Time to continue! I…get sucked into yet another cutscene.
Hau has just lost again and is being cheery. This only makes his opponent more cranky.
???: Are you even taking this seriously?
Let’s be fair here, ???, lots of people don’t take pokemon training seriously. Just yesterday I was ambushed by little kids a few yards back. Now, for me, Hau’s lameness is an issue because he’s designated rival, but for you, he’s just some guy.
Hau tries to say he’s so seriously enjoying himself, and ??? just grouches harder.
You can enjoy Pokemon battling when you put everything you have into it…which clearly you haven’t.
Now now, ???, it’s also possible he has and just sucks.
I run up and Hau tells me, This guy is plenny scary! Dialect or spelling error? Black and spiky is startled either by the insult or my appearance and asks if I am, in fact, myself.
Yeah, that’s me/Nope, not me/Who?
…as curious as I am, I’m pretty pleased with myself and see no need to deny anything.
Hmph. Not very cautious.
Or so great I don’t need to be cautious.
Even some Pokemon have a better sense of self-preservation than you apparently do.
Uh…given they’re wild animals, wouldn’t most pokemon have a better sense of self-preservation than pretty much any human?
I’m Gladion.
Yeah, I didn’t ask.
I battle for my partner, Null, to make it strong.
Well, that’s a bit more interesting. So you’re doing this because your pokemon wants to?
Though most of our time gets used up doing small jobs for Team Skull.
If you’re so grouchy about that, why are you part of the group? Why not just battle people all the time?
Battle me. I won’t take no for an answer.
Okay, but like, that’s how it is for all regular trainers? You’re precisely as hardcore as those toddlers who challenged me.
He…he has a L17 zubat. As one of two total pokemon.
Ah, but his other is “Type: Null”, words I think I’ve glossed over before! Whatever it is, it’s only L18 and you can paralyze it. Fake out also works, so not flinchproof. And weak to fighting. So…normal?
It looks like it was assembled from spare parts, which I think is the point.
I win, he’s mad, but then he starts ranting about how awesome Hau is which is why it’s a personal insult the kid isn’t trying. Dammit game, Hau isn’t the protagonist! Don’t you dare start, especially not after setting up this guy as alternative rival and making both rivals boys.
Some grunts show up to say that Gladion is homeless and insult him for it. We’re traveling pokemon trainers, how can any of us be “homeless” really? He then insults them back saying they can’t possibly beat him and shouldn’t get their pokemon hurt. Then the other grunt says he got in the way of their stealing the totem pokemon. Then the first grunt says that Gladion is just some hired help we keep around for when we need you as opposed to the rest of them who are volunteers?
You aren’t part of Team Skull, not really. And you never will be. Got it? You better get it.
I am completely lost.
But so okay, tragically homeless child with frankensteined pokemon it is. At least you’re more interesting than Hau.
Seriously though, why both boys? If the issue is that boy players get annoyed by the idea of having a girl as a legitimate rival, you could have the rival match gender instead, then I’d be getting girl rivals and the boys could still have their preciouse sausagefest.
Fomantis! Aw, are you a praying mantis pretending to be a plant?
…no, apparently. That’s extremely weird. It’s a pure grass type, and listed as the Sickle Grass Pokemon. I mean, I was mentioning a lack of grass types, but the real bug pretending to be a flower is cooler than this even before being pokemonized – PLUS, we see sudowoodo showing up, so it’d have been cool to add a new variation on that sort of mimicry.
They give off a sweet and refreshing scent. Cutiefly often gather near the tall grass where Formatis are hiding.
SEE? See how much more sense this would make if formantis did that to lure the cutieflies in for nomming, just like the real orchid mantis is actually an even more beautiful flower than a real flower?
My formantis knows both leafage and razor leaf. How redundant.
I also chat up the pokecenter, where I find a researcher looking for me to catch a feebas. That’s completely reasonable. Why weren’t all those other people just researchers instead of each having some bizarre request that was somehow fulfilled by pokedex entries?
My egg hatched!!!!!!!!!! into eevee, boo.
