-raids-magikarp-dynamax-gigantamax-nintendo%2F
I don't understand why the AI is just so bad in Raid Battles in Pokemon Sword and Shield. Like I try to fight a Gigantamax Pokemon, and the game thinks that it should give me NPC trainers that use Magikarp??
— Thatchner (@ThatchnerTweets) November 28, 2019
It’s worth noting that Game Freak likely intended for players to use the Switch’s online capabilities to take friends and others from around the world into Raids, but does that excuse such poor replacements? Those without internet access or friends that share the same level of interest in Pokémon as themselves certainly wouldn’t think so, and with the pair’s online functionality being wonky at best and outright unusable at worst, even getting a team of random players together is often a headache-inducing nightmare.
With any luck, Game Freak will have a fix in the works to address the issues soon, though one does wonder if it genuinely picked some of the franchise’s worst Pokémon just to troll fans.
Pokémon Sword and Shield are out now for Nintendo Switch.