Sorry, game. But they’re everywhere in Pokemon Go, plus they’ve been in about every game, plus I’m pretty sure I’d have heard about it if there was a new evolution for them in this game. If they are unique, then that means I’ll have to breed a bunch more and hatch those eggs anyway, if they’re not, catching would almost certainly have been a better use of my time. Going through all the trouble of hatching an egg should result in more of a surprise.
According to the dex, they’re catchable anyway. My theory eevee are invasive matches well with the progression of the games, doesn’t it?
Current studies show it can evolve into an incredible eight different species of Pokemon.
Sure sure. Well, I could just raise it and see what it evolves into first.
Continuing, I find another captain, who says that since I’m “able-bodied” I need to help with something she fails to explain before walking away.
OOH, psyduck at last!
This Pokemon is troubled by constant headaches. The more pain it’s in, the more powerful its psychokinesis becomes.
As I brought up recently elsewhere, an interesting fact about psyduck is it takes quite a while to learn psychic moves. Possibly that’s the time it takes to master harnessing its pain, but another option is that the headaches get worse as it levels.
I reach Lana again, who explains something is splashing in the middle of the pond – and yes game, it does look very pretty – and that something could possibly be a powerful pokemon…and therefore I have to go poke it. Why? It’s literally in the exact center of the body of water, it’s not hurting anyone. Where else are powerful pokemon supposed to splash around?
Before doing that, let’s fight more people.
I crammed Pokemon in my backpack, bounced around, and now I’m here!
I’m not quite sure how those phrases connect to each other.
I get on the lapras and whoa that’s weird.
Wouldn’t being up that high just be more dangerous, because now you have a distance to fall? It looks so precarious. And we already know exactly how you ride lapras!
Oh my god the game won’t let you even swim around without smacking you with a cutscene and dragging you back toward the splashes.
As I approach, tiny fish shadows swim away (HMMMM. HMMMM I SAY.) and into another pool further off that’s blocked by some rocks – one I couldn’t get a look at EARLIER because of that STUPID CUTSCENE LEASH. I wonder how much faster the game could’ve been done if they hadn’t had someone programming in each and every one of these.
And it’s wishiwashi!
…who faints to a single hyperfang. Good thing I saved. I then almost faint it again when I mistakenly select thundershock rather than thunderwave despite the fact my magnemite is two levels lower, then it gets right in the greatball.
It’s awfully weak and notably tasty, so everyone is always out to get it. As it happens, anyone trying to bully it receives a painful lesson.
Well, I noticed the weak part, but I seem to have gotten away with the bullying part.
Lana tells me there’s more splashing, but I don’t see it. I do see a poliwag!
It’s still not very good at walking. Its trainers should train this Pokemon to walk every day.
Well that entry reads more like the flavor text on those totally legitimate trading cards I got with my totally legitimate pokemon figures.
What does “still” mean here? There’s no baby form of poliwag, so it pops out of the egg like this. I’m guessing “not yet” is more what they meant, but there’s something more interesting here in the fact you’re supposed to teach it to talk. Does it evolve once it masters the whole legs concept? Or is its physical shape completely capable of dexterous walking but the brain is struggling? If you asked me why poliwag were clumsy walkers, I’d have gone with it being a matter of their form, but the fact they can be taught otherwise suggests it’s neurological connections that are at fault.
My team’s about done so I guess that’s it for today.
Currently:
L16 magnemite
L17 fomantis
L18 rattata
L13 eevee
L17 meowth
L18 mudbray
Also, there was a post about using urls to see what qr pokemon pops out and I tried it.
Tumblr URL = lileep
Livejournal = togepi
This blog = rhyhorn
This very post = mothim
AOOOOOOOO account = lombre
FFN account = bibarel THIS GAME IS CYBERBULLYING ME
I do think that with Hau, at least, it’s nice to have a boy who’s a laid-back friendly type who just wants to cuddle pokemon. If he was a girl it would have just been Bianca all over again. Gladion could probably have been a girl, though — girls can be tryhard edgelords too!
I wasn’t bothered by Hau being all genki chill at first, but by the midgame his blinding incompetence has become so annoying. Gladion even starts lampshading that he has no business being involved with the plot because he’s an idiot.
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I think the thing is that Lillie and Gladion’s issues are hard to miss, while Hau’s are really easy to. He’s a goofing-off idiot because he’s grown up in the shadow of Hala and everyone has been expecting him to become the next Kahuna since before he even got a pokemon and battled, ever. Add to that the fact that Tapus are consistantly shown to be fickle and hard to understand and it’s very likely Hau will be passed over for being the Kahuna through no fault of his own, despite what everyone expects – although I’m unclear on why they expect so much if Tapu Koko is well-known to be flighty.
With that in mind, Hau goofs off because he expects to hit a wall and fail hard at some point and he’d rather fail because he was goofing off than try seriously and fail anyway. Also, he’s 11. Given how well Hau keeps up with you when you’re specifically called out as a prodigy and outlier, he’s actually an extremely competant trainer, he just tries to… deliberately avoid the plot except where his friends are specifically in trouble.
Mind I could just be reading waaaaay too much into this but oh well. Given how high-stakes pokemon plots tend to get maybe Hau is actually the smartest for trying to avoid the plot.
Him being annoying and incompetent on purpose doesn’t change that being forced into the company of an annoying, incompetent character all the time is something I want to stop.
Given how well Hau keeps up with you
Uh, he’s routinely curbstomped by both the me and Gladion. Dumbass hasn’t even figured out he can keep six pokemon at once like a good rival.
I’ll be honest, it’s hard for me to understand how anyone can have standards in re: rival trainers. Like, even Gary, way back in the day, fielded an abra that could only use teleport at least once, and I’m pretty sure Wally or w/e the kid’s name is tried throwing down with a raltz to similar effect.
To be fair, Wally was set up by his family to be killed, so he doesn’t count.
In Gary’s defense, you can only get a pokemon levels by putting it in battle, and his Alakazam was a complete beast in the endgame, especially in Gen I.
Wally was the first failrival. I’ve never been sure what his role in the story was supposed to be, when we already had arrogant Brendan/May to beat down. Though now that I write that out, I realize it was to ensure a male PC had a male rival. Whelp.
Gary fielded it as one of four, as a come out of nowhere ambush where he didn’t care if your team was already almost dead, which happened right after getting through the first big dungeon and, if you foolishly explored rather than healed immediately, meant you’d wake up after losing back on the other side of the dungeon.
Jesus Christ, I never thought of that, that’s horrifying.
I remember there was a Hiker who would ambush you if you took a left instead of a right when you exited the Rock Tunel into Lavender. So you went through this nightmarish tunnel, possibly in the dark, came out with barely anything left, and then got killed by some opportunistic shit and had to do it all over.
It was awesome.
So I had it slighly wrong — if you tried to walk behind him, there was a chance he’d turn around and trigger a battle with you. So you though you were home free and NOPE BACK TO THE START FOR YOU.
I mean I think by that point Gary said that he’d captured like 30 kinds of pokemon (or was that on the ship). He also has a gyarados later, but we never see him rolling the dice against you with a magikarp, so he does know how to baby pokemon while they’re still helpless. I still call it dumb.
It’s times like that where Pokemon stops being Pokemon and becomes, I dunno, Metal Gear Solid, right down to the guards/trainers both having “!” over their heads when they spot you just before the cruel beatdown.
He also has a gyarados later, but we never see him rolling the dice against you with a magikarp, so he does know how to baby pokemon while they’re still helpless.
Bear in mind it isn’t like he meticulously picked out the team for a rival battle. He just happens to run into you after visiting Bill. He presumably just caught the abra (since it’s found in the area above) and started training it up.
Even the top battlers in the region don’t keep a full team of 6, with one exceptions that I can think of. I see it as 6 being the limit, but most people being unable to split their attention 6 ways for the proper, well, care. Even having just 3 real-life pets runs me ragged sometimes.
I went through my run without using the exp share and leveling just as much as I could from trainers and wild pokemon encountered regularly, and Hau almost wiped my full team a couple of times, and that’s with a good range of typings, good stats, knowing what he has, and the number advantage. Hau isn’t incompetant in-universe, there’s just gameplay and story segregation on how hard training up a team actually is.
Even the top battlers in the region don’t keep a full team of 6
I know, and it’s completely infuriating. If they wanted a game of one-on-one battles, they should have made that, not this 6-v-2 nonsense.
Hau isn’t incompetant in-universe
He is though? He’s constantly smacked around by Skull, who are canonically imcompetent, and Gladion is chastizing him for sucking every time they interact. He never beats you to any plot markers and no one respects him, not even his own family. He’s a nice kid and all, but he’s a terrible rival and an annoying millstone.
I honestly don’t know how you could lose to Hau — especially in the mid and lategame — unless you were going to insane lengths to handicap yourself. His team is terrible, the AI is embarassingly designed to let you win, and you get an extra ‘mon.
Fine, guess I just suck at this or don’t use healing items enough.
I mean at that point he had like 5 levels on me so that was probably it, sorry for being snippy.
Can’t edit, so:
On second thought, the fact that I had to be 5 levels underleveled on purpose for Hau to even get my team half-down shows that no, he’s not an effective rival. Gladion is much moreso, and Hau isn’t even plot-relevant, so I agree he seems like an extra character. I think the difference for me is that I liked his personality, and that one non-serious hanger-on is a breath of fresh air after the frigging four they gave you in X/Y. Why did you give me 4 friends I didn’t even like, game? Your rival is bad. Most of your friend characters are flat and one-note. I don’t like any of these people except slightly Shauna, and you could cut Tierno and whats-his-face completely and use that energy to develop her better and give us an actually good rival.
Lillie and Gladion were great, though, and with an actual plot to chew on and some very interesting twists near the end, I think that left Hau as less of a bother to me, especially with my underleveling.
I felt really bad when the game forces you to take the legendary from the character that had been holding them for the entire game, though. It’s like… no. I am taking this legendary temporarily. This is your pet and friend. I am giving them back to your care just as soon as you’re ready for- please don’t tell me I’m their mother now I’m 11 I’m not ready for this.
That being said, I’d love it if Gamefreak took off the training wheels and gave us rivals with full teams at about the midpoint of the game at LEAST. I just don’t really get why you’re calling Hau incompetant when the fact that he’s slightly trailing behind a trainer deemed as in-universe great as the protagonist says otherwise, and when he provided quite a decent challenge for me.
You don’t like his personality which is fine, but I liked it. Would have liked to see more personal growth with him over the course of the game, but he’s never really a central character, that’s Lillie.
I don’t care about his personality. I care that he’s a complete failure as a rival, in that he offers no challenge from either an in-story or meta perspective, and actively hampers the PC and NPCs who don’t suck from doing things to move forward the plot. (Seriously, why are we always waiting for him to get places before moving on?! Why did Gladion even let him come to Aether Paradise when he’s so clearly not taking anything seriously and has four poorly-trained pokemon on him? Was Gladion also hoping he gets killed off?)
Can’t edit my posts, so multipost: This is neither here nor there, but I actually really like Gladion and Lillie. Lillie carries a lot of the plot, while Gladion is an actual rival: someone confident and capable who has a strong team, is always a step ahead of you, and who doesn’t get discouraged when you lose. Honestly, with Gladion and Lillie Hau is a super extraneous character. I wonder if the writers thought the tone was a little too heavy without him?
Have you played Pokemon Uranium? I think you might like the rival there.
I think the thing about him is, he doesn’t work as a recurring battle. If we fight him once as a training battle and then he never fights us again in favor of cuddling his pokemon, I’d have no issue with him.
Right now, he’s a perfect storm of what I hate: rivals who aren’t challenging from a battle standpoint and aren’t fun to beat from a story standpoint, and characters who aren’t trying getting talked up by the plot as having some sort of natural talent anyway.
Given how well Hau keeps up with you when you’re specifically called out as a prodigy and outlier, he’s actually an extremely competant trainer
Why IS someone who isn’t trying still an extremely competent trainer? How does that add to the basic storyline of someone stressed by unreasonable expectations to the point of self-sabotague? The only reason for Hau to have some sort of innate talent like this is if the point actually is that blood will tell and everyone is right to assume great things of him just because of his family.
Good point. Honestly I’d have liked it if the game kept with the theme of kids being pushed to do things they weren’t suited for with the reveal that Hau wasn’t actually really suited towards battling but was great at something else, like befriending pokemon.
See, I don’t mind Hau – I actually think he’s a sweetie. What I mind is him being the rival.
I really don’t think of him as a rival. He’s just a friend, and plays that role way better than anyone in XY. Sure, he’s not the diabolically annoying Gary Oak everyone wants to see return to the games. But if you don’t try to cram him into a rival role he makes a nice addition to the Alola experience.
He is a recurring battle opponent who takes the opposing starter and has a unique battle theme. That is the textbook definition of a Pokemon rival. I don’t want to cram him into the role either, but the game sure seems determined to.
To expand on the recurring battle thing, the fun of a rival is that they’re a very hard battle. Originally, they were also often situated in the middle or end of a dungeony area, so you could be thinking, Okay, my team’s half dead, but I just have to go a tiny bit longer and I can heal at the other side of this… and then BAM RIVAL IN YOUR FACE. In RB, this goes to the point that simply walking into the champion’s room makes you autofight him without any chance to heal, so if you didn’t right after Lance because you wanted to see what you were getting into and think about how to distribute your few remaining healing items, NO BEFORE-FIGHT HEALING AT ALL, SUCKER!
If the game’s going to pause to hype up a cutscene battle, it ought to be for a challenging battle worthy of that much time and attention.
Like, let’s say first battle Hau is a monster, because he’s been training pokemon longer than you and his family’s been pushing and pushing this whole time. His starter is higher level than yours but yours has the type advantage, so you can still win. Second battle he’s brought his other pokemon so it’s again pretty hard, and worthy of impressing a pokemon with. Third battle…he didn’t improve at all, there’s a quick curbstomp that feels earned after how hard he was the other times, and he never battles you again after that because he goes into the trajectory of non-battler.
I think at this point the rival being a challenging antagonist is our Empire Strikes Back– we have to accept that it was the outlier, not the norm, after 5 gens of “nice” rivals and elites who don’t have six pokemon. The best we’re going to get is a prickly keener like Cheren, we’re never going to see Silver or Gary again.
At this point in SM I’ve basically accepted the meme that I’m the rival and I’m doing my best to smell everybody later.
THAT SAID lord jesus pokemon is so overdue for difficulty settings. Give me hard/insane difficulty or perish.
It had to be a conscious move on the designers’ part to make the rivals nice and pathetic, but I just… don’t see the aim of it. Were there parents complaining that the rivals were driving their kids to tears or something? Jerk badass rivals were awesome. Victory Road being essentially empty because Silver raged on it was hilarious, and I don’t even need to sing Gary’s praises.
I mean, I shouldn’t really talk about pokemon. I’m about four or five generations behind and probably can’t even name a third of the pokemon I originally saw. But I try to read everything Farla posts on the games and it’s all just “damn I literally can’t hamstring myself enough to make this game slightly difficult” and “oh thanks for healing me the one time I might have lost to you, rival”. Pokemon is probably the only series I’ve ever seen that ‘escalates’ in this way, ever-expanding and yet becoming infantile.
For whatever reason, the driving design decision in pokemon lately has been MORE ACCESSIBLE! MORE ACCESSIBLE!, and this has propelled a lot of great QoL improvements like IV inheritance in breeding and fewer instances of invisible information in the games (e.g. move descriptions, accuracy, power, IVs, EVs) but also dumb stuff like shallow NPC level growth, high-level NPCs having 4 pokemon or fewer, and poor AI. I’d also argue that this is the reason for the Yokai Watch-like stuff in SM, it’s Gamefreak going “well what do people like???” and then copying it wholesale.
I think a series of difficulty settings like Fire Emblem would be a huge improvement AND fit in with the “make it easier for the childrens, we only have 0.25 sec to get their attention before they’ll be on to the next mobile crap game” mandate. Like make a “phoenix mode” where it’s impossible to fail, but also a hard/insane mode for the veterans where the NPC trainers’ level scales and everyone has 4-6 pokemon after the fourth badge or so.
The totem pokemon were a step forward at least.
You know, I actually wonder if maybe the problem is simply the glut of healing items? When you’re packing 99 revival herbs, it doesn’t matter how underleveled you are, you can outlast any opponent just by nullifying everything they do. And if you have something with Prankster and Toxic, sweeping a team of level 100’s with baby pokemon is actually possible.
I just finished the championship match, and made it difficult for myself by refusing to use revival items — and it was actually pretty tense! I got knocked down to only my version mascot, who allowed me to eke out a cheap win over his last pokemon. Just flat-out eliminating in-battle revives would probably go a long way for the difficulty curve, since it puts you on even footing with your opponents.
Alternatively, they could give enemy trainers revives. I actually think it’d be really hilarious to flip the script and make you fight a lower-leveled trainer who spends the entire fight trolling you with heals and revives.
But does the series really need a rival figure in every game? I mean, I’ve only played the original GB “Pokémon” so I’m probably missing something, but wouldn’t the Team Rocket-equivalent be enough to carry the plot?
It’s not about the Team Rocket-equivalent affecting the plot. Like, not at all. In fact, I’d prefer a game with no Team Rocket and a good rival than the reverse, and here’s why (for me anyway Farla can shut me down or w/e):
The idea behind the games is that you catch a bunch of pokemon and use them to fight gym leaders and the Elite Four to eventually be the best, not that you catch a bunch of pokemon and use them to save society. A major part of the appeal of a rival is that they’re running through this theme with you, always just ahead of you. As the personal parallel character who is always just slightly ahead of you, they’re designed to make you want to succeed, in a way that the next gym leader can’t. The gym leaders are cool, but they’re ultimately fixtures and so they can’t really give you that same sense of urgency. It’s the difference between an obstacle and a genuine villain.
A lot of this has probably changed and become more nuanced since I stopped playing like, over ten years ago, but that’s my basic understanding.
I’d argue that Team Rocket in particular was similarly good because they made for massive dungeons full of trainers and a sense of accomplishment as you defeat their escalating threat.
“Enemy team” in the abstract, through, hasn’t done much for itself since. The areas are sparse and half the time other people are “helpfully” occupying the few trainers there so you don’t have to fight them, wow thanks. You don’t actually thwart them until the end was since the epic enemy teams only ever have one master plan so it has to keep going. And they’re now portrayed as harried and pursued by all sorts of NPCs, so there’s no sense they’re a super powerful organization bringing all their power to bear against you now that you’ve attracted their attention.
Power creep has really obliterated enemy teams.
It’s really a super amateur mistake — “Well, kids loved saving Goldenrod, so they’ll love saving the world universe time and space INTERPLANETARY DIMENSIONS. It’s a mistunderstanding of why beating down the Rockets was so fun.
The biggest difference is, of all things, suspension of disbelief. The idea that a kid could take down an organized crime unit because being great with Pokemon levelled the playing field is just as bizarre in-universe in Gens I and II — the admins are constantly frustrated by how young you are, and Giovanni even tries to recruit you. You could relate to the kid who wanted to take down the Powers That Be, and you could project yourself into Red/Gold’s situation because it was only a small step removed from our world.
But when Gen III introduced the idea of Pokemon as world-destroyers you had to stop, suddenly this was very clearly a fantasy entirely divorced from any reasonable reality. Wanting to take down parents? Sure! Wanting to stop enironmental disaster? Not so much. And from there, things just got less and less sane, less and less connected to how we know realiy works. In Gens I and II, we were asked to accept Pokemon — but with each proceeding Gen, the things we’ve been asked to accept have gotten more and more bizarre.
This goes hand in hand with the general power creep and over-saturation of ledendaries. In the first two Gens, they were “legendary” because they were unique, rare, and powerful — but powerful in a way that Pokemon were powerful. Even Mewtwo’s ability to decimate Cinnabar came as a shock to the scientists, who had already been working with Mew for a long time. Even the more impressive powers they had were purely elemental — Ho-oh’s ability to survive the tower fire, Lugia’s creating whirpools to protect themselves.
But then Gen III introduced the idea of ledgendaries as actual ledgends, as gods. This was a bad, strange decision that the franchise has not only not been able to come back from, but has doubled down on and it’s destroyed the mythos.
It’s the old “If they like X, they’ll 100Like 100x” fallacy bad writers make. GameFreak has just consistently, consistently misunderstood what people want from this franchise — the power of RBY/GCS came from doing normal things in an extraordinary way, from travelling the world and arresting bad guys and doing it with colorful pets and a knack for training them. No one is asking to destroy Team Eternity and save the multiverse — fans want to be on the ground, in the nitty-gritty, experiencing the mundane of this fantasy world. Entire franchises are built on the premise that a strange world is inherently interesting; I don’t know why GF’s team can’t wrap their heads around that.
If we could get one game, just one, that hit reset on the power creep, I suspect a ton of other major issues would suddenly be ironed out as well.
tl;dr: it’s all because GF has no sense of proportion and doesn’t understand the success of their own franchise
Don’t get me wrong, I liked Team Rocket, but they and all the other enemy teams feel like a sidequest that I would usually skip if I could. I did enjoy that, like Gary, Team Rocket grew in power and moved around. Ultimately, though, they don’t follow you to the end. Giovanni being the eighth gym leader was a cool twist, but he’s not even Elite Four level, while Gary was the champion with a team like 10+ levels higher than Lance, most likely utterly demolishing you in the first attempt.
I dunno, I actually like god-legendaries and find the standard badge quest mind-numbingly boring. But I’m a big epic fantasy fan, so that’s probably an influence. I think the real mistake was making the gods catchable like everything else — that’s what really breaks suspension of disbelief for me, the idea that the creator of the universe allows any 10-year-old with a masterball to order it around and that it can lose to an ordinary pikachu. Kyogre and the like should have been like totem pokemon, challenging boss fights you’re not able to control directly.
If we could get one game, just one, that hit reset on the power creep, I suspect a ton of other major issues would suddenly be ironed out as well.
tl;dr: it’s all because GF has no sense of proportion and doesn’t understand the success of their own franchise
You know…I’ve heard the games now are each designed by a different team, to keep the production schedule going. I’d bet there’s issue with each team wanting to outdo the other. As it is, you can see a lot of franchises have to get absolutely absurd topping the previous game and only when there’s nowhere at all to go can they reboot to the basics people actually wanted.
And the fact that the games are also fighting over whose can be easier can’t help – if you can’t get epic through difficult battles, well, saying that the easy battle you just went through is for the fate of the multiverse and now you’ve captured Super-Jesus at least sounds epic.
Yeah, but you barely played any of the games because they’re not really what you’re into.
Pokemon is supposed to have the pokemon mechanics as the main draw – the story mode ends but you can’t reset and do it again, you’re supposed to keep breeding pokemon with new movesets and battling other players and searching for special pokemon and so on.
The big selling point of original Pokemon was there were no secret boss monsters who got access to stuff you didn’t. Every cool trick they had was one you could try out, experiment with, and combine with a bunch of other stuff. There’s every other RPG if we want to fight God and take his stuff.
Yeah, that’s a common mistake.
It feels less like SoD issue and more like immersion issue, however. Like, I can buy the idea of fighting god over the fate of time and space and all that, but in an abstract, remote way that doesn’t really concern me all that much.
By contrast, take something like TWEWY. It’s fun because you’re not saving the world, you’re saving one district in a big city. But you’ve spent the whole game exploring it, discovering all the locations it has to offer, getting to know various characters hanging out there, befriending shop clerks (even if it means buying crap that you already have), setting trends and generally, well, living there.
And then it starts to change. People you know and enjoy seeing get brainwashed or die, something sinister is lurking around, even the reapers are acting crazy.
Well, fuck that noise. It’s your district and you’re going to fix it with the power of catchy J-pop.
I actually felt like Sun and Moon was working on reversing the power creep. It’s not right back to where it started in Gen I, obviously, but a lot of the overarching plot is more personal stakes. Sure, the police are lazy assholes and called out as such and you shouldn’t HAVE to be dealing with this, but there’s always a sense except for one scene that someone else could at least hold things off as well as you, and you’re stepping in because you’re in the right place, at the right time, and you’ve got personal motivation to do shit because of your friends.
Furthermore, I really liked how the fate of the entire world WASN’T at stake here. Ever. I don’t know how much detail I want to go into because some people in the comments are presumably not there yet, but there was only one battle where I really felt as much as an entire island was truly at stake, and that was post-game. There’s still some suspension of disbelief issues, but it’s a lot more balanced than ‘oh by the way we’re going to flood the entire world’.
I’m not to the post-game yet, but I’d argue there’s an element of saving not only “the” world, but two worlds in this one.
“The idea behind the games is that you catch a bunch of pokemon and use them to fight gym leaders and the Elite Four to eventually be the best[…]”
But that was the first one. Wouldn’t it be better to have at least some variety in the plots?
Well, the plot is (or should be) a vehicle for pokemon battles, which is where the variety is centered. New pokemon, new moves, new type combos, new styles of battling.
So it does need to boil down to some flavor of “fight a whole lot of different people over and over and over (and over)”.
I am interested in non-battling versions of the franchise, like Pokemon Snap and Hey You Pikachu, but for the basic game, gym leaders or something equivalent works so well. (Come to think of it, I’d also be fine with a more plotty thing that was more of a visual novel or something – just that if you’re going a different direction in the plot, you probably need to overhaul the game section with it.)
I thought Colloseum’s setup of replacing gym leaders with the Evil Team admins worked fine. Gym leaders are so boring; even if everything is just a vehicle for pokemon battles, there’s no reason why those vehicles can’t have interesting contexts that increase investment. I’ll take real characters who actually do stuff and move around instead of stationary cardboard obstacles any day of the week.
Sure – but they functionally were gym leaders, and also that was a shorter game (the regular games do have admin battles as well, after all).
You could definitely do something other than standard gyms and gym leaders, but it’d have to be something functionally very similar.
So it does need to boil down to some flavor of “fight a whole lot of different people over and over and over (and over)”.
True, true. But the reasons for fighting can be more varied than the old metaphor for growing up, right?
(the regular games do have admin battles as well, after all)
Yeah, and they’re barely any stronger than regular trainers. That’s what really annoys me, that the gym leaders are so much stronger than the villains. It makes no sense to ask players to get more invested in battles with nobodies than in properly climactic fights. Using boss fights as milestones is fine, throwing in fake boss fights in between as an afterthought is nonsensical.
Fomantis and Lurantis are plants pretending to be bug-types in a reverse twist on the orchid mantis. It’s exactly the same mimicry as Sudowoodo and Flygon, the part where it sorta falls apart is that Grass and Bug share a few weaknesses anyway, like Flying and Fire.
Okay, I guess I can see that……but they’re doing a worse job mimicking than the orchid mantis, because they still have big leafy chunks and a plant color scheme. Real animals should not be out-fantasticking pokemon. And maybe Sun sheds more light on this but the pokedex entry I got gives no explanation for why they’d want to do so.
Yeah, I’ve got Moon so I’m in your boat. I can see what they were going for with an orchid mantis instead of a mantis orchid, but it not only doesn’t work quite right design-wise, I’m not sure the actual pokemon stands out in a generation with some pretty cool grass types.
Hm. Well also, there’s the problem it’s still acting like a flower, since what we’re told is all about the smell attracting bugs. A bug pretends to be a flower because flowers are harmless. Reversing that would mean this flower pretends to be a bug to deter predators. But…that basically means it’d be scyther, but grass type this time, and it still wouldn’t look very interesting because scyther is designed to blend into grass – and while it’d be clever for it to have shiny scyther colors (look! I’m an apex predator with a rare birth defect making me obvious!!!), shiny scyther is one of those awful one shade different shinies.
Oh, it should’ve pretended to be scizor. The red is a good fit for wanting something visually similar to the pink mantis AND for something that stands out.